(John - Part 20): The Woman at the Well - a Lesson Is Proper Testemony

The woman of Samaria. Our Lord met her there at the well, Jacob's well, and asked her for a drink. She wondered why.

They got into conversation. Then they went on to talk about worship. She asked a technical question, where they should worship, since the Jews and the Samaritans did not agree.

And he said to her, woman, leave me the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Then he said to the woman bluntly, you worship thee know not what. Samaritan religion was a compound of paganism and Old Testament.

And he frankly said, you don't know what you worship. But we Jews know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But apart from that, the hour cometh.

And now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Then she said she knew that when the Messiah came, he'd tell everything. And Jesus said, I that speak unto thee am he. Then verses 28 to 30, the woman then left her waterpot.

She'd come out from the city of Samaria, started to say, wearing that, holding it upon her head anyhow, the kind of huge hat. She hadn't any water. She'd gotten into a conversation with the strangest man she'd ever met.

And she ran off and left that waterpot and went back into the city. And she said to the man, come see a man which told me all things that I ever did. Is not this the Christ? I can see the literal-minded person accusing this woman of falsehood here, because certainly our Lord didn't tell her everything she ever did.

Then verse 30 says, then they, obviously those men to whom she'd spoken, went out of the city and came unto him. Then skipping over to the 39th verse, many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, he told me all that I ever did. So when the Samaritans were coming to him, they besought him that he would tarry with them, and he abode there two days.

And many more believed because of his word. And they said to the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying, but we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world. Now our Lord's great, his holy secret, he had here told.

He had told more about himself than yet any time in his whole ministry, and almost more than he ever told to anybody. And he had told it to a woman who was not a very good woman. I touched that last week, but I want to speak a little more about it tonight.

There were plenty of priests around Jerusalem, men who had been appointed and had come into the priesthood after the very order of Aaron. They could have shown their credentials, could have proved their right to be rabbis, or priests, or both. And there were scribes there, men appointed to teach and transcribe, to make copies of the scriptures.

There were lawyers skilled in the Mosaic law. There were religionists there, and there were there are plenty, because, as you know, Israel was a very religious nation. And if we had been doing it, we'd have never chosen this woman, with a shadow lying across her life, as the receptacle for a holy secret, a divine revelation above anything ever yet made, and equal to anything ever made until after the resurrection.

Now, I don't know why this was. I only know that it's an everlasting rebuke to human self-righteousness. I only know that.

I only know that every smug sister that walks down the street of Chicago ought to be ashamed of herself. I only know that every self-righteous man who straightens himself up in the morning before the mirror and shaves what he believes to be an honest paste ought to be ashamed of himself. I only know that the priests in their order, the rabbis in their proper place, and the scribes at their tables, and the lawyers at their work, were passed over, and this woman was given the holy secret.

I say I don't know altogether why it was, but I would assume that there were a number of things that were in her favor. One was her conscious need. There are some things that do not always follow.

That is, they are not always the same. There's lack of uniformity, as I said this morning. But there's always uniformity here.

Everybody that ever gets anything from God has to have a conscious need. There must be a conscious sense of a lack that is vital, and this woman had it. She never fought back.

She was in great need, and she knew it, and she was completely frank. She was a pretty good sidestepper, and no doubt she'd heard much religious argument, and she did what she could to take the heat off as the Lord's kindly eyes bored into her conscience. And when she saw there was no use, she threw up her hands and was completely frank.

And her frankness, her humility, then her enthusiasm, pleased the Lord Jesus Christ. For always remember that Jesus Christ never thinks about what you have been. He always thinks about what you're going to be.

You and I are slaves to time and space and chronology and records and reputations and publicity and the past and what we call the case history. Jesus Christ cares absolutely nothing about your moral case history. He forgives it and starts from there as though you had been born one minute before.

So that the Lord cared nothing about this woman's past whatsoever, it didn't enter into the consideration. But he was drawn to her warm enthusiasm and her frankness and her self-conscious need. So he revealed himself and gave himself to her, and I repeat again, gave her the secret that he had not given to anybody yet, and that he gave to very few even following that.

So that the woman received the great disclosure. The Lord himself disclosed a secret to her, a mysterious secret to her. It was the secret of his Messiahship and the secret of the nature of God and the secret of the true nature of worship.

And the woman let it out. She wasn't a stodgy, dull person, apathetic and hard to move. But as soon as our Lord had said, I that speak unto thee, to you am he, she let right out and ran to tell others.

A revelation had come to the woman. The light of God had slipped down into her shadowy interior, and there had begun to shine a light. And it lifted this woman, and she lived out on light feet.

And the scripture says that she went to tell the men. Now why does it say she went to tell the men? Why did she not tell the women? I assume that this woman's kind of life had made her more familiar with men than with women. I don't add anything here.

It says that she went to tell the men and told them. And it's strange how Jesus, our Lord, accepted this situation. I can't see a church board anywhere that would have accepted it quite.

And I can't see a women's hindrance society any place in any church either. Ladies, that would have given it any notice here. They would have raised their eyebrows and made funny little plucking sounds with their tongue.

And they would not have accepted this testimony. But our Lord accepted the situation here because, you see, he always begins as though there hadn't been any past at all. Behold, he maketh all things new.

And so if it's going to be new anyhow, what's the difference about the old? And the Lord started right there with the new. And he accepted this situation. Now I say her kind of life had made her familiar with the men of Samaria a great deal more familiar than with the women of Samaria.

And yet our Lord didn't shame her and he didn't denounce her. Christians have always been great denouncers. But it's an odd thing that they often denounce the ones the Lord opens his arms to receive and receives the ones that the Lord denounces.

Some carnal old rascal may get into a church. Did I tell this story here or since I heard about Benny Nicholson and the brewers? I think I ought to tell you that. Brother Ravenhill told me this.

I had been, had had something in the magazine about Nicholson, the great Irish evangelist, and he told about Nicholson going into a certain church. I'm not going to name the denomination because I wouldn't be kind in doing it. It was a nice church, very well-known denomination.

And this fiery Irishman that was somewhere in England or Ireland or Scotland, this fiery Irishman was called in and they said to him, Now, Mr. Nicholson, we appreciate your ability as an evangelist and you've done great good and we want you to come and help our church. We want the benefit of your ministry and we want to turn you loose now to help yourself. Only, Mr. Nicholson, there's just one thing we want to get straight.

We have in our church a great Christian brewer and he is a very good man and he is the financial pillar of our church. And in addition, it was a small town, in addition to being the leading brewer of the city, he's also the local undertaker. And he is the financial pillar of our church.

And Mr. Nicholson said, Well, and why would you be telling me this? And he said, Because we want you to lay off on brewers. Now, he said that the only stipulation, don't bother the brewers. And Billy smiled a wry Irish smile and then got up that night to preach and he preached the gentlest, tenderest sermon anybody had ever heard.

And they were walking around there, these deacons and elders and the pastor and the rest of them that were in on the conspiracy. They were walking around shaking their own hands if nobody was near enough to shake. They said, This is going to be wonderful.

We're going to get the benefit of a blessing, a revival and an added number to our church and we won't have our brewer disturbed. But the second night, Billy was sitting there quietly waiting and watching the song leader operate. And he wasn't operating right and they weren't singing right.

And Billy jumped up and said, Sure, and why don't you sing? He said, This sounds as if there were a dozen tomcats here in the audience singing. He said, Why don't you sing? And then he led them. And pretty soon he got them to singing as we sang here tonight with real radiance.

And when he was through, he stepped to the edge of the platform and said, Now I'll be telling you. He said, Do you know what you've got here in your church? He said, You've got a Christian brewer. And he said, He's not only a brewer, he's an undertaker.

He said, Sure, and he sells you liquid damnation to send you to hell. And if that wasn't enough, he sends a carriage around to take you there. That was the end of Billy.

He never got back in that church again. But God Almighty used him throughout England and particularly Ireland, they say, to save Ireland from a revolution. And you have to go to Charles G. Finney to find anything as horrific as the impact of the preaching of the Irishman.

Now I say, we're busy denouncing that which God opens his arms to receive, and slyly permitting that which God hates. But not Nicholson. He knew that a Christian brewer was a contradiction in terms, and he let him have both guns.

Now, this woman, I say, was allowed to go and to teach or preach or testify to the only people she knew. And when she went, it wasn't very much of a story yet. The Lord knew that.

She didn't, but he knew it. But he had about it the brightness of a revelation. And the woman was completely sincere.

Now, there's this about her actions. They weren't imitative, and they weren't formal, and they weren't planned, and they weren't programmed. You know that ugly, vicious French word.

I hate it as I hate the devil. That word program, and then the word programmed. They say, now the service is so programmed as to have a minimum of preaching and a maximum of enjoyment.

The devil could program it like that, and he would. But I don't like the word programmed. I use it sometimes, because you get in a fix and you can't get out without using the very word you don't like.

But if this woman had been programmed, there never would have been any revival in Samaria, brother. She wasn't programmed. They didn't program this little woman.

They couldn't. She had too much bounce in her soul. They couldn't get her on a car.

And so she just ran as fast as her slick, fast heels would take her. And there was nothing formal about this, and nobody planned it. We say we're going to meet and plan a revival.

You might as well try to meet and plan a lightning stroke as to meet and plan a revival. Nobody ever did yet, and nobody ever can, and nobody ever will plan a revival. God Almighty makes a world, nobody plans it.

And when he raises the dead, nobody plans it. And he never raises the dead fifth item on the program. You can be perfectly sure of that.

We programmed ourselves into deadness and death, and that this little woman had only, somebody had only caught her by her fleeing garments and stopped her and said, Sister, we're glad to see the new light in your face. We'd like to have you third on the program. She died along with the rest of those scribes and Samaritans and the rest of them.

But she went bouncing along, eager with a new revelation in her heart to tell the men, for she didn't know many women, they would talk to her, to tell the men she knew that she had found the man who had told her everything she ever knew. And it was an exaggeration, and every spiritual man that ever lived gets blamed for it. But you know, brethren, when you get so full of something that you begin to talk very often, your mouth is smaller than your heart, and exaggeration is a result.

This woman, hyperbole now, I think they call it. Hyperbole is a learned word for an exaggeration. But she did have one thing.

She had a sweet contagion about her. She was contagious. She didn't make converts.

She, they caught it from her by contagion. So God uses artless testimony and the candid witness. He still uses them, even though they may be perfect and limited.

This woman, I say, had a long way to go. But she had had one thing. She had had a valid encounter with the one called the Messiah.

Two hearts had come into collision with each other, and the result had been an emotional upheaval in the woman's life. I don't know what to do with those Christians, those teachers, who are so afraid of the word emotion. We say the man is very emotional when we merely mean that he is a neurotic, that he's lost self-control, that he cries over nothing, laughs over nothing, and gets blue over nothing, and gets elated over nothing.

That man is simply a mental case. And we've taken the word emotion and applied it to that. No, no, my brother, that's not emotion.

That's a condition the man is in. He needs prayer and rest. But when I use the word emotion here, I'm never afraid to use it, because emotion is your inner feeling, what Jonathan Edwards called the religious affections.

I like that expression very well. I wonder why somebody, I'm so busy I can't do everything I think of, but I wonder why somebody doesn't resurrect the word religious affections and show some of these cold, stiff, deep-freezed Christians of the present day who go only on texts and theology and are afraid of emotion, why don't they show them that religious affections of Jonathan Edwards and the spiritual emotions of the modern day are meant the same thing? They mean the same thing. This woman had had a collision.

Her heart had come into violent contact with the heart of Christ, and the result had been an experience that the woman will never forget, and I think the Lord never forgets. A stroke from God had fallen upon her, and so she lit out without her water pot. Every woman should have come back with that pot full of water.

She came back without even the water pot, because she had forgotten all about the house and the kitchen and the meals. Now, the men of Samaria heard her testimony and then started out to find the one about whom she had spoken. I wonder why they went.

I suppose they went out of curiosity and out of a spirit of religious adventure, for you cannot deny that we have in us a certain spirit of high adventure, even religious adventure. I am sure that a great many religious things are done out of this spirit of curiosity and adventure. But certainly that was not all.

This woman had jarred them. She had stirred them. She'd roused them.

And she could only do it because she herself had been stirred and roused. And there was contagion there. And this woman, who had been jarred by her contact with the Savior and deeply stirred and moved, when she raced into the presence of these men, she moved them the same way.

It was contagious, and they caught it at once. And I suppose there was an element of religious adventure there, but I think it was only an element. I think the main motivation back of their getting up and hurrying to meet him was that she had stirred them to the depths of their being.

Now, why is it that there's so much ineffective and ineffectual Christian testimony today? If I were not a Christian, ladies and gentlemen, if I had never been, and I was still not a believer in Jesus Christ, I suppose that I now never would be, if I knew as much about Christians as I do know now about them. Because I find, and I regret to say this, and if there be any non-Christians present as there probably are, I hate to admit this in company, but we might as well be honest, and I believe God loves an honest man. They say, tell the truth and shame the devil.

And I believe that the Christians are, for the most part, a very sad people. They are not the happy sort that they ought to be, and for that reason their testimony is ineffective. The gleam is gone out of most Christian eyes, and the shine out of the countenance, and the glory of a birth and a revelation that this woman had that made her testimony contagious isn't found very much these days, because we plan everything.

Everybody reads a little leather little book on how to do Christian service, and we go do it the way we're taught to do it, but we do it perfunctorily and without the contagious element the woman had here. So there's a great deal of ineffectual Christian testimony--honest, sincere, I suppose, and well-intentioned. We do the best we can at what we have to work with, and we go like a salesman selling thousand pens.

We make a case for our product, but down in the heart of the ones we deal with there is a deep knowledge that we're not too much convinced ourselves. We're unconvincing because we've not been convinced, and we're ineffectual because we have not met ourselves the Lord from glory. A cross light making cross lights--it seems to me that if angels can weep, they must weep salty tears.

To see a cross light who has never met the Lord making another cross light who will also never meet the Lord. Now, I want to give you a quotation from a Frenchman. I don't mean that I believe what he believed exactly, but a great French philosopher by the name of Paul Richard, who wrote a book, the name of which I've forgotten, but the sentences you'll never forget.

He evidently must have been a Baptist because he said that infant baptism was vaccination against the new birth. That is, you get sprinkled when you're a wee tot, and brother, you're immune. You're immune to the new birth.

Now, some listening to me are sprinklers. Why, brother, just go right on and sprinkle. I wouldn't divide with my brother.

But I wouldn't for the life of me. We had occasion this week in New York City to deal with the question of a fellow who sprinkled a few, and we went to the records to find out what our old black book said about it. And the black book says, We in the alliance recognize immersion as a mode of baptism, but receive into fellowship Christians of every persuasion.

Now, if you can get any more contradictory than that or inconsistent, I beg of you to show me how it can be done. You just can't get any worse than that. So I'm not talking against the fellow who sprinkles his baby, but I am saying that it's possible to have some kind of external religious experience that immunizes you to the new birth and puts you where you will never be born again because you think you are already born again.

That's what Paul Richard meant, and that's what I mean tonight. So the cross light makes a cross light, and because the cross light never was in, he doesn't require the other cross light to get in. And so we have whole churches established that are only cross lights, echoes of echoes and reflections of reflections, but never the true light shining.

Now, these Samaritans, moved by this lady, this woman, went out and found Jesus and brought him to the city. And they heard him, and they saw him, and they were convinced, and they believed, and they testified, and they said, Now we know, not because of what you said, we know ourselves, for we ourselves have met this one, and we believe that he is the Christ, the Savior of the world. What had begun so low now had risen so high.

And what had begun in the shadows had now gone into the clear sunlight. And the testimony of this woman, whose real life had only just now begun, brought these men to God, and to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to God. They couldn't rest on another person's testimony, didn't know that.

You might as well try to get fat or what somebody else eats, as to get to heaven on somebody else's religious experience, or meet the Lord in somebody else's testimony. You say, Now you're contradicting yourself because you just were talking all nicely about her testimony. Sure I was, and I still will, but I keep her testimony in context.

I know God used it to bring people to him, but when they got to him, they said, Now we don't need your testimony, we know ourselves. But if they hadn't come to Christ, they could have started the first church of the Samaritans down in Samaria on that woman's testimony, and never have met the Lord for themselves. And that's what I mean where a testimony breaks down.

A testimony doesn't convert you. A testimony may only excite you to get going in the direction of the one about whom the testimony has been given. And that is the glory of the Christian witness.

A Christian witness never saved anybody, and can't. A Christian witness is not a spiritual experience for a third person. A Christian witness is the honest confession of what the Lord has done for me.

And that may spur others to go and do likewise, and hunt the same Lord, and go to him, so there's not too much to be said for the Christian witness, provided it is not a planned witness, provided it is not a program. Brother McAfee is a musician, and a chorister, and all that stuff. And maybe he and I will have to have lunch together over this tomorrow, but at his expense.

But do you know, do you know what I, I, should I say this or not, I have a reputation for being a little radical. I might just as well stay in character. Do you know what? I've never been blessed by a planned testimony since the world began.

I have had to sit and listen through various and sundry musical organizations that get up and do a Negro spiritual, and then a classic, and then a semi-classic, and then something else, and then the fellow says, now give the testimony. And they've all been told ahead of time who's to talk and what they're to say. And they all get up and testify, and I sit there just as cold as a dew pickle.

There isn't a response in my life. I can't find a thing that responds to that, not a thing that responds to it. And one night, here not long ago, it's been several years ago now, but it was eleven-thirty at night, and I don't know whether I'd gone to bed or was about to.

It was Sunday night, and the phone rang. And a friendly, vibrant, excited voice on the other end of the line--I recognized it immediately--said, Mr. Tozer, I've got something to tell you. I couldn't wait till morning.

I said, what is it? He said, I've been born again tonight. He said, you know, I've been around your church there, and I've been around your church, and my wife's a nice little Christian, and she's prayed for me, and I thought I was a converted man, but I have never been converted till tonight. As a result of tonight's service, he said, I have come into a spiritual experience.

I know I'm born again. And this quiet fellow that you never could get excited or get to talk or raise his voice was pouring it on like an evangelist. You know who it was, Burroughs Barker.

He's gone from us now and is living further out west. But he lived that life until he moved away from here and is still living it in the church in where? Galesburg. But there was a man--now that testimony, that's okay--that man was bouncing that he had had an encounter with God and was perfectly willing to admit that all his previous religious experience had only been preliminary.

Now he knew. He could say to his wife, Little Mary, now I know the one about which you've been talking. I no longer believe through your witness.

I know from myself. Now, that kind of testimony always is contagious. But whenever you're third on the program, brother, look out.

That testimony will start out dead and end up worse than dead. And there you plan a man's spiritual expression and program his happiness and incorporate his vision. We've got them nowadays, vision incorporated, healing incorporated.

We incorporate the glory of God and take out corporation papers on the divine grace. How low can we get? How far from God can we wander and still say we're Christians? Now, I have a few little conclusions here, a recapitulation of what I said, put briefly so that I can take it home with you. I draw these conclusions that Christ received great sinners, no matter how great they are, no matter whether they have no reputation at all, no matter whether they're pariahs cast out by society, he receives them.

This man received a sinner, they said about him in their region, and he lived and died and rose to prove it, that they were right. He received great sinners. Meister Eckhart, the great German devotional philosopher, says this.

He says that God loves to forgive big sins more than he does little sins, because the bigger the sin, the more glory accrues to the God who forgives it. It makes quite a case in one of his great sermons for God having actually being partial to great sins. It says that God forgives great sins.

Then he goes on to say this. Not only does God forgive great sins and enjoy doing it, but as soon as he's forgiven them, he forgets them and trusts you just as if you'd never sinned. When I first read that, I almost went out through the ceiling, because I believed it in my heart, that God not only forgives great sins as quickly as little ones, but that once forgiving them, he starts over right there and never brings it up.

Now, you take a man who works in a bank, and one day there's a little shortage. It isn't much, and it isn't worth going to trouble about, but there's a little shortage of a few dollars, and there is a question about that man. Maybe he got away with it, but they still let him stay on.

But the board of directors or whoever decides such things discuss him every time they meet. There's a shadow across his reputation, and they never quite forget it. But if you carry our illustration further, he came and frankly admitted it and wept over it and paid it back and said it was a weak moment and I'll never do it again.

And they said, all right, stay on. Still the shadow would be there, because man can forgive, but he never can quite forget it. And what we have been colors a reputation for all time to come in the minds of some.

But when God forgives, he starts from right there. And if the devil runs up and says, what about his past? God says, what past? There's no past. We started when he came to me, and there's no past for you to kick about.

And God forgives us and entrusts us as if we hadn't done a thing. And if the topside of our soul is open to God. This, I admit, is a little doctrine of my own, but I think it's pretty biblical, and it's certainly in line with all Christian experience, that there's a topside of the soul that's open to God in some people's lives and not in others.

Jacob was a crooked fellow, the very name Jacob meant to supplant her, and he wasn't a pleasant man, and he was the kind of fellow that you always button your pocket tight when he was around. Jacob just wasn't a trustworthy man. But for some reason, Jacob had the topside of his soul open there.

There was a little window that was open to God. He saw his brother was, everybody will admit, a finer character than Jacob, less wily, franker, tender, for he wept on his brother when he should have killed him. In every way, he was a finer man by nature.

But there was no topside of his soul, no window there. But Jacob, the crooked supplanter, met God because the topside of his soul was open to God. Oh, my friend, I don't know, I don't know.

Is that election? Is that predestination? What is it? I don't know what it is, and I don't care what it is. I only know that I can, I'm told, to go and tell everybody everywhere that Jesus Christ died for all men, and anybody that will come can come, and I don't have to worry about predestination. Somewhere, someway, some have the topside of their soul open, just a window open toward the light.

And this woman had, though she certainly hadn't lived a very good life, there was someplace in her soul there, a window that was open, and the light of God finally shone down through. And I note also that he'll use any witness to start a story that no one can substitute for Jesus himself. The new life has to be born in us, and the new life will not be born until there has been a collision with Christ, a collision.

And the sinner has been met and defeated, and his will for the moment shattered, and his life brought down to the dust. And he'll always remember and look upon that encounter. Though happily he'll go forward, leagues up the mountainside, always he'll remember that encounter.

And his soul and the heart of God met in violent conflict for the moment, till God won, and then the heart of the man surrenders tenderly and says, not my will, but thine, and salvation comes to the sinner. That kind of encounter, that kind of meeting of the soul with God, comes with the freshness of a birth, with the brightness of a dawning. It comes with the clearness of a revelation.

And I believe we're where we are in religious circles in America, because we've taken our religion at second hand. We're programmed it. We've been taught it.

We accept what people tell us, but we don't push on to know him, so that we can say, now I know for my person that has to be picked out of the shell, that has to be by red lines and blue lines under verses, urged and pushed and psychologized into the kingdom of God never gets in. It must be a revelation to the heart. It must be an encounter with Christ.

It must be a sudden indulging of the soul with Jesus Christ the Lord. And if we had our standards higher, people would expect that, but they don't now. If we preached repentance more and raised Christian levels higher, that would be an ordinary thing.

You get argued into belief in Christ, you can get argued out. And any man who can win you by presenting reasons, somebody else presents stronger reasons, can upset your faith. God never meant that our hope for heaven should rest upon the words of a man, but power must come to our lives.

And the presence and the revelation and the knowledge that we indeed have met Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now, does this sound like radical religion? It isn't at all. It isn't.

And I'm sure that if I were to ask for a show of hands or ask you to stand, that there would be scores of you here tonight who would stand and say, Mr. Towles, you've described my situation. This is what happened to me only I just didn't word it like that, but my heart tells me this is what happened to me. I met him, I know him, he's mine, I'm his.

We've had that collision and he won and I lost, and yet I won because I was saved. My old will went down and my old boldness and aggressiveness went down. Jesus Christ came in, took over, and now I live no more, but he lives in me.

A lot of you could arise and say that tonight. Witnesses to what I'm talking about. It's not radical.

The other thing is abnormal. Well, let's expect it. Let's expect the Lord Jesus Christ to do this thing for us.

Let's come to him with simplicity, frankness, hunger, conscious need, and say, Lord Jesus, here I am without one plea, but that that blood was shed for me, and that thou biddest me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come, I come. You don't have to be a Ph.D. nor a doctor of theology. Come as you are without one plea.

The Lord will receive you in. He'll take you in. You can go away tonight saying, oh, I've heard this for years, but now I know for myself that thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Savior of the world.