In this sermon, the speaker criticizes religious discussion groups, stating that they often engage in superficial conversations without truly connecting with God. He emphasizes the importance of sincere prayer and repentance, stating that a few minutes of genuine prayer can have a greater impact than endless discussions. The speaker also highlights the story of Nicodemus and how his pride prevented him from fully surrendering to God. He encourages the audience to be honest with God about their shortcomings and to seek a deeper spiritual experience.

In the gospel according to John, third chapter, and a few verses out of that third chapter, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The same came to Jesus by night and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again, cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born of water, and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. So is every one that is born of the spirit. Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be? Jesus answered and said to him, Art thou a master, a teacher of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily I say to thee, we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven. Let's have a moment of prayer before I attempt this. O Lord, thou who didst patiently deal with thy servant Nicodemus, deal with us tonight. Thou knowest, Lord, that the flesh, with all of its pressure, and the world with its distractions, and the devil with his wiles, unite to make our hearts fat, and our ears dull of hearing, and our eyes blind. O come, Lord Jesus, and do for us what thou didst do for the disciples, and thou didst open their understanding, and enable them to see. O Lord, we pray, give us sharp eyes, willing feet, quick hands, and above all, humble hearts, as we think together over this truth discussed so long ago, living still without any diminution of content or quality, remaining everlastingly the same as thou didst give it. Help us now as we wait in thy presence for Christ's sake. Amen. I shan't at all attempt to talk on all that I have read, but our Lord Jesus, as I said before, being who he is, makes everything that he ever said or did to have brilliant significance. He never did a common thing, for every common thing he did became quickly and instantly uncommon. He never did an ordinary thing, for every ordinary thing he ever did took on a halo of the extraordinary. Because this is true, then, we can well afford to linger over this story of Jesus and Nicodemus. Now, the man Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and he said, Rabbi, though Jesus was not a rabbi, was not even of the tribe from which rabbis came, but he gave him the term rabbi, as we sometimes say doctor or give some other term to a man who we feel in our hearts certainly deserves it, but perhaps never had it formally bestowed. Rabbi, he said, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, and we can't take this any further than Nicodemus took it. He said, thou art a teacher come from God. That wouldn't be saying too much, because there were a great many teachers come from God. And he said, no man can do these things that you're doing unless God be with him. Now, he didn't ask a question. He didn't introduce an argument. He didn't lay before our Lord a proposition. He simply made a flat statement and was immediately interrupted. Our Lord interrupted him by ignoring him completely. He ignored everything that Nicodemus had said up to that moment, and he took a new direction, and completely overlooked the statement made by the man Nicodemus. Jesus changed the subject. If I were a sensational preacher, I'd bear down on that a lot and try to make something out of it, but because it has a certain dramatic significance here, that when this teacher came to Jesus and made a statement, which was, I assume, to be introductory to a series of questions, Jesus changed the subject by interrupting the man after his first sentence. Now, why did he do this? In the first place, the man Nicodemus came to Jesus because his heart brought him. There are some places you go because you have to go. Nobody ever went to a dentist because his heart took him. You know that. Nobody ever did that. Nobody ever went to pay his income tax just out of the sheer love of it. But there are some things that we do and some places we go that our hearts take us. And Nicodemus was led here by his heart. Some men go to church because their wives lead them, and some young people go to church because they know they must. They're driven by external pressure. But Nicodemus had none of these pressures back of him. So far as I know, his wife wasn't interested in Jesus, and he wasn't afraid if he didn't go to Jesus that he couldn't get out of purgatory. There just seemed to be none of the external pressures at all. Our Lord was a magnet that drew men of heart, and Nicodemus had a heart. And his heart drew him to Jesus. But when he got there, his heart would not expose itself to Jesus nor to anybody. The man Nicodemus would not expose himself. He had erected a screen to hide the condition of his heart. Nicodemus, being one of Israel, was described by the man of God several hundred years before. And here is the way the Holy Ghost to Isaiah described Israel's heart. Why should you be stricken any more? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot, even unto the head, there is no soundness in it. But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. That is the heart. There is no soundness in it, the heart. But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores that have not been closed, nor bound up, nor mollified. Now, there was God's description of the heart of Israel. And here was one of Israel's noblest sons. And he was coming to Jesus with that kind of heart. But he was determined that the Lord was not going to find out about that heart of his. His shame would not let him speak. It would not let him weep out the true story of why he came. If Nicodemus had been sincerely honest about it, he would have wept in the lap of our Savior, kneeling at his knee. He would have thrown himself down and forgotten his priestly robes, or his rabbi's robes, and would have fallen at the feet of Jesus and, like a child, sobbed out his fear. He would have told Jesus a story of shattered hopes. He would have told Jesus this shameful story of secret sin. He would have confessed to Jesus the longings and the lonelinesses and the disappointments. But he didn't, and he wouldn't. These were the sores and the terrific diseases that affected the heart of the man. But like a man who has cancer but is afraid and ashamed to let it be known, so this man had a heart, but he wouldn't tell Jesus what kind of a heart that was. Brethren, there's a great deal of getting into the Church nowadays and signing cards saying, I this day take Jesus as my Redeemer, and then sending it in to some fellow. There's a lot of that going on in our time, and that is why the level of our spirituality is so tragically low, because the people who compose our spiritual bodies, many of them, never brought their hearts to Jesus and exposed them. They came to Jesus, maybe by night or maybe by day, but they came to Jesus sick and disappointed and beaten with woes of every kind. But when they got there, they were ashamed to tell Jesus what was wrong with them. Now, that's exactly the way it was with Nicodemus. There was nothing that brought him but his own disappointed, sick heart. But when he came, he never said a word about it. He began with a theological discussion, and so he talks like the theologian and the scholar. His head spoke because his heart was ashamed to. If I could get every one of you to just close your eyes where you are now and stop being theologians and church people and doctrinarians and just begin to talk to Jesus Christ honestly out of your heart, about your heart, the whole level of this Church would rise instantly, and the level of your spiritual life, the content and quality of your spiritual experience would be raised immeasurably. But as soon as we begin to pray, we stand off and begin to discuss. Rabbi, he said. He hadn't come there to tell Jesus that he thought he was a teacher because he'd reasoned out that the man that could perform miracles must come from God. He hadn't come for that intention at all. He could have told Jesus that by day. He wouldn't have had to sneak in the back door by night. He could have told Christ that any time. He could have argued that on the street. Nobody would have cared too much about that, because many others had that opinion too. But he, when he got there, his heart bringing him, his sick heart pressing him there, when he got there, he wouldn't tell Jesus what was wrong with him. Oh, I wonder how many have gone to altars and into prayer rooms and have gotten down on their knees and would not tell the Lord Jesus Christ the truth. Sometimes even people will hunt out counselors, spiritual instructors, and will tell them a great story, a religious story, and yet will hide all the time what is wrong with them and never tell the truth at all. I suppose that Catholic priests get lied to more than any other class of men in the world. I'd guess that. I may be wrong, you know. But I suppose that they get lied to more than anybody else, because I can't conceive anybody in his right mind going into one of those telephone booths and really exposing his soul. You know, he goes in there and stands off in spires and shadow boxes and said, Father, I have done this, and Father, I have did that. But when it's all told, I wonder whether they ever tell the truth at all. Maybe I'm a little hard on my friends over on the other side of the river, but I'm inclined to believe that they get lied to a great deal, and I think they know it. But Jesus certainly got lied to a lot, and so does every teacher, I suppose, and every soul winner, and everybody that kneels by a seeking sinner simply get lied to. And this man, Nicodemus, came. He wasn't a liar. I don't want to condemn the man and say that he lied to the Lord. I only want to say that when he got to Christ, he suddenly got panicky and embarrassed, and he wouldn't tell Jesus what was wrong with him. So he said, Rabbi, we have reasoned out that thou art a teacher come from God. And he came as now as the thinker, and what he said sounded reasonable and wise and proper. And of course, it's always the business of the teacher to sound reasonable and wise and proper. He saves his own face that way and maintains his reputation for being a very grave brother and very wise. So he protected himself in his own eyes by introducing religious speculation, and Christ immediately changed the subject and ignored his words and replied to his heart. And I believe the Lord would always do that if we would let him. When we go to the Savior, instead of going with our prayers nicely made up, I believe that we ought to let our hearts take us to the Savior. You know, one of the greatest snares in the world is fluency in prayer, to be able to drop to your knees or to stand and say, Lead us in prayer, Brother Jones. And then Brother Jones closes his eyes piously and launches into a long lecture on theology. I don't think it amounts to much because his heart isn't talking. I don't mean our Brother Jones here. He wouldn't do that. But you know, the anonymous Brother Jones, he prays like that, and God never hears such prayers. Now, I'm absolutely convinced that he never hears such prayers as that. I don't mean that he doesn't know that they've been made, but I do mean that they don't register where they should before the power of God, because they have not been made by the heart. Anything the heart doesn't do, God doesn't recognize. And whatever the heart does, God recognizes whether it be right or wrong. If the heart does it, God says, I've got it. It always registers. So this man Nicodemus came, his poor, sick, weary, shattered heart, secret sins and longings and lonelinesses and disappointments and self-accusations and bitterness was in his poor heart. And yet when he got there, he straightened himself up, dusted the lint off his shoulders and lapels, and began to talk like a learned scholar. And the Lord ignored it. Thank God that he did. If Jesus had geared in where he was and begun to talk about what they call Christian apologetics and Christian evidences, if he had begun to reason whether it were possible for a man unaided by a deity to perform miracles or not, we would never have any third chapter of John. But we have that wondrous chapter because Jesus changed the subject and he rejected religious speculation, because he knew, and we ought to know, the vanity of religious theory, that it's fruitless and profitless and vain, that theoretical discussions in religion mean absolutely nothing at all. And yet, theory, religious theory, the defending of a religious theory or the attacking of a religious theory, or studying to attack or to defend, or writing or printing or laboring to defend or tear down or establish or destroy, some religious speculation takes up the religious activities of most people during their lifetime. But this is all evil. Nicodemus's opening words were evil. They sounded good, but they were evil for the reasons I want to give you now. They were evil because they assumed that true religion lies in intellectual notions. That is why you can get a man violently angry if you make a statement that doesn't sound to him entirely orthodox. But he will see you blow up red-faced in his presence and not think a thing of it. He'll know that you're a chiseler when it comes to money and still accept you as a brother. He'll know that when you open your mouth to tell the size of the crowd you lie about it and he'll accept you, think little of it. But if you dare make a statement that doesn't quite sound like all the books on orthodoxy, he'll fly into a rage, because he believes that religion lies in doctrinal notions and theological statements. It's all wrong, and Jesus taught it was all wrong by his changing the subject here, because religious speculation always overlooks the real calamity. There is only one real calamity that you and I have ever suffered, and that is the calamity of sin. Sin with all its slimy, slithering movements within us. Sin like a thousand serpents crawling through the pores of our beings. Shimmering, slimy sin. That is the calamity that's visited us. That's the disease that we have. But religious argument always ignores that. You can see two fellows, red-faced and cords on their necks, standing out, arguing religion, and both of them guilty of sin, and yet ignoring the very thing that religion is about. And it ignores also the true nature of sin by placing sin in ideas instead of in the heart. It makes a god, God, a party to that kind of thing. And I believe perhaps that is the worst that this religious speculation business does. It makes God a party to this wordy religion. One of the most eloquent passages in Shakespeare is, Words, words, words, he says. Words, words, words. And words in religion, words to take place of deeds, words to hide our own hearts, words to hide the emptiness of our hearts, words to hide the iniquity of our hearts, and words to hide the disappointments of our heart. Words, always words. And it makes God a party to that kind of thing, which God never is. God is realistic to the last degree, and everything God says must gear into reality so it can produce immediate fruits. And religious speculation is an evil because it leaves sin in the life completely undisturbed. I read somewhere of the young Chinese boy that was learning English, and he didn't always get the synonyms correct. And when they asked him how he fixed aches, he said proudly in English that he could fix them two ways, prime or disturbed. Well, the scrambled ache is a disturbed ache, God knows that all right. And the trouble with us is that we can talk for a hundred years about religion and never get any inward disturbance. We never allow God to scramble us, get a hold of our heart and perturb us. Now, I want you to know that this religious speculation business, this standing off, aloof, properly lecturing deity, is bad because it never deals with the self-sin, the hyphenated little two-part devils that eat at the vitals of men, self-love and self-confidence and self-righteousness, self-admiration, and a hundred other such self-sins that lie in the light. That's what's the matter with us, my friends. And that's why we come to Christ at all, but often when we do come, we never tell him the truth at all. We're like a man who goes to a doctor, and then when we get in the presence of the doctor, we get panicky and tell him something else. Honestly, you know I've done that. And I know others have done it. We're just afraid to tell the truth about ourselves, or that we might just get simple-hearted and tell God the truth. Now, you don't have to go spilling it all around other people. Some of our brethren have gone so far with that, that they call that continuous revival. I call it continuous confusion because you never get anything settled. It's always confessing, always confessing, running around telling other people, telling other people, telling other people, always wrong, because it is God against whom I have offended. Therefore, it is God that should hear the story of my repentance. And it's relatively easy to go to your mother-in-law and confess and hide from God the fact that you're rotten inside. Sometimes I think it is a dodge that we pull to get out of real confession, because it's always hard to take the lid off and let God see deep inside of us. Now, there is a trend in our day that I want to talk about a little bit right here. And of course, this will be one of those radical positions which I'm supposed to take. And I might as well play in character, because I do take it. And that is, I'm bothered a little bit about Christianity becoming a religion of the discussion groups. You can just go anywhere now and find discussion groups. They meet to discuss religion, not to repent. Many all sit around together, and usually they're young people, because they're more naive, you know, and more talkative. And they meet and discuss religion. I wouldn't give fifty cents a group for all the religious discretion groups that have met between now and next Michael Mass, because when we meet to discuss religion, we're right where Nicodemus was. We got the moderator. We get up and say, Mr. Chairman, I believe that no man can perform a miracle unless God be with him. What do you think, Brother Jones? So he tells us what he thinks. And when it's all over, we've been playing baseball. We've been batting the shuttlecock back and forth across the court. But we've never gotten through to our heart. Five minutes on your knees with God in complete sincerity will get you farther than all the discussion groups in the world. But the farther we get from the cross and the farther we get from repentance, the more we run the panel discussions. Lord will forgive me, I've taken part in some of them. But I want to testify right now and report that nobody ever got anything out of it. But we ought not to meet to discuss religion, brethren. We ought to meet to practice it. We ought not to meet to discuss these things. We ought to meet to do them. One man on his knees repenting knows more about God than all arguments about repentance. Let us have a little discussion tonight. What is repentance? Mabel, Bill, and Charlie will take the affirmative, and Shirley, Dom, and Edward will take the affirmative. And so we sit all night long, and still we talk, and still the wonder grows that one small head can carry all he knows. And when it's all over, we have persuaded ourselves that we're very wise and profound, good debaters, and very religious indeed. But, oh, man, when David sinned, he didn't need a discussion group. He needed a pile of sand or ashes somewhere where he could get down. And when God Almighty talked a while to Job, Job didn't need somebody to discuss with him what righteousness was. He put his hand over his mouth and said, I am loyal. I am vile. Now, just take that for what it's worth. And if anybody wants you to discuss religion with them, I recommend you say, let's pray. When they used to come to Dr. Simpson and say, Dr. Simpson, I should like to know what you mean by this teaching, he'd say, let us pray. And that usually ended the discussion, because you can't very well argue when some godly old man is down on his knees, pouring his heart out to God in your presence. Now, I point out here a few places where Christ refused to become involved in discussion, theoretical discussion of religion. Take the woman at the well. You remember the woman came to Jesus? They met there, the woman and Christ. And she said, Rabbi, where should worship be performed? In Jerusalem or on this mountain? Because, you see, there's a difference between Samaritans and Jews. And Jesus said, Go get your husband and hive. The man I'm living with now isn't my real husband. He had her on the hip right there. But he could have spent all evening discussing where he should worship, one place or another. But he penetrated straight through to the heart of the woman by changing the subject swiftly and getting to what was wrong with her. And then they have an argument they called, which is the greatest commandment argument. The Jews used to stand up there, you know, and stroke their silky beards. And one would say, I believe the first commandment is the most important. Another old man's face would get red and he would say, I'm a follower of Rabbi so-and-so who holds that the sixth commandment is the most important. So they argued over which was the most important commandment when they were all breaking the commandments. So they brought their which is the greatest commandment to Jesus. And he set them back on their heels. He said, the greatest commandment is you should love God with all your heart and your neighbors as yourself. And they never even included that in the commandments. And he said, there's your greatest commandment. We'll not talk about the theory of the commandments and their relative importance. We'll just tell you you should love God with all your heart. And that made them sweat. The Lord knew what was wrong with them. And then who is my neighbor issue? Instead of acting like neighbors, they argued about who the neighbors were. And they said, now what do you mean by neighbor? And the Lord said, here's what I mean by neighbor. Fellow was in great trouble. Another man came along and helped him out of trouble. And they all began to sweat because not a one of them would do it. They would theorize about what neighborliness meant. And they would write essays about neighborliness and articles on neighborliness and speak very fluently about neighborliness. But they didn't know that neighborliness meant to do a practical good deed to the man that needed it when he needed it. So you see, I give those three illustrations from the life and teachings of our Savior to show that you could never involve him in religious dispute. He always cut straight through all that to the heart of the people. He knew what their trouble was and he knew it wasn't their discussion. It was their hearts. So he said to this Nicodemus, you must have an immediate radical change of heart, Nicodemus. You come to me and I'm glad, but I must tell you at the outset that what you need is an immediate radical change of heart, which I'll call the new work. And you don't have to understand it, Nicodemus, or take a course in Christian apologetics. He said, you hear the wind blowing? It blows back and forth, and so it is with everybody that's born of the Holy Ghost. It is something that takes place but that cannot be described. And I'm going to finish by having another text, saying this, that toward defensive talkers, Christ always turns a cold face. When we come into his presence and hide our hearts and pull the screen around the putrefying sores within us and begin to talk, Christ always turns a cold face, for he will not be party to hypocrisy. But toward the poor in spirit, our Lord always turns and smiles and invites, for he's looking for the poor in spirit. Now I want to go to another text, the text which had more to do with my conversion than any other in the entire Bible, or indeed the whole Bible itself. At that time, Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and has revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so seemed it good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. I'm so glad that mother's room is soundproof, aren't you? Wouldn't it be too bad if it wasn't soundproof? He says, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent. You see there, my friends, the wise and the prudent, they never get anything from God. When God sees a wise man, he always hides. And when he sees a babe, he reveals himself, even a babe that hollers through a soundproof window. The Lord always reveals himself to the babe and hides himself from the wise man. Oh, it was in the Garden of Eden, you know, that the devil tempted Adam and Eve by saying that this fruit will make you wise. And so they became wise because they wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil. The result was they fell when they got wise. And that proud wisdom, that cold, proud wisdom that asserts itself against God's throne is always a hateful thing. But you say, aren't some of the holiest people that ever lived, have they not been very learned men? Yes, sir, they have been very learned men, many of them. You could name them an Augustine, a Chrysostom, a Francis of Assisi, you could name them. But always they had a spiritual experience that took them past their learning to humility like a baby. But a self-conscious intellectual is absolutely unsalvageable. God can't save him until he gets rid of his self-conscious intellectualism. It's offensive to me. I'd rather meet the striped pussy on the highway than to have anything to do with the self-conscious intellectual who knows so much. Because when God sees him coming, he just steps behind a sunbeam and lets the fellow go on down the road, mauling over how much he knows, and the Lord won't reveal him. But when he sees a simple man with a babe-like heart, the Lord steps out from behind the sunbeam and says, come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Because God hides himself from the wise and prudent and reveals them unto babes. And do you know what there is about a babe? A babe isn't ashamed of anything. I never saw a baby ashamed in my life, did you? They're the most utterly shameless little rascals that you ever saw. It's only when we get older that shame begins to take over and we begin to hide. Forty years before, maybe, or forty-five, Nicodemus wouldn't have been ashamed of anything. Just lie there, dump him down on a table naked, and he'd lie there and kick and gurgle, he didn't care. But when shame began to enter his heart and he knew that he was naked, and when moral shame began to creep into his soul, then his poor, hungry heart would take him to the very fountain of life, and his pride wouldn't let him drink. Because his pride wouldn't let him tell the true story about himself. I am preaching to some people tonight here who've had a very unsatisfactory spiritual experience, and you wonder why. I submit that the reason may be that you have never really told the Lord the truth about yourself. You've gone through the form of it, you've accepted the Lord Jesus, you believe in the divine inspiration of the Schofield Bible, excuse me, I mean the Bible, and you're theoretically sound and you can argue religion, but you've never really humbled yourself and let the Lord look inside. You just won't do it. You come to him by night, you travel long distances to get to him, and then when you get to him you get embarrassed and begin to talk religion to him. That's the trouble with it, you know. If we just stop that and let our prayers mean and say and express just exactly what we feel, tell the Lord exactly, tell the Lord the truth about ourselves. A poor crippled fellow in one of our meetings out in the east, in a half a campground, he was spastic and badly crippled up, and they were testifying once about different people being physically healed in answer to prayer. And they get up and say, the Lord healed my stomach and the Lord did this, and a whole lot of testimonies. And finally this poor fellow dragged himself up painfully and he said, I'd like to testify that the Lord liked to ruin me. And they laughed, but I wouldn't laugh. That man was honest, and probably the only downright honest testimony he heard that night. He just got up painfully to his feet and admitted God nearly ruined him, giving him an old twisted body. And of course it brought laughter from the people, but it was sincere, and I'd rather have man go to God in absolute sincerity no matter what he told God. One old writer said, always tell God the truth when you go to him. And if you don't like what's going on, tell God. Go to your Old Testament and see. They didn't go piously into the presence of God. They went boldly into the presence of God, and if they didn't like what God was doing, they argued with God about it. Job went straight to God and said, why'd you do this? And the prophets would go to God and say, God, you did this! And God always straightened them out. The point was, God didn't bless them because they were wrong in their judgments. He blessed them because they were childlike in their sincerity. They went straight to the Lord and told him the truth. If they liked what was going on, they praised God uproariously. If they didn't like it, they asked God, how come? And God loved them because they were sincere and they weren't hiding anything. Now, all I'm asking tonight is, are you hiding anything from the Savior? That thing you hide can become a shadow across your heart for all the rest of your life. And even if you were going to the prayer room and get down on your knees and pray, you could so word your prayer as to cover the sore inside your heart and not even let the Lord know. He's called the great physician, ladies and gentlemen, and you'd better tell the physician what's wrong with you. For if he isn't told, he'll act as if he didn't know, though he does know, God knows all things. But he'll act as if he didn't know, but he wants you to tell him what's wrong with you. So in coming to Christ, let's put our wisdom aside. And as little babes in the presence of our Lord Jesus tonight, let's tell him what's wrong. Don't tell me. Don't tell me. And don't tell others. Tell Jesus the great physician, the Savior of men.