Mark Batterson - You Go Swimmer

On October 28, 1926, Dr. Allan Craig delivered a speech to the American College of Surgeons. If a 150 lb man was reduced to chemicals, claimed Craig, there would be enough iron to make a ten-penny nail, enough lime to whitewash a chicken coop, and enough sulfur to kill the fleas on an average-sized dog. The sum total of all the elements in the human body could be purchased at a local drugstore, according to Dr. Craig, for 98 cents. The New York Times ran an article the next day with that 98-cent estimate, and the rest is history.

Fast forward to 2013. In preparation for the Cambridge Science Festival, the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to do a reassessment. They calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes, a.k.a. Dr. Strange. The human body comprises 59 elements. Now, I will not itemize each one, but oxygen and hydrogen are worth $4 and $26, respectively. Thirty pounds of carbon would cost you $69,500, and trace elements of nitrogen would go for 4 cents. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, can I get a drum roll? The total cost of building Benedict Cumberbatch is $11,583.06. Of course, that doesn’t include labor—a little double entendre right there.

«No matter what you pay or how carefully you assemble the materials, ” said Bill Bryson in his book The Body, „you are not going to create a human being. You could call together the brainiest people who have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of human knowledge, and I would add an unlimited budget and every technology, including AI, and they could not, between them, make a single living cell.“ Yes, sir, never mind a replica of Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Batterson, or the person sitting next to you. „That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us, ” said Bryson. „We are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.“

And that’s where I would deviate and delineate: how does dirt write poems, produce films, make music, design rockets, engineer software, draft legislation, design theme parks, practice medicine, choreograph ballets, architect skyscrapers, and patent inventions? How does dirt do that? I think the short answer is Genesis 2:7: „Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground…“ There it is! Oh, but wait—there’s more! „And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.“ The name for God in Genesis 2:7 is Yahweh Elohim: Elohim, the all-powerful God; God most high, Yahweh, the personal God, and God most nigh. Thank you, Jesus!

Elohim created the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, but then Yahweh creates humankind out of a raw material called dust. Now, I’ll be honest: if you were making this up, I’m not sure that’s the raw material you would choose. Maybe pixie dust, but not just plain old dust—vacuum cleaner dust. Dust is so pedestrian. Dust is so ordinary. Or is it? Come on, sir, I mean this entire series, the entire book, „A Million Little Miracles, ” is built around a very simple principle: nothing is as simple as it seems, and everything is more miraculous than we can imagine. Dust is no exception. Yes, we are made from dust, but technically, scientifically, not just any old dust—stardust, which is way cooler!

When a star explodes, it’s called a supernova, and that exploding star ejects most of its mass, which is where the periodic table of elements comes from—where you come from. By the way, that makes perfect sense in the sequence of creation in Genesis 1. So, chemically speaking, you are 65% oxygen, 18,5% carbon, 99,5% hydrogen, 3,3% nitrogen, and I’ll just throw this in there—100% miracle. According to rabbinical tradition, we should carry two stones, one in each pocket. The first stone is inscribed „I am but dust and ashes, ” but the second stone is a counterbalance: „For my sake, the world was created.“ It’s this humility and dignity in tension with each other that helps us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, but not to think of other people more lowly than we should.

Remember that 98-cent estimate from Dr. Craig at the American College of Surgeons? He wasn’t trying to devalue humankind; quite the opposite! Dr. Craig said, „It is the spirit that makes man supreme. That is what sets us apart.“ In other words—and you know this is true—you are more than the sum of your parts. You are not just flesh and blood; you are soul, whole in spirit. You are a temple of the Holy Spirit. I might even say you are a house of miracles. We are animated by Elohim; in Him, we live and move and have our being. Yahweh is this mysterious force that quantum mechanics can’t quite pinpoint. All things were created by Him and for Him (Colossians 1), and in Him all things hold together. It is the spirit of God that sustains all things. If God were to withdraw His breath (Job 34), we would return to dust.

This is our cosmology; this is our theology of dignity. This is where our high view of humanity comes from: you are not a cosmic accident, the result of random chance. You are the image of God; you are the breath of God; you are God’s workmanship; you’re fearfully and wonderfully made. You were made a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory. „Mark, do you really expect me to believe that?“ Well, with all due respect, do you really expect me to believe that life came from non-life, that reason came from non-reason, that order came from chaos without intelligent design? I mean, I think it’s worth quoting again: Glenn Scrier said, „Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus; atheists believe in the virgin birth of the universe. Choose your miracle.“

„There are only two ways to live your life, ” said Albert Einstein. „One is as if nothing is a miracle; the other is as if everything is.“ So with that, welcome to National Community Church. We’re in a series called „A Million Little Miracles, ” and you can meet me in Psalm 139. We’ll get there in a moment. When I was 19 years old, I was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I took a class at the University of Chicago Medical Center—a class in immunology. Now why I chose that class is still a mystery to me. I was a pre-law major, not pre-med. But I remember walking out of one of those classes one day and just praising God for hemoglobin. I don’t even think I knew what hemoglobin was walking into the class. I’m not even sure I know how to spell it today. But that professor, every day, would just unravel the mystery and the miracle that is the human body—everything from the white blood cells that fight disease to those killer blood cells that target cancer cells. We talked about the blood and how it clots and the way that we fight infection, and I would just marvel! I don’t even know if my professor believed in intelligent design, but the entire class felt like an exegesis of Psalm 139: „We are fearfully and wonderfully made.“

I want to talk a little bit about that. St. Augustine said, „We marvel at the height of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, and the movement of the stars; yet we pass by ourselves without wondering. The greatest mysteries are not out there. The greatest miracles are not out there; they’re in here.“ And it starts in a place called the womb. If the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, then the womb is most certainly the holy of holies. Hallelujah! Psalm 139:13: „You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.“

Now, I want to break this down kind of verse by verse, word for word. „You created my inmost being, ” which, biologically speaking, would it be fair to say deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) would be our inmost being? In 1962, British biologists Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for deciphering the double helix structure of DNA. I’ll show you an AI-generated image because it’s really hard to do this justice since it’s so microscopic, but just as God created the heavens and the earth with four words—“Let there be light”—and just as those four words are creating galaxies at the outer edge of the universe, and just as the universe is God’s way of saying, „Look at what I can do with four words, ” DNA is God’s way of saying, „Look at what I can do with four letters.“ The alphabet of DNA consists of only four nucleotides, and I’ll just use the letters A and G, right? Yet, Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, calls it „the language of God.“

Only four letters, but they form about three billion base pairs. If your genetic code, which is as unique as your fingerprint, eye print, and voice print, could be transcribed and read like a book at 60 words a minute, eight hours a day, seven days a week, it would take you more than 50 years to read that book. A single strand of hair measures 100,000 nanometers; a single strand of DNA is 40 times smaller—2.5 nanometers. So small that six feet of DNA are packed into the nucleus of every cell in the human body, and the human body has more than 37 trillion cells. So, do the math: your DNA, if it were stretched end-to-end, would reach 10 billion miles. It would stretch to the moon and back 150,000 times. If that’s not miraculous, I really don’t know what is!

„You created my inmost being, ” says, „You knit me together in my mother’s womb.“ That word „knit, ” in Hebrew, is „kah.“ It’s a protective word, almost like a mother hen covering her chicks or like a fence that provides a protective boundary. It’s the word that’s translated to overshadow, just as the Spirit overshadowed Mary. It means to prick and to penetrate. Jesus long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, was a single cell that measured one-tenth of 1 millimeter—a microscopic miracle in waiting—and it was destined to become you.

Now, the average woman carries about a million eggs in her ovaries, which would make you one in a million. In the course of a lifetime, of course, it takes two to tango. The average ejaculation, which is not something I say in every sermon, contains 300 million sperm—enough sperm, according to Bill Bryson, to repopulate a medium-sized country. Now stop and think about this: there once was a swim meet—300 million swimmers lined up in the starting blocks. The gun went off, so to speak, and you, my friend, you won that race! You go, swimmer! Come on, turn to your neighbor and say, „You go, swimmer!“ You’re sitting next to Michael Phelps; you’re next to Katie Ledecky. You have been defying the odds since day one! Thank you!

Now, fun fact: every egg cell that a woman will ever carry is formed in her ovaries when she is in her mother’s womb, which means the egg that was destined to become you spent five months in your grandmother’s womb, which I just think is mind-blowing and boggling. Yet, because there are 385,000 babies born every day, because it happens so often, we take it for granted—sir, instead of taking it for gratitude! But that is the mystery of life; that is the miracle of life! Now, in 2014, researchers at Northwestern University captured this miracle of conception. They were using fluorescent microscopy and recorded this moment when an egg is fertilized by a sperm. I’ll actually show you the video loop; it may loop a time or two, but you’ll get the idea.

Now, inside every egg cell, there are 8,000 zinc compartments, and each of those zinc compartments contains more than a million zinc atoms. At the moment of conception, it’s almost like God says, „Let there be light. Let there be you!“ It’s almost an instant replay of that moment of creation as billions of zinc atoms flash. How do these two tiny cells, a single egg and a single sperm, turn into you? It’s something that we probably ought to marvel at for the rest of our lives. What if we actually treated each other, come on, sir, like the miracle that we are?

Now stick with me: the average heart will beat about two billion times without skipping a beat. Of course, it’ll pump about six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries, which is twice the circumference of the Earth. I already mentioned it, but 30 trillion red blood cells recycle every 120 days. Your body produces 2 million red blood cells every second, and each of those red blood cells has 260 million protein molecules called hemoglobin that Uber oxygen to every cell in your body. Thank you! And it all starts on day 23 of pregnancy, as a baby’s heart starts to beat. By day 30, it is growing 10,000 times larger than the day that baby was conceived. By day 42, its tiny little skeleton is formed. Adults have 206 bones; babies are actually born with up to 300 bones because, you know, the soft spot in the skull has to fuse—so we actually lose a number of bones in the first few years of life.

By day 56, a baby can suck its thumb; by day 98, we can identify the sex and throw a gender reveal party. By day 102, eyes begin to blink; by day 126, a baby can begin to hear and recognize your voice. By day 152, a baby can smile. A fascinating study involving 568 babies between 156 and 214 days into pregnancy—so second and third trimester—used four-dimensional ultrasonography. The average baby smiled 51 times during 62 minutes of recording; the smiles lasted, on average, 3.21 seconds. Just wow! Just wow!

In nine months, a fertilized egg has gone through 41 cell divisions with very little margin for error. How those cells—blood cells, bone cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, and sex cells—even know what to become is a mystery. Yet every single one of those cells has a complete copy of your DNA! I mean, I know people who say, „I’ve never experienced a miracle.“ You have! Never not! You are one! You are one!

Even more amazing than the human body is the human brain. Well, how much time do we have? Do you know when a baby is born, it starts making a million synaptic connections every second? Now, according to Dr. Chugani’s brain scans, he suggests that a toddler’s brain pulsates at about 225 times the rate of an adult brain. In other words, that brain is like a nuclear reactor! So, I think the next time your toddler is bouncing off the walls, it’s because their brain is working so hard and so fast.

Astronomers estimate about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Neuroanatomists estimate 100 trillion synaptic connections in the human mind, which is about ten times the number of stars in our galaxy. Maybe that’s why John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, in their book, The Book of General Ignorance, say the human brain is the most complex single object in the cosmos. It can make more connections than there are positively charged particles in the visible universe, and it runs on the energy equivalent of a 20-watt light bulb!

How is that possible? One cubic millimeter of your cerebral cortex can hold 2,000 terabytes of information. That’s enough storage space to download every movie ever made in one cubic millimeter of your cortex! No wonder Emily Dickinson said, „The brain is wider than the sky.“ I mean, we’re just touching the surface, right? I mean, we’re not getting into the parietal lobe or the temporal lobe or the prefrontal cortex—my favorite, the medial ventral prefrontal cortex—that enables us to juxtapose things and find them funny. It’s the seed of humor! And by the way, I think it’s part of the image of God! Why? Because it distinguishes us from the rest of God’s creation! Who else has stand-up comedians? We love to laugh!

And this is a function—we have a metacognitive capacity to think about how we think! Consciousness itself is like…I mean, it’s three pounds of gray matter. If you were to take it out of your skull and just look at it, it’s 80% water. You would never fathom what it’s capable of doing! Oh, and along with that consciousness, a conscience that can discern right and wrong! A meaning-making machine that has to find purpose in life. All of this knit together in your mother’s womb. „I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, ” which honestly is starting to sound a little bit like an understatement.

Let’s just go to one little verse: Proverbs 17:20—“Eyes that see and ears that hear, the Lord has made them both.“ And we just keep reading on to the next verse without even giving it a second thought! Do you know, along with a unique fingerprint, you have a unique eye print? We don’t get close enough to other people. In fact, I had to renew my license recently, and I was like, „Wait, what color are my eyes?“ I don’t even know what color my eyes are! We don’t stop and think about it. But the fact that your iris—this part of the eye—if we can put it up, is this unique design that surrounds the pupil. It’s almost like a black hole, right? And then surrounded by a galaxy, in a sense.

It’s remarkable what it can do! I mean, the retina contains about 10 million light-sensitive cells. Those cells are recycled every seven days, so when an image hits the retina, photo receptors turn that image into an electrical signal, which travels through the optic nerve into the visual cortex, and you’re able to see things! Now, Byte Magazine many years ago said it this way: „To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations and would take at least several minutes of processing on a crazy supercomputer.“

Keeping in mind that there are more than 10 million cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of a hundred years of cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye every second. I don’t even know what that means! I don’t even know half of those words! But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Like, it just happens! But it didn’t happen without design, did it? No! A God who crafted and created this incredible mechanism! I mean, even Charles Darwin said, „To suppose the eye, with its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of focal and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.“

And maybe that’s because it is! It’s not an accident; it’s God’s divine design! So when was the last time you thanked God for motion detection, depth perception, peripheral vision, color vision, or anything else that your eye allows you to do? Pretty amazing! Ears that hear? We don’t have time, but let’s just do one thing as a little experiment. Let’s put up that Cambridge study—like what your eye does and its ability to fill gaps. I mean, you know there’s a blind spot, right? I think it’s like—close your left eye and then kind of go like this, and your finger will disappear. That deal?

Help me out—can anybody else pull this off? In fact, I’ll just do it real-time, live! According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are—the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess, and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole. Come on, who pulled it off? Who did it? Come on, give yourself a little hand clap today! What a remarkable, remarkable thing!

Let me close with this. I always have three or four books in my reading rotation. I think all truth is God’s truth; areology is a branch of theology, so I love reading this, that, and the other thing. I’m interested in about everything! But I always try to have a history or biography in my reading rotation because I think biography is a bit out of body for me. It helps me get a little bit of perspective on myself. So, I recently picked up kind of a combo history-biography called The Scientist, which is a look at the history of science through key players that made a difference. I picked the book up, and the very first sentence was like such a Debbie Downer! Like, do I even want to read this?

The very first sentence says this: „The most important thing that science has taught us…“ Oh, this is going to be good! I can’t wait to see what this is! What is the most—this is a pretty big setup. I need to know! „The most important thing that science has taught us about our place in the world, here it is, is that we are not special.“ I was like, „Really? This is the most important thing? Wow!“ Then the author says, „The Earth is an ordinary planet; the sun is an ordinary star, and the Milky Way is just an ordinary galaxy.“

Okay, friends, I’m just putting my cards on the table: I don’t even believe in ordinary—it just doesn’t exist! There is no ordinary day, say it! I mean, you’re spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, speeding through space at 67,000 mph. So even on an ordinary day, you did travel 1.6 million miles through space. I just don’t think that’s ordinary; I think it’s miraculous! I don’t think anything is ordinary—not a single star, not a single seed, not a single cell. There’s just nothing that’s ordinary! And there certainly aren’t any ordinary people! There are no ordinary people, said C.S. Lewis. „You have never talked to a mere mortal.“ It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

This does not mean, said Lewis, we are to be perpetually solemn; we must play. That’s right! But our mirth must be of that kind which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. The Talmud said it this way, and we’re kind of coming to a close: this Jewish commentary on the Old Testament said, „If you destroy a life, it’s as if you have destroyed an entire universe. If you save a life, it’s as if you have saved an entire universe.“ Yes! Hallelujah! Thank you, Lord!

A few weeks ago, I reached out to an artist friend, Jason Deo. He was here for our renew conference; he’s a synthesizer. He uses discarded pieces of fabric—things that haven’t worked, almost remnants from other pieces of art or things that could just be, I don’t know, a lot of us would just throw them in the garbage. He takes those pieces and recreates them. His whole motto, as an artist, is that matter is miraculous, which I kind of like. So I said, „Jason, I just wrote this book, A Million Little Miracles, ” and it starts with that single cell. I said, „Would you do me a favor? Would you just get creative with it?“ And what would be your take on that? This is what he came up with, and I think it’s beautiful.

I think this is a universe in itself, but it’s also just a single cell. But the colors, the texture, and then that moment of conception is pretty miraculous. What we wanted to do this weekend was just give a little reminder of who you are. So, you got one of these postcards on the way in. And listen, online family, we’ll find a way to get it to you digitally; we can send it, so we’ll figure that out. But I want you to take out this card and just turn it over. On the back, I’m going to give you a little homework assignment, and then we’re done.

There never has been, and never will be, anyone like you. It’s not a testament to you; it’s a testament to the God who created you. You have a unique fingerprint, voice print, and eye print, and the significance of that is this: no one else can worship God like you or for you. No one can love like you or lead like you; no one can live your life for you. Uniqueness is God’s gift to you, and what you do with it is your gift back to God.

Now, my hunch is there’s someone in your life that needs to be reminded of how unique, how special, how miraculous they are. Why don’t you jot a note, put a little stamp on it, and then drop it in something called a mailbox? Just remind someone of who they are! In Jesus' name, amen.