NextGenKent

REALITY: Revelation's Message For Today LTO THE CHURCHES 1. The World Is NOT As It Seems.  The world is a matrix of falsehood, a falsehood affecting you to the core, and trying to mold you into a false-self. MANY have taken on the false-self way of life. But there is a much, much better way! 2. Jesus, The King Over All, Knows All About You.  Christ knows your past (where you have come from), your present (why you are who you are), and your future (what it will take to get you where He wants you to be = with Him all the way!) 3. Our Enemy Has Messed Things Up.  A Dragon is in control of the fog that covers the Reality of things. You will only see things his way in this world. Unless you hear God's voice speak to you (and have a Revelation) and go God's way, you will continue to live in a fantasy world = Satan's destructive world with a candy coating. Jesus knows every move the enemy makes and WILL make--and Jesus is hated for that! You can learn the...

Have we merely exchanged one place for another, one attitude transported from the Temple of old to our Church today? Have we denied access to people and issued invisible passes for entry? Have we sinned by marking off the territory between people and God and made it much bigger, much more difficult than it really is? Do we surround our churches (and our hearts) with "courts" limiting admittance to people? Do we wear looks on our faces that betray our sinful hearts which speak to people, “You may come THIS far but no farther!” The court of the Gentiles is where we marginalize our children and our youth. We have sent them out of our adult worship communicating to them that access is for adults only. We have told people who work on Sundays they are to be in church but then feast at their tables and in our hypocrisy banish them to the outer courts. We must repent and tear down the gates of our attitudes. The court of the women has become the boundaries of where the age...

I was recently reminded while reading Marva Dawn's book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down , about a phrase I heard in a church back in 1991. It was the first time I heard it and saw it demonstrated that summer in a church in Greenwood. The children's pastor's message for the 'children's chat' was how they (we) are the actors in worship and God is the audience. He posited the question, "When you leave today, be sure to ask your parents on the way home, 'How did we do today?'" as a way to remind them (us) that God is the audience alone and we all are the performers (not just those on stage). Neat illustration? Yes. Corrective? Sure. But there was always something it that didn't seem to sit well with me. And Marva's words (p153) helped me to reflect on why. Marva: "...the congregation being the actors who worship God and God being the Actor who reveals himself in that worship to his people..." Yes, God is involved in t...

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...

What if teens today are living out their lives in a somewhat Matrix existence? A false reality where the "adult world" that is seen and lived in by adults is participated in by their sending a 'surrogate avatar' out into it everyday while their 'real body' is kept in an underground world. This makes sense. The world the next generation has been handed by adults of the past 2-3 generations has not been a very safe one at all. What is seen on the outside is never the "real"--it hasn't been the real in the former generations for decades! All that is cared about is the self--and we have become very adept at self-preservation. But I wonder if this isn't just a deception of the Enemy? If we are creating a lifestyle of fake-living, how can the next generation be real? They would be cast to the sidelines until they wised up on how to live with us--in a fake, covered up manner. But learned they have! 2 nd life living among our teens is n...

REACTION TO:  Chap Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers   (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) 264pp.                 I resonated with so much that is in this book—personally and professionally. It isn’t hard to want to take to heart the challenge to be a youth advocate once reading Clark’s findings about today’s youth. Adults who want to be effective in reaching out to this generation need to consider Clark’s presuppositions—today, not many are “getting it”—not the church, the schools, youth workers or parents. What IS going on inside the world of today’s teenagers? I am still in the process of re-wiring my mental thought processes to Clark’s ‘underworld’ schemata but frankly it is taking a while—he states in his update to his first edition, “It isn’t getting any better,” and that is the ‘why’ for this second edition.         ...

I had a life-transforming experience when I was about 19. A MEGA-shift that was so simple I am still moved by it 25 years later. It happened when I bought my first NIV translation of the Bible. All of my life I was exposed to the hearing and reading of the KJV of the Bible. I am not bashing it. But that is all I knew--one verse after another in tabbed formation. I memorized it, studied it for Bible quizzing competition, knew some passages frontwards and backwards. But something happened deep within me when I read the Bible for the first time in paragraphed form. I can still feel the newness of the distractions (those little super-scripted numbers which represented the verse I was on while reading) caused me and how I had to search through words and even sentences to catch up with others while reading to find where we were together so I could keep up. That learning curve is behind me now. But the impact the Word of God has had on my life since is ever in front of me. I was re...