Good sentences give you fodder for contemplation. I’ve come to adore the writing of Cormac McCarthy this past year. Right now I’m reading “All the Pretty Horses” and I want to share a sentence from that book. The Context John Grady and his pal, Rawlins, were preparing to sleep under the stars after a long day breaking wild horses. Oh, also, earlier that morning, John Grady had his first encounter…
Reflections On Writing “Surprising God”
A book about God is a book about everything. No wonder books about God sprawl all over the place: the topic ‘God’ touches every other conceivable topic. Any true thing about God will echo in the fibers of all that God has created. Me, I have no interest in writing a book about everything. I…
Protecting Your Faith from the Dangers of Seminary
Podcaster Nick Loper once confessed: “I thought I liked cashews, until we got some unsalted ones. Turns out I just like salt.” A similar epiphany happened to me. I thought I liked theology and Bible study. I downloaded sermons, listened to lectures, and read books-too-big-for-backpacks. I even earned a master’s degree from Bethel Seminary. Many…
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…
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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:
Escaping Babylon
In this sermon, Dan Kent traces his own love for the Bible from his first encounter with the Book of Ecclesiastes, all the way up to the end of Revelation. He traces the theme of futility and meaninglessness in the scripture, and shows how God rescues us from life’s absurdities. If you listen to this sermon, you might feel liberation from bondages you didn’t even know were immobilizing you.
Love Trusts
This first sermon in the “Love Does” series highlights the action of trust. Dan Kent explores the way that God trusts, the call to be trustworthy in our relationship with God and how to grow in our trust of one another. This challenge to the worldly pattern of distrust invites us to manifest love in concrete and practical ways.
The Delight of the Lord
In this sermon, Dan Kent opens up the meaning of the prophesy from Hosea 11:1 about Jesus being called out of Egypt. He shows the unique way this verse was fulfilled in Matthew 2:13-15. He also focuses on God’s delight in his people, and how that delight uniquely fulfills us.
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."
