NextGenKent

Perseverance is an important virtue,  requires confidence in God,  and is your means to overcome! And it looks good on a T-Shirt! What is  one thing you feel like you are “persevering” right now? I have three projects I am working on at our house: an upstairs closet for my wife, a wall behind the fridge has come loose, and a small, stairwell window needs to be made bigger so we can move bedroom furniture upstairs (finally). I say three projects, but you and I know projects are never ending (I am also simultaneously working on painting the back patio and resealing our driveway and maybe ...). I think I am persevering a lot! James wanted us to know something about persevering. He wrote from a Christ-like perspective to inform us that perseverance is not a natural outcome unless faith is involved: the testing of your faith  produces steadfastness (or perseverance) . The faith he is speaking about is in Jesus specifically. When we have made it throug...

Exodus 2  Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. 2 The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. 4 And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. 5 Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” 7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women ...

We usually only hear the NOTHING CAN part in Romans 8. No one wants to talk about the BUT EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO part. Here is where I am getting this from. It's in the Bible. Paul is writing to the Romans and in chapter eight there is A LOT of good stuff! And it ends great, take a look. Let's begin with verse 35, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.--NIV. So how does everyday stuff seek to separate us from the love of God that i...

A reaction to David F. Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World, 2008. “This disappearing trick [of the church] would never have been possible if evangelicals were still thinking in doctrinal terms. But they were not” (11). When you come across someone who is putting into writing the same things you yourself have been thinking it is rather exciting and serious business. The dissonance I felt during the “seminar movement” and their after effects producing little if any results is unnerving. I wonder if the foundational elements of the author are valid or are simply his perspective--so I am cautious of embracing them. We need to have “the courage to be faithful to what Christianity in its biblical forms has always stood for across the ages” (21). The author writes with great clarity of the dangers presented in society and how believers have been so enculturated in our thoughts and beliefs. He calls us to have the courage t...