In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes that Jesus Christ is above science and all human knowledge. He states that humanity is trapped in a fallen state and unable to escape the valley of sin and despair. The preacher uses the analogy of reaching for a distant star to illustrate the futility of human efforts to save themselves. He concludes by highlighting the fallen nature of mankind and the need for God's intervention to overcome the darkness and despair in the world.

In the third chapter of John, John the third chapter, there arose a question between some of the John's disciples and the Jews about purifying, verse 25 and on. And they came unto John, and said unto him, Whereby he that was with thee beyond the Jordan, whom thou dost witness, behold, it came that pirate, and all men come to him. John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves tell me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom. But the friend of the bridegroom, we call him best man now. But the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must be preached, but I must be preached. He that cometh from above is above all. He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth. He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth. For no man receiveth his testimony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true. Whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God, for God giveth not the Spirit by nature unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. And he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. Now, it's just possible that tomorrow, when my clothes and socks, I'll use the text, He must be preached, but I must be preached. Though I don't say that I shall, because I am trying to play this by ear. And find out from day to day what God wants me to say. But the text for this day is, He that cometh from above is above all. He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth. He that cometh from heaven is above all. Now, these words are the words of John, according to all that I can learn. There are no quote marks as we have it now, so it's difficult to know when somebody quits talking, somebody else begins. At verse 30, He must be preached, but I have to preach. Probably the last public utterance of John the Baptist. Then another John, the Beloved, takes it up, and he comments on what Jesus and John had said. These words that I read in your hearing were written by a man of little education, and they were written for readers of little education. Oh, I wish God would let me sometime preach a sermon all together positive, 150% positive, affirmative. Oh, and I wish I didn't have to say, Now look how sure it is. But I suppose as long as there were soldiers and the devil shooting at it, we're going to have to say, Well, we're not that bullet. And I'll have to say this, that today we're reminded that our intellectual and educational equipment is superior to the New Testament Christians. They say they were simple-hearted people, they fed sheep, and they gathered sycamore fruit, and they were Republicans, they were clean people, and they didn't have what we have, nor gone into the depths of the atom and pulled down the lightning out of the clouds. You haven't done all of that. You didn't know the blood circulated. You didn't know much. They were simple people. But today, we are educated intellectuals, and our educational equipment is just something to write home about. Well, now, they tell us that because of this, because we are wiser, then they contradict it and say, We've got to furnish a lighter diet for them today. Now, that all seems self-contradictory to me, that we know so much more than they did. Why can't we take the strong meat they took? You see, they tell us that we have to make religion attractive and easy, but people simply will not stand for the heavy stuff. Some years ago, Moody Press brought out a series called the White Cliff Series. They were mostly the writings of the great Puritans. They were great writings, nevertheless. John Owen, Scroogle, Isaac Wabba, and the such. And they had to stop publishing them because nobody would buy them. They were gathering dust. They would read fiction, but they wouldn't read anything heavy. And yet they say that we're so much brighter than they were back there. Yet you know the whole New Testament is a deep and solemn book, and a heavy book, if you like. Nobody ever sits down to read the New Testament to get a little refreshment or to get a little relaxation. That book wasn't written to relax a fellow who was tense from watching The Lone Ranger. That book was a heavy book, written for heavy-thinking people. And yet it was written for plain, mostly uneducated people. People that didn't know much, but thought seriously. And they were expected to believe and to accept this heavy stuff. They were expected to do it. They were expected to understand the Book of Romans, and John's writing is tremendously profound. The elevation of it and the depth of it, the profundity and the height of it. And yet they were expected to believe it. They didn't excuse them on the ground that they weren't educated men. They were supposed to be able to understand what Paul meant when he wrote Romans. Now, Paul was one, as they said to be, one of the six greatest minds, had one of the six greatest minds of all time. The other five we'll forget for the moment, but Paul was supposed to be one of the profoundest minds. And they say, oh, you're supposed to know that the Book of Romans is the profoundest book ever written. When Lord Bohegan wrote Nodomorganum, he sent a copy to the king. The king called to it and then sent it back, and he said, thank you for your book. But he said it's like the peace of God that passes all understanding. He couldn't understand Nodomorganum and New Orleans, so he just sent it back. But yet Paul is profounder than Nodomorganum, profounder than anything ever written, the Book of Romans. And yet they were supposed to be able to understand the Book of Romans. But there's a modern revolt against serious truth, and of course a corresponding demand for streamlined religion. Now, I'd like to tell you this, that this is not the result of a deficiency in our intellectual life. We're as smart as our fathers were, and we can understand anything they can understand. There is no tapering off of our intellect. You'll be as a son in your own image. You, like you, will be just about where yours is, and yours will be just about where your daddy was. So we're not going downhill intellectually. That's not our problem. But the reason we don't like good, solid reading that demands streamlined religion is carnality and lack of spiritual appetite. You know, it takes spiritual appetite to read David's Psalms and the Book of Romans and the Book of John. It doesn't take a profound intellect to understand it, but it takes a spiritual appetite to make you want to read it. And that's what's the matter with it. We've lost our appetite. Sick people always lose their appetite. That's one of the first things they do when their blood gets bad and their liver gets out and the other way. And that's what's the matter with us. But I have made it a habit, I have made it a habit, always to preach the heaviest thing I know. Never, never slow for people, because they'll get it all right. They'll get it. And the ones that are hungry and the other ones wouldn't get anything anyhow. And I, for my part, I refuse. I know my name is John, even though I do have a dog's name. And if it goes over anybody, that's up to God and the people. Now, he that is of the earth is earthy. And the man of God here draws a sharp contrast between the earthly and the heavenly. Now, there's a great gulf fixed, you know, between the earth and the heaven, between the earthly and the heavenly. Why don't God's poor people know that? That there's a gulf fixed as wide and as uncrossable as that which was fixed between divies and lizards. You just can't cross over it. Now, I believe in the fall of man. We are trying to trim that down these days, and you don't hear much said about the fall of man. I'm writing about it all the time, but I never get much reaction. People either don't believe it, or else I'm shooting at deadlines, because I believe in the fall of man. I believe that man sinned and the light in his power went out. He didn't cease to exist, but he ceased to live spiritually. And when the race awoke to find itself fallen, God was gone into invisibility, and in its place there was sickness and decay and death. And men found themselves fallen into a great deep valley. That's where the human race is. Now, it's a moral valley and a spiritual valley rather than a physical one. But men found themselves fallen into a great deep valley, enveloped in shadows and darkness. That describes the human race. We are down in a shadowy veil, surrounded by shadows and darkness, by tears and disease and death, and filled with fears and disappointment and despair. Now, there's no way to climb out of this valley. There isn't any way to get out, and so we've solved the problem by saying that we didn't fall down into it, that we climbed up to it, that we started still further down than we are. We started in protoplasmic mists and colloidal homes, and slowly evolved to where we are now. But the Bible says we started up on a level where the image of God stamped in our souls. But the day that we ate thereof, we died. And we're now down in the valley, fallen down into it, but not climbed up to where we are. If you had to climb up to touch the bottom of it, you were pretty low to start with. But that's where educated fellows tell us we started, way down there in colloidal ooze. But there's no way to get out of this valley. There's no ladder. Jacob saw a ladder once, but the human race can't climb the ladder, and they can't climb a rope, and nobody can help anybody else because we're all down the same valley, you see. You can't get out of it. It's a valley of sorrow, and you can't get out. And the human race stands, or kneels, or lives, or dies, or crawls, or hopes together on the same level. Now, some have tried hard to get out of it, but they can't get out. They've tried it very hard. But you know, if all the people in the world were to reach for, say, Arcturus, the great star, or Venus, the planet, if all the people in this section of the world tonight were to reach up and try to reach Arcturus or some other star, nobody could reach it. There would be millions of miles between the waving fingertips of the man trying to reach it and the star itself. Yet some would be a little closer than others. There was a little sawed-off fellow who was too lazy to go on up. He was about four foot seven. He couldn't reach it. But the seven-foot, four-inch football boy, I mean basketball boy, he couldn't reach it either. It isn't a matter of a foot or so difference. As far as reaching the star is concerned, it makes no difference whether you're up on the mountain or down in the valley, whether you're six foot seven or whether you're four foot six. Because you can't reach the star. You can't climb to the stars. And so to climb out of this fallen valley where we find ourselves is a total impossibility. Men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin and many other such men, they were a little taller than the average of mankind. They were a little bit morally better. But to be morally better, it means you're about a foot taller than the fellow beside you who's morally lower. If somebody put a bomb in that airplane that exploded over Indiana and killed 63 people, I don't think he did. I think it was a mechanical failure. But if he did, and there are suspecting maybe somebody did, he was pretty short morally, I'd say. He was pretty low down. And there were lots of sinners in Pittsburgh a great deal higher than he is. But neither one of them can reach the star. Neither one of them. Neither the man in Weston's Pennsylvania State Prison, where I preached when I was here before as a visitor, not as an inmate. He's short morally, but still he can't reach it. And the fellows over at Pitt, I've been hearing about Pitt since I've been here. What's that? University? Well, they're pretty good, but they can't reach it either, you see. We're down here. Here we are. Some are tall, some are short, some are educated, and some aren't. Some are cultured, and some aren't. Some read Shakespeare, and some read the comics. But none of us can get out. We can't get out. And not only that, we can't help each other. Nobody can help anybody else because we're all down here together, you see. You put somebody on your shoulder, and then somebody stands on your shoulder, and somebody on his shoulder, and pretty soon you begin to topple over. You'd never get out. It'd be like the human race standing on each other's shoulders, trying to reach the moon. You can't do it. You can get up a little higher, but you can't get high enough. And not high enough is just as bad as not even trying. Well, now, the worst part about all this is, I say, that people don't know we're falling. We don't know we're down here. We look at each other and think that's the way it ought to be. I look at you and think that's the way you ought to be. Oh, no, brother. Uh-uh. And not even you, sister. Pretty as you are, you're not the way you would have been if you hadn't fallen. Uh-uh. No, no, no, no. And you dear pretty ladies that are so grateful, give Mother Nature a little time. She'll shove you around. You'll have an awful time. And some of these fine, tall-worked young fellows as handsome as our brother over here that's in town are going to catch up with you. I don't say him, but I say you, young fellow. And you're going to be old, and you're going to go down looking down at the Earth. The gravitational tug of Mother Nature, you know, on the Earth pulls you down. Pretty soon, when you just can't hold up against it anymore, you're left going down and going to say, Mr. So-and-so died last night. Well, now, we've got a little instinct for God left in us. Paul says that we reach out and feel after him. There's a little what they call a racial memory. There's a little racial memory of better days, but it isn't very strong, and we soon get over it and learn to get some entertainment to hide it. And when any man opens his mouth, says John, he speaks down on this valley of sea. All dust and misery and blood and sweat and tears and sorrow and disappointment and despair and graveyards and prisons, we're down here. And every time we open our mouth, dust comes out. He says, he that is of the Earth, when he speaks, he speaks of the Earth. He's earthly, and that's the best he can do, because that's the only place he's ever been. You see, if you haven't been around the world, you'll just speak English. If you've been around the world, one man said he went around the world on two French words, oui, oui. And if you've been somewhere, you speak French and all, or at least oui, oui. But outside of that, you speak of where you've been. My friends up in Canada kid me, that is the ones who know me well enough, about my American accent. They've been making a little list of them for me, things that I say. Well, I speak of where I've been, brother. I was born out here not so far from Pittsburgh in the hills, and when I die, there'll be a little bit of Pennsylvania somewhere to stick under on a stone and project. But you talk of where you've been, and that's what people do. They open their mouths, and what do they talk about? They talk about the valley. They talk about the fallen world. They talk about Adam's lost faith, only they don't call it that. They call it something else, but when you hear them, you know what they're talking about. They're talking about certain things, dark and fallen and hopeless. That's what we talk about. But now, thank God, we turn away from that a bit. He that cometh from above is above all, and we identify him. No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven, we identify him here. And we find that this man who came down, who is above all, he's Lord Jesus Christ. You see, help has got to come down. Help can't come to you from the same level that you're on. It can't come to you as they say, horizontally. It has to come down vertically. It has to come from above. That's why I don't pay any attention to psychiatry and psychology and all that. I've read the stuff, you know, and I can talk intelligently about it if I want to waste my time. But I don't recommend it to anybody because it's, for example, it's some fellow who studied your insides to see what you were like and what made you tick. And he wrote it down in a book. A fellow named Sigmund Freud, a sexy old buzzard, wrote psychoanalysis, and out of psychoanalysis grew up as a psychiatrist. And this will make some of you horribly mad, but you'll get over it and be better for the experience. But I don't go much for it because Sigmund Freud's dead, you know. He died and he didn't rise again. He's still dead. All he did was take a little photograph of the inside of our head and tell us about it, but nobody said anything, according to him. And I think he's about right in that. But here we are, and nobody can reach out and help anybody else. I can't lift anybody above myself, and neither can anybody else. So, somebody had to come down. He that came down from heaven, he came down. He that is from heaven, he's above all, he said. So, he came down from a higher level. He came from above, and he must be above all if he's going to lift anybody up out of this mess that we're in, you see. He's above all. Now, let's look at what he's above. Jesus Christ our Lord. He's above all human reason, I'd like to say. You see, human reason can't save us. I started out by arguing that we ought to read, that we ought to think, that we ought to read and become acquainted with heavy stuff. And yet I tell you that human reason can't save you, because human reason can only extend out on its own level. It can never lift you up on another moral and spiritual level. Particularly, it can never lift you up to a higher level of life. He that cometh from above is above the reason. That's why I don't feel called upon to try to equate Christianity with philosophy. Can't do it. And I as a young chap began it when I was about 21 years of age, and for the next 15 years I was preaching all that time, too. For the next 15 years I read philosophy around the world, in fact. I read more philosophy and science than I did New Testament in those early days of my ministry. But, I mean, I did religious literature. I lived on the Bible itself more than I did of religious literature about the New Testament and about things about the Bible. But nevertheless, human reason can't lift you up. There's nothing that they've done. Never feel humble and meek before a great mind. That great mind is simply a fellow a little bit taller, but he's in the valley, and his feet show the mud of the fallen world where he was born and where he'll die. The one who came from above, he gains nothing from human reason. He takes nothing from it, because he's above it. He lifts us up out of it, you see. And that's why we glorify him. He came down to lift us up. He was born down, and we might be born up. He came from heaven, and we might go to heaven. Jesus Christ the Lord. Then he's above human science. Now, human science is horizontal, too. Science, you know, is the application of reason to matter and motion and laws and so on. That's all science is. Science just means knowledge, you know. A woman who knows how to make butter is a scientist. My wife's a scientist. She can make dresses. She cuts them out and lays them around, and they look to me like a lot, but they turn out to be a dress for a granddaughter. Well, she's a scientist. Anybody's a scientist that knows anything. But over here, you know Dick, or over at University of Chicago or University of Toronto, they just know a little more of that sort. But not appreciably more. Not appreciably more. Everybody's dumb, only just dumb on a different subject, somebody said. And we don't know very much. So, let's not try to equate human reason and human science with Christianity. There's a movement afloat today. I get among them, and I preach for them, and I write for them, but I don't believe in them, particularly. You know, they're good fellows, but they're off. They think that the trouble with evangelical Christianity is that we're not educated enough. That if we apply more reason and education to evangelical Christianity, we'll show the world. We won't show the world a thing except a bust on our heels, and that we're down in the valley and can't get out. Human reason had been tried, you see. The Greeks, they knew everything there was to know, except a little of the modern industrial stuff. They knew it all. There isn't an idea popping anywhere that wasn't known by the Greeks, Pythagoras, and Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle, and all the rest of them. So that human science won't do, my friend. You get all goose pimply when you read that that Pioneer of the Fifth is up there talking back to one million miles of space. Can you imagine it? They put a little thing up there weighing how much? Sixteen or eighteen pounds? And it's talking back. Every time somebody pushes a switch somewhere in England or the United States, the things begin to chatter back again. You can show the cartoons about the sun standing there yelling, Oh, barber mouth! Pioneer Five is barbering all the secrets of the sun. Well, all right, all right. But you get all scary and frightened, don't you, my brother? Because they don't know a thing about how to get out of this valley. We're all falling down here together. We're lost and hopeless. But Jesus Christ our Lord came from above, and so he's above science. He's above it all. He owes nothing to it, and from it he learns nothing, because he contains it all. Anything that anybody can discover, he already knew. And anything anybody knows, he already knew. So he doesn't learn anything from human science. And there's human civilization. What's human civilization? Well, civilized man brushes his teeth, and the uncivilized man doesn't. And it turns out that the civilized man loses his teeth at least twenty years earlier than the uncivilized man. Now, I don't know there's any relation there, but I know that the African national has his white, gleaming teeth when he's an old man. And the American national loses his when he's about thirty-seven, and gets plates when he's about forty-two. And, of course, he uses striped toothpastes. That's the difference between the heathen, you know, and the civilized man. The heathen fellow, he just eats whatever he gets ahold of, you know. And the civilized man, he refines it and takes all the vitamins out of it, then goes into a laboratory and gets the vitamins again, puts them in bottles, and sells them back to you. Fruits and all, and out of the field. But we have to buy them in the drugstore. Yeah, I'm glad I'm a civilized man. I comb my hair with a plastic comb, brush it with a brush bought in the store. But I wonder if I'm any better off. That's an open question I don't know. I really don't know. I think that our brother Bozeman here would probably say it's better to be civilized than to be a caveman. But that's an open question. He's not there to civilize them anyhow. He's there to win them to Jesus Christ the Lord. He's not there to make Americans out of them. He's there to tell them about one who came down. Not bring horizontally civilization to them, but bring vertically salvation down to them. There's the difference, you see. There's a difference between the lions' foreign missions and the missionary activities of a great many denominations. They expect what we've got on the earth in this fallen valley, and they bring it in horizontally and say here it is. Put on a shirt, brush your teeth, comb your hair, and shave. They bring it in horizontally. But the lions' missionaries goes out and says it come down from above. That's the difference. Well, in human religion, there's a lot of human religion these days. We've got more religion now, father, than ever we've had. The temples we build, though, are made out of the bricks, bloodstained bricks that we got in the Valley of Sorrow, the fallen valley of the world. Some truth and much error, and no power to save. No power. Milton, in his Paradise Lost, told about Satan falling in and over, and all that gang falling with him. And God threw him down to hell. I think Milton was off eschatologically, but he was on as far as theology was concerned. He said he threw him down there, and there was gold there. And he started in and began to work on the gold that paved the streets of hell and made a beautiful palace out of it. Now, what he was trying to say was that the best thing we got down here, we build buildings out of them, but they're fallen buildings. They belong to hell and not to heaven. They're from the earth and not of the heaven above. But there's a lot in religion, you know. We're dealing it. We have a religion of all sorts. This is the day of a multiplicity of creeds. They're trying to get us all together now. You don't dare say a word. In a Toronto paper I read, before I came down here, they were condemning some of the teachers because the teachers were telling them that Jesus Christ was the only Savior. They said, you shouldn't do that. And one of the professors in the university said, I don't see where a child is benefited by telling them that there is one God, that people believe what they want to believe. When you hear people talking about it like that, you just see dust coming out of their mouths, you know. That's dust. That's the clay. He that is of the earth, he speaketh of the earth, and the earth hears him. He's earthly, and he'll die and go back to the earth again. So that human religions, they're just human things, even though they're a lot of them. Have you been hearing about Zen Buddhism? Zen Buddhism. Buddha would turn over in his grave, if he's in his grave. I don't know whether they cremated him or what happened to him. Anyhow, he'd turn over twice if he knew they were using his name on this modern Zen, this beatnikism. Old ladies, you know, who have no babies but a lot of dogs, and they have servants and have nothing to do. And they drive, you know, they've never hit a lot, two blocks in twenty years, and they're fat and stiff and miserable mentally and spiritually. So they got to have somehow that story by a book on Zen, and they studied Buddhism. But somebody who used to be a communist, who was twelve years, who was a communist as an organizer, a very good friend of mine now, marvelously born-again Christian, who knows God radiantly happy, and has turned the rest of that mess over to the devil first that it came from, said that they didn't, this Zen stuff, all this beatnikism and Zen stuff, communists don't even believe in it. They laugh at the people who are mixed up in that. But we Christians take them seriously, you know, and give them a place on the platform. Well, Christ is above all religion, because Christ didn't come to institute another religion. Thank God he didn't. He came to bring down something from above. He came to bring life down from above. Old G. Campbell Morgan shouted to his congregation, he said to the preachers before him, he said, Go, go to the world and offer them peace. Go, go to the world and offer them rest. Go to the world and offer them life. Jesus Christ is the life of the world, and he came to bring life to the world. He brought life down to a dying and dead world. So go and tell the world I bring you one who is life of all life, and who will be the death of all death in that day to come. Now, he brought it down from above. Note the Jews. The Jews were, they sought after righteousness. They believed in righteousness. And the Greeks, they believed in wisdom. And the Oriental, they believed in redemption. That is, they all sought it. They sort of divided the world up like that. The Jews believed in morality, the Greeks believed in wisdom, and the Oriental cults and philosophies went out after some way to escape this world of ours and get out of it, that redemption. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he said, "'Of God are ye in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.' And he took in everything the Jews had sought, and everything the Greeks had sought, and everything the Orientals had sought, and added one thing more, and said, "'This is Jesus Christ, you've got to take it. Take Jesus, and you'll have all of the world in seeking, the better part of the world. That part of the world has been planning up on the high heels and trying to get out of the valley. They never got out. The Greeks never got out. And the Jews tried it, but you know it says they did it without faith, so it didn't work. But Jesus Christ came and said, "'Now stop planning, stop planning, stop reaching for the sun. I am the bread of life, and if any man leaves it me, he shall never hunger again. I am the water of life, and anybody that drinks of this shall never thirst again. I am the resurrection, and I am the way and the truth and the light.'" I have a little hymn here. I like hymns, and I put this one on upside down, but I just copied this before I came out of an old Methodist hymn that was 111 years old. I carry around with me, along with my Bible, how sweet the name of Jesus sounds in the believer's ear. It soothes its sorrows, heals its wounds, and takes away its fear. You ever sing that? You should sing that, but we don't sing it much anymore, you know. We leave such songs out of our book as they're in. We skip them. And then he says, "'He makes the wounded spirit whole and calms the troubled breast. It is manner to the hungry soul and to the weary wretch.'" The name of Jesus. When I was ordained, they asked me why I had come to the Christian Missionary Alliance. I was 21 years old, and I had been converted four years, and I'd never been to Bible school and hadn't been sent back. But I had never been, and I didn't know what to say. So I told them I thought that I could probably stay in the Alliance with less trouble to my conscience than any other. I wouldn't have done it if they did. But what I like about the Alliance is not all of it. You, dear people, are Alliance true and true. The Lord deliver you now. Amen. Because, you know, there's a lot wrong with us Alliance people, and not a lot wrong with us. And a fellow that says, I'm Alliance true and true. Well, he's got people probably pretty empty. But the one thing about the Alliance keeps me in it. Two things that keep me in it. One is, Jesus Christ is everything to the Alliance people. Instead of arguing about Calvin and Herminia, we talk about Jesus Christ being all in all, you see. Instead of arguing about Moses' baptism, we say, You know, Jesus Christ, he's the rock on which I build my shield and hiding place, my never-failing treasure filled with boundless stores of grace. That's why I'm in the Alliance. And mission, that's the second reason. Apart from that, there's a lot wrong with the Alliance. I sat one time in the convention, that is, summer convention, where I preached. And here they were down there, you know, beating the bench and howling and Schumann, Dr. Schumann was sitting beside me. And I said, Dr. Schumann, for a man who believes in as little of this as I do, I do well to stay in the Alliance. No, I don't believe everything I see. I'd be a fool of a bitch. But I still believe that the Alliance has the emphasis. Well, there's the emphasis where it belongs. He is my all in all. He came from above. He is above all. He brought it down. He is it. He gave himself to us. He is the rock on which I build my shield and hiding place, my never-failing treasure filled with boundless stores of grace. Now, that's why I love the Alliance. I criticize our dear brethren, but I love the Alliance because it's Christ-centered. You know, they try to take that away from us and call it Christocentric. I wonder why the Lord's dear preachers and leaders won't let God's truth roam. Everybody on the North American continent would know what Christ-centered means. But only a handful know what Christocentric means. And so instead of saying Christ-centered, we say Christocentric. That's the way to keep people from understanding it. But we are Christocentric, which is Christ-centered. Jesus Christ is at the center, and we are out on the rim, and everybody's as near to him and everybody's as far from him. And the nearer you get to him, the nearer you get to one another. I remember the wheels in the old days, those buggy wheels with a thin rim around it or tire around it. And then there was the hub, and the hub held the thing together. And if you were out on the rim and you wanted to get near the hub, you'd start moving in towards the hub. And if there were 25 other people out on the rim and they wanted to get near the hub, the nearer they got to the hub, the nearer they got to each other, you know. And so with Christ, Jesus is the center, and you and I move closer to him, we're moving closer to each other. And the other fellow may not even know it. Twenty-four legals on twenty-four spokes, all moving towards the hub and moving towards each other, even if they don't know each other, you see. So I go around over this country in Canada, and I run into denominations everywhere, every kind of people, from Anglicans and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and all the rest, as well as our land people. And I am surprised and delighted sometimes to find a kindred soul among them. We've been crawling towards the hub, and I've been crawling towards the hub, and I look up and say, how do you do? We know each other. We're getting closer to each other because we're getting closer to the center, you see. So the way to get the alliance close and unified and all that kind of thing is not to pass regulations, it is to get closer to the center. As you get in near Jesus and I get in near Jesus, you and I will be near each other. Jesus, my shepherd, savior, friend, my prophet, priest, and king, my Lord, my light, my way, my hand, except the praise I bring. That makes the Lord Jesus just about everything. Now, I close by saying that the deeper life isn't a thing. They want me to preach on the deeper life. I get called some denominations everywhere. Come and give us a series on the deeper life. They don't pay attention to me. They just have me up there as a little showpiece, and I get up and I preach all around the deeper life, and then they pay me off and I go home. They give me my tickets, you know, and I go home. But nobody listens to me because they're just as bad as they were before. I preach the conferences, and they listen to me at 1030, and then at one o'clock they get up and vote way, way off-center, way off-base. The way they vote, way off-base. But they've listened to me talk about the deeper life. Well, then, the deeper life isn't a thing. You can't go to God and get a hunch of the deeper life as you might go to a store and buy five pounds of sugar, put it in the basket, and lug it over. Christ is the deeper life. Jesus Christ in you, living glory, he's the deeper life. He's all the life there is. And if anybody offers you anything more than Christ, he's offering you a phony bill of goods. Reject it. More of Christ is all you need. More of Christ. And to get closer to Christ automatically brings you closer to those who are close to Christ. So let's not go away from this. This is the life doctrine. This is what we were born on. This is what we came out of. Jesus Christ is in yesterday, today, and forever. He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. He's the way, the truth, and the life. He's our yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He's our life, and our death, and our resurrection, and our glory. Jesus is all in all. Get to know Jesus better, and you already started on the deeper life. Amen? I could say an awful lot more. The time's up. And I'll ask you to pray a moment. Oh, Christ Jesus. We would, as the song said, we would break bread together. We would drink the holy wine together. We would worship together. We would pray together. And oh, if you please, Lord, have mercy on us. Have mercy on us for our ignorance. Have mercy on us because we've got all tangled up in religion. Deliver us, we pray thee, from the confusion of religion, and from the frustrations of theology. Help us, we pray thee, to see that Jesus is all in all, to push our way past all obstacles to our heart, and live there, and dwell there. God bless our society. Bless this convention, and this church here on the North Side, and all the churches, and the fellowships and the branches. Grant, we pray thee, that whatever else we may lose, we may never lose that great, throbbing, central, glorious, life-giving fountain that Jesus Christ is all I need. All I need. Now we pray that thou wilt help us through the rest of the afternoon, and evening, and night. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. In the third chapter of John, John the third chapter, there arose a question between some of John's disciples and the Jews about purifying. Verse 25, and on. And they came unto John, and said unto him, Rabbi, he that was with thee, John the Jordaner, whom thou barest witness, behold the thing that titheth, and all men come to him. John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom. But the friend of the bridegroom, we call him best man now, but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoices greatly because of thy bridegroom's voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease. He that cometh from above is above all. He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth. He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth, and no man receiveth his testimony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to each seal that God is true. Whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God, for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hands. He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. And he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God is on him. Now, it's just possible that tomorrow, for my closing talk, I'll use the text, He must increase, but I must decrease. Though I don't say that I shall, because I am trying to play this by ear, and find out from day to day what God wants me to say. But the text for this day is, He that cometh from above is above all. He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth. He that cometh from heaven is above all. Now, these words are the words of John, according to all that I can learn. There are no quote marks as we have it now, so it's difficult to know when somebody quits talking, somebody else begins. But verse 30, He must increase, but I must decrease. Probably the last.