Writing is seduction. Stephen King said that.* I like this metaphor because, whoa, have I beheld terrible attempts at seduction! I’ve worked at night clubs and fancy restaurants. I’ve heard pickup lines bad enough to flatten your beer. I’ve smelled colognes and perfumes so thick the fire alarms went off. The gimmicks people use to turn each other on, well, I blush a deep-and-existential blush at the rampant folly of…
Levitating with Augustine
Somewhere in my early teens I wanted to levitate. The thought of defying gravity struck me as an obvious life skill only a fool would neglect. I went to the library and secured the appropriate book: Yoga & Meditation for Beginners. I remember a man on the cover sitting in a yoga pose with his…
To Judge or Not to Judge? Seeking God Among the Pigs and the Dogs (Matthew 7:6)
Jesus kicks off Matthew 7 with a firm warning about the dangers of judgement, then follows this up by mocking those who judge the speck of dust in the eyes of others. On its own, I consider this teaching against judgement challenging, but also compelling and thoroughly coherent. If the teaching ended with verse 5,…
A Writer’s Venn for Writing-Zen
Let me share with you the nature of my toil. I’ve got all this stuff in my head that I believe you would enjoy having in your head. That’s why I write. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. A great distance lies between my head and yours, with terrible obstacles in the space…
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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:
Waiting with Anna
This sermon examines the story of Anna when she met the child Jesus in the temple. Dan Kent highlights how she waited for the Messiah for decades and the importance of waiting on God to act in our lives and release his gifts through us.
Crowns not Crutches
At the start of the Book of Revelation the angel tells John: “Do not be afraid.” Then the angel proceeds to affront John with a terrifying series of visions. How could John NOT be afraid? What’s going on here? Dan talks about how having different objectives at our centers makes us more or less vulnerable to fear.
The Joy of God’s Judgment
In Revelation 6:9-10 the martyrs call out for justice, asking how long will they have to wait for God to make things right. This speaks to our common longing for justice as we live in the space where Jesus has conquered Satan, yet we wait on justice to be fully realized. This sermon shows how we live in this space.
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."
