Indescribable — How Great Is Our God

An arena, somewhere in America, mid-2000s. Eighteen thousand university students are on their feet as Chris Tomlin finishes “How Great Is Our God.” Then the lights drop, and Louie Giglio — a fast-talking Atlanta pastor who founded the Passion conferences in 1997 to aim an entire student generation at the fame of Jesus — walks out with nothing but a remote in his hand. On the giant screens: the Whirlpool Galaxy, thirty-one million light-years away, photographed by Hubble. For the next hour the screens will carry the sermon as much as the voice does — star fields, nebulae, and finally a single microscopic protein — in the first sermon many of these students will ever describe, years later, frame by frame.

The sermon moves in two directions, and both end at the same cross. First, outward. Giglio walks the crowd through the actual scale of the universe — the sun that could swallow a million earths, Betelgeuse, whole galaxies flung like spray from the hand of God — while Psalm 19 stands over the images: the heavens declare the glory of God. Isaiah 40 sharpens it: He brings out the starry host by number and calls them each by name. The point is not astronomy; it is proportion. You are staggeringly small, and you have never been lost in the crowd.

Then, inward — and this is the turn the generation never forgot. Giglio puts up a diagram of laminin, the adhesion protein that binds human cells together, the molecule biologists themselves describe as the glue of the body — and it is shaped like a cross. He is careful about the science and unashamed of the poetry, because he is really preaching Colossians 1:17: He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. The One who breathes out stars is the One holding your body, your atoms, your story, together — and the shape of that holding, even in your cells, is cruciform.

It is Psalm 8 preached in the native language of the internet age — the image — for hearts learning that smallness before God is not humiliation but the front porch of worship.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

— Psalm 19:1 — the oldest sermon in the universe, projected in high resolution.

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together — and the protein literally holding your cells together is shaped like a cross.”

— Colossians 1:17 beside the laminin image — the sermon’s unforgettable turn.

“Indescribable” toured arenas through the mid-2000s alongside the songs it grew up with — Tomlin’s “Indescribable” and “How Great Is Our God” — and then did what no sermon before it had done in quite the same way: it went online. Burned onto DVDs, passed around dorm rooms, clipped onto the young video platforms, the “laminin” segment alone reached tens of millions, and for years afterward pastors worldwide could say the word laminin and watch a congregation nod.

The Passion movement Giglio founded has gathered millions of students since 1997, birthed Passion City Church and the sixsteps worship label, and helped write the soundtrack of a whole church era — “How Great Is Our God” is sung on every continent. “Indescribable” itself became the template for a new homiletic: screen and scripture together, wonder as apologetic, the sermon built to travel online after the building empties. Its deepest gift was to a generation told science had retired God: it handed the telescope back to the psalmist.