He experienced all the proper limitations of human life.  He needed food and sleep and rest and needed to give His body proper thought and care.  He was under the human limitations regarding space and material construction.  He got from one place to another by the slow process of using His strength or joining it with nature or that of a beast.  He entered a building through an opening as we do.  Both of these are in sharp contrast with the conditions after the resurrection.  His stock of knowledge came by the law of increase, the natural way; some, and then more, and the more gaining more yet.

But there’s more than this.  There’s a bit of a pull inside as one thinks of this, as though Jesus in His humanity after all is on a level above us, hardly alongside giving us a hand.  Ah! there is more.  He had fellowship with us in the limitation that sin has brought.  He shared the experiences that men were actually having.  He knew the bitterness of having one’s life plan utterly broken and something else—­a rude jagged something else—­thrust in its place.  But the bitterness of the experience never got into His spirit or affected His conduct.  The emergency He found down here wrought by sin affected Him.

He was hungry sometimes without food at hand to satisfy His hunger.  He always showed a peculiar tender sympathy with hungry people.  He couldn’t bear the sight of the hungry crowds without food.  He would go out of His way any time to feed a man.  He makes the caring for hungry folks a test question for the judgment time.  There’s a great note of sympathy here with the race.  Every night hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters go hungry to bed.  It was said at one time that the death rate of London rises and falls with the price of bread.  If true when said it probably is more intensely true to-day.  Jesus ate the bread of the poor, the coarsest, plainest bread.  But then, that may have been simply His good common sense.

Jesus got tired.  Could there be a closer touch!  He fell asleep on a pillow in the stern of the boat one day crossing the lake.  And the sleep was like that of a very tired man, so sound that the wild storm did not wake Him up.  It was His tiredness that made Him wait at Jacob’s well while the disciples push on to the village to get food.  He wouldn’t have asked them to go if they were too tired, too.  Was He ever too tired—­over-tired—­like we get?  I wonder.  There was the temptation to be so ever tugging.  Probably not, for He was wise, and had good self-control, and then He trusted His Father.  Yet He probably went to the full limit of what was wise.  Certainly He lived a strenuous life those three and a half years.

Jesus knew the pinch of poverty.  He was the eldest in a large family, with the father probably dead, and so likely was the chief breadwinner, earning for Himself and for the others a living by His trade.  He was the village carpenter up in Nazareth, an obscure country village.  I do not mean abject grinding poverty, of course.  That cannot exist with frugality and honest toil.  But the pinch of constant management, rigid economy, counting the coins carefully, studying to make both ends meet, and needing to stretch a bit to get them together.  It is not unlikely that house rent was one of the items.