Meet the True Human
- Jeremiah Reeves
- Jan 22
- 5 min read
Published on the True Human Project Substack!
Y’all, we’re back! Our first writing of the year.
I’m sorry I’ve been offline for the last month, but I’ve been building up enough content to last through the year. Now, we have a new rhythm I’m excited to share with you about this newsletter:
➡️ Each week, I’ll post a (brief) WATCH section for what’s happening in the world and with THP.
➡️ Each week, I’ll post a (brief) WORD section to help us interpret the times.
➡️ Each week, I’ll post a (less brief) WAKE section to stir awakening to Jesus Christ in our own lives.
I realize there are a thousand other things you can read this year. But if I have one selling point for you, it’s that each of these writings will focus unapologetically (or perhaps very apologetically) on the one person for whom there can never be enough writing: Jesus of Nazareth.
He’s a Man worth reading about.
It’s my prayer that by the end of this year you’ll see and hear Jesus in fifty ways you’ve never seen or heard Him before.
Only seeing Jesus—the True Human—newly, truly, rightly will make us more watchful, more Word-filled, more awakened Jesus-followers in a sleeping generation.
So, if you find any of these writings to be beneficial, please feel free to share them.
On that note, here’s our foundational article for 2026…
WATCH…
2025 was the quiet year of comeback for the church in the West. For the first time in forty years, Pew Research Center, BARNA, USA Today, and many others posted groundbreaking research about church attendance and Bible-reading going up. Let’s continue to pray fervently that the church can sustain her hunger in 2026.
The fear of most American church leaders for the last two decades has been impending government persecution. That fear has shifted rapidly since the overturning of power to the GOP in 2025. Now, “Christian nationalism” is the buzz-phrase of our moment. Much thought is currently being dedicated to how we navigate church and state relations (I’ll publish multiple articles on this in 2026).
The True Human Project is here! We came partially as a timely response to the AIpocalypse that erupted in 2025. Be on the lookout this year for podcasts, articles, AWAKE Nights, and The True Human book launch in the Fall. This is a year of entrepreneurship — and I expect there’ll be far more twists and turns than last year. Glad you’re here for the ride.
WORDS…
“There is never a year when I look back and wish I had prayed less.”
— Journals, AD 2025
“If the world is against the truth, then I am against the world. God became human that humans might become [like] God.”
— Athanasius, AD 330
WAKE…
(*this is an article I’ve already published, but a perfect refresher for us at the New Year!*)
Our generation is really good at everything virtual and virtually good at nothing real.
Welcome to the most anxious1, most relationally dysfunctional2, most spiritually confused generation in the history of the Western world3. We’ve lost ourselves. We’ve lost others. We’ve lost God.
And they’re all linked.
Whenever we misunderstand God, we lose sight of our humanity. After all, if God isn’t real, really real, then humans are nothing more than a bunch of molecules.
Apparently we’re nothing more than matter… which means we don’t matter. For all our hubris, Gen Z feels like we don’t matter at all.
So we’ve made ourselves animals, like hamsters sprinting on wheels until we wear ourselves out in the pursuit of the perfect, authentic, original “me.” The “me” that doesn’t exist. We’ve made ourselves bots, hijacked and programmed to be more comfortable with loveless machines than people, always holding out for the perfect, authentic, original “them” to marry or befriend or give birth to. The “them” that doesn’t exist. We’ve made ourselves gods, unable to recognize another God who demands everything from us, and uploading in his stead a perfect, authentic, original version of “God” we cheffed up. A “God” who doesn’t exist.
But don’t you see? We’ve lost what it means to be human.
Our time and attention have been stolen by things that don’t love us, by manipulative algorithms that train us—whether we realize it or not—in the religion that starts and ends with ME.
But there is another who demands our attention.
There is another who claimed to be the True Human.
His name is Jesus Christ.
Our generation feels immense pressure to tame Jesus, to squeeze him inside the plastic box of our digitized imaginations. Because our algorithms only push forward what people want to hear, we quickly discard the parts of Jesus we don’t like. Jesus the hater? Jesus the homophobe? Swipe left. Jesus the health and wealth guru? Jesus the happiness genie? Swipe right. Maybe if we make him more appealing our Jesus can survive this world’s beatings.
But Jesus doesn’t need our help surviving the world’s criticism. He did just fine surviving death without us.
Do you want to be you? Then we should want God to be God. Jesus will not be a human of our making. He would only have us be humans of His making.
Let me say this: if you’re a Christian in the western world, you probably don’t know the Jesus of the Bible. You’ve probably missed Him for some algorithmic, cheapened, plastic version. And so you’ve probably missed yourself (and others) for some algorithmic, cheapened, plastic version.
This Substack is my confession of all the ways I’ve missed Jesus, too.
It’s my attempt to be real with you.
I want to show you the unabridged, raw, unedited version of Jesus we see in the Bible. In doing so, I want to show you the raw version of myself, because even after seven years of theological school, the best way I can tell you about the Love and Lord of my life is not simply to tell you how I know Him but how He has known me.
Then I want to show you that He is real. And that He knows and loves you as much as He knows and loves me.
This Substack is a series of emergency letters to the Christians of my generation, a plea for us to beware the lies perpetuated by our algorithms, a guide for us to be human in an increasingly robotic world, and a call to take joy in the crazy, costly, worthy, misunderstood fullness of the True Human, Jesus Christ.
It’s a prayer for awakening.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything above: feel free to leave a comment or like on this page.
Let’s be human this week. Love y’all.
May Christ awaken us,
J.T.
“Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”Revelation 13:11
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024).
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: HHS, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.National Center for Health Statistics, “Marriage and Divorce,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm.Jean M. Twenge, iGen (New York: Atria Books, 2017), 143-178; 203-226.
Pew Research Center, “8 in 10 Americans Say Religion Is Losing Influence in Public Life,” March 15, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/03/15/8-in-10-americans-say-religion-is-losing-influence-in-public-life/.
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