<TITLE>08. Par 23-26</TITLE>L-23 Now, I do not wish you to think I'm sacrilegious, but I want to make a statement, and listen close. Any kind of a birth is a mess. If a birth is in the barnyard, a calf, it's a mess. If a birth is anywhere... If it's on a bed of shucks, or straw tick, or in a pink decorated hospital, it's still a mess.
And this new birth is nothing less than a mess. You get up from the altar crying and boo-hooing, and carrying on. It makes a starchy church think you don't have to do that. But through that new birth brings new Life. You can only have it as you're ready to get all messed up. When you get the starch out of you, when you get away from the self-styled hypocrisy that we live in today, and are willing to pay the price, and lay there until you are dead to the things of the world, and reborned again by the Holy Spirit... They bypass it.

L-24 We take our ministers and make great doctors of divinity out of them, instead of giving them the new birth. Many of our seminaries take the man and try to educate him. Education is a wonderful thing. But education will never substitute salvation or the new birth. It cannot do it.
God has a program and we must measure up to that program. We try to teach our ministers knowledge. We ought to teach them the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We ought to teach them Christ. But we're trying to get a better class of people among us. There's no better class of people than borned again Christians. They may be peculiar, act peculiar, look peculiar, dress peculiar, but they are peculiar people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation offering spiritual sacrifices, the fruit of our lips giving praise to His Name. Certainly.

L-25 Knowledge, that's the first thing that took a man away from God. When in the garden of Eden, there was a tree of knowledge. When Adam took the first bite, he separated himself from God. But we try to teach knowledge, educate the people into the program of God. You cannot do it. Education's all right. It's a very fine thing. But let me say this: It'll never take the place of the new birth or God's provision for salvation.
Could you imagine, a little canary bird jump up on the little limb in the cage where other canary birds are, and he would say something like this: "My fellow canaries..." pull his little glasses, as it were, over his nose as a professor, and say, "I have been studying. I have acquired a lot of knowledge. I begin to know all about these human being. Oh, I know them from A to Z." Just about like we try to know God.
And then the first thing you know, a professor of Purdue comes up. He said, "Good morning, my little insignificant friend," and begins to speak some great words to the little canary. And he's embarrassed. He turns his little head; he listens. He's got eyes; he can see him. He's got ears; he can hear him. But he can't understand him. Why? He's got a canary brain.

L-26 And that's about the way it is with us with our human knowledge. How we going to understand God, the supernatural, with a natural mind? with knowledge? Sometimes I don't want to say a joke; it's not a joke; but yet we act like we got canary brain when we do that. We do not understand God and cannot understand God, no other way than... It's not from knowledge, but by the revelation by the Holy Ghost is the only way. The Scripture even says, "No man can say Jesus is the Christ, only by the Holy Ghost."


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