John 5:43

John 5:43. I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not. Referring everything to His Father's power and presence, in everything doing His Father's will and not His own, at all times seeking His Father's glory, Jesus came ‘in His Father's name.' Because that was His spirit, they did not receive Him.

If another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. So far has self-seeking gone with them, that they can understand no other course of action than that which is animated by this principle. If a man come in the opposite spirit to that displayed by Jesus, setting forth himself alone, seeking his own ends, and guided by no will but his own, though all under the guise of promoting the glory of God, such a man they will be able to understand. They will sympathize with his motives, will even enthusiastically embrace his cause. The other course they cannot comprehend; so far as they do understand it, it is a constant reproach to them. This is a terrible description of those who were then the rulers of ‘God's people Israel: ‘but, alas! the words apply with perfect fitness to the spirit which in every age of the history of Christ's Church has contended against God whilst professing to do Him service; which in every age has tried to stop the progress of truth, sometimes without, at other times within, the Church, as truth has striven to pierce through forms that, once good, have with the course of time stiffened into the rigidity of death. Nothing can save from that spirit but the higher and nobler spirit breathing in the words, ‘glory from man I receive not.'