"Now who do you actually say that I am?"
And then verse 16 says, "Simon Peter replied
you are the Christ, the King, the Messiah
the Son of the Living God." 
That's what he says.
"The Son of the Living God."
See here's what Jesus wants to do.
When he forces them 
to answer this question
he's trying to make it so that they are
conscious of their own sin.
He's trying to make it so that they,
when you recognize 
that you're conscious of your own sin
then you need a saviour.
Then you need Jesus to be Christ.
If you're not conscious of it
you don't understand your need.
Jesus isn't going to let you 
go through life
like the world does unconscious of your sin.
We have tendencies and proclivities toward 
sin and corruption.
But if we just go about our life
the world will never wake us up 
and go,
"hey listen!"
The insidious thing about evil
is that it's unconscious.
It's you and I, we don't even recognize it.
It's like as what one writer said, 
"it's like we're a fish in water.
And another fish," he tells the story in a
lecture I was reading
by David Foster Wallace
as he's giving a presentation,
a graduate speech to Kenyon College in 2005
and he starts the whole thing off 
by saying:
"Two fish were swimming through the water 
and another fish came
and he said 'hey how's the water?'
And the fish looked at him and went on
and a few minutes later 
they look at each other and they
said what the 'heck is water?''".
Because fish when they're in water 
don't even know it.
That's the insidious thing about sin and evil
is that we don't even know
we're unconscious of it.
But when we become,
see here's what Jesus does.
He says,
"I want you to become conscious of it.
I want you to become conscious of your own need 
of your own sin." Because sometimes,
if verse 14 is right,
the crowd is wrong.
The crowd is wrong about you.
Some of you are sitting here right now, you're like
"Man, I can't become a Christian 
because the crowd,
my friends, my family, 
the pressure around me..."
Verse 14 just said, 
sometimes the crowd gets it wrong.
There are whole historical moments throughout history.
We were saying that the earth is flat,
we were killing witches,
we were doing stuff like eugenics 
in the twenties and the thirties
where we would look out and say
Social Darwinism created a situation
where we just wanted the brightest and the best to marry each other and have kids.
So let's take the disabled 
and make sure they don't marry each other or have kids,
because they're going to slow us down.
These are ideas that were popular,
that we actually believed in.
Sometimes the crowd is wrong
and Jesus wants to push against 
your unconsciousness and go,
"wake up".
I want you to be aware of your own situation.
I want you to know you're in water,
this is water.
This is water that you're that you're in,
and you need a Saviour
whether you know it or not.
