Look at All the Stars!
Greater in number than the stars and the sand
by Janice Ross
Suitable for Key Stage 2
Aims
To consider that God keeps his promises.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the PowerPoint slides that accompany this assembly (Look at All the Stars!) and the means to display them.
Assembly
- Point out that the days are getting shorter and that it is beginning to go dark earlier in the evenings.
Ask the children if they have spent any time looking up at the night sky in the last few weeks.
Explain that in summer, we don’t see the stars as much because we’re in bed before it’s dark. However, as autumn and winter approach, we have more chance of seeing the stars. - Ask the children how many stars they think there are altogether.
Show Slide 1.
Point out that we can’t even count the stars in this image, never mind the stars in the universe! Even with the most powerful of telescopes, we can’t see them all, so we definitely couldn’t count them all.
According to astronomers, there are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. They estimate that if we look up at the night sky on a clear night, we can probably see about 6,000 stars. - Show Slide 2.
Point out that many of us enjoy time on the beach, especially during the summer holidays.
Show Slide 3.
Point out that it is impossible to count the number of grains of sand in this person’s hands. The magnified image shows the individual grains more clearly, but we still can’t count them! - Explain that we can find the story of a man called Abraham in the Old Testament part of the Bible. Christians believe that God made a special promise to Abraham.
Abraham and his wife Sarah were very old and didn’t have any children. Then, God spoke to them and promised that they would have a son.
This must have seemed impossible to Abraham and Sarah, but then God went a step further and made an enormous promise. He told them that, rather than just one son, Abraham’s descendants would be more numerous than all the sand on the beach and all the stars in the sky! - Imagine Abraham looking up into a cloudless night sky, unspoiled by street lights. How many stars did he think there might be? A hundred? A thousand perhaps?
Of course, there were no binoculars or telescopes in those days to see into the vast beyond. - Imagine Abraham picking up a handful of sand from the ground. How many grains of sand did he reckon there might be? A thousand or ten thousand?
And let’s remember that there were huge expanses of desert all around him! - Ask the children, ‘Do you think that Abraham believed God’s promise?’
Explain that Abraham believed that God was so great that he could do anything. - Abraham didn’t know how God would fulfil his promise, but he believed that he would keep it. Today, we can trace Abraham’s descendants back through history. There are billions of them now!
- Explain that Abraham didn’t know how vast the universe was, or how many deserts and beaches there were around the world. However, he believed that God was powerful enough to do anything. This is called having faith. Abraham believed that God would always keep his promise – and he did!
Time for reflection
There are many promises recorded in the Bible. Here are just a few of them.
- God made us special.
- God made us unique.
- God knows our thoughts, so he understands us.
- God will never leave us.
- God loves us very much.
Encourage the children to take some time to look up at the sky on a clear night and think about God.
What does it mean to them to know that:
- God made them special?
- God made them unique?
- God knows their thoughts, so he understands them?
- God will never leave them?
- God loves them very much?
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank you that you kept your promise to Abraham.
Thank you that we can trust you to keep your promises to us.
Thank you that you know the number of grains of sand and the number of stars in the sky, and that you even know us.
Please help us always to remember how huge your love is for us.
Amen.
Song/music
‘I am amazing’ by Philippa Hanna, available at: https://youtu.be/fVNKj0fbMiU (4.21 minutes long)
