Today we are being told two self-contradictory
things.
We are being reminded very often that our
intellectual and educational equipment are very much superior
to that of the New Testament Christians.
And then, as though we had not heard
that, they tell us a second thing.
They tell us that we must furnish the
people of the day, this day, a lighter
diet, because they tell us we must make
religion attractive and easy in order that it
may be palatable for these intellectual giants that
tread the earth today, tread our courts, and
tramp up and down the streets.
They tell us that the people of the
day simply will not take heavy stuff, but
that, strangely, they're also better educated than they
were back there and have better intellectual equipment.
And yet, do you know that the New
Testament, deep and solemn and heavy as it
is, the New Testament was written for plain
and mostly uneducated believers?
Our Lord Jesus Christ spoke his wonderful message
to many thousands of people who could not
read or write, and they had nothing else,
those early Christians.
They just had this Bible and nothing else.
As it became written, they had that.
They had the epistles of the various writers
in that time, and they had the Old
Testament.
Some of them had the Old Testament, and
they had nothing else.
They had no painless method of getting religion.
Nobody had fixed it so you didn't have
to think.
No simplified, streamlined messages or methods were being
used to give it.
And they were expected to understand and to
relish such books as the Book of Romans.
They were expected to read 1 John and
understand and relish 1 John.
They were expected to read the Book of
Hebrews and understand the Book of Hebrews.
They were expected to read the gospel according
to John and understand the gospel according to
John, love it, relish it, and live by
it.
And then we of our day are told
that we cannot give the people any such
heavy stuff as this, that we've got to
come down to their level, and that we
have to streamline it and denature it and
put it in fiction form in order that
the people of the day will get it.
Well, my friends, the simple truth is that
the modern revolt against serious truth, with its
corresponding demand for a streamlined religion, is not
the result of intellectual deficiency.
It is the result of carnality and lack
of spiritual appetite.
The saintlets of the day are simply too
kernel to enjoy anything very deep.
So they say, well, we're living in another
kind of age, a reader's digest age, and
you've simply got to simplify it.
You've got to make it short, and you
have to illustrate it, and you have to,
if possible, set it in a fictional setting.
God's dear dumb sheep, I don't know whether
we'll ever get any sense at all or
not.
I heard a discussion while I was resting
today a bit, and they're talking about books.
And the president of Random House, publishers in
New York City, one of the greatest publishing
houses in North America, Leonard Surf, the president
of Random House, says that there was a
time a little while ago when magazines and
books were 30 percent non-fiction and 70
percent fiction.
But, he says, there has been a complete
shift, and the figures are now exactly reverse.
That secular magazines now can carry 70 percent
non-fiction and only have to lug in
30 percent fiction.
And the books that are being published now
are in the same proportion.
Now, here comes God's poor, tired, lame lambs,
and our publishing houses are turning out fiction,
fiction, fiction.
Forgetting that the world has long ago passed
them up, and that even old whiskery Adam,
an old fallen and unregenerate man, has actually
gotten so serious-minded in the day in
which we live, that he'd rather have 70
percent non-fiction and content himself with 70
percent bedtime stories.
And publishing houses now are making big money
on bedtime stories for saintlets.
Now, that isn't in the sermon magazine.
I just couldn't help but say that, brethren.
I just wonder how long God's people are
going to come limping along behind.
And when they get on a coattail, they
always get on the coattail of some fella
who's petering out.
They never get on the coattail of a
fella who's on the upswing.
They always get on the coattail that's coming
down.
So that now, we are the fictioneers, we
Christian people.
We have to have it put in story
form.
Children, once upon a time, Jesus said, and
we have a little story all fixed up.
But do you know, brother, that coattail's coming
down.
You better hunt around for another coattail because
he's going down.
And even out there in the world, they
know it.
Now, I have to say that because here
I am preaching to you tonight on truth
that is profound, that is elevated and deep.
So deep that you can't get deeper, and
so high you can't get higher, and so
broad you can't get broader.
And I'm not apologizing.
I preach to smaller crowds, but I preach
better stuff.
Don't forget that.
Not that I'm a better preacher, but that
I insist upon turning my tiny talents loose
on good stuff.
Better preachers are wasting a lot of their
time and effort and God-given energy on
trash, and I refuse to preach trash.
If I can't preach as well as they
can, I can preach better stuff.
Now, here's this man, John, and he said
that he that is from above is above
all, and he that is of the earth
is earthly.
Let's look at that a little bit.
He that is of the earth is earthly.
You know, when the human race awoke to
find itself fallen, found that God was gone
into invisibility.
Not that God was gone, that's an impossibility,
but that God was hiding himself and was
gone into invisibility.
And in his place were fears and sickness
and decay and death.
And men found themselves, as it were, fallen
into a great deep pit.
For that is what the Bible teaches about
the fall of man.
It teaches that we are fallen into a
great deep valley.
And there we are in that valley, and
all above us there are clouds, and all
around us miasmic mists and the shadow of
death over everything.
And the tears and groans of the fallen
human race are to be seen and heard
everywhere.
And that decay and old age and sickness
and pain and death are everywhere in that
valley.
The human race fell down, and all around
us are the sheer cliffs on every side
and smooth, and we can't get up.
And that's the human race, and we're down
in that valley.
That's the fall of man, that's where we
find ourselves, that's where we are.
And no man has a ladder to get
out, and no man could climb out if
he had a ladder.
And no one can help another because we're
all down in here together.
How to get up and get out and
get back into the sunshine and get back
where there is life and get back where
there is light, that nobody knows, for we're
all fallen down here together.
And so whether we stand or fall or
lie or crawl over the muddy bottom of
this valley where we find ourselves, in this
fallen world, we nevertheless are here together on
the same level.
And our help must be from above.
Now down in this valley where we find
ourselves, some are taller than others, and they
stand up and they make others look short
by comparison.
But you know when two men are reaching
for the stars, if one of them is
a little taller than the other, there's no
advantage to him.
One man is six foot four, another man
is four foot six.
And when they stand up on a hill
someplace and reach for the stars, the heaven
above smiles because neither one of them will
reach the stars.
So in this world in which we live,
we're not all on one flat level in
the sense that we're all exactly alike.
We're not.
Some are very tall.
There have been some tall men that lived
in the world.
Abraham Lincoln was a tall old man.
And you can name them, you have your
heroes in history, men who were tall men.
And then there have been little Benedict Arnolds
and little forgotten men that were the little
short men of the world.
But we're all down standing on the same
muddy bottom, all down here where we fell
to.
And the tall noble figures whose busts are
in the libraries and whose statues are on
the green lawn in front of the courthouse,
there weren't any higher up in the long
run than the rest of us little shorties
that walk around and are never heard of
and our name will never be remembered except
as it's cut into a tombstone.
So everything is on a horizontal plane.
Everything is horizontal, I mean, plane.
Everything is on a level.
We're all down here together, big ones and
little ones and short ones and tall ones
and great ones and small ones.
We're all down in this fallen world together.
He that is of the earth is earthly.
And every time the earthly man opens his
mouth, he talks like a man of earth.
He's earthly.
And if he's one of the tall characters,
he opens his mouth, he's full of the
dust of the earth anyway, and those who
know God can detect the smell of the
burnt earth upon them.
And if a man rises to help another,
he comes to that other one on a
horizontal plane.
He comes from where he is over to
the man and tries to help him there.
But inasmuch as he can't get up, he
can't help the other one up.
All help comes from a level, you see,
a horizontal level.
It's all on an even plane and it's
all resting down on the muddy bottom of
the valley into which we plunge in that
tragic and dramatic moment when our forefathers ate
of the forbidden tree and stretched out their
hand and received that which was sin and
death and darkness and alienation and night settled
upon them.
Here we are all down together.
And the worst of it all is that
the great masses of mankind have even forgotten
the world from which they fell.
Or if it is there at all, it
is there only as a relic, a trace,
a dim racial memory, lying yet in their
hearts, half forgotten, they're dimly remembered.
Most people are satisfied with the clay and
the soil and the bog and the shadows.
Here we are, he that is of the
earth is earthy.
That is why you don't dare trust people
when it comes to your soul.
That is why you don't follow around after
Cain and say, Cain, will you please show
me the right flowers that I am to
take to God?
That is why you cannot go to Mr.
Worldly Wise Man and inquire the way to
heaven, because he doesn't know either.
He's down below and all the help he
can give you will come from him to
you on the same level that you're on.
He has no ladder either.
He has no rope.
He has no spiral staircase that will lead
him to the skies.
He that is of the earth is earthy.
We find earthly men everywhere around about us.
Newspapers are filled with earthly-minded men's writings.
Magazines vie with each other to entertain us,
earthly people entertaining earthly people.
He that is of the earth is his
magazine, his life, his time, his harpers, his
Atlantic, his American, his whatever it may be.
And we vie with each other trying to
entertain people and make it a radio broadcast
out to comment on this or that.
Earthly men talking to earthly men about earthly
things.
And the light above is out, and the
mud beneath our feet gives away the fact
that we are fallen men.
But the sunshine and the silver clouds are
not ours, that we're doomed to walk in
the valley, that this pit into which we
have fallen is a pit of sin.
The human race is struggling there, living and
dying and procreating and living and dying in
this fallen earth.
He that is of the earth is earthly
and speaketh of the earth.
And because he speaks of the earth, everybody
understands it.
That's why, by the grace of God, I
would urge you never to take your religion
from the newspapers.
Never take your religious convictions from some fellow
that's writing a series for any newspaper.
Never take your religion from the current magazines,
Sunday Supplement or what have you.
Never, never listen to the man who talks
to you with the dust on his breath,
whose feet have the tell-tale marks of
the clay.
He that is of the earth is earthly,
and he speaketh of the earth.
And men receive what he says because he's
of the earth.
And you can lie to him and betray
him and violate him and spoil him and
sell him downriver a thousand times in one
generation, and you'll still come back with a
sickly smile of hope, ready to be told
a lie by the next fellow that comes
along.
And listen avidly to the voice of him
that is of the earth, earthly, and speaketh
of the earth.
Cain and Esau and Saul were men of
the earth, and they left a progeny after
them that was like flies in the earth.
He that is of the earth is earthly.
Our Lord said that, or John said it,
basing what he said upon what the Lord
had said and being guided by the Holy
Ghost to say the truth, that it's an
earthly world we're living in.
And people say, well, what's the matter with
the daily press?
What's the matter with the radio?
What's the matter with television?
Well, the best thing can be said about
them all is they're of the earth, and
they speak of the earth, and they are
earthly.
And they have upon them the same blindness,
the same inward ignorance, same shadows, same mist.
They have around them the same open graves.
They have upon them the same doom.
They have the marks of the valley, the
deep pit into which we're fallen.
And because they can't get out, they can't
help anybody else out.
And a man will write himself a book,
and it'll be a bestseller on how to
get peace with your nerves, and then he
dies.
Another man will write about how to have
peace of mind, and he'll commit suicide.
Funniest book I ever knew, without any doubt,
was a book called A Slow Train Through
Arkansas, written by a man named Thomas H.
Jackson.
When I was a kid, he used to
sell it on trains, peanuts, popcorn, chewing gum,
candy, and A Slow Train Through Arkansas.
And I can still, if you get me
in the right mood, if you buy the
coffee, I can still tell you some of
the screaming things that I remember out of
A Slow Train Through Arkansas.
The man who wrote it committed suicide.
He just got so funny that he lived.
He was of the earth earthly.
He that is of the earth speaketh of
the earth.
And we have an earthly philosophy, and earthly
everything round about us.
Now, against that is this.
He that cometh from above is above all.
You see, my friends, we're down in this
valley, this muddy, blood-stained valley.
And the only way to get out is
to get up.
And nobody can help anybody else out, because
we're all on a horizontal plane, all on
the same level.
And any help that comes, comes from, to,
on the same level.
And he that is from above is vertical.
And help must come from above, vertical, not
horizontal.
Nobody that's on the same level with you
can help you.
No word that comes out of the mouth
of a fallen man can help another fallen
man.
No hand stretched forth by a fallen man
can lift another fallen man to heaven.
Nothing built by a fallen man can help
another fallen man out of the morass.
He that cometh from above is above all.
And the help comes from the world that
has been forgotten.
Now, he came from above, and he's above
all.
And John, verse 13, identifies him as the
Son of Man.
Let me sketch over briefly here tonight how
he is above all.
And I want to be fair, and I
want to lean over backwards in being fair.
And I want to point out to you
that he that cometh from above, Jesus Christ,
the eternal lobus, the eternal Son, he that
cometh from above is above human reason.
Now, human reason cannot save us for the
simple reason that human reason is fallen too.
That which is fallen cannot raise itself above
its fallen level.
And human reason is fallen as well as
the human body is fallen and the human
soul.
So, human reason extends out from its fallen
level to another man on a fallen level
and entertains him with high ideals.
But it cannot lift him out of the
clay.
It cannot fly him out of that low,
cloud-covered valley.
It cannot take him out of the shallows.
Among the finest things left in this tragic
wreck of things is human reason.
And yet, it cannot help us.
A man can sit down like a rodent
spinker and think until his hair is gray.
And when he gets up and shakes himself,
he's still where he was before.
He's not out of the valley.
He's still behind the sheer walls.
But he that cometh from above is above
reason.
And he never learned anything from it, nor
gained anything from it, nor owes anything to
it.
Nor takes any advantage from it, nor has
any need of it.
He that cometh from above is unique.
He that cometh from above is incarnated reason.
The old theologians say that one of the
attributes of God is reason.
I believe it.
And that little bit of reason that you
and I have fallen and broken like a
shattered vase, the little bit you and I
can gather up and scrape the mud off
of and polish and send to school, that's
a bit of shattered reason which was given
us of God, who is the fountain and
source of all reason.
And man talks about his reason, and yet
human reason can't get him out.
You cannot reason yourself up a sheer wall.
You cannot reason yourself because your human reason
itself is fallen and subject to error, and
rated above, down in the same bloody mud
where you found yourself when you started to
think.
But he that cometh from above is above
all that.
He comes down.
He's the incarnation of it.
He comes down like the owner of the
vase, down where men have shattered bits of
it.
Now, he that cometh from above is above
human science.
And I want to point out that human
science is nothing but the application of reason
to matter and natural laws, that's all.
We are terribly frightened in the day in
which we live.
We have a big H-bomb got out
of control over there, and it was so
big that they said they didn't know it
was going to act the way it did.
And they thought they had a pony, but
they found they had a real horse on
their hands, and it bucked them through them.
And I don't know how far this science
is going to take us, but all it
is is human reason applied to matter and
natural laws.
So we have jet planes and all this
stuff to kill bugs in you when you
get pneumonia.
It's all right, but it's limited because you
can't rise any higher than it is.
And to talk about science saving the world
is as ridiculous as to throw a wash
tub to a man in a well and
tell him to get in it and lift.
You know what I mean?
Here's old Levi down in the well, and
you can barely hear his voice.
He shoved down here.
All right, Levi.
He says, yes, I'm all right, but how
are you going to get me out?
We said, just dunk over to one side
a little bit, and we'll throw this tub.
Now, get a hold of the handles and
lift.
He can lift till he's dead and never
get himself out of there because he and
the tub are on the same level, and
one can't help the other.
How can a science help me?
How can science help me?
Because science begins and ends on the same
level with me down here in the valley.
There's no leverage, no fulcrum, no elevator, no
ladder, no stairway, no rope, because it all
begins and ends down here on this fallen
level, so that Jesus Christ is above human
science.
How we'd love to make Jesus beholden to
the science.
Once in a while I see a book.
I told Brother Mac that we had preachers
and preachers down on the loop tomorrow, and
I said, well, after I preach, I'm going
over and buy a book.
He said, do you think you need a
book?
I have them stacked up like this up
there in my study.
Well, whenever I run onto one of these
books and it's through science to God, oh,
it shuts the cover.
I wish I could say I pray a
prayer for the poor blind man who wrote
it.
I don't.
I haven't yet.
Maybe I'll get around to it, but he's
blind, and here he is through science to
God.
Lift, Levi, hang on, you'll get yourself out
of that well yet.
But he won't.
He's still where he was, and he'll die
down there and rot.
So human science can't help us to heaven.
But he that is from above, he's not
beholden to science.
He doesn't know Edison anything, or Henry Ford,
or Steinmetz.
He doesn't know them anything.
He is from above.
He's above it all.
Science works on a horizontal plane.
He comes down from above.
He that is from above is above all.
And then I think of human civilization.
And what is human civilization?
It's simply education and science and art applied
to the task of refining people and making
them more comfortable in the valley.
That is all.
Science and art and reason, they go to
work on a man.
Now here he is down in the valley
walking around on the dark and bloody ground,
unable to get out or find anybody that
knows how to tell him to get out.
For a while he lives in caves and
bolts his food uncooked, and they say pulls
his mink in by the hair of her
head.
And they call him the caveman.
Then civilization comes along and says, you shouldn't
do that, junior.
There's no way to treat a lady.
Ask her right, and romance is born.
And they call it civilization.
And instead of taking her to a cave
that drips with stalactite, he takes her to
one of these modern jails.
Walk up third floor, and with the refrigerator
and all the electric appliances.
Civilization has come along and refined this man
in the valley.
Instead of beating his wife now, he does
something else.
Walks out on her or something else.
But that's civilization.
And instead of eating his meat raw, he
cooks it under a pressure cooker.
She does.
And that's civilization.
And instead of taking the jawbone of an
ass and going out and beating a man
to death and getting it over one man,
put off a bomb and kill 130,000
at a whack.
Civilization.
We're refined these days, brethren.
Extremely refined.
And instead of letting our beards grow until
we tramp them off in self-defense, keep
them stumbling, why, we take them off now
in the latest forehead sunbeam, electric rays.
We're more comfortable in this valley than we
were before, but if you look down, you'll
see blood and mud.
We're still where we were in Adam's day.
We're still where they were in the day
of Genghis Khan and Attila, the Hun.
We're still where we were and we can't
get out.
We're more refined and we're probably more comfortable.
Out on 95th Street, there is a new
store moved in, and it sells furniture.
And there's a bed there.
I can believe this or not, it's as
big across as this piano and completely round.
Completely round, but circular, I'll mark you, circular.
And I have said it's for a fat
man, but I don't know really what it's
for.
You wouldn't know, you wouldn't know which is
the head and which is the foot because
there's no head and no foot.
It's completely circular.
And I'm quite sure that it'd be more
comfortable to lie down and dream away into
the arms of Morpheus on that round, lovely
thing than it would be to lie down
on a rock in a cave after having
gorged yourself on uncooked meat and picked your
teeth with a shattered bone.
But we're all on the same level.
And the man who rises in the morning
and can't find the foot of his bed
and falls out wherever he can, he's just
as fallen and just as lost and just
as hopeless as the man who sleeps on
a brick bed in China or crawls out
of a cave in Cambodia.
We're all down in this valley.
We're fallen, and he that is of the
earth is earthy, and human civilization has never
done anything to lift us up to God.
It simply made us more comfortable without God.
No, he that is from above was before
the world was.
Civilization to him is simply the change of
color of a molecule in the palm of
his hand, no more.
And then, human religion.
Now, human religion, and that takes in all
religions except the religion of him who is
from above.
Human religion is built out of the bricks
made from the bloody mud of the valley
in which we find ourselves.
And we have done pretty well, I suppose,
refined things very well.
Instead of having just an ordinary tub now,
we have a golden basket.
And it has its handles on the side
too, and we call it religion.
And men step in that golden basket woven
of gold filigree, reverently take hold of the
sides and pull that we don't rise one
inch from the bloody mud of the valley.
Religion doesn't help us.
Christ is above religion.
Religion is horizontal.
It comes to us from somebody else.
Mrs. Baker Eddy, or Joseph H.
Smith, or Muhammad, or Confucius, or Leipzig, or
somebody else teaches us, and they teach us
from where they are to where we are,
but there's nothing vertical, nothing elevating, nothing to
lift us.
It's all horizontal.
It's all on the same level.
All rest down on the mud of the
valley.
But suddenly there is one who came from
above.
He that is from above is above all.
And from religions he borrows nothing, and to
religion he owes nothing.
He is himself the religion, and is himself
salvation, this Jesus.
Blessed Holy Ghost, how we inspired John to
say it.
And that's why the study of comparative religions
means very little to a man.
You can study the religions of the world
all you want to, and you're simply getting
a little help from a man who's down
as far as you are, maybe a little
taller than you.
But what's the difference of a few inches
in height when we're all standing in the
valley, and the heaven above is leagues beyond
us?
Now with this thought that Jesus Christ cometh
from above, above all religion, above all reason,
above all science, above all civilization, above everything.
Now we know why he said what he
said in following, that the Father loveth the
Son, and hath given all things into his
hand.
Now we know why he said the testimony
of the Son is final.
And we know why he said, he that
believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, because
the Son brings help from above.
And the life that lies above, and the
hope that lies above, he brings down.
And he came from above down.
All others came from without too.
He came from above down, and he brought
down the help we needed.
And he told us of that other world
from which we'd fallen.
He told us of God, and the many
mansions, and the redeemed, and the just spirits
of just men made perfect.
He told us of eternal life.
He came down.
And he that receiveth him hath everlasting life,
and he that believeth on him hath eternal
life.
And we see now also why he that
obeyeth not the Son, death remains on him,
and he's doomed to the valley.
And the wrath of God remains on him,
because he has despised him who came from
above.
Oh, my friends, I know I sound old
-fashioned, and I suppose that I am counted
radical by some.
But with a great calmness and prophetic insight,
I am able to tell you that Jesus
Christ is enough for you.
That you don't need Jesus Christ, plus a
thousand additions that come from the same level
as you come from.
What are they to give me?
What can they offer me?
What can they bring me, except to comfort
me and cheer me a little while here
on the blood-mugged valley floor?
But as we're getting out, only one can
help us.
Is there anyone to help us, one who
understands our griefs?
Yes, Jesus Christ.
God sent his Son, and he that receives
his Son has the help he needs.
He has the out.
He has the up.
He has the lift from above.
He has that eternal life which was the
Father who came down.
And he that rejects all that and disobeys
the Son has cancelled out any help from
above, and he must lean on his brethren
who are the same as he, and no
further up.
How foolish to lean on a man that
can't help you.
God called it leaning on a broken reed,
or a reed that would break and run
into your hand.
Poor crutches and canes and braces that we
wear around in this world of ours, trying
to help ourselves to God.
The world is blossoming out now with books
on how to get peace of mind and
peace of soul and peace of this and
a peace of that, and when it's all
over, it's a piece of mud and human
effort.
But it's not God, and it's not eternal
life, and it's not him that comes from
above.
Oh brethren, there is one who came from
above, and he's above all, and you don't
have to apologize for him, and you don't
have to try to make him palatable to
the carnal world, and you don't have to
make him fit in to the pattern of
the lost world.
He's not like the valley in which he
came to, to which he came.
He's not like that valley.
He's different.
All together different, because he came from above.
And when he opens his mouth and talks,
there's no dust in his throat.
And when he reports, he's not guessing, he
knows he's been there and seen it.
No man has ascended up to heaven, but
he that came down from heaven, even the
Son of Man, which is in heaven.
And when he spoke, they looked at each
other with a simple hearted, and they said,
wonderful, wonderful, no man ever spoke like this.
Those who had a vested interest in the
valley, they cursed him and said, he's disturbing
us, taking away our living.
We'll kill him, and they did.
And he ascended back from whence he had
come, back from whence he came, but he's
coming once more.
And in the meantime, the way is open.
Shaft is now made in the clouds, and
the light shines through.
And he that believeth on the Son hath
everlasting life.
And he that believeth on the Son hath
everlasting life.
Right now, right now you can do it.
You say, but I've got to eat this,
or dress this way, or join that.
Why waste your time fooling around on the
horizontal level?
Down on the same plane with everybody else,
your help must come from above, not from
without.
And it can come from above, right where
you are now, right this minute, without waiting,
right now.
You can bow your head, and the light
of God will slip into your heart like
quick silver, like a flash of light from
above.
God can save you and bless you right
where you are now.
Take you up and give you the essence
and foretaste of that eternal life which is
with the Father.
And you'll have life, not all there is.
You'll have more when he comes, but you'll
have life, eternal life, within your own bosom
now.
He that is from above is above all.
I want to say to you, Christians, don't
go around apologizing for him.
Don't go around worried because you can't make
his doctrines fit in with what you've learned
in school.
All you learned in school was one fallen
head instructing another fallen head.
Some of it true, some of it false,
some of it all mixed up, but it's
one head instructing another head, all on the
same muddy floor, together, fallen.
You don't have to apologize for him who
comes from above all, who on that plane
of life is above all, equal with God
and is God, who came down from above
and comes down from above.
The dear old German mystics of a few
hundred years ago had their own nomenclature and
their own theological phrasings.
Sometimes we'd throw it out as not being
quite accurate or squaring with the way we
know doctrine.
But they used to say, when a man
is born again, Jesus Christ is born in
his heart.
They said the Father is everlastingly generating the
Son.
The eternal generation of the Son was the
doctrine they held and that we never hear
of now anymore.
But it was the eternal generation of the
Son.
And they said when a man, a sinner,
believes in Jesus Christ, God generates the Son
within.
And he's born anew for the generation of
the eternal Son within his bosom.
High and lofty concepts, my brethren, certainly infinitely
superior to the low views we have now,
that I accept Christ in order to escape
the atom bomb, or I accept Christ in
order that my business might prosper, or I
accept Christ for some other low reason.
They said we accept Christ in order that
the Son may be generated within us and
we may be born into the new world.
Praise his name.
That's help from above.
I'm finished, and it's time I should be.
I simply leave it with you, my friends.
God sent his Son, and his word is
final.
And your reaction to him is final.
And whatever you do toward him, God marks
as final.
You take him, you have life.
If you disobey and reject, you have not
life, and the wrath of God remains on
you.
In the doom and the gloom of the
valley are yours till death removes you.
Let us pray.
O God, our Father, we bless thy name,
that thou didst send us help from the
sanctuary, out from the heavenly palaces, down
from the lofty heights above.
He came.
He came to be born under law, to
be born of a woman, that he might
redeem us who were under law, and who
by the curse of the law were lost
hopelessly.
Down to the mud and the blood, down
to the shadows and the gloom, down to
the tears and the tomb, he came.
We bless thy holy name for sending him.
He came because he wanted to come, but
he came because thou didst send him.
And Father and Son agreed.
We bless thee, O Triune God.
We praise thee, O blessed Holy Ghost, the
conscience of the world that still keeps dimly
alive the racial memory of the world from
which we fell.
Great God, we do not want thy wrath
to be upon us.
We want to have that eternal life which
was with thee.
We pray help tonight.
There might not be one go out of
here who has not received the Son, who
has not obeyed the Son, who has not
now taken the Son, believed the Son.
O Son of Man, we hear thy voice.
Son of God, we see thy light.
With our grant, we pray that as we
go from this place tonight, we may go
driven by the hard, overwhelming force of logic
to Jesus Christ the Lord, to know that
there is nothing on our level, ancient or
modern, that can help us remotely, but only
he who came from above, only Jesus.
Blessed be the name Jesus.
We pray thee help us to love that
name and follow with us wherever we go.
Help these friends who have listened tonight.
We thank you for the privilege of speaking
to them.
O Lord, we pray send them out with
a bit of another world on their hearts,
a yearning, a longing, an aspiration, that they
may open wide the gates of their soul
and receive the Lord Christ in.
And rest in him, and trust him, and
know that even now in spirit they can
be raised out of the valley, and finally
that he is coming, taken out for good,
and the valley itself transformed, no longer from
the valley of death, but now of life.
For the knowledge of the Lord shall cover
the earth as the waters cover the sea.
We pray in Jesus' name, amen.