<TITLE>22. Par 277-290</TITLE>L-277 Then he come around, and the crowds was standing there. He was so sure that the Messiah was in his day, because he was the one that was ordained to introduce this Messiah, because Malachi 3 said so. "I'll send My messenger before My face. And he'll prepare the way."

L-278 John knew where he was standing. No matter how many priests would say, "You mean to tell the time, we got up here, the daily sacrifice would be done away?"

L-279 He said, "There'll come a time when the Lamb of God will come, that'll take away the sacrifice." Standing in mud, with whiskers over his face, that you'd run him away from your house today. There was... See?

L-280 God is not in class and glamour, as we try to put Him in, and we Pentecostal people. God is in humility.

L-281 There he was, standing. Watch him. And he was introducing. He, he said... He was so sure that He was there, he said, "There is One standing among you, Who you don't even know." Oh, my! What a rebuke! "There is One among you, right now, Who you don't know."

L-282   I wonder if it'd sound sacrilegious if I mimicked him for a minute. Maybe I'd better not. One among you, that you don't know. You claim you know Him, but you don't. Golgotha, they kill the very God that they claim they were serving. They didn't know Him.
John said, "There is One among you, and you don't know Him."

L-283 And one day he looked out there, and he absolutely seen a Dove coming down from Heaven, and a Voice. Nobody else saw It. Nobody else heard It. But he saw It, and It was an absolute; not Professor Jones, or somebody else. It was, "Upon Whom thou shall see the Spirit descending and remaining on, He is the One that'll baptize with the Holy Ghost and Fire." That's the Divine vindication of God making it so. It was an absolute. There was no--no question in John's mind. There it was, just exactly what God said would take place. There it was. So, that Dove upon that ordinary Man was--was John's absolute. He knew it was the truth.

L-284   Now I'm going to close by saying these few words. Don't you think we need an Absolute? [Congregation says, "Amen."--Ed.] Don't you think we need something that's real? Sure. We need something, that something that you can say, "This is It," put your hands to it. "This is It," we can see. How we going to do it? Everybody says, "This is It. This is It." But that's got to be Scriptural, an absolute.

L-285 Let me just give you a little personal thing before I close. Brother, sister, when I taken my choice, to whether I wanted to remain with the Baptist church, or what. It's just as good as any--any of them, to me, just a bunch of men put together, which is all right. But when it come to a time they had to tell me that I had to compromise with the Word, now, that, I ain't made out of that. No. See? The Word is first. See?

L-286 "Well," they said, "if you don't do that, you can no longer belong to the Baptist church."

L-287 I said, "I don't. It isn't the Baptist church that saved me. It was Jesus Christ, see, that saved me."

L-288 He is my Ultimate. He is my Stand. He is my Absolute. He is my Tie-post. There I stand.

L-289   Now, if I've got the wrong thing, then God will never confirm it. But if you have got the right thing, God is obligated to confirm it. There you are. And that's the proof of it. See? If it's right, God is obligated to prove it's right. If it's wrong, He will have nothing to do with it.

L-290 So, I remember, after my first revival. I was down on the river, baptizing. I took the seventeenth person out. My wife, a little girl standing on the bank at that time. (I had never been married to my first wife that's dead.) And there she was, on the bank. And they was all standing there, hundreds and hundreds of people, yes, four or five thousand, maybe more, up-and-down the river bank, a real hot afternoon in June.


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