Influence has its proper place.  It’s good, if it is.  But we are not saved by it.  We are not saved by what some one else can do for us; “not of the will of man.”  Your mother’s prayers and your wife’s, and the influence of their godly lives will have great weight.  It’s a great blessing to have them.  They help enormously.  But the thing itself that takes a man into the presence of God, saved and redeemed, is something immensely more than this, some action of his own that goes to the roots as none of these other things do.

One time a deputation waited on Lincoln to press a matter of public concern.  But his keenly logical mind discerned flaws in their impassioned and carefully worked out arguments.  He waited patiently till their case was complete.  And then in that quiet way for which he was famous, he said, “How many legs would a sheep have if you called its tail a leg?” As he expected, they promptly answered “Five.”  “No,” he said, “it wouldn’t; it would have only four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one.”  So a simple bit of his homely sense and accurate logic scattered their finely spun argument.

Calling either family or culture or influence the chief thing doesn’t make it so.  These are John’s three tremendous “nots.”  They rather cut straight across the common current of thought and belief and conduct to-day.  We may indeed be grateful if a single homely drop of black ink from John’s pen put into the beautifully cloudy-grey solution of modern thought clears the liquid and makes a precipitate of sharply defined truth that any eye can plainly see.

This is how we won’t be saved.  This is how we don’t get into the family of God.  It is “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man”; not through family connection, nor by what we can do of ourselves simply, nor by what we can get some of our fellows to do for us, simply.

“But of God,” John says.  It is by Someone else, outside of us, above us, reaching down from a higher level, and putting the germ of a new life within us, and lifting us up to His own level.  He puts His hand through the open door of our will, what we do in opening up to Him, through “the will of the flesh.”  He walks along the pathway of the earnest desire of those who would help us up, “the will of man.”  But it is what He does that does the one thing that all depends upon.  His is the decisive action, through our choosing and our friends’ helping.

I said it isn’t a matter of blood, of lineage.  Yet it is.  That statement must be modified.  Family relationship is of necessity a matter of blood.  That’s the very blood of it.  This is a matter of blood; but not our blood; His. There has to be a new strain of blood.  Our blood is stained.  It is at fault.  It is impure.  There’s been a bad break far back there in the family record, a complete break.  We were powerless either to purify the stock, or to get over that gap, even if we admitted the need.