oth. Yet he knew its limitations. He
said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, "I am not sent save to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel." He had come do a special work
among the Jews, and in that a work for all mankind. He had not come
to be glorified. He had not come to be ministered unto, but to
minister. But he had come on a distinct errand; and whatever be
your doctrine of Christ's person, you must confess that he
considered himself no accident of history; that he did not regard
his life work as originating in his own choice; that his sense of a
mission did not come as an afterthought to him, or grow clear as he
advanced in life. He felt his special errand from the start. It was
always before his mind, so that life was to him the performance of
a given task and the fulfillment of an assigned duty.

2. But furthermore, our text discloses that, to Christ's mind, this
errand of his in the world derived its sanctity from the fact that
it was the will or wish of his Father. Every man is governed by
some controlling motive or class of motives. The lowest of all is
the motive of personal gain and pleasure, and the sorrows and sins
of men chiefly spring from the tyranny of this degraded passion.
Higher than it is the motive of pity and compassion, which may lead
us to do good for the sake of benefiting others. This is the spring
of much charity and philanthropy, and, so far as it goes, it is of
course to be commended. But there is a higher motive than even it,
and Christ reveals it to us here. It is the wish to do God's will.
Such was his motive. To him the will of the Father was the perfect
good. He knew of nothing nobler than it, so that the whole energy
of his character consisted in the force of obedience.

This phrase may carry us back to that time in the counsels of the
Godhead when, as we conceive such matters, the Father determined to
save the world that had rebelled against him. The question was,
where to find a Saviour; and the spirit of the Divine Son was
manifested in his self-dedication to the work. He, too, loved man,
but that was not his main motive. He loved the Father. He
appreciated the Father's wish to save. He gave himself to carry out
that wish. "Lo, I come," said he, "to do thy will, O God." Thus we
may perceive, I think, the deep reality in the Divine Sonship of