“I am thirsty.” –John 19:28
Jesus knew that his mission was now finished, and to fulfill Scripture he said, “I am thirsty.” A jar of sour wine was sitting there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put it on a hyssop branch, and held it up to his lips. (John 19:28–29 NLT)
Jesus thirsted. He hungered; He got tired; I imagine He occasionally hit his funny bone. Too often we are so focused on our understanding of Jesus as fully God—the divine Son of God who was the Word in the beginning, who was with God and who was God—that we diminish the fact that He is also fully man. In 1 John 1:2–3, the apostle writes that to deny Jesus as human was in the spirit of the antichrist. To deny His humanity is to claim that His death was merely playacting, for God cannot die; to deny His divinity is to claim His resurrection was a sham, for man cannot conquer death.
Because Jesus is fully man, He experienced the same struggles that are common to all of us. Not only that, but “because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying” (Hebrews 2:14–15). Jesus is fully God and fully man. Bring your struggles to the throne of Jesus today, safe in the knowledge that He has firsthand experience with the kind of difficulties you are going through.