He Is Above All — A.W. Tozer

John 3: John the Baptist Testifies That Christ Is Above All

In the 3rd chapter of John, there arose a question between some of John's disciples and the Jews about purifying, 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 all men come to him.

He answered and said, A man can repeat 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, we standeth and hear him, he rejoices greatly because of the 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 his seal that God is true. Seeketh 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 shall not be died, but the wrath of God abideth on him. Now, it's just possible that tomorrow, on 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 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, speaketh of the earth.

He that cometh from heaven is above all. As we have it now, so it's difficult to know who, when somebody quits talking, somebody else begins. Verse 30, He must increase, but I have gone back. Then another John, the beloved, takes it up, and he comments on what Jesus and John had said.

The New Testament’s Serious Truth and the Loss of Spiritual Appetite

These words that I read in your hearing of literal education, I would let me sometime preach a sermon all together positive, 150 percent positive, affirmative, all in which I didn't have to say, now look how sure it is.

I suppose as long as there were soldiers and the devil shooting at it, we're going to have to say what we're about to say. I have to say this, that today we're reminded that our intellectual and educational equipment is superior to the New Testament Christians.

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. The man hadn't explored space, nor pulled down the lightning out of the clouds.

We haven't done all of that, circulated to people, but today we are educated intellectual, and our educational equipment is just something to write home about. Now, they tell us that the cause of this, and 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, Scrooge, Isaac Watt, and such.

They stopped 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 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. It 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, well, you're supposed to know that the Book of Romans is the profoundest book ever written.

When Lord Bacon of North Morganum, he sent a copy to the king. The king called to read 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 North Morganum and New Orleans, so he just sent it back. But yet, Paul is profounder than North Morganum, profounder than anything ever written in 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. Your IQ will be just about where yours is, and yours will be just about where your father's 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 otherwise they begin to go to pieces physically, the first thing you notice is they don't have any appetite.

Nothing tastes good. 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 Tozer, and some people call me Tozer, but I'm not going to jump through hoops to please the people.

Even though I do have a dog's name, I'm not going to do it. I'm not a performing puppy. I am a prophet sent of God to preach the word. And if he gave the word, many are there to publish it, and I'm one of them.

The Fall of Man and the Valley of Sin

So I'm going to give the word up on the same level that he gave it, so far as I can. And if it goes over anybody's heads, they're all right. That's up to God and the people. Now, he that is of the earth is earthly, and the man of God here draws a sharp contrast between earthly and the heavenly.

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 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. 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 a deadline, 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 his place there was sickness and decay and death, and then 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.

It describes the human race in a shadowy veil surrounded by shadows and darkness, by tears and disease and death, and filled with fears and disappointment and despair. 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 a protoplasmic midst and colloidal wombs, and so evolved to where we are now.

But the Bible says we started up on a with 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 have to climb up to touch the bottom, buddy, we're pretty low to start with, but that's where the 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 the valley of sorrow, and you can't get out. And the human race stands or kneels or lives or dies or crawls or hopes to get there on the same level. Now, some have tried hard to get out of this fallen man valley, 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, people on this section of the world tonight were to reach up and try to reach Arcturus or some other star, and 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. A little sawed-off fellow who was too lazy to go on up, who was about four foot seven, he couldn't reach it.

But the seven-foot, four-inch football boy, he couldn't, 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 into 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 I suspect maybe somebody did, he was pretty short morally, I'd say. He was pretty low down, and there were lots of sinners in Pittsburgh who were a great deal higher than he is.

But neither one of them can reach the star. Neither one of them. Neither the man in Western 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 fellows. They don't go over there, 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 can't. You put somebody on your shoulder, and then somebody stands on his shoulder, and somebody on his shoulder, and pretty soon we begin to talk 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, huh? No, no, no, no. And you dear pretty ladies that are so graceful, 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.

You're going to say, Mr. So-and-so died last night. Now, Paul says that we reach out and feel after him. There's a little, 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.

We soon get over it. We'll learn to get some entertainment to hide it. And when any man opens his mouth, says John, he speaks down in this valley of sea. All the 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.

Christ Comes From Above to Save the Fallen

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 a stone and forget.

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 place, 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 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 is up 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 this 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 horizontal.

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 the book. A fellow named Sigmund Freud, a sexy old buzzard, wrote psychoanalysis, and out of psychoanalysis grew up as a psychiatrist.

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 and he decided that whatever I said he'd tell us about it, and that's what he said, according to him, and I think he's about right in that. But, here we are, all down here, 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.

Christ Above Human Reason and Philosophy

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, as a young chap began it when I was about 21 years of age, and for the first 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. I mean, I did religious literature. I lived on the Bible itself better 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 got. 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.

Christ Above Human Science and Human Achievement

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, the 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. She can make dresses. She cuts them out and lays them around, and they look to me like law, 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 the University of Chicago, or University of Toronto, they just know a little more of that sort.

But not appreciably more. Not on a different subject, somebody said. And we don't know very much, so let's not try to equate human reason, 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 the 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 the dust 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'll 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?

16 or 18 pounds, and it's talking back. Every time somebody pushes a switch somewhere in England or the United States, the thing begins to chatter back again. Show the cartoon of all the sun standing there yelling, old barber mouth, old pioneer five is barbering all the secrets of the sun.

Well, all right, all right, but you get all scary and frightened, don't 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.

Christ Above Civilization and Human Religion

Then 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 20 years earlier than the uncivilized man.

I don't know if there's any relation there, but I know that the African national has his wife leaning teeth when he's an old man, and the American national loses his when he's about 37 and gets plates when he's about 42.

And, of course, he uses a striped toothpaste. That's the difference between the heathen and the civilized man. The heathen fellow, he just eats whatever he gets ahold of, 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 him.

But the African native gets his vitamins right out of the roots, you know, 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.

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 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 bring 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 a difference, you see. There's a difference between the land's foreign missions and the missionary activities of great many denominations. That's just 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 land's 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, probably, than ever we've had. The temples we build, though, are made out of the bricks that we got in the valley of Saul. Some truth and much error, and no power. Milton, in his Paradise Lost, told about Satan falling, you know, 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 began to work on the gold that paved the streets of hell and made a beautiful palace out of it.

I was trying to say that the best thing we got down here, we'd 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 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 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 there are other ones.

Have you been hearing about Zen Buddhism? Zen Buddhism. Guru 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, but 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 haven't walked two blocks in twenty years, and they're fat and stiff and miserable mentally and spiritually.

So they got some outlet for a Bible on Zen, and they studied Buddhism. 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, 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.

Christ as Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, and Redemption

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. The Greeks, they believed in wisdom, and the Orientals, 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's redemption. Well, when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he said, Of God are ye in Christ Jesus, 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 then added one thing more, and said, This is Jesus Christ, you've got to take it.

Take Jesus, and you have all of the world been 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 leave 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 life.

I've got a little hymn here. I like hymns, and I put this one on upside down, I just copied this before I came out of an old Methodist hymn, 111 years old. I carry around with me, along with my Bible, how sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's ear.

His sorrow heals his wounds, and takes away his fear. You ever sing that? You should sing that. Well, you ought to sing it in such songs out of our book as they're in. Then he says, He makes the wounded spirit whole, and calms the troubled breast.

To the weary it rests. The name of Jesus. 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, thankfully.

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, and they passed me and ordained me.

I wouldn't have done it if they did. But what I like about the Alliance is not all of it. You dear people at our Alliance, your delivery of now. You know, there's a lot wrong with us Alliance people, and not a lot wrong with it.

And if that's what it says, I'm Alliance 2 and 2, yeah, we're 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 Herminius, 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 on a 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'd preach.

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.

Now, I don't believe everything I see, I'd be a fool of a bit, but I still believe that the Alliance has the emphasis that this word 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. I 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 meant, 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 them.

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 fin, and then there was the hub, and the hub held the thing together. The rim, and you wanted to get near the hub, you 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, if 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. 24 legals on 24 spokes, all moving toward the hub, and moving toward each other, even if they don't know each other, you see.