This last charge I did not dwell upon; I reserved it for our consideration to-day. The discourse of our Lord which follows in this chapter has reference to it. No words throw more light upon it than those which I have taken as my text from one of the latest verses. The answer to the charge begins in the nineteenth verse. '_Then answered Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise._' You will feel at once that this sentence is the expansion of that plea which Jesus put forth for the cure which He had wrought on the day of rest,--'_My Father worketh hitherto, and I work_.' But, I think, you will feel also how wonderfully it meets the other more awful accusation, that He was raising Himself to a level with God. If it had been true, it would not have been a new charge. '_Ye shall be as gods_,' was the first temptation presented to human beings,--the temptation to which they yielded. The ambition had never ceased in any age or in any man. Jesus would have been but the Person who exhibited it in its highest power, who expressed it with the greatest boldness. But if the doctrine which St. John asserts at the beginning of his Gospel, which he has been working out in every passage of it since, is a sound one; if there is a Word who was with God and was God; if that Word was made flesh, and the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father shone forth in Him; then Jesus was the one Person in the world to whom this charge did not apply; the one Person in whom there was no ambition of making Himself equal with God. And this is what He declares here: 'You think I am exalting myself; on the contrary, this proclamation which I am making of a Father, this claim which I am putting forth to be His Son, is the abdication of all independent greatness, the denial that I am anything in myself. I can do _nothing of myself but what I see the Father do_.' Here is the new revelation, the discovery of the real ground upon which all things stand,--the will of a Father commanding, the will of a Son submitting. Here is that idea of Godhead which men had been seeking for,--if haply they might feel after it and find it,--in which they had been living and moving and having their being, yet which they had always been rebelling against and contradicting, and which every thought and act of self-will and pride had been putting at a distance from them. The lowliest of all, He who was called the '_carpenter's son_,' was able to speak it out, to translate it into language, as His whole life translated it into act. And this union of wills, this inward substantial Unity, He declares to have its basis in love, the underground of Deity,--'_For the Father_ LOVETH _the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth_.'