In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of seeking God and hearing His voice. He encourages the audience to not compromise with worldly pursuits but to draw near to God through the cross of Jesus Christ. The preacher also highlights the need to have a personal encounter with God and to allow His voice to convict and transform their lives. The sermon concludes with an invitation to experience the attributes of God and to continue exploring the topic of His eternity in the next sermon.

Let me read a number of passages from the scriptures having to do with the divine transcendence. Next Sunday night I want to speak on the eternity of God, tonight on the transcendence. 1 Chronicles 29, 11. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the glory and the victory and the majesty for all that is in the heaven. In the earth is thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all. Job 11, 7 and 8. Canst thou by searching find out God? Those are rhetorical questions, as you see, the answer is always no. Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? Deeper than hell, what canst thou know? Job 26, 14. Lo, these are parts of his ways, but how little a portion is heard of him. By the thunder of his power, who can understand? Psalm 145, 3. His greatness is unsearchable. Isaiah 55, 89. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. 1 Timothy 6, 15 and following. Which in his own times he shall show, who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who only hath immortality dwelling in light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see, to him be honor and power everlasting. Amen. I am to speak on the transcendence. Now, that may sound as if it were some took a lot of learning or at least a lot of profound thinking to understand it, but it doesn't. Transcendence simply means to go above, to rise above, to be above. And of course, it is very difficult to think of God as transcendent and think of him as immanent at the same time, that is, as being omnipresent, as being here with us, in us, in things, at the same time transcending all things. It looks like a contradiction, but as with many other apparent contradictions, it's not at all contradictory but entirely in accord with itself or the two thoughts in accord with each other. Now, sometime I'm going to speak on the omnipresence of God, and I just would say here that God is always nearer than you imagine him to be. God is so near that your thoughts are not as near as God. He is so near that your breath is not as near as God. He is so near that your soul is not as near to you as God is to your soul. God is so very near, and yet God, because he is God in his uncreated being, is so far above that thought cannot conceive it nor words express it. Now, I think that I should make it very clear, when I say far above, I do not mean geographically or astronomically removed. Because we are human beings and we are born in this world and we live in it and we learn to speak by analogy, almost everything we say is by analogy. You see, everybody is a poet and doesn't know it, as the boy said. A poet is somebody who speaks by analogies and sees eternity in an hour and the world in a grain of sand. You and I are always thinking in analogies. We say that a man is straight, and we're thinking we're comparing a man with a foot rule. We say that a man is crooked, and we're comparing him with a foot rule. We say that it's a foot long, and we're comparing that with a man's foot. And we say a man has two hired hands, we mean he has hired hands. And so almost everything we say is taken from the common earth round about us. We say that a man is off his base, and that's from baseball. We say that he's counted out, and that's from boxing. And we say he puts all his cards on the table, and that's from gambling. And so we go every phase of life, everywhere gives its tools to us to think with. So when we say that God is far above, we're using an analogy. We're thinking about a star that's way above or some planet or body that's way under, but that isn't what we mean when we think about God at all. Now if you miss this, you might as well stay at home, and I might as well too, because this is very important to the understanding of the message that follows, that we are thinking in God's transcendence, his farness above, not about astronomical distances, nor altitudes, nor physical magnitude. Physical magnitude has nothing to do. God never thinks about the size of anything. He never thinks about distances. They don't mean anything to God, because God is everywhere, and because he's everywhere, he doesn't have to go from one place to another. And because he doesn't have to go from one place to another, then distance doesn't mean anything. And because God contains everything, he doesn't have to worry about the size of anything. But when we use these expressions to help us to think, they're analogies and illustrations. Now I'd like to make it clear that size hasn't anything to do. When God thinks about things, he thinks not of their size. Can you imagine, if you will, a child that gets lost in a mountain, as sometimes happens, they're out having a picnic, and the little one wanders off and disappears, and they get sound trucks and bloodhounds and do everything to find that little child. She's only a tiny little mite, two years old, and she hasn't been in the world long, and she doesn't know much. She hasn't much size. She may be, if she's good and plump, forty pounds in weight. And as far as this world's concerned, she could disappear from it, and the world would never know that she'd gone, except a few bleeding hearts back home. But then there she is in the mountain. Now that mountain weighs how many billion tons or hundreds of millions of tons? I wouldn't claim to know. And there's minerals in it worth thousands of dollars, and there's timber on it, and there are animals roaming it, and there are great rocks there. It's all a very beautiful and a vast and a mighty thing. So mighty that we stand in front of the mountain, as the Jews did in front of old Sinai, and were stunned by the immensity of it. And yet one little two-year-old girl, weighing thirty-five or forty pounds, that has only been around a short while, she's of more value than that mountain, because the mountain has size, but that's all it has. It can't say, momma or daddy, and it can't say, now I lay me down to sleep, and it can't kiss you and throw its chubby arms around your neck, and it can't pray, and it can't laugh, and it can't dance with joy, and it can't sleep relaxed and limp in its little bed at night. It lacks all that God values the mountain lacks. It has stability and strength and weight and mass and size and form and shape and color, but it doesn't have hearts. And when God thinks about people, he thinks about hearts, not about size. So we talk about God being high and lifted up, being elevated and lofty and transcendent, we think not about distance, for that doesn't matter. We think about quality of life. It's quality of being that matters. It's the quality of being that makes the child valuable and the mountain not. The mountain has being, but it has not a high transcendent quality of being. A little child has less being, but it has quality of being infinitely higher, and so God has quality of being. Now I'd like to have you hear me say this. You probably won't believe it when I first say it. You may not believe it at all. That's my business, to try to persuade you, and that's why I'm here. But if you shouldn't believe that, it won't ruin the rest of the sermon. I'd like to say this to you, that God is just as far above an archangel as he is above a caterpillar. Now you know what a caterpillar is. It's a little worm the size of your finger with a fur coat on that it didn't buy and didn't cost anything. It's just there. Well, now that's a caterpillar, and of course it's not a very high class thing. It's never been out in society. It doesn't amount to much. It's just a worm, and you have to look very carefully or watch it go to know whether it's traveling west or east or which way it ought to travel, because it looks the same all the way around. Now that's a caterpillar. Now we have an archangel, and an archangel is that holy creature that we see beside the sea of God at the presence of God's throne, that mighty creature a little higher than the angels as man was made for a time a little lower, that being that can look upon the face of God with unveiled countenance. This is the archangel that never was in sin. This archangel, nobody knows how vast it might be. And yet God is just as far above that archangel as he is above the caterpillar. Now I'll tell you why. Because both the archangel and the caterpillar are creatures, and God is the uncreated one who had no beginning, the self-existent one, as I told you last week, who never was created, who wasn't made, but who is simply God who made all things. But the archangel is a creature. God had to put it together. God had to speak and say, Be, and it became a creature, and it is a creature, and it isn't God, and it never can become God, and God never can become it. There is a gulf, a vast gulf, an all-but-infinite gulf fixed between that which is God and that which is not God. That which is God is the great I Am, and that which is not God is all created things, from the archangel down to the amoeba, down to the caterpillar, down to the tiniest virus that they can't even find with the naked eye. God made all that, and so there's a separation between that which is God and that which is not God. And God is just as high above one as the other, because it is God's uncreated quality of life that transcends him, or that he transcends, causes him to be transcended, I'll get it straight, and makes him rise as he does high above all other creatures. Now, we've got to be careful, and I think that we Christians are guilty of it all the time. We've got to be careful and not think that life is like this. It begins with a sail and goes on to a fish, and goes on to a bird, and goes on to a beast, and goes on to man, and then an angel, and then an archangel, and then a cherub, and then a seraph, and then God. That simply puts God on the top heath of a pyramid of creatures. And God isn't a creature. God is just as high above the seraph as he is above the cell. He's just as high above the cherub as he is above the amoeba. He's just as high above the archangel as he is above the worm, because God is God. Now, God is of a substance wholly unique. And because he is, then, why my proposition stands, that he is as high above any creature as he is above any creature. But how can I go on? Really, how can any man go on? How can I speak of that which can't be spoken, and continue to talk about that which escaped all our human speech? And how can I think about that which is above all thought? And how can I talk when silence would become me better? St. Augustine said, O God, when I would speak of thee, I can't, and yet if I did not, somebody must speak. And so he burst out and spoke. But do you know something? I think that if there were some watcher or holy one from the vast universe yonder, who spent all his centuries by the sea of God, looking upon the holy face of God, I wonder how maybe that holy creature listens to our speech, listens to our talk, listens to our vain and idle words, listens and looks. And here is the chatter of earth's busy tribes of men, and the meaningless talk of the pulpits. How strange and how welcome such a talk as this tonight would be, even though it would have no more relation to the high truth of it all than a two-year-old child playing a violin would have relation to fine music. And yet every father would smile if, in obedience to the suggestion of his father, the little one took up the violin and tried to play. Every father who is away from home knows what it is to get a letter written in a block of letters by a child in school, misspelled and run down the edge and all the rest. But it's a letter from home and from a little one that he loves very much. And so I suppose that this message that I'm giving tonight is certainly far from being all that it ought to be, all that it could be, and all that sometime I may be able to give. Yet I think God is pleased because, compared with all the chatter of the world, it's at least an effort to talk about the great and holy one high and lifted up. You know, I wonder if some holy one, some watcher who had spent his centuries by the sea of God, I wonder if he were to come to this city and get into one of our pulpits and be allowed to speak. I suppose that if he spoke here he would say very little that we usually hear. I suppose that he would charm our ears and fascinate our minds and cheer our hearts by his talk about God, the great God, the rapturous God, the one that gave his son to die for us, the one in whose presence we expect to live while the ages roll, this great God whose love brought the Psalms into being, whose love brought the universe into being, this is God. And I suppose that after we'd hear such a being speak about such a God we'd never consent again to hear a silly timely sermon preached out of Time magazine. I imagine we'd insist if any man dares to take our time preaching to us that he preach about God, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and not try to settle the political problems or the economic problems of Canada or the United States or England or Germany, but would talk about God and God only. Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 2 But how little a portion is heard of him. See, all that we can think or say is intellectual, it's rational. But God rises above rationality. He rises so high above the rational that he rises as high above the rational as he does above the physical, because God being himself of an essence and substance, it's the like of which nothing else exists in the universe, he is above it all, yet we can know a little portion of God's ways. When I preach on the being of God, the attributes of God, what God is like, what kind of God God is, I am approaching it respectfully from afar off, and pointing with a reverent finger to the tall mountain peak which is God that rises infinitely above my power to comprehend. But that's only a little portion, and the paths of his ways that cannot be known, the rest is super-rational. My brother, I believe that we ought to get back our spiritual mysticism to the church again. I believe that we ought to come back to our effort to find God and to walk with God and to talk with God and live in the presence of God. We have pulled gospel Christianity down until it's been programmed, until people and men and gifted men and talented men and men with personality have taken over the holy place, and we've forgotten that we are here to worship God, that God is the source and center and foundation of all. How shall, says the hymn, how shall polluted mortals dare to sing thy glory or thy grace? Beneath thy feet we lie afar and see but shadows of thy face, and even in our church services we can see only the shadows of God's face. For God transcends and rises so high above it all that the very angels in heaven veil their faces, and the living creatures cover their faces and cry, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. How terrible it is that in the presence of this awesome, awful God, how terrible it is that some people are untouched by it all, how frightful, how awesome, how awful it is that most people are untouched. We don't want to hear about God. We want to hear about something that can tickle our fancy or satisfy our morbid curiosity or our longing after romance. Whereas the great God is there and we are going to have to face him now or face him then, this mighty God like a great burning universe will burst in upon us some day, burst in upon us and break down our defenses and destroy everything that we put up around ourselves, and we'll have to deal with him. And yet the average man isn't worried about it at all. He sleeps well at night and he thinks out his job and does it on him by day, eats and sleeps and lives and breathes and gets old and dies never having given a good high thought to the great God who transcends all. This God about whom it is said, Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the glory and the victory and the majesty for all that is in the heavens. Thine in the earth, it's Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted as head above all. This great God, and yet we care so very, little about him. How tragic I say that men will follow their lusts and live in their pride and their money and live for business and appetite and ambition. No additional proof needs to be made, no more needs to be said about the spiritual death that lies in the hearts of men. She that liveth in pleasure is dead, says the scripture, while she liveth. He that liveth in ambition and lust and appetite and pride lives for money and fame, that man is dead also. So as the blind man can't see the sunrise, so that dead man, though he may be only 25 years old, weigh 200 pounds and be athletic and intelligent and well to do, he still is dead and rotting in his death because the great God rises above the horizon of his understanding and he doesn't know the sun has come up. Like a flatworm in a cave or like a toad under a rock, he lives his life out and forgets that he's got to deal with God sometime, the great God Almighty. Now when God breaks in upon us, I want to live for the day when God will crash in upon me, when God will crash past my human understanding, when God will crash past everything, every defense that I might have as a human race might have put up. But what happens when that happens now? There is such a thing as having that happen right now in this world, and that's partly what conversion is, my brother. That's partly what it is to be saved, to repent, to be forgiven of your sin, to see a vision of God in your heart, to see Jesus Christ on his cross and on his throne. That's partly what it is. And when we're brought into the presence of this Holy God, you know you can go through the church, the whole routine of the church. You can come and learn to say, God is love, when you're a wee little tiny thing, and you can go on up and get your Bible from passing from one grade to another and then get big enough to make a speech in Sunday school programs, and you can get old enough to sing in the choir, and then you can join the church, and then you can be baptized, and then you can be asked to teach a class, and then you can entertain missionaries, and then you can learn to tithe, and you can give of your money to the work of the Lord, and you can be faithful in it, and never have ever had an experience of the great God breaking in upon your consciousness. But to live always wants removed from God, to live in another part, and to live as the King lived. Why does the King's son live in the city of Jerusalem and never see the King's face? For the conclusion of this message, please turn your tape to side two. Now, dread is one thing. There is a dread, you know. Everybody, I just read this week, somebody said this week, I never read the Torah. Nobody in this town said it. I don't know how many there would be that say it. But, and I say that it's different from here, it's from another place. Said, I don't read any passages, they're negative. Well, negative. My brother, before, before there can be any healing, there has to be diagnosis. When you go in to see a doctor, the doctor can't just smile and look up from his coffee break and say, take pill number nine. He can't do that, because maybe you don't need pill number nine. Maybe that'll kill you. Maybe what you need would be a knife or be straightened out and something. And so what you have to have is diagnosis. And sometimes I think the diagnosis is worse than the disease. I've had more trouble having seen what was wrong with me and finding it wasn't, than I have with the treatment. And this that I preach may be negative, I don't know, if God's negative, all right then. If the God I lifted up and that I can love him and worship him and live in his presence and pray and then be with him forever, if that's negative, give me a whole basket full of negatives. I want them. Well, one thing that comes to us when we meet God is dread. Now, it's hard to say that people don't like that. They don't want to dread anything. They want to be cheered up. They want to go to church in order to be cheered up. Oh, it's one of the silliest things I ever heard in my life. I'd rather preach to 25 people upstairs over a barber shop than to preach to a whole church full of people who couldn't stand the sight of God. To have a whole church full of people giving their money and riding me around in a Cadillac or a Lincoln and yet they couldn't, they can't, they want me to talk about God. They don't want me to embarrass them by talking about God. Well, the dread of God. It's called the dread of Isaac, you'll remember. And Jacob said, how dreadful is this place. And Peter said, depart from me, Lord, for I'm an unclean man. You'll find all down the years, wherever a man looks upon God, even dimly and briefly, it affected him so terribly. And the dread I'm talking about is not physical danger. When you meet God, you get over the dangers of the world and the fears of the world, but the danger, the fear, the dread, it is God. It's not a sense of danger. It's a sense of being in the presence of someone very awful, very wonderful, very transcendent, very highly lifted up. And there's a sense of creature consciousness. Abraham said, I am but dust and ashes. Oh Lord, allow me to, allow me to speak. I who am but dust and ashes. Abraham had been asked to lead in prayer, or rather let's put it around like this. If Abraham had come out of that place and had been thrown down suddenly in the midst of some of our gospel churches and had heard somebody lead in prayer, he undoubtedly would have been shocked at what he heard, for he wasn't so fluent. Sometimes I think our very fluency is an indication that we're not very near to God. We're just repeating what we've learned. We blame the Catholics for reading out of their prayer books, and at least what they read is good English, and it's fluent and beautiful. And we, we pray prayers that are just as embalmed as those prayers are, only that we make them up as we go along. They're just as dead, because there's no sense of creature consciousness. There's no feeling that I'm in the presence of this great God, before whom angels fold their wings and shut up their mouths, only to open them again and cry, holy, holy, holy. That sense of creature consciousness, that sense of abasement, of being overwhelmed in the presence of that which is above all creatures. We ought to have that return again. I say I'd rather have 25 people like that than to have 2,500 that are simply there as religious socialites, meeting socially in the name of the Lord. They tell me that Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great English preacher, one of the greatest English preachers of them all, they tell me that he once in a while goes, gets on a train, or drives, I don't know how he gets there, but he travels a long way, a day or so, way up into Wales. And there he gathers with 12 or 15 people, and charges his batteries again, before he comes back to his great London pulpit, where he reaches 1,500 or more people. But he wants to go up there, and he says, after I have been with those simple-hearted worshippers a little while, I am a better man, and I come back to London better prepared to preach. I believe that this is what we need in this hour, my friends, and the feeling of all ignorance. Now there is a certain cult abroad, I'm not going to mention their names because I don't want to advertise them, but there's a certain cult that says we can answer any question there is in the Bible, anything to be answered, we can answer it. And I have run on to a lot of people that felt the same way. They would be what, Cicero, wasn't it, that said that some men would rather anything in the wide world than that they should seem to be in doubt about anything. They were so sure of themselves that they'd rather, almost rather die than seem to not know anything. But you know, the closer we come to God, the less we know, and the less we know, and the more we know, we don't know. Our flippancy in these days, I don't want to say it about Canadians because I'm a guest among you, and I've only been here a year, and I haven't learned to say left-handed yet, rightly. But I will say about Americans, without hesitation, I've said to them for 40 years that this flippancy is a terrible sin in the presence of the Holy God. What would you think, my friend, if the Queen of the Commonwealth, the Queen of England, were you were to be in her presence with some friends, and you'd start kidding and telling jokes and trying to be funny and making cracks about things. Oh, what a shame and how horrible it would be. Nobody would do such a thing, and she's only a woman, a human being like you. How much more terrible that we can be so flippant in the presence of the great God, who is God of all lords and King of all kings. Well, that feeling of ignorance, we know too much. There should be a speechless humility among us, a speechless humility in the presence of the mystery inexpressible. And then there's a sense of weakness. I don't think that you'll ever be strong until you know how utterly weak you are, and you'll never know how utterly weak you are until you have stood in the presence of that great plenitude of strength that we call God, that great fullness of infinite power that we call God. And with the eyes of our heart, for an awful, happy, terrible, wonderful moment, have gazed upon the transcendent God high and lifted up with his train filling the temple, and we'll know how weak we are. Let me tell you, sir, that God never works out of human strength, and the strongest man is the weakest man in the kingdom of God. And the holy apostle said, when I am weak, then I must strong. And you can turn it around and say, when I am strong, then I am weak. Never I feel that I can do it. I've been preaching now since I was 19 years old, and I'm 63, and I began to preach when I was 19. And yet to this hour, after all these years of preaching, I came into this pulpit tonight shaking inside, not because I feared you. I have nothing to fear from you. You're my friends, and you're hospitable beyond anything I knew of any people I've ever met. I don't have to fear you, but I don't, I fear God. It's the fear and trembling of knowing that I stand to speak of God, and if I don't speak rightly about God, what a terrible error it will be. And if I speak evilly of God, what a frightful crime. And it's only when I speak well of God that I dare sleep at night without forgiveness. Weakness. Daniel said, after he had been talked to by God, I set my face toward the ground, I became dumb, there remained no more strength in me, neither is there breath left in me. That's the effect of self-depreciation and a sense of impurity. Isaiah said, woe is me, I am undone, I am unclean, I am a man of unclean lips, a feeling of absolute profanity. You say, must I live all the rest of my life in a state of dread, and in a state of ignorance, in a state of weakness, in a state of impurity? No, but I say that unless you arrive at that conviction about yourself, and not be told that, now it's all right for me to tell you you were born in sin. I grew up being taught that I was born in sin. I was born in sin. They told me that as soon as I got where I could hear teachers. They said, there's none that do us righteous. No, not one. All your righteousnesses are filthy rags. And I believed it, and when I began to preach, I began to tell other people, your righteousness is all filthy rags. But I thought their filthy rags were filthier than my filthy rags. And I thought their sins were worse than my sins. You can be as orthodox as John Calvin, and believe in total depravity as much as any Baptist, and still, when it's all over, be proud of yourself and self-righteous. If you had asked a Pharisee, are all men sinners, they'd have said, yes! But they said, with us being accepted. And they looked down upon the publican and the harlot and the Pharisee, for the Pharisee looked down upon the publican and the harlot, and Jesus looked down upon the Pharisee, for he knew that they were just as sinful. The Pharisee who'd never broken the law to his own knowledge was just as sinful as the harlot who'd broken it every night. And yet, is there anybody that's never broken the law? No, I didn't say there was. I said that the Pharisee was never consciously broken the law. You can strike a compromise with your own conscience. You can learn to look at yourself in the glass and see something better than is there. The old wise Esau, the fabulist who wrote so many great tables, told of a man with two bags tied with a rope thrown across his shoulder, and he was walking. And they said, what is that in those bags? Well, he said, in the front bag, in the rear one, he said, that's my fault. And in the front one, that's my neighbor's. He had him out where he could see them, but he had his own back where he couldn't see them. So we live. But once we have been brought into the presence of God in true repentance, we will never again, never again think of ourselves as good. We'll never again think of ourselves as pure. We'll only have to say, Lord, thou knowest. That's all. As God says to you, son, are you pure? We can only say the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. God, you said it. That is the way I feel. I feel as if I was the worst of all men. Saint Teresa, that dear woman of God, said that the closer we are to God, the worse of this effect. The more conscious we were always of how bad we were. Oh, the paradox, the mystery, the wonder of knowing that God, the transcendent one, is so high above all others that the gothics, nobody can cross, and yet condescends to come and dwell among us. The God who is across on the other side of that vast million-mile gap that separates that which is God from that which is not God, that God one day came and condensed himself into the womb of the Virgin who was born and walked among us, and the baby that tramped around on the floor of Joseph's carpenter shop and got in the way and played with the shavings, there was the great God so infamously lifted up and so transcendent that the archangels gazed up to him. There he was. I remember hearing a song, I've never heard it sung in public since, oh, many, many years ago. I heard it in the night song. It starts out by saying, it has a sort of antithetical idea that one thing's one thing and another thing's another, and the man who's the sinner, he sings, which way shall I take, shouts the voice on the night. I'm a pilgrim, a weird and faint is my light. I seek for a palace that shines on the hill, but between us a stream lies sullen and chilled. How shall I bridge the gulf between me and the palace that I seek, knowing that I am so weak and he is so strong, knowing I'm so bad and he's so good, I'm so ignorant and he's so wise. How can I bridge the gulf? And then the other man speaks up and sings back, near, nearly my son is the old wayside cross, like a gray friar cowl in lichen and moss, and its crossbeams will point to the far distant strand that bridges the water so safely for man. That great gulf between the transcendent God, who is so high I cannot think him, and so lofty that I cannot speak him, before whom I must fall down in trembling fear and adoration. That great God, I can't climb up to him, and I can't soar in any man-made vehicle to him. I can't pray my way up to him, but there's only one way, near, nearly my son is that old wayside cross, and the cross bridges the gulf that separates God from man. That cross, my brother and sister, this God is transcendent. You will never find him, you never can find him. Mohammedans can search for him for a thousand years and not find him. Hindus can cut themselves and lie on beds of glass and walk through fire and not find him. Protestants can join churches and lodges and all other things and not find him. Philosophers can rise on rungs after rungs of thoughts and not find him. Poets can soar away on imagination and not find him. Musicians can compose heavenly music. I've been listening to Bach's Christmas Oratorio, such music never was on earth, and yet you can listen to that and enjoy it until it breaks your heart and not find him. Never find him, never find him. I must need to go home by the way of the cross, there's no other way but this. If I ever climb to the heights sublime, I'll never climb to the heights sublime at the way of the cross, I admit, for the way of the cross leads home. So I offer you the cross. I offer you first of all that great God. Lost in thy greatness, Lord, I live as in some gorgeous maze. This sea of unbegotten light blinds me, and yet I gaze. I point you to God, the transcendent one. Then I point you to the cross, but you will never know the meaning of the cross nor value the cross until God the Holy Ghost has done something within you to break you down, to destroy your pride, to humble your stubbornness, to change your mind about your own goodness, to blast away your defenses, take away your weapons, to do what the Quakers call meek you, to meek him down, to come down and become meek in God. What about it? What about it? Some of you are saved, some of you are half saved, some of you are badly and poorly saved, some of you knew God once and you've wandered away, some of you have compromised with your business and your school, and God seems so far, far away. He is in one sense, but in another he's as near as your heart's beat. So the cross has bridged the gulf. What about it? This is the night, tonight, this very night. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. He who is God, the transcendent one, says, Come unto me, all ye that labor under heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. You shall find rest under your soul. Now, I've been preaching here for a year, and I've been talking to God today and yesterday about it. Are you knowing what I'm saying, or is it simply the voice of another man? Oh, the Jews said, Don't let God speak to us, we can't stand it. Speak to us, Moses, don't let God speak. But a wiser than they, Thomas of Kempis, said, I want to reverse that, God, and I want to say, Let not man speak to me, speak thou, God, for I want to hear what you have to say. And I want you to hear two voices these nights. I want you to hear mine, of course. But if you only hear mine, we're all failing. I want you to hear another, another voice, a voice that'll get hold of you, that'll grip your conscience and your will and shake and hold you. And if it doesn't, then you haven't yet learned what the gospel is all about. You're religious, but you have a name to live by your death. May God forbid it, may God cure it, may God deliver it, may God heal it, through the blood of the Holy Son of God. Now, we're going to sing a number. This concludes sermon number three, The Attributes of God. The next in the series, The Eternity of God, follows on tape number four.