A friend of mine recently reminded me of a paragraph from a past blog post. The paragraph reads:

Jesus hates it when we attempt to have Him on our terms. Jesus will not tolerate our agenda to reduce Him to anything less than our Maker and Master. Jesus withdraws because we want to neuter and domesticate Him. We want to commodify Jesus, or weaponize Jesus, or informationalize Jesus. Jesus condemns and circumvents our evil aspirations to tame Him and make Him our trophy, or our textbook, or our ordnance. Simply put, Jesus is not offering us information, He is offering us transformation. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life.” There is a big difference between accumulating Bible knowledge, and actually following Jesus.

Excerpt From Previous ECPC Blog Post

As I was reflecting on this paragraph I thought about something my friend Preston recently said about how Jesus always insists on affirming our humanity. Jesus MADE us human, and thus He holds all the patents on our humanity; and He truly, beautifully, and authoritatively dominates and defines all the particulars of our humanity. So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty… when Jesus visits Samaria and chats with the wanton woman at Jacob’s well – He affirms her humanity! Which essentially means two things: [1] Jesus truly SEES this woman, and He loves her, and He deeply desires what is best for her! [2] Because Jesus loves this woman, He will not allow her to define womanhood on her own terms, and He will not permit her to determine her own sexual identity or ethical standards. The FACT is that Jesus truly affirms this woman’s humanity, and He sincerely loves her; and thus He imposes His authoritative definitions, restrictions, and standards on her! This irrevocable fact of Jesus’ love is powerful and true no matter how this woman feels about it, but for what it’s worth – the woman is completely overjoyed by the authoritative love of Jesus (and subsequent limitations); and she is (for the first time in forever) free and confident as a beloved bondslave of Jesus!

*See also Paul’s letter to Philemon to further explore and envisage how God affirms our humanity/imposes His standards and restrictions of joyful, costly, hard-to-do/die-to-narcissistic-self.