y appearances." So the crowd talks. Poor
God! How He is misrepresented by some walking translations. "Of His
_skimpiness_---!" Be careful. Don't take too much. Be grateful for the
crumbs.

Please clean your spectacles, and readjust them carefully, and if you
are afflicted with the small-print Bible that seems in such common use,
get a reading-glass and look here at the proper translation. That
crutching, leather-bound translation is grossly inaccurate, if it _is_
in such big print, and in such wide circulation. Look here. Can you see
the words? This is the only correct reading: "Of His _fullness_ have all
we received." Put that into the print of your life, for your own sake
and for the crowd's sake, yes, and for God's sake, too, that the crowd
may know the kind of a God God is.

And as if John had a suspicion about possible bad translations, he did a
bit of underscoring. That word _fullness_ is underscored in John's
original copy. It's a heavy underscoring, in red. The underscoring is in
three words he adds: "Grace for grace." That is, grace _in place of_
grace. It's a sort of picture. Some grace has been received. And it is
so wondrous that nothing seems so good. And the man is singing as he
goes about his work.

Then comes a sudden soft inrushing of a flood of grace so great that it
seems to displace all that was there. Oh! the man didn't know there was
such grace as this. It seems as if he had never known grace before. And
the work-song is hushed into a great stillness, though the wondrous
rhythm of peace is greater than before.

And then before he quite knows how it happens in comes another soft
subtle inrushing flood-tide of grace that seems to displace all again.
Some temptation comes, some sore need, some tight corner. You look to
Him; lean on Him; risk all on His response. He _responds_; and in comes
the fresh inrush.

And then this sort of thing becomes a habit, God's habit of responding
to your need, need of every sort. It becomes the commonplace, the
blessed commonplace that can never be common. That's John's underscoring
of the word "fullness." May the crowds whose elbows we jostle get this
underscored translation, bound in shoe-leather, _your_ shoe-leather.

Then in his eagerness to make us understand the thing really, John makes
a contrast. "The law was _given_ through Moses; grace and truth _came_
through Jesus Christ." The law was a thing, _given_, through a man.
Grace and truth was _a man coming_