Morning, brothers and sisters.
Let us read a few verses, shall we? Let us turn to John Chapter 9, beginning with verse 1.
Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth.
And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.
We must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day. The night is coming when no one can work.
As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.
And He said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent).
So he went and washed, and came back seeing.
Then, in John Chapter 20, verses 30 and 31:
And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book;
but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that believing you may have life in His name.
Let us pray.
Our heavenly Father, we thank You for Your grace. We thank You for the grace that we spoke of today, and for Your giving of Your Son to us, and all that He is for us, and all that He has done for us. Everything in Him is Amen. Lord, we thank You.
Now we come to You, Lord, in need. We come asking that You would open the Word to us and let us see Jesus. Let us see Him in a way that will change our lives. Lord, only You can open the Word in this way. We look to You, Lord. We ask You for this blessing in Christ’s name. Amen.
As you know, I have been going through the Gospel of John—not verse by verse, but chapter by chapter. This morning we come to John Chapter 9.
What we see here is not merely the healing of a blind man. I would call it the giving of sight to a blind man.
This is the sixth of seven signs that John gives in his Gospel. Or we could say it is the fifth or sixth of seven, or the fifth of eight, depending on how you look at it. Stephen considers the cleansing of the temple a sign; others do not.
The other signs include the changing of water into wine in John Chapter 2; the healing of the nobleman’s son in John Chapter 4; the healing of the man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years in John Chapter 5; the feeding of the five thousand in John Chapter 6; and the Lord walking on the water, also in John Chapter 6.
Here, in John Chapter 9, we find Him coming upon a blind man. We have to understand that this is a sign. He is trying to show us something.
Signs have purposes. We want to see why He is showing us this. Why does John bring this out? What is he trying to show us? And all signs have applications.
This morning, then, we want to look at the sign: what happened because of this sign, and then how it applies to our lives. If it is just a story to us, it means nothing. There must be practical application for us.
What was the purpose of this sign? Why did Jesus do this? What was He trying to show us?
The purpose is shown in John Chapter 9, verse 3. He said it was in order that the works of God might be openly shown in him—that is, in this blind man. This is the Wuest translation. You may be looking at your translation and saying, “I do not see that.” But the works of God might openly be shown in this man.
So then, what is the sign? Basically, there was a man who was born blind, and Jesus gave him sight. That was the sign.
First, we have a man who was born blind. Let us add emphasis to that: he was born blind.
Jesus healed blind people before. We know about blind Bartimaeus in Mark. In Matthew, there were two blind men. When John the Baptist’s followers asked Jesus, “Are You the One, or should we look for another?” He told them, “Go and tell John what you see: the blind receive their sight.” So He had healed blind men before.
But this passage particularly says that this man was born blind. That is something different. What is He trying to say to us?
All these signs are physical realities which show us something in the spiritual realm. This man was born blind, and in that sense, we are born blind. All of us.
Of all the senses we have, sight is probably the one we would most hate to lose. My wife and I were talking about this over dinner last night. I asked her, “Of your five senses, which one would you give up?”
Probably the easiest one to give up would be smell, although taste goes with that, does it not? I would probably eat healthier if I lost that sense. I would eat things that are good for me but that I do not like because of their taste or smell.
I would not want to give up touch, because in touch there is tenderness. I have lived with a blind man, and I had blind friends growing up. I asked them, “How do you perceive things?” One of the biggest things for them was touch—the tenderness of a touch, and what it tells them when someone touches them tenderly.
Hearing? I am starting to lose that as I get older. I am always saying, “What? What? Speak up.” I even try to take the hair out of my ears, but it does not help. But at least if I could see somebody laughing, I could enjoy it even if I could not hear it.
But take away sight, and it is like you have lost perception of almost everything.
This man was born blind. I have never met a person born blind who was bitter about being blind. Their blindness is natural to them. It is simply their natural state of being. They have never known anything else.
But you ask people who are losing their sight, or who lost it through an accident, and you may find bitterness because they have lost something they once had.
I asked my wife, “When do people who are born blind know that they are blind?” In a sense, I would think they do not know they are blind, because that is all they have known—unless someone tells them, “You are blind,” or their other senses give them the perception that something is missing.
Someone might say, “Oh, you came into the room,” and they would ask, “Someone came into the room? I have missed the connection here.”
But blindness is natural if you are born blind. Someone might say, “Well, you cannot see,” and they would say, “I see in other ways.” They can tell by someone’s touch or tone of voice. If they smell smoke, they know there is danger. They may not see the fire, but they can smell it.
Yet someone born blind will never have true perception of certain things. They may say, “My intellect makes up for that. I am a smart guy. I can understand.” But intellect does not make up for seeing.
You have heard the old poem about the blind men and the elephant. They say it is translated from the Indian, though some say it comes from the Chinese. For all you Chinese folks, I want to give you props.
In the Chinese version there are three blind men; in the Indian version there are five. They are discussing an elephant, and a merchant says, “You do not know what an elephant is? Come on, I will show you.”
He brings them to an elephant, and they all feel around it. Then they go back to discuss what an elephant is. One says, “It is like a rope,” because he felt its tail. Another says, “No, it is like a wall,” because he felt its side. Another says, “It is like a tree,” because he felt its legs. Another says, “It is like a spear,” because he felt its tusk. Another says, “It is like a snake,” because he felt its trunk.
They all had a perception, but none of their perceptions was wholly true, because they could not see the whole elephant. They only perceived different parts.
The same is true of our intellect. We may say, “This is what I think about God,” but until you see, you really do not know.
Sight is needed. And that is what was given: sight.
How did he get sight? It was given to him. He did not do anything. He was given sight; it was a gift.
We are all born blind spiritually. It does not matter if someone grows up in an atheist family or a Christian family. Your children are born blind. They may see you and perceive Christian things as simply, “This is what we do,” but they are still born blind.
Even Nicodemus, the ruler of the Pharisees—what did Jesus say to him?
Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
It does not matter what privileged position you have. Sight comes when Somebody gives you sight. This sight is a gift.
As Ephesians 2:8 says:
For by grace you have been saved through faith;
and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.
It is a gift. This man was given a gift. He was given sight.
How was sight given to him? In verse 6, Jesus made clay.
Now, some people symbolize this. What are we made of? We are made of clay, are we not? Good Virginia red clay. I am from California—it is adobe.
What does that tell us? Sight was given by God becoming flesh.
There would be no sight given to man. Man would be left in the dark about God had not Jesus Christ come in the flesh to show us who God is.
That is what John Chapter 1 says. “In the beginning was the Word,” and then verse 14 says:
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.
This is where our blindness comes in. When we stop at seeing Christ’s humanity, we do not get a true picture of Him.
The highest natural sight will bring us is to see Christ as a prophet, a good teacher, a moral teacher, a healer, or simply a good man who did good works. We might say He was well-intentioned, misunderstood, or that it was tragic that He was killed.
Others say He was not God, merely a good man. But Charles Wesley wrote in his Christmas carol, Hark! the Herald Angels Sing:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.
Brothers and sisters, it is not enough simply to see Jesus Christ as a man, though He was truly man. We must see Him as God also—very Man, very God.
Our sight is to see Him as more than a man: as God Himself. This gift was given because Christ became flesh.
The man’s sight is mentioned three times in John Chapter 9—in verses 11, 15, and 18. People ask, “How did you receive your sight? How did this happen?” The answer is that he received it. He was given sight.
Now that this man had sight, what did he perceive? If he had been blind to who God is and to God’s purpose, what did he see now?
From verses 8 through 34, this man is pressed. People keep asking, “How did this happen to you?” There is no doubt that something happened. The question is: what changed you? What made you different?
That is our testimony when people ask, “What made you different?” We cannot say, “It was my good upbringing.” No.
The man began by saying, “A man called Jesus made clay, put it on my eyes, told me to wash, and I did. Voilà—I see.”
Then they pressed him further and brought him before the Sanhedrin. He began to perceive that Jesus was more than merely a man. He said, “He is a prophet.” He was one who spoke for God, One who knew what God was after.
When pressed further, he said that since the world began, no one had heard of a man born blind receiving sight. They said Jesus was a sinner, but he responded, “How can He be a sinner? If He were a sinner, God would not hear Him.”
He came to the conclusion: this Man must be from God. He cannot be a sinner. He is like no other man.
Finally, the Lord found him after he had been cast out. Wuest says they “threw him out”—they jettisoned him. The Lord found him and said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man asked, “Who is He?” Jesus said, “You are looking at Him.”
Finally, he came to the point of seeing Jesus as the Son of Man, the Son of God, the One sent by God. He believed in Him, and he became a worshiper.
This is what the sign is showing us: once a man is given sight and truly sees who God is, he becomes a worshiper. That is the work of God.
God reveals Himself so that you see Him as He is, and in seeing Him as He is, you worship Him. Not that you bow the knee because you are made to bow the knee, but you bow willingly because you see who He is.
Now we come to application. We have gone through the lecture class, and now we are going to the laboratory.
I never took anything but biology—well, I took geology too. Biology is the study of living things; geology is the study of rocks. I think I liked geology better.
It was because of the teacher, Dr. Bender, an old guy from Kansas about seventy years old. He was so wonderful to be with, even though I got a C in the class. I loved it. Hey, C is average. I am the average Joe.
But the laboratory is where you find out what makes things tick. In biology, you cut open the frog. In geology, we got to cut rocks in half. You can cut rocks in half—really cool.
This is where you see what really matters. How does this apply? What is God telling us? How does it apply to my life?
The first thing we must understand is found in the very first verse: Jesus saw.
God sees. Wherever we are, whatever our state is, God sees.
If it were not for Him seeing, we would all be lost and would not even know it. Is He not omniscient? Does He not know all?
Is it not interesting that He leads us to see our own condition? How many of you have looked back to when you came to the Lord and seen how the Lord led you to see that you were blind and far away from God?
I remember when I was a junior in high school. I took a course in utopian novels, and we read two books that had a big impact on me: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Stranger by Albert Camus.
In Huxley’s world, people were doped up, living a supposed utopian life, unaware of their real condition. They had everything they needed, but they had no feeling. They were fed these drugs called soma, and they were just working for the man.
Then, in Camus’s The Stranger, Camus was an existentialist. Existentialists believe there is no purpose to life except what you make of it. Once you are born, you die; that is it.
When I read those things, I thought, “I cannot see any purpose for living.” I started looking: where is there purpose for life?
I had a friend who asked me to go to church with him. We were on the basketball team together. He was the guy who rode the pine, but he was interesting. He became a doctor.
He said, “Hey, Jim, why do you not go to church with me?” He was Catholic, and I was Catholic at that time. It had been a little while since I had been to church, and I said, “Go to church? Okay.”
I remember going to St. Christopher. Our ceiling here is low, but some Catholic churches are very high. I remember entering that church and feeling so far away from God. The building was so big and massive that I felt, “God, where are You?”
But God saw. He sees all that.
Within that year, my neighbor from across the street came and shared Christ with me. I knew about Christ. Talk about being blind—I knew about Christ.
I saw Him every time I went to church. There was a big crucifix behind the altar, and we had one in our kitchen. When I was a little kid, we prayed in front of that crucifix. I knew all about Him, but I had never seen Him in the way this man shared Him with me.
He was saying things that I knew were true. I said, “Yeah, I am going to hell. I know. Is there any way out of it?”
He told me about the gulf between God and man, and how Jesus Christ bridged it. I said, “Yeah, that sounds really good.” He asked, “Do you want to pray?” I thought, “I would be kind of stupid if I did not.” So I prayed.
Boy, when I finished praying, I saw. I saw. I saw that I was clean. What a wonderful day that was.
I went over to my friend’s house telling him, “I am saved.” He asked, “What does that mean?” I said, “I do not know, but I am saved.”
It is true. I did not know what that meant. It took me a year or so before I really began to say, “God, something has happened. What is this?”
God sees. Because God sees, He provides. He has given us Christ. That is His provision for us. He has given us a Savior. He has not left us to ourselves.
Whatever you say you are lacking, God sees, and He provides.
Secondly, what do we see as Christians, since our eyes have been opened to see God in Christ? What effect has that had on us?
Have you seen Him as your Savior? Have you?
If you have seen Him as your Savior, you should be at rest—totally at rest. Your sins have been judged, and God has nothing against you.
If you have seen Him as your Savior, you should not fear to enter into His presence. Someone prayed that this morning: we can come right into His presence.
The judgment we deserved has passed. It has fallen. We should be at rest, and we should be at peace.
The enemy always tries to get us off at this point. “Yeah, He might have saved you from this, but not from that.” No. He has saved completely. It is a wonderful message: we are saved in Christ.
Have you seen Christ as Lord? We often have a different idea of “Lord.” We think of someone lording it over us.
Younger believers may think, “I do not want to give my life to Christ as Lord. He is going to be some mean taskmaster. He is going to take everything I want away from me.” They think that is what it means to have Christ as Lord.
But the picture I have of Christ as Lord is this: it does not look very lordly, does it?
Yet He is Lord in this way:
Yoke with Me.
Follow Me.
Walk with Me.
Let Me lead.
If you let Him lead, you will find that He leads you into everything that is good. “Yoke with Me.” That is what He means as Lord.
Those who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God. Those who are led by the Spirit are not caught up in the things of the flesh that Jeffrey showed us last week.
It is not those who merely try to do things. It is those who are led—those who find Christ as Lord, not on the outside but on the inside.
There is a registration within us that He is Lord. When He says something, we understand, “This is the Lord speaking. Do not do that.” Then we obey what the Lord is speaking in our spirit.
It is not merely saying, “As a Christian, this is what I do, and this is what I do not do.” It is a living relationship. He is a living Lord, not a lord on a piece of paper.
When we were in Catholic school, the Ten Commandments hung on the inside wall of every classroom. “Do not steal. Do not do this. Do not do that.” You were always faced with them. That is the taskmaster idea—the lord who is never satisfied.
But here we have a Lord who says, “Let Me lead you. Let Me be Lord in this way.”
Have we seen Him as more than a man? Have we seen Him as God?
Then let us reverence Him as God. He is not merely a prophet. He is not merely a teacher. He is God the Son. That is who He is.
Finally, do we see Him in our brothers and sisters?
If I perceive Christ manifesting Himself through the gifts of the Spirit in the brothers and sisters with whom I am in contact, have I found a brother or sister comforting me and understood that this was Christ Himself coming alongside me?
Have I been in a place where I needed help and found one, two, or three brothers and sisters coming to my aid? Have I seen that it was beyond merely kindhearted people, that this was actually Christ ministering to me?
The Word became flesh. Have we seen the Word become flesh?
We do not live in Bible times. Does that mean He cannot become flesh in our time? Well, He does—in our brothers and sisters.
Do we see that? Do we acknowledge it when we go home and say, “Oh Lord, it was You who helped me. Thank You”?
And do we, in turn, let Christ live in us, becoming that part of His body which ministers to others?
We can lose our sight. We may not have been born blind spiritually after coming to know Christ, but we can lose the sight that He has given us.
Many people are born sighted and then lose their sight because of some degenerative disease. How precious sight is to us.
My sight is so precious to me that it goes beyond my vanity. I wear my glasses. I do not wear those little contacts. I let you know there is something wrong with my eyes. Hopefully, you will feel sorry for me.
But we can lose our sight. At the end of the chapter, the Pharisees asked, “Are we blind too?” Jesus said that when they claimed to see but did not recognize Him in His rightful place, they remained blind.
The Pharisees were blind because they worshiped a concept of God.
They saw God as righteous, and because He had given the Law, they concluded that they had to maintain certain behavior. They thought, “God is the magistrate. There is no leniency. This is what the Law says, and this is what you do.”
They thought that certain behaviors were all they needed in order to please God. Some of us are like that. We say, “Jesus died for my sins,” but we still think, “This is the way God is. This is what He expects.”
So we say, “I have my quiet time. I read this. I go to this meeting.” Blah, blah, blah. Every week, the same routine, the same routine.
But the Pharisees were always befuddled by the Lord Jesus because He did not fit that pattern. He did not have the same behavior. He went out and ate with sinners.
My gosh, He healed this man on the Sabbath. Good Lord, does He not know?
How often did the Lord say to them, “Go and find out what this means”?
I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.
The Lord was saying, “You have this, but you are missing this: you do not see God as a person.”
You see Him as a thing, some object far away in the sky. You do not see Him as a person who relates to you. You think He cannot relate to you because He is God and you are merely creatures.
But think about it. Even we, as human beings—the superior beings on the earth—can relate to our pets in kindness. We feed them, walk them, and pet them.
Our pets do not see us as something unrelatable. They come readily to us because they have found something in us. They have found us to be another being, another personality.
The Pharisees missed that. Because they missed it, they did not understand that God wants a relationship. That is what God wants. That is what He is after.
In Genesis, two men walked with God. Of Enoch, it says that he pleased God. Besides Christ Himself, that is the only testimony Scripture gives concerning a man: Enoch pleased God.
Why? Because he walked with God. Because he had a relationship with Him.
That relationship is pleasing to God. That is what He seeks. That is why He sent Christ.
He did not save us simply to say, “Okay, you are safe from hell. Now go do what you want. I have a big house; just do not mess up too badly.” No. He wants us with Him. He wants relationship.
That is what the Pharisees missed. If we do not see this, we can lose our sight. That does not mean we lose salvation. It means we lose spiritual sight.
That is why Paul was so anxious about the Galatians. They were turning away from what he had shown them.
Consider the Laodiceans in Revelation Chapter 3. Beginning at verse 15:
I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I would that you were cold or hot.
So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth.
Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing.”
Material blessings and physical well-being can blind us. Oh, how much we know about that.
When things are good, we do not think we need God. What a danger.
Moses warned the children of Israel in Deuteronomy: “When you get into the land, and the crops are good, and all these things are happening, do not forget Me.”
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all said somewhere in their prophecies, “You have forgotten Me.”
“I have need of nothing. I do not even need Your fellowship anymore, Lord, because I have all these other things.”
It is a terrible place to be, because the Lord says that you do not see that you are poor, wretched, blind, and naked.
My daughter Jamie, who read The Problem of Pain, keeps asking me, “Have you finished the book yet?” I have only read parts of it. She keeps asking, and I say, “No, I have not.”
But why pain? God sanctifies pain in this sense: when we come to a place of pain, that is when we look to Him.
When we come into loneliness, we look to Him. When we come into hard times, we look to Him.
It is not that He sends all those hard times. They come as part of life. But when those parts of life come, God says, “I will use this opportunity to let you know that I love you. If you call out to Me, I will come.”
I wonder whether, in the United States, where we have been so prosperous as Christians—with prosperity teaching and big megachurches—we are in the same place as Laodicea.
We have nice places, nice sermons, and we agree with them. But perhaps we do not know that we are missing fellowship, missing the relationship God intended for us from the beginning.
We can also lose our sight by not acting on the light we have been given.
As a teacher, I do not give extra credit. I know—bummer, huh? Students ask, “Why do you not give extra credit, Mr. B?”
I tell them, “Because it implies you are not doing your other work. Why should I give you extra work if you will not do what I have already given you?”
Usually, the students who want extra credit are the ones who have not done their work. At the end, they say, “Oh my gosh, I have a D. I have an F. What am I going to do? Can I have some extra credit?”
I say, “Sorry. It is more work for me.” But really, I ask, “Why did you not do what you were asked to do?”
It is the same with the Lord. The Lord gives light, and He gives light for a purpose. He gives a word so that it will not return to Him void.
If He has given you words and you are not doing anything with them, He may say, “I cannot give you more, because you are not doing anything with what I have given you.”
We hear sermons and say, “Oh yeah, I have heard that before,” but it does not make a dent in us.
What does James tell us?
Be doers of the word, and not hearers only.
The Lord gives us light so that we may walk in the light. As we get to the place illuminated by that light, He gives us more light so that we can walk further. Then He gives us more light so that we can walk further still.
But once we stop walking in the light, why should we have more light? Sometimes there are glimmers, and we see light ahead, but we say, “Oh well. It is okay. I like where I am.”
When we become satisfied with where we are, with ourselves, and with what we know, we stop receiving light. There is a danger in that.
Lastly, why does the Lord give us light? Why does He give us sight of who He is? Why does He open our eyes?
This is the reason:
We must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day.
He gives us light so that we might work His works. He has a purpose for us.
I want to stress the word we. We must work the works.
We may take that merely as individuals, and in one sense that is true. But if we are going to use the word “we” correctly, it means as a group.
We, as a group, are to work the works of God. That does not mean everyone has to do the same thing. It may be two or three, or five or six, who are being moved by the Spirit of God to do something.
God does not merely send individuals. Even when Jesus sent out the disciples, how did He send them? In twos.
We are part of His body. That is the whole thing about being part of His body.
As His body, are we seeing and hearing Him, so that we obey Him and become His provision for a particular need, just as He was the provision for this blind man?
That is what is asked of us as the body of Christ: that we work the works of God, not merely as individuals.
I am beginning to see something of the corporate nature of the body. I have not seen much of it before, but my eyes are opening to the Lord saying, “I did not save you to be an individual. I saved you to be part of a body.”
That is something different. As Americans, we are so individualistic. “I am the star.” It is amazing we even have team sports.
But once you have been on a real team, you understand something of this.
I have been on a real team, and I will tell you this: if people give themselves to the team concept, something glorious happens. You win.
You win because everybody knows their place, and everybody functions as they are supposed to function.
Not everybody on a basketball team is going to be the big scorer. But that does not mean one person will do all the scoring either.
On a real team, when one person is up, another may be down; when one is down, another fills in. Everybody is a joint of supply. Everybody fills in where they are supposed to go and uses their gifts according to the need.
The gift goes into effect. It is a glorious thing.
That is what the Lord wants. He wants His body to function. We are all part of His body, taking our place in that body.
We are not to worry about what our gift is, but to use our gift whenever it is needed.
He is not out to make everybody a preacher. He is not out to make everybody an evangelist. But He wants everybody to follow the life of Christ within them, so that they help, encourage, correct, restore, and do all these things.
That is what Christ does, and that is what we are supposed to do. We are extensions of Him. We are His body. We are called to work the works of God.
In closing, I want to say this: the body of Christ is not just for the church. The body of Christ also goes out to unbelievers.
Christ went out to those who did not believe. Just because we are believers does not mean we do not touch the world in which we live.
We go out and function as the body of Christ, as Christians, even though people may not believe. Their unbelief should not deter us.
Remember, the sower went out to sow seed, and he sowed it indiscriminately. He sowed it everywhere.
If there are those here today who are blind, I appeal to you.
Now that you have heard that there is One who saves, One who can give you sight concerning your condition, do not wipe the mud off your eyes that He has put there.
Go and wash, and come out seeing. Just like I did when I prayed: “Oh, I will just pray.” And I came out seeing.
The same is true for you. There is hope for you. Do that.
If you do that, then today, while we are praying, stand up and say, “Lord, I take You as my Christ. I take You as my Savior.” Just stand up and say that.
Even if you interrupt somebody’s prayer, say it. Cry out to Him, and find out that He does save.
For the rest of us, now that we have seen, what do we do? How are we seeing? Let us respond to Him. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, how we thank You that You did not leave this man and simply say, “Oh, it is just part of nature. He was born blind.”
Thank You that You saw him, singled him out, and gave him sight.
Lord, we thank You for the sight You have given us, and we ask for Your mercy. We pray for those of us who are in places where we are going blind because of our concept of You, because of our material bent, or because we are simply not obeying You.
Lord, forgive us and turn us to where we should be. Help us to walk in what we do see of You.
Lord, You are our Savior. Help us to come into Your presence. Help us to be before You with gladness and rejoicing.
Help us to know You as Lord, leading us. Help us to know You as God. Help us to see You in the brothers and sisters keeping us.
Oh Lord, help us, we pray, in Christ’s name. Amen.