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These eighteen years are of immeasurable importance in any human life. They cover the period when human nature is most impressionable, most receptive, most plastic. The seeds of all future production are sown then. Year by year, month by month, day by day, the life is built up — life physical, moral, spiritual. By processes slow hut sure, never to be undone, by steps never to be retraced, development is gained, the coil of life is lengthened and unwound. At thirty the man's character is formed. What he will be in the future depends on what he is then. Now, it is the history of this time — all-important — that St. Luke describes in these verses "obscurely bright"; revealing, yet enveloping in sacred and profound mystery, the life of the Second Adam who regenerates, redeems the world. What is here recorded is the earthly and human side of Christ's preparation for that work. What you and I are to-day, what the Church is to-day, what the world is to-day, is the outcome of those eighteen silent years. Study, then, this short, sweet record of the human life of Jesus Christ; and study it, not only to admire, but to imitate. Our motto should be — "Christ for me, Saviour, example, Lord: I for Christ, scholar, follower, servant." In this record we may trace some lessons which may enable us the better to fight the good fight.

1. Submission. The characteristic virtue of childhood, its natural and necessary condition. The daily round of home life, with its routine of duties, its continual calls for submission, often all the more difficult to obey because we cannot, even to ourselves, dignify them with the name of hardships or great trials — this Christ has consecrated by these eighteen silent years.

2. Work. Doing each day's work in its appointed time — be the work what it may — fitted Him for the future, when the work was different. Surely the lesson is not what you do, but how you do it.

3. Growth.

(1) This does not necessarily mean imperfection. The child is not to blame because he is not a man all at once. It is the law of his being to grow. He lives by growth. Up to his measure he may be perfectly developed; but that measure, that capacity, is continually expanding. So we learn to think of growth as inseparable from healthy human life, of progress as the law of our nature, of increase in wisdom as perfectly compatible with all moral and spiritual excellence. In Christ this earth has for once been permitted to witness the natural development of a sinless childhood — development, not by sudden miracle, but by Divine indwelling. The glory that dwelt in Jesus shone in those eighteen quiet years in the orderly progress, step by step, of the boy to the youth, the youth to the man. For(2) nothing can be more plain than this, that the Lord's humanity was real indeed. Every line of the gospel tells us this; every word of these verses, which record, while they do not reveal, these eighteen years. We do not doubt it, indeed; perhaps we dwell on it with appreciation and thankfulness. But let us never forget that the same Lord, who thus lived and toiled, rose, ascended, lives, reigns. It is not simply by contemplation, even devout contemplation, of the perfectly human Jesus, that our spirits live. It is by personal fellowship with the God-man, as human now as ever, but God then in the days of His flesh, as now. This is the message of redemption, God's message to the Church and to the world, to the soul that suffers, sins, dies, to the world that sickens, staggers, swoons — God made man for you!

(John Brown, M. A.)

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KJV: And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them.

WEB: They didn't understand the saying which he spoke to them.