The following article is an excerpt from Make Me Like Jesus by Michael Phillips.

The truly startling thing about these statements of submission become apparent when we recognize that Jesus was not forced into his role in the divine drama that resulted in the world’s salvation.

He chose his Sonship.

He had to choose to submit his way to the Father’s will, just as we do. He confronted this decision not just once or twice, but ten thousand times, over and over, all day, every day…all his earthly life. It didn’t “just happen.”

Pause a moment to allow the wonder of it to sink in.

What else is the prayer of childness—though modernism hates the word—but a prayer of submission?

Jesus was not a Son because he could not help it. In the midst of a fully human mortality, he chose to be a child. His every breath, every thought, every action, was both a prayer and a living out of that prayer: Father, what would you have me do?
There are those who would make of Jesus an angel—a being without free will. If most men and women were to analyze it, I think they would find in their minds a sort of half-man, half-angel occupying the central role in the gospel story.

But Jesus was born a complete man. No angel wings. No halo around his head. His was a physical and mortal body. His was a human will. He got tired. He sweat. He went to the bathroom. He had to wash his hair and his hands and his feet. His brain possessed the capacity to think. He had emotions that loved, got irritated at his disciples and angry at the Pharisees, and became fearful for what he had to face as the Cross neared.

Most important, he was born with a fully developed free will of humanity.

This was no glow-in-the-dark Son of God whose Sonship came any other way than ours must come. He was a Son because he chose to be a Son.

Now in truth he was God-man, the Divine Man. But we mustn’t let his divinity obscure the totality of his manhood. We can’t imagine that he brought along a tiny magic wand into the manger at Bethlehem to pull out when the going got rough or to make sure no sin could get too close to him or temptation bite too dangerously deep. It wasn’t a cute little baby angel that Mary held in her arms, a being incapable of sin because of his heavenly origins. The enormity of Christ’s Saviorhood is found in this—that it is born out of a manhood that chose to be our Redeemer. Mary held a tiny boy in the swaddling clothes of the incarnation…her own son and God’s own Son.

– Excerpted from pages 40-43 of Make Me Like Jesus by Michael Phillips