In his Introduction to seventh edition of his lectures on The Atonement (1875), R. W. Dale adds further insight to the implications of Jesus’s willful obedience in the Garden and on the Cross.  I find in it my shortcomings and my hope, my willing spirit and my weak flesh.  Dale tells us that our life is bound up in the life of Christ, that His life might be ours:

“Our whole conception of the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ rests upon our faith in His Divine dignity. He was the Son of God. But He was also the Son of man. That it should have been possible for a Divine person to reveal Himself under the conditions of human nature, and in a human history, is very wonderful, and throws an intense light on the vast possibilities of perfection which belong to our race.  These possibilities are still more gloriously illustrated when we discover what, indeed, seems to me to be implied in the Incarnation, but is also distinctly affirmed in the New Testament that the life which dwelt in Christ is the true life of man, that we were created in order that this life might be ours. Hence, while the Lord Jesus Christ is the brightness of God’s glory, and the express image of His Person, He is also the visible manifestation of the glory of human nature, the “idea” and prophecy of its moral and spiritual excellence, and of its true relation to God. He is God’s “Word” to us; and there is a sense in which He is also our “Word” to God. He reveals God to man; I will not say that He also reveals man to God ; but He is the true root of the human race; the life which is in Him is to be in us if we confess His authority and trust in His love; so that what He is may be described as expressing, not, indeed, what we are, or what we shall ever be, but the transcendent perfection towards which, through the life we receive from Him, we are to be for ever approaching.

When I, a sinful man, come to God through Christ, I acknowledge that I am not what I ought to be, nor what I desire to be. Christ is at once my condemnation and my hope. In Him I see the ideal perfection of my nature, and it stands in vivid contrast to my sin.  But in Him I also see the revelation of that absolute trust in the Father, that faultless loyalty to the Father’s authority, that delight in doing the Father s will, which, though in inferior forms, may be manifested in me, if I receive the life which is His supreme gift.”  [Atonement, pp. lvii – lix]

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