Our Lord most carefully guarded His sentence against this construction. Our translators have honestly and righteously preserved the singular phrase,--'_If any man will_ (or wills to) _do His will_.' Supposing a man really recognises a will as higher than his own, and wishes, above all things, to be conformed to that will, then Christ's words about _His_ coming to do a Father's will,--His whole doctrine, which is grounded upon His relation to His Father, and His fulfilment of His will,--must become by degrees intelligible to that man. He may be confused about phrases, he may blunder in his statements, but he will enter into the meaning of the teaching; there will be a continual interpretation of it in his own thoughts and acts. For self-glorying, self-seeking, self-will is that which he will be continually dreading in himself, from which he will be continually flying in himself. He will know that that has been and is the cause of all falsehood in his words, his deeds, his thoughts; and therefore he will acknowledge that One in whom there is no such self-seeking, self-glorying, self-willing, who was entirely seeking the glory of another, and doing the will of another, must be true altogether, must be right altogether,--that there can be no falsehood, no wrong in Him. Here is our Lord's famous test, which has never been superseded,--which has never failed in the case of any generation or of any man. Jesus applies it at once to those who were about Him. They had a law,--they boasted of a law. But did they bow to the law, as expressing the will of One higher than themselves? No; it was a document which they could call _theirs_, which belonged to them--not a power which was to rule them; therefore this law which forbade killing was to be the very excuse for killing. They went about to kill Jesus, out of love to the law. A more tremendous illustration of a principle--tremendous, because its force has not been spent in eighteen centuries--cannot be conceived. It is possible to make God's commandments an occasion for boasting over others, for self-glorying; and so it is possible to make God's law a perpetual barrier between us and all knowledge of His will--even a reason for resisting it in our acts.