I just finished the book “Prince of Darkness,” about Jeremiah G. Hamilton, America’s first black millionaire. In the early 1800s he made a great deal of money scamming insurance companies—especially maritime insurance companies. The racket was simple during those early days of maritime insurance. Insure the cargo for more than its worth, then sink the ship. Or, unload the cargo first, then sink the ship, then claim the cargo was…
Free Will Traps and How to Escape Them
Step out in search of free will and you encounter many traps. Say you make the astute claim that something free must be something uncaused. The way you see it, if something is predetermined it cannot be free. If we witness a free act, we must be witnessing something that has no prior cause. As…
Deepak Chopra Says God is a Construct
“Seek the Lord.” That imperative is found over a hundred times in scripture. Why so often? For one thing, finding God is not easy. Not because God is a construct, but because God is not a construct. God is the very real treasure, found by those who truly seek (Proverbs 2:4-5). God wants to be…
Trading Crutches for Crowns
The Book of Revelation begins with an angel telling John: “Do not be afraid.” But then the angel goes on to pummel John with one terrifying vision after another. How do you explain this? Is John a fraud? He says not to be afraid, but then he paints, in great detail, many scary threats. That’s…
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Confident Humility:
Becoming Your Full Self Without Becoming Full Of Yourself
"In the spirit of Dallas Willard... Dan addresses one of the most persistent problems that Christians face: Why does our faith in God’s transforming love transform us so little?”
-From the foreword by Greg Boyd, author of Letters From a Skeptic
Almost all self-help books emerge from one of two flawed views of the self, and these mutually exclusive ditches are destructive. The Ditch of Smallness says that people are fundamentally bad and that humanity's greatest spiritual threat is pride. The Ditch of Bigness says the exact opposite: people are fundamentally good, and shame is our greatest danger.
Dan Kent presents a third view, a road between the ditches. He shows how the humility Jesus revealed offers the most accurate and freeing view of the self. Whereas shame and arrogance are dysfunction steroids (making our depression darker, our anxiety tighter, our addictions stickier, and so forth), humility, as Jesus teaches it, counteracts both shame and pride, thereby subverting two major psychological forces that thwart us.
Once we embrace this new way of seeing ourselves--how Jesus sees us--we begin to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us in a way that allows us to overcome a whole host of vices and self-sabotaging behaviors. Furthermore, whereas the ditches both lead to powerlessness and passivity, humility as Jesus teaches it is empowering, fosters proactivity, and serves as a scaffold for true confidence.
Confident Humilty Learning Tools:
Foundations of True Flourishing
The concluding chapters of Revelation provide a vision of what it means to flourish. This vision is of a holy city, one that is built around the presence of God. There we discover the ultimate foundation of human flourishing, the meaning of all life.
Arrival
Dan Kent invites us to see three grand themes that are woven throughout Revelation and are brought together at the end of this grand book. These themes are the “two ways” pattern repeated throughout Scripture, the fact that the path of God is a person and that the destination of the path is communal.
The End of the Charade
At the heart of Christian unity sits a lifestyle of confession. We cannot connect with one another meaningfully if we are pretending to be someone we are not. Dan Kent shows us what biblical confession is, what it is not, and then points us toward practical steps to move into honest confession.
Study Guides
Daniel Kent (@thatdankent) was born to a 14 year old mother in the humorless tundra of Northern Minnesota. He went to college to figure out if God exists and taught his first college course when he was 25. He wrote his first novel when he was 12 (a nature adventure story, hand-written on 20 sheets of loose-leaf paper and sent off to New York for publication. Unfortunately, the publishing company was "not considering material of this type at this time").
Due to a chronic tendency to underestimate the difficulty of a task, combined with a spirit of stubborn determination, Daniel decided to learn programming. Realizing he was a lousy programmer, he returned to his love of writing. His first book ("The Training of KX12") has been a surprise hit. In 2019, Fortress Press published his best-selling book: Confident Humility: Becoming Your Full Self Without Becoming Full of Yourself.
He is the editor in chief (and occasional contributor) for Greg Boyd's blog ReKnew.org and is the host of the wildly popular podcast: "Greg Boyd: Apologies & Explanations."
