Christ Magnified - Part 4

I don't care where you go, what school you go to, and I thank God for schools, this school particularly again. But remember you can't, what do you do when the schools pull away from you? See so many people get happy and blessed when they're in an association, a fellowship, and then you go and stick them up the Amazon somewhere, they go to pieces. Can you imagine a man going to, going to pieces, who, let me go back here and quote this exactly, oh, oh, oh, here in Romans 8, again, verse, verse, verse 9, Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.

And verse 10, if Christ is in you. In verse 11, the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead. I said in the class Tuesday night, by the way, we have a class here Tuesday night if you want to come with, starting with a person this week, in Hebrews 11.

The Holy Spirit of God is totally incapable of doing anything that's small. The world in which we live is beautiful, carpeted with flowers and everything. It was a ball of mud shut up in the womb of the universe.

The Holy Ghost brooded over it. Out of chaos brought cosmos, and out of wildness he brought this marvelous system of the world. He brooded over chaos, he brooded over death and brought forth life.

He brooded over the virgin of a little girl that nobody noticed hardly going up the street. I've often thought of a little virgin Mary going up the street pregnant and people suspicious. Did you know about her? You know who she's keeping company with? Do you know how far along she is? They didn't think they were passing the creator of the universe in that little woman.

So near to her and never recognized it. Never knew him. You know that's like how other people go to church, they get within touching distance of Jesus and they never touch him.

They just go year after year, week after week, and never touch him. The Holy Ghost came and did that miracle in her, brooded over her and brought forth the most amazing creature that this world will ever know. Quote Wesley again, you'll think I'm a Wesleyan.

Wesley says God was contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man. Here is the one that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, and he's shut up in the little womb of a woman. He made all the food in the world and yet he has to sustain his life by, from his mother's breast.

He owns the world, he made it and yet he never owned a stick in it. He owns all things and yet never had a dime. But after he brooded over the universe, after he brooded over the virgin, he brooded over a bunch of men in the upper room.

They weren't all geniuses by a long way, a lot of them were cowards. And out they went, streaming in the power of the Holy Ghost. I puzzled over this again today, if you can help me, write me a dissertation on it.

We're supposed to have about, what, 15 million people in America today, filled with the Holy Ghost manifesting gifts, and nobody knows we're here. Only 120 in the upper room and they turned the nation upside down. What's wrong, what's the difference between their baptism and ours? Tell me.

Maybe you're right there, partly right I'm sure. But then after the creation that the Holy Ghost did, after the miracle of the birth of Jesus, after the men in the upper room, then you've got this wonderful Word of God. The creation, holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

I heard of a local preacher saying not too long ago, the story of Jonah is a fish story. Well sure it is, didn't have to buy the donkey, is it? But all he meant is something a bit fishy about it, that's what he meant, which is not true. Because Jesus said, does he deny the Word of Jesus? A man that denies scripture should renounce his job and go sell hamburgers.

He came in as a fundamental believer and he becomes a liberal, he should get out at the back door. I'd fire him if I had any power over that guy. But here we have the Holy Spirit of God creating through all kinds of men.

A man that climbs trees and gathers sycamore fruit. A man of colossal intellect at the other end of the line, like the Apostle Paul. A shepherd like David, a wise man like Solomon.

And yet the wonder of this book is that it's so indestructible. Men have burned it and banned it and blamed it, isn't it? Tennyson has a poem in which he says, men may come and men may go, but I go on forever. Well the Word of God is like that.

You know one of the great contemporaries of John Wesley was a very, very powerful speaker in France by the name of Voltaire. He ridiculed the scriptures. One day he said in his little house, a hundred years from now, Bibles will be in museums.

Well he didn't miss it by much, did he? Except about a thousand million copies. Bibles will be museum pieces. People won't bother, they'll be so advanced they won't bother with the Bible.

One of the nice things that World War II did was blow his little house off the face of the earth. But you know not long before, a few years before that happened, a few years before that happened the Geneva Bible Society bought that house and distributed Bibles all through Europe out to the very house where he said the Bible wouldn't even be existing in a hundred years. Here it is.

It's God's Word. And it will last forever. Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever.

Heaven and earth may pass away. My Word shall not pass away. Here it is.

It has all the power of God behind it. So come on now. The Holy Spirit of God who invaded the lives of those men in the upper room, according to Romans 8 here, the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead abides in us, He's risen us from the dead spiritually.

We can think and move and have our being in God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Lowry, an old, old Nazarene had a marvelous book that's out of print. It's called The Possibilities of Grace.

I've never read it. I've just peeped into it. I have an old, old copy.

But I think of that so often it stretches out the possibilities of grace. What does a good book say? I hath not seen, e'er heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for them that love him. That he has revealed it unto us.

Not to the world. They stagger at it. Impossible.

How amazing that a human being, corrupted, defiled, doomed, damned, can be forgiven, cleansed, and indwelt by the Spirit of God and become a living vessel of God. God is yet to produce the greatest men ever. I don't believe God went off production with Wesley and Finney and George Whitefield or the great men who built the old spiritual empires like Hudson Taylor and others that went to China and Gilmore to Mongolia and Judson to Burma and Cary.

First missionary from England to India was Cary. I preached in his church once there in, is it in Calcutta? I think it is. Then there was the other little man, Henry Martin.

I said to the class the other night, I wish some of you folk would wake up and use your brains while you're young enough to use them. There was a young lady singing on TV. I love to hear these great singers.

She was a great singer, about 220 pounds. Could she sing? She's born in a little shack somewhere up in the Mississippi area or somewhere. That might have ended up serving hamburgers to somebody.

Somebody took her in the home. She'd twinkle with the piano and then they discovered she had a voice. So they got her to sing.

I think she went to the conservatory in Milan and various other places. Now she can sing in about five different languages.