Pick a number, any number. How many picked a number between 1 and 10? How about 10 and 100? Did you pick a number larger than a million? If you didn’t, why didn’t you?
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google while still graduate students at Stanford University. According to Fortune Small Business magazine, Internet users perform over 150 million searches a day on the Google search engine. The Google search engine can access over 2 billion pages in 74 different languages. One study recently showed that Google users used the search engine 13 million hours in one month. Compare that with Yahoo, which came in second with 5.4 million hours.
How did they get so big? I don’t have the expertise to answer that question, but I can tell you that it began with their initial vision. The word googol is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. While most people are likely to pick a number like 14 or 98, Brin and Page decided to pick a googol—1 with 100 zeroes.
Jim Reese, chief operations engineer of Google, says this about the company’s founders: “It takes a lot of confidence and courage to go ahead and do that [be huge]. It’s rare to find people who think on such a grand scale and are able to create a great product at the same time.”
Now then, let me ask you this – how big are you willing to dream? What are you willing to believe God for?
- Are you willing to believe that God can increase the size of this church by 20 over the next year? Why not 40? Or 70?
- Are you willing to believe that God can lead us to 5 people who will receive Jesus Christ as their personal Savior this year? Why not 10? Or 20?
- Are you willing to believe that we can disciple these new believers so that they become growing, reproducing Christians?
- Are you willing to believe that we can begin ministering to broken homes, seeing families restored?
- Are you willing to believe that as a congregation we can give additional funds to missionaries so we can see the gospel of Jesus Christ taken throughout the world – and at the same time continue to meet the budget needs right here in this church?
- Are you willing to believe that we can do all of this right here at Tabernacle Baptist Church, 910 Tarboro St., Wilson, NC, in the year 2006?