Restored Church

Sunday Sermons from Restored Church San Diego.

Restored Church is a religion podcast hosted by Restored Church San Diego, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Restored Church San Diego hosts Restored Church, a religion show with 300 episodes published.

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  Proverbs: How to Build a Life: Wisdom in Parenting

  Sep 13, 2026—

  Grant Clark continues the How to Build a Life series through Proverbs with a message on wisdom in parenting. Working from the ninth fatherly discourse in Proverbs 6:20-23, he argues that the goal of parenting is not the cultural scorecard of success but children who know God, walk in his wisdom, and follow Jesus, and he lays out four practices from Proverbs for getting there: delight, demonstrate, disciple, and discipline. The message is for everyone in the room, parents or not, both as children of the Father in heaven and as the aunts and uncles of the church's kids. Grant opens with a story from his own week and names the humility this topic requires: none of the four points is a magic bullet or a quick fix, all of them are processes repeated over years. He recalls the ten fatherly discourses of Proverbs 1-9, where Solomon sits his son down and passes on a whole way of life, what some commentators call a curriculum in wisdom, and offers hope to parents who never received that kind of training themselves. He reads Proverbs 6:20-23: a father and a mother working together to teach, command, guide, and correct their child, where a command is a lamp, teaching is a light, and corrective discipline is the way of life. The four D's: 1) Delight in your Children 2) Demonstrate How to Walk 3) Disciple them in Wisdom 4) Discipline them in Love ## What is the Goal of Parenting? Before the four practices, Grant asks what parents are actually aiming for. Every parent wants healthy, secure, happy children, but Proverbs gives a larger vision than the Western one of a good school, a good job, and a home. The goal of the Scriptures is that our children would know God, walk in his ways and his Word, and follow Jesus, or in New Testament language, that they would live out the great commandment and the Great Commission. Parenting is not controlling external behavior; it is forming hearts and showing children how to live wisely in God's world. Solomon told his son plainly what his goal for his life was. Grant asks the parents in the room: if your kids were handed the mic this morning and asked what your biggest desire for their life is, what would they say? ## 1. Delight in Your Children Proverbs 4:3-4. Solomon remembers not only what his parents taught him but how they made him feel: tender, precious, cherished, tenderly loved. Grant reads Tim Keller on this verse: "The verse literally says, "I was the only one in the sight of my mother." A child should feel they are the object of powerful, unconditional love from the parent." – Tim Keller Solomon's parents did not just love him, they enjoyed him, and he wants to pass on both the teaching and the feeling. Grant connects this to the Father's words over Jesus at his baptism in Matthew 3:17, three formative pillars of identity: you are my son, I love you, I am proud of you. He describes speaking those same words over his daughter at bedtime for six and a half years, so that when correction comes, her identity and his love are never in question. Practical ways to show delight: give focused attention and be present, play with them in ways that fit their stage of life, listen to their stories and ask questions, speak affirmation over the good you see in them rather than only calling out the bad, build family memories, and tell and show them often how valuable they are to you. ## 2. Demonstrate How to Walk in Wisdom Proverbs 23:26: "My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways." The heart in Hebrew thinking is the control center of the person, desires, thinking, and decision making, not just feelings. In context the father is warning his son against envy, drunkenness, sexual sin, and foolish companions, all of them competing for the son's heart. The father is saying: entrust your inner life to my wisdom, let me shape what you love and how you live, and watch my life. Grant links this to Jesus in John 13:15, whose disciples watched him in every conceivable situation, the highs and the lows, and to Paul in Philippians 4:9, whose discipleship strategy was the same: do what you have learned, received, heard, and seen in me. Children learn from instruction and correction, but they are also formed by example. Our lives interpret our words. If we say prayer matters but they never see us pray, if we say church matters but treat it as an obligation, if we say apologizing matters but they never hear us say sorry, they learn from the disconnect. Our faith does not need to be perfect, but it does need to be real, and the most powerful thing a parent can do is be a real example and repent when they mess up. More is caught than taught. ## 3. Disciple Them in Wisdom Grant summarizes a Gospel Coalition article, "Raising Kids in the Faith is Simpler than you May Think" by Joe Carter, built on research from the Institute for Family Studies. The single strongest predictor of a child's adult faith is not the church, the youth group, or their peers. It is the parents. The behaviors that most strongly predict lasting faith are active and verbal: praying together, saying grace before meals, reading and discussing the Bible, and talking about Jesus regularly in daily life. The report also notes that a generation of parents reacting against purity culture has overcorrected toward a light touch, and that children read parental silence about faith not as respect for their autonomy but as evidence that it is not important. Biblical parenting is intentional. Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and repeat these words to your children when you sit in your house, walk along the road, lie down, and get up. Grant quotes Mark and Jan Foreman: Parenting is "on-the-job training. We use the show-and-tell of everyday moments to transmit spiritual life." – Mark and Jan Foreman Deuteronomy 6 holds together the formal and the informal: a daily, age-appropriate rhythm of Scripture and prayer as a family, and the spontaneous moments through the week, discussing situations at school, processing friendship and disappointment, talking about the messages in what they watch, and sharing stories of answered prayer and God's faithfulness. The home is the primary place of discipleship, and parents are the most important disciple makers. One practical action step: Eat together. Sit at the table, talk about highs and lows, and hear their questions. Grant reads from Leonard Sax's book The Collapse of Parenting: "Every meal counts. In a survey of 26,078 adolescents from a wide range of backgrounds—urban and rural, affluent and low-income—researchers asked each kid, In the last seven days, how many days have you had a meal with a parent? Kids who had more meals with a parent were less likely to have "internalizing problems" such as feeling sad, anxious, or lonely. They were less likely to have "externalizing problems" such as fighting, skipping school, or stealing. They were more likely to help others and more likely to report being satisfied with their own life." "But just insisting that everybody eat together, while the TV is blaring and the kids are texting at the dinner table, probably won't accomplish much by itself. We actually have good evidence that when the TV is on during suppertime, many of the benefits of a family meal evaporate." Make intentional, undistracted time to sit and talk about the day together. ## 4. Discipline Them in Love Grant recalls a church visit where Hebrews 12:6, God disciplines those he loves, was the verse on the screen as everyone walked in. Because God loves us, he disciplines, forms, and shapes us. Proverbs has a realistic (not an idealistic) view of children: they are a gift from God, and they are not born wise. Proverbs 22:15 says foolishness is bound up in their hearts, and it is trained out through teaching, correcting, encouraging, and at times rebuking. "The word discipline means to punish. While the primary goal of parents is to teach what is right in an environment of love and delight, one of the main ways to do that is to establish both boundaries and consistent consequences for trespassing those boundaries for your children. Why? There is a design in the world, and to go against it brings natural consequences. If parents do not bring carefully controlled, unpleasant consequences into the children's lives, they will go out into the world and bring far more painful and harmful results onto themselves later." - Tim Keller Discipline prepares children for the real world. Grant points back to Jackie Rodgers' sermon on discipline from the Ephesians series and her ten-year rule: if this behavior is still there in ten years, will it still look cute? He then reads three verses he expects some will find hard, and asks the church not to bypass uncomfortable texts but to humbly study, reflect, and pray through them: Proverbs 13:24, Proverbs 22:15, and Proverbs 29:15. He acknowledges directly that some in the room were physically or verbally abused by enraged parents who twisted Scripture, that this was not love, and that faithful families land in different places on how they apply these verses. What matters is the heart of what the verses are saying. "...the rod was literally used to punish criminals in ancient society, it came to be a symbol of authority and of discipline in general. So when Proverbs tells parents to use the rod, it does include the possibility of corporal punishment, but it means much more." - Tim Keller Three clarifications. First, the rod does not boil down to spanking; the biblical idea is parents lovingly exercising authority through clear boundaries and meaningful consequences, in a culture where the children often lead the home instead of the parents. Second, Proverbs does not treat the rod as a magic bullet; discipline is not the essence of child rearing and spanking is not the only tool, as "a rod and a reprimand" in Proverbs 29:15 shows. Third, the discipline must be unpleasant. Grant tells the story of taking away his daughter's TV for an afternoon, the tantrum that followed, and the different child at breakfast the next day. "We have said that the rod of discipline is not necessarily corporal punishment, but it is punishment—real consequences with teeth in them. If sin and folly are deep in every child's heart, it will take more than words to root them out." - Tim Keller Hebrews 12:11: no discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those trained by it, like exercise that feels awful in the moment and bears fruit later. Kids need corrective discipline to grow into healthy, godly adults, and parents are responsible to follow through. So, what does Healthy discipline look like? - Loving - Calm - Consistent - Corrective - Formative - Punishment and Reward - Age-appropriate - Restorative Loving: it flows from commitment to the child's good, and Proverbs calls the easy path of not disciplining hate. Calm: never driven by uncontrolled anger or frustration, so watch what is going on inside you. Consistent: follow through on the boundaries and consequences you have named. Corrective: it teaches what went wrong and what wisdom looks like, never humiliation, intimidation, or aggression. Formative: it is for their future and who they are becoming, not for our convenience. Punishment and reward: it teaches responsibility for actions, words, and attitudes, with consequences good and bad. Age-appropriate: parenting must change as children mature. Restorative: it ends with reconciliation, prayer, and a hug, with no lingering cloud, followed by talking through what was happening in their heart, what wisdom would have looked like, and what to do next time. ## There Are No Perfect Parents The goal is not perfection but being pointed to the perfect Father in heaven and learning from him. All four D's are true of God: he delights in his children and sings over them (Zephaniah 3:17), he demonstrates his character to us in Jesus, he disciples us through his Word and Spirit, and he disciplines those he loves for our good. A hard season does not mean you are under God's discipline. When parents fail, they can come to him for mercy and wisdom, and parents should be the lead repenters in the home, quick to apologize and to show their own need for grace so their kids know it is okay to need it too. We cannot control the choices our children will make. We delight in them, demonstrate God's ways, disciple them, and discipline them for their good, and then entrust them to the Father who loves them more than we do. Delight: How will I communicate enjoyment to my child this week? Demonstrate: What area of my life needs to align with what I teach? Disciple: What simple spiritual rhythm could we begin at home? Discipline: Where do I need to become calmer, clearer or more consistent? Through the cross we are adopted into God's family, and the words the Father speaks over Jesus he speaks over us: you are my son, you are my daughter, I love you, and I am proud of you. Verses referenced: Proverbs 6:20-23 (CSB) Proverbs 4:3-4 (CSB) Matthew 3:17 (CSB) Proverbs 23:26 (CSB) John 13:15 (CSB) Philippians 4:9 (CSB) Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (CSB) Hebrews 12:6 (CSB) Proverbs 22:15 (CSB) Proverbs 13:24 (CSB) Proverbs 29:15 (NIV) Hebrews 12:11 (CSB) Zephaniah 3:17 (CSB)

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  Proverbs: How to Build a Life: Wisdom with Technology

  Sep 6, 2026—

  Continuing our series How to Build a Life, a walk through the book of Proverbs, Grant Clark applies the ancient wisdom of Proverbs to our relationships with modern technology. In a week dominated by news of Meta's $17.1 billion settlement over the addictive design of its platforms, Proverbs asks each of us a question: what kind of person are you becoming under the influence of these things? This message is not "screens and media are bad" - it asks what kind of people our technologies are forming us to become, and whether that is the kind of person Jesus is calling us to be. Grant opens with the prayer of James 1:5, asking God for wisdom - hikmah, skill in the art of godly living - and then turns to the cultural moment: Meta has agreed to pay $17.1 billion to nearly every state in the US over allegations that its platforms were designed to keep children and teenagers hooked while downplaying the risks. Ninety-five percent of teenagers use social media, a third say they are almost constantly online, and the average teen spends three and a half hours a day on these platforms - a threshold at which the US Surgeon General warns the risk of depression and anxiety roughly doubles. The reforms Meta has agreed to (daily time limits, overnight restrictions, fewer notifications, hidden likes) tell us something: technology is not neutral. It disciples us and forms us into a certain kind of person. The through line of the whole series returns: "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it" (Proverbs 4:23). Grant quotes James K.A. Smith: "What we do, does something to us." And again from Smith's book You Are What You Love: "…if the heart is like a compass… then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north. It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires, and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end. We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love." Our devices and apps may be morally neutral, but their design is not. Johann Hari, in Stolen Focus: "It is not the smartphone in and of itself; it is the way the apps on the smartphone and the sites on our laptops are designed… the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention." Grant then gives four lenses for examining our use of technology and media: 1) Quality - Is my media diet making me spiritually healthy or sick? 2) Quantity - Am I consuming too much media? 3) Devotion - Is this helping me to love God more? 4) Compassion - Is this helping me to love my neighbor? ## Quality - Is my media diet making me spiritually healthy or sick? Paul gives us a grid to run our consumption through in Philippians 4:8: whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable - dwell on these things. What we dwell on, ruminate on, and give mental airtime to affects us, whether toward anxiety and envy or toward health. ## Quantity - Am I consuming too much media? Expanding the series' earlier definition of gluttony to overconsumption of anything, Grant quotes Brett McCracken: "When every square inch of our lives is filled with content, we have no space for anything we consume to be processed into nutrition. If it's all just junk food we binge on—TikTok candies fed to us by AI developed in China; sugary Instagram candies dialed into our tastes by a behavioral psychologist on Mark Zuckerberg's payroll. We have no space in our lives to think, make connections, synthesize, discern, consider, weigh. We just consume." Jesus models the alternative in Mark 1:35, withdrawing early in the morning, away from people and inputs, to be still and undistracted with His Father. ## Devotion - Is this helping me to love God more? Even things that are not sinful can hinder our devotion. Psalm 46:10 calls us to "be still and know that I am God" - and the Hebrew behind "be still" means relent, be lazy, leave it alone and wait. We cannot be still while multitasking. Intimacy requires exclusivity, with the people we love and with God. ## Compassion - Is this helping me to love my neighbor? Grant quotes Andy Crouch's family commitment: "We use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone." Left unexamined, our devices can cultivate envy, gossip, judgment, shame, and distraction from the people right in front of us. To cultivate deeper presence to Jesus and His people, Grant gives three practices: ## 1. Give God your first attention each day. Bible before phone; wake up before your devices do. Tony Reinke writes: "I surveyed eight thousand Christians about social-media routines. More than half of the respondents (54 percent) admitted to checking a smartphone within minutes of waking. When asked whether they were more likely to check email and social media before or after spiritual disciplines on a typical morning, 73 percent said before." ## 2. Use technology intentionally, not instinctively. Before you pick up your phone, ask what you are picking it up to do - then do it, and put it down. Andy Crouch, in The Tech-Wise Family: "The problem isn't with our devices themselves—it's with the way we use them. We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently." ## 3. People before pixels. When you are with someone, put the phone away. In 2026, our full attention and presence with the person in front of us is one of the most tangible forms of love we can show. ## Wisdom for our households and families A recent Sam Altman tweet suggested using ChatGPT to generate a personalized podcast for your kids on the drive to school; the top reply asked, "What if you just talk to your children?" Two visions of family life: convenience and entertainment, or presence and engagement. Proverbs 22:6 calls parents to lead and protect their children - not just their short-term happiness but their long-term flourishing and formation. Jean Twenge's new book Ten Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World opens with RULE 1: YOU'RE IN CHARGE. Tony Fadell, known as the father of the iPod: "I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?" And: "My first son was born three weeks before the iPhone was released, so my kids have never known a world without them." And: "Your worldview changes dramatically when you have your first kid. You change from 'me, me, me' to family and community." Fadell's own family rules with technology: (1) Time Limits (2) Screen-free Sundays (3) Parental Controls Drawing on Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, Grant suggests these rules for our homes: 1. No smartphone before high school. No social media before 16. 2. Make bedrooms and meals phone-free. 3. Use screens together, not alone. 4. Parents go first. Our children need to see us voluntarily limiting our own devices, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:1 - follow me as I follow Christ. ## Not a new scorecard This message is not a new legalism, and getting it all right will not make God love you more. There is a danger of a digital Pharisaism where we look down on others with self-righteousness over screen habits. We are not saved by our righteousness with screens and devices; we are saved by Jesus, by His grace, by His death in our place. To paraphrase Philip Yancey, there is nothing you can do on a screen or an app to make God love you any more, and nothing you can do on a screen or app to make God love you any less. His goodness and faithful love pursue us all the days of our lives (Psalm 23:6). This is a message of repentance: changing the way we think and live so that we can become the kind of person Jesus is calling us to be. Verses referenced: James 1:5 Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) Philippians 4:8 (CSB) Mark 1:35 Psalm 46:10 Proverbs 22:6 (CSB) 1 Corinthians 11:1 Psalm 23:6

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  Proverbs: How to Build a Life: Wisdom with Money

  Aug 30, 2026—

  In this message from our Proverbs series, How to Build a Life, Royce Nicholas looks at what Proverbs says about the practical use of money. Setting aside the dangers of greed and envy (covered earlier in the year), Royce argues that because everything belongs to God, including our money, God has a plan for how we use it, and that plan is meant to free us rather than burden us. He works through four lessons from Proverbs on spending, debt, saving, and generosity, and closes with Zacchaeus and the gospel, where our spiritual debt is cancelled and Jesus's righteousness is credited to our account. ## Three Reasons a Money Sermon Belongs at Church Royce opens with a story from a cruise he and his wife took shortly after they were married. They were given $500 in onboard credit, were told they could take home whatever they did not spend, and skipped every excursion to save it, only to learn at the end of the trip that the credit was not refundable. "We misunderstood whose money it was and what we could do with it. And I think in the same way with our literal actual money, we do the same thing." He reads Psalm 24:1-2: the earth and everything in it belong to the Lord. "So everything according to God who made everything is his. Even our money. It's not like an exception." The second reason is that the one who created money knows how to use it best. "He actually can free us from using our money badly, help us to use it better, to actually enjoy it better as well. So it's not meant to be like a burden when God helps us to know how to use this money." The third reason is that spending reveals our hearts. Royce quotes Jesus: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. "If you care about your heart, if you care about really the most spiritual thing about you, you're going to care about your spending and your use of money as well." 4 Lessons on Money from Proverbs 1. Live Within Your Means 2. Debt Is a Curse 3. Save and Invest 4. Sharing Is Caring ## Live Within Your Means Proverbs 21:20: the wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down. "The idea is not just using up everything you have as quickly as you have it. Not living paycheck to paycheck." Royce then reads Ecclesiastes 4:4-6, where all toil and achievement spring from one person's envy of another, and better is one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil. Envy drives us to overwork. "When we overwork, this type of envy of other people's achievements or possessions, it can lead us to be this really busy, exhausted, to have a chaotic life where we just never feel like at rest." He recalls Jesus's question, what good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul, and says Christians should be able to work hard out of God's image rather than for it, put in the day, and then rest. Envy also drives us to overspend. Nearly half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and roughly 35 percent say they probably or definitely could not cover a $2,000 emergency expense. Royce shares a study Grant sent him: researchers looking at Canadian lottery data found that when someone wins a large prize, the neighbors nearby become more likely to file for bankruptcy. Visible consumption triggers comparison, and comparison leads households to overspend or borrow. Social media has made this worse. "You could live in the poorest neighborhood where you can barely afford just to live there, but then you're online looking at people living in the richest, most lavish neighborhoods and you're like, oh, I want that." The application is simple: have a budget and stick to it, and stop feeding the comparison. Proverbs 13:7: one person pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth. Royce illustrates this from The Millionaire Next Door, a twenty-year study of American millionaires. When the author hosted a group of them with expensive food and wine, nobody touched it; one said he only drank two kinds of beer, free and Budweiser. Royce reads from the introduction: "Most Americans have no idea about the true inner workings of a wealthy household. The advertising industry and Hollywood have done a great job conditioning us to believe that wealth and hyper consumption go hand in hand. Yet, as I have said many times, the large majority of the rich live well below their means." He continues with the account of a millionaire engineer who, after college, lived on one income and saved the other, stayed twenty years in the same modest house, and whose kids sometimes asked if they were poor because she made them order from the dollar menu. "Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you're not getting wealthier. You're just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend." And: "Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and most of all, self-discipline." Eighty percent of American millionaires are first-generation rich. ## Debt Is a Curse Royce clarifies what he means. "If wealth is a blessing because it makes your life better, then in the same way debt is a curse. It's going to make your life worse, or at least more risky, or at least cause you some anxiety." He reads Proverbs 22:7, the borrower is slave to the lender, and Proverbs 22:26-27, do not put up security for debts, or your very bed will be snatched from under you. He tells the story of Dave Ramsey, who leveraged real estate until prices fell and he went bankrupt, then turned to Proverbs and concluded that Christians should avoid debt altogether. "A lot of people were like, no, you're wrong. There's like good debt, there's your house debt and there's bad debt. And he's like, no, there's just bad debt. And I'm kind of beginning to actually, the more I study it, think like he's on to something here." Royce shares his own experience with a commercial loan whose terms allowed the bank to call the note when he closed his business, and how stressful even a well-serviced mortgage turned out to be. "Not having it is better than having it. Like if you had a paid off home right now, you probably wouldn't go take out a mortgage." "Having debt is not a sin. It's just unwise." America has a fascination with borrowing, from buy now, pay later to no money down to financing a burrito. The Bible does not ban debt; it treats it as a mostly unfortunate reality, and Nehemiah 5 shows God's people trying to get out of it as quickly as they can. Royce reads Deuteronomy 15:6, where the blessing is that you will lend to many nations but borrow from none. Debt can leave us feeling helpless, drowning. "While it may feel hopeless to us, our debt is not hopeless to God." Galatians 5:1: it is for freedom that Christ has set us free; do not be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. "I think that God wants to help us to get out of debt, to live freely. He can absolutely do that. It is such an easy thing for him." Spending less and saving more, paying off debt little by little, is how it starts. ## Save and Invest Proverbs 13:11: dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow. "It's like the tortoise and the hare situation. We don't need more cryptocurrency, dogecoins, or get rich quick schemes or whatever. It's just saving little by little over the long term." Royce works the math for his twelve-year-old son: $100 in a boring index fund today, never added to, becomes roughly $15,000 by age 65; $1,000 becomes roughly $150,000. Money has historically doubled about every seven years. "Most financial advisors would be like, hey, investing should be pretty boring. You just save a little bit every month, buy an index fund. Forget about it. If your investments are so exciting, you're like, I'm going to check on this every week, it's like, either you're excited about something that's pretty boring or you're investing in stuff that's too exciting." The other error is doing nothing. Inflation costs roughly three percent a year in purchasing power. Royce points to the parable of the talents, where the servant who buried the money out of fear is called wicked and told he should have at least deposited it in the bank to earn interest. "We don't want to be too fear averse. We don't want to be going crazy, dogecoin. Also not just doing nothing with your money as well." The point is habits over one-time decisions. "Our financial habits are more important than any one time decision. Just like we have good spiritual disciplines, we need to have good financial disciplines as well." And the goal of saving is not only a better vacation. "We should have extras so that we can share." ## Sharing Is Caring Proverbs 28:22: the stingy are eager to get rich and are unaware that poverty awaits them. Proverbs 11:24: one person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. "Paradoxically, a lot of times holding wealth, saving just for ourselves without giving or investing in others will leave us far less rich than we would have been if we were generous." This is a general pattern Solomon observed, not a formula or a promise; Jesus himself was the wisest person who ever lived and did not end up rich. Royce mostly commends the church on this point: cars given away, hundreds of thousands of dollars given to fund other churches and missionaries, and all of it as a group effort of sacrificial giving. He recalls investing in the LA church plant when it looked uncertain. "That was definitely, probably the best investment I've ever made in my life." He also remembers his parents quietly paying for his non-Christian friends to go to Hume Lake camp each year. "I just remember picking up generosity habits from watching them. If you have kids, they're going to naturally pick up your generosity, your use of money. So let's do a good job." Galatians 6:9-10: let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. "Let's keep it up. Let's not get tired of being generous, of being frugal with our money in ways that maybe you don't have to." ## Zacchaeus and the Gospel "Our spiritual debt to God is even worse than any financial debt that we have going on. It's even worse than any bad spending that we've been doing. But the good news is God always has hope for us, for finances, for our spiritual debt." Royce retells Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, a traitor and a thief, who climbed a tree to see Jesus and was met with an invitation to dinner while the crowd grumbled. He reads Luke 19:8-10, where Zacchaeus gives half his possessions to the poor and repays fourfold, and Jesus says salvation has come to this house. "That's the only way that we can really make any powerful changes to our finances. It's not just like learning something new, but we need to experience Jesus forgiving our debts, our whole spiritual debt Jesus has paid for on the cross. And that can actually begin to change our hearts." Colossians 2:13-14: he forgave all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, nailing it to the cross. Royce notes that the Romans would write out the charges against the condemned and nail them to the cross. "You can just imagine, it's like the sins of you and me being nailed to the cross of Jesus that he paid for when he was crucified." And in financial terms we did not only get our debts paid; Romans 4:22-24 says righteousness is credited to those who believe in the one who raised Jesus from the dead. "If he can do that, he can easily get you out of debt, help you to save, help you to become generous." Verses referenced: Psalm 24:1-2 Proverbs 10:22 Matthew 6:21 Proverbs 21:20 Ecclesiastes 4:4-6 Mark 8:36 Proverbs 13:7 Proverbs 22:7 Proverbs 22:26-27 Nehemiah 5 Deuteronomy 15:6 Galatians 5:1 Proverbs 13:11 Matthew 25:14-30 Proverbs 28:22 Proverbs 11:24 Galatians 6:9-10 Luke 19:1-10 Colossians 2:13-14 Romans 4:22-24

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  Proverbs: How to Build a Life: How to Ruin your Life

  Aug 23, 2026—

  In this message from our series How to Build a Life, a walk through the book of Proverbs, Grant Clark extends our look at wise counselors by turning the question around: what about the voices we must never listen to? Reading Proverbs 5 alongside Genesis 3, this sermon traces how seduction works, why the way that "seems right" ends in ruin, and how the same chapter that records the fall also announces the grace that rebuilds a life. The sermon opens with Proverbs 14:12: "There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death." A path can look desirable at the entrance while its finish line leads to ruin. Grant illustrates this with Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge is shown the end of his road, his own neglected grave, and wakes up a changed man who chooses a different way. That is how the warnings of Proverbs work: the father shows his son the end from the entrance. Proverbs 5 gives a visceral picture of this. The forbidden woman's lips "drip honey and her words are smoother than oil," but in the end she is "as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a double-edged sword." Her feet go down to death. The father pleads with his son to keep far from her door, because at the end of that road a person laments: "I'm on the verge of complete ruin before the entire community." Warnings of Proverbs 5: 1) Don't listen to everything you think. 2) Don't go after everything you desire. 3) Don't trust everything you feel. From there the sermon moves to Genesis 3:1-13, the Bible's paradigmatic picture of temptation and seduction, read as both a warning and a playbook that unmasks the serpent's schemes. The serpent, identified in Revelation 12 as "the ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the one who deceives the whole world," opens with the first question in the Bible: "Did God really say?" He does not start with a bold statement; he plants a subtle seed of doubt about God's word and God's character. Eve's reply distorts what God actually said. In Genesis 2:15-17 God's command is an abundance of yes with one small no: free access to every tree, with a single warning attached to one. Grant shares Joshua Ryan Butler's illustration of an all-expenses-paid vacation to anywhere on earth with only one dangerous destination excluded. The serpent's tactic is to zoom in: he narrows Eve's focus from a garden full of yes down to the one no, and the offer of abundance starts to sound like restriction. Two details in the text expose the play. First, until this moment God alone has defined what is good; now Adam and Eve take it on themselves to call good the one thing God said would kill them. Second, the narrator consistently names God "Yahweh Elohim," the Lord God, the covenantal and personal name, but the serpent drops "Yahweh" and speaks only of "Elohim," and Eve takes the bait and does the same. The serpent casts doubt on God's word, then denies it, then dethrones God in his language while elevating Eve. He is a dangerous counselor, and his voice is reshaping how Eve sees God, herself, and the world. "Eve is talking to Satan about her problems with God instead of talking to God about her problems with Satan." - Philip Bethancourt Locked in on the one forbidden tree, Eve sees that it is "good for food and delightful to look at, and desirable for obtaining wisdom." A good desire has become an over-desire, an idol, and she has become discontent in the middle of abundance. "What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable." - Tim Keller ## Practicing the Absence of God Drawing on Alan Fadling's book A Non-Anxious Life, Grant contrasts practicing the presence of God, living aware that God is with us and for us, with practicing the absence of God: losing sight of God in our circumstances and making decisions with no reference to him. In Genesis 3 Eve is practicing the absence of God. She is no longer listening to his voice or thinking about him at all; she has bought the lie that God is holding out on her. Adam, meanwhile, is silent and passive through the whole exchange. He never challenges the serpent and never speaks God's word. Ruin comes not only through active rebellion but through passive abdication. They eat, their eyes are opened, and for the first time they hide from the Lord God in shame. "What is shame? Disgust over having disobeyed. Shame tells us we are nothing better than our worst moments… Satan shifts from using his powers of deception to instead accuse… The serpent easily moves from seducing to shaming, from deceiving to devouring, from alluring to accusing." - Philip Bethancourt This, Genesis 3 shows us, is how to ruin your life: don't listen to God's word or wisdom, walk your own way, be seduced by things that look great from the outside, practice the absence of God, and you will find yourself isolated, exposed, and ashamed. ## How to Rebuild a Life But Genesis 3 also shows us how to rebuild a life. First, God pursues them. Adam and Eve hide, and God does not reject or stonewall them; he comes looking, calling "Where are you?" The question is not for God's information but for their diagnosis, an Ebenezer Scrooge moment: which path have you gone down, and what will you do about it? Second, God covers their nakedness and shame. In Genesis 3:21 the Lord God makes clothing from skins for them, which means an animal died so their shame could be covered, an echo picked up when John the Baptist announces in John 1:29, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." Ultimately Jesus dies to cover our shame and clothe us in his righteousness. Third, Genesis 3:15 gives the first preaching of the gospel, the protoevangelium: the offspring of the woman will strike the serpent's head while the serpent strikes his heel, fulfilled at the cross where Jesus crushes the serpent, is wounded in the process, and rises in victory over Satan, sin, and death. The serpent says God cannot be trusted; the cross says look how far God will go to save you. Reflection Questions: 1) Name the Lie: In which ways are you currently tempted to DOUBT God's goodness to you? Are there any areas where you believe the lie that God is holding out on you? Or, that God is not for you? 2) See the Entrance: Are there any specific areas where you are tempted to be seduced? To choose the way of Ruin, rather than the way of wisdom? 3) From Ruin to Redemption: Are there any areas of your life where you need God's forgiveness? God to cover your shame? Or, to redeem a decision you have made? A closing word before communion adds one more observation: the devil tempts people with what they already have. He told Adam and Eve they would be like God when they were already made in God's image, and he offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world when every knee will already bow to him. Both Eve and Jesus responded to temptation with God's words; Eve changed them, Jesus did not. Know your Bible, not just for knowledge's sake, but to combat the lies of the enemy. Verses referenced: Proverbs 14:12 Proverbs 5:1-14 Genesis 3:1-13 Genesis 2:15-17 Revelation 12:9 Genesis 3:14-15 Genesis 3:21 John 1:29 Genesis 3:15 Genesis 1:26-27 Philippians 2:10-11 John 3:16 Romans 5:8

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  Restored Church

  Proverbs: How to Build a Life: How to Choose a Counsellor?

  Aug 16, 2026—

  Part of "Proverbs: How to Build a Life," Andy Rodgers picks up the second half of a two-part look at wise counsellors. Last week Grant Clark asked why we need trusted voices and who has permission to tell us something we do not want to hear. This week turns to the follow-on question: once we have discerned that someone is qualified to speak into our life, how do we get the most out of what they say. The message covers therapists, pastors, spiritual fathers and mothers, GC members, and friends. Andy opens by distinguishing two things that are often confused. Therapy is a practice: a trained professional with a set of skills, a licensed person helping a specific person with a specific problem, with ethics, accountability, and evidence based practices behind it. Therapy culture is something else. It is when the language of therapy and a therapeutic orientation become the way you engage every relationship in your life, and when organizations, schools, churches, and the political sphere all route their questions back to what feels good therapeutically rather than what is good. "How does that make you feel?" is an excellent question in a counselling room and a poor one for setting the economic direction of a nation or for asking what a passage of Scripture means. He is explicit that this is not an anti therapy message. Restored started a therapy centre, has subsidised thousands of dollars of therapy for people in the church who could not afford it, and runs the Restored Counselling Network. Good therapists using good practices are very helpful. A number of the people writing against therapy culture are themselves therapists. On reading for authorial intent rather than feeling, he points to Mark Twain, who prefaced a later edition of "Huckleberry Finn" by telling readers the book is not an allegory and asking them not to treat it as one. His English class spent fourteen weeks treating it as an allegory anyway. That is survivable with a novel. It is a real problem with Scripture, and a bigger one when the same instinct is used to determine what marriage is, what your identity is, and what is good and true and beautiful. ## Four markers of therapy culture 1) Concept creep. Precise language meant to help us see something clearly starts to mean more than it meant, and once it means everything it means nothing. Gaslighting comes from a 1938 play and describes a genuinely abusive man deliberately making his wife doubt her sanity. It is real and it is rare. It now gets used for ordinary cognitive dissonance. Andy walks through a recent scheduling mix up with a fellow pastor where he genuinely felt confused, and notes that memory is fallible and two people can remember the same event differently. Choosing the gaslighting reading would have turned a good friend into someone dangerous who had to be removed from his life. Choosing "maybe I forgot that" carried far less pressure and required villainising no one. The same creep has happened to abuse, to trauma, and to narcissism. Genuine narcissistic personality disorder runs around one percent, so it cannot be everyone's dad, just as borderline personality disorder cannot be everyone's mom. Naming everything as abuse diminishes our ability to help the people actually experiencing it. 2) Boundaries become walls. Boundaries are a biblical idea: knowing where you stop and another person begins, holding your values, refusing to be manipulated. To be a Christian you have to have firm boundaries. But for many people boundaries have come to mean cutting out anyone who makes them uncomfortable, which is avoidance, and which most good therapists will tell you leaves you less mature because you never learn to handle difficult people or hard conversations. Seventy three percent of millennials have gone no contact with a close friend or family member in the last two years, half of those tied to their parents' politics. Disagreeing with your parents is normal. Cutting them off is new. Where there is genuine danger or a history of abuse the calculation is different, but the usual work is helping people figure out what they can realistically expect from a relationship and how to show up in it. 3) Validation becomes authority. Being heard matters, but being heard is a means, not the end. It creates a space safe enough to look at what is hard to look at. If someone has to tell you that what you want is good, that will keep you from wisdom, because sometimes what you want is dumb. Andy is candid that he has plenty of dumb ideas himself and needs godly, loving, wise people alongside him for exactly that reason. 4) Diagnosis becomes identity. Restored is not anti diagnosis. The DSM categories are genuinely useful for describing patterns of behaviour, understanding how someone relates to others, and explaining a tendency. They are never an excuse to hurt people or to continue in sin. Andy speaks openly about his own ADHD, the forgotten texts and missed medications, and the systems he has had to build to take responsibility for it. Most diagnoses people receive are not their fault, but to thrive and love people well they still have to do the work. God's standards do not decrease; some people simply need more help in a given area than the average person. The irony he draws out: something you went to in order to see clearly now makes the world look more threatening than before. Something you went to in order to protect your relationships has produced more isolation. Somewhere you went to be heard has made you unreachable. He notes the same dynamic can quietly reshape a GC, where groups drift into venting and status updates rather than asking what Scripture says and what Jesus is calling us to. It is fine to say a thing is hard. The question is whether the group helps you then go and do it. Two tests run underneath the whole message. If we are engaging counsel in a way that makes us more fragile rather than more resilient over the long term, something is wrong. And if we have adopted a worldview that makes us less open to insight we do not want to hear, it is keeping us from becoming wise. ## We get the most out of the counsel we receive when we do five things 1) Choose the right story 2) Are discerning about who we let counsel us 3) Engage honestly 4) Work towards a goal 5) Seek sanctification over validation ## Choose the right story There are no neutral worldview people. Everyone speaking into your life is answering a set of questions whether or not they say so out loud: What is a person? What is a man, a woman, a mother, a father? What is parenting? What is marriage? What is sexuality and what is it for? What is actually wrong with us? How do people change, by insight, by empathy, by repentance, or by better tools? And what is the goal of a life, which decides the goal of counselling. The Bible says we are image bearers of God, made with inherent dignity, value, and worth, created to be known and loved. That is a different story from being a bag of chemicals and neurons colliding. Andy is careful that these are not simple either / ors. We are image bearers and we do have physical bodies that God chose for us. Scripture names three broad things that can be wrong: a fallen body in a fallen world, with real physiological realities; sin committed against us by others, which covers much of what people bring to therapy as wounding, shame, and pain, and which is not their fault; and our own sin, the lies we tell ourselves and the ways we try to live independently of God. He pushes back on starting the story at Genesis 3. God made us wonderful, beautiful, and glorious, and sin damaged it. One of the worst things about sin is that it diminishes the good person God created you to be. He is now restoring that, like a fine painting, over years and with patience. Repentance and clinical tools are not rivals. A tool can make repentance easier. Andy uses his own example: externalising what he cannot hold in his head helps him forget less and love his wife better. But the decision to get help in the first place is an issue of the will. Someone whose trauma triggers leave them in fight or flight is not at fault for being triggered, and may still need to deal with the thing they have been avoiding, because the people around them are still getting hurt even when the motive is not bad. The question that matters is what wins when two stories are mutually exclusive. When a view of the world conflicts with the Scriptures, the Scriptures need to win. He works this through cognitive behavioural therapy, the most used approach in talk therapy, whose core claim is that emotions and behaviours run downstream of thoughts. He agrees that is broadly true, finds CBT tools genuinely helpful, and notes that CBT ironically has the most in common with biblical counselling. But Scripture carries a category the therapeutic world often does not: we do not only have bad thoughts, we have bad desires upstream of our thoughts. James says our conflicts come from wanting something and not getting it. "The tools are great. They're just not everything. There's not one tool that solves life. The only person who solves all of life is Jesus." ## Be discerning about who you let counsel you Counsel in a person's heart is deep water, and a person of understanding draws it out. Good counsellors ask good questions and get beneath the surface. Does a therapist need to be a Christian? Andy says it depends on the issue, and that for some things it is close to vital. Marriage is his clearest example, because a counsellor is helping you understand the story you came from and the story you are building, and it helps enormously if they share a Christian understanding of marriage, sexuality, communication, and desire, even if they use plenty of clinical tools alongside it. Better is open reprimand than concealed love, and the wounds of a friend are trustworthy while the kisses of an enemy are excessive. Friends who only ever validate you are not evil, but they will not help you grow. If you talk about your marriage, do it in an honouring way, and be wary if your friends always take your side. You want someone willing to play devil's advocate and ask what you can do, since you are the only person who can do what you can do. Practical advice for choosing, drawing on Eliza Huie's "How to Get the Most Out of Your Counseling," a sixty page book he recommends. Most people do not know they are allowed to interview a counsellor about their modality, their approach, and their worldview. Questions worth asking: How do you integrate your faith and your work? What do you think is wrong with people? Do you ever talk about sin in the work that you do? Will you ever challenge me, even if I do not love it in the moment? What do you specialise in? Licensure tells you what someone is trained in. It tells you nothing about their worldview and nothing about their character. It is a good place to start, not a place to stop. Be wary of anyone who treats everything, the way some restaurants serve cheeseburgers, spaghetti, and sushi off one menu. Andy helped a friend look for OCD treatment and found that of the hundreds of providers listed who said they treated OCD, none listed ERP, the approach both the International OCD Foundation and the American Psychological Association name as the first line treatment. Claiming to treat OCD without it is like claiming to treat bacterial infections without antibiotics. ## Engage honestly The one who conceals his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them will find mercy. Andy points out what the verse does not say. It does not say concealing is wicked. It says concealing does not work. If you want to lose weight without discussing what you eat, or want your knee treated without describing the pain, you will not get far. Two reasons we are not honest. The first is the fear of man, which Proverbs calls a snare, over against the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. The question is whether you are more aware of what a person thinks of you or what God thinks of you. He notes a related risk: keeping the same therapist for years with no goal, until they function as a friend your insurance covers, at which point you want them to like you and become less honest. The second reason is pride, wanting to be seen a particular way. He also distinguishes being authentic or transparent from being vulnerable. Plenty of people will tell you a great deal, sometimes more than they should about others, without ever being open to having any of it challenged. Vulnerability is being open to someone speaking into it. This cuts the other way too. Not everyone is owed your depths, and dumping ninety minutes of heavy material on a friend who did not ask for it is its own marker of therapy culture. ## Work towards a goal There is profit in all hard work, but endless talk leads only to poverty. A goal means direction rather than a deadline, and it lets a counsellor, pastor, or friend stay within their expertise. Andy cites a clinical psychiatrist who said that having a long term psychologist with no goal is having a bad friend you pay to be your friend. The arithmetic matters. You are awake roughly one hundred and twelve hours a week. A forty five minute session is well under one percent of your life and will not change it on its own. Implementing what you learn during the other ninety nine percent will. It is the personal trainer problem: the workouts do not do themselves. ## Seek sanctification over validation A fool does not delight in understanding but only wants to show off his opinions. Wanting to be understood is human and God given. Wanting to change and become like Jesus is a supernatural work of the Spirit. The danger is letting "finding someone who gets me" become the destination of the journey rather than a stage in it, and then asking the church to function as a therapeutic community on those same terms. Andy makes the case that the church has an enormous amount to offer if we engage it rightly. There are people in the room who handle money well and would change your life if you had the humility to open your budget to them. There are people who have worked through hard things in their marriage who could mentor you without being your therapist. He cites Rebecca McLaughlin quoting a Harvard researcher that attending church weekly is "like a miracle drug," with measurable effects on depression, anxiety, self control, addiction, and burnout. Churches are also good places to work through attachment wounds, because good attachment work aims at being able to trust other people rather than depending on one safe person indefinitely, and because Scripture defines how we are allowed to treat one another, which is part of what makes a church safe. He closes on what he calls the most underrated thing, even among Christians: spending time with Jesus. He describes a retreat at a monastery with a group of people mostly in their sixties and seventies, including a retired psychiatric researcher, a doctor and psychiatrist, recently widowed and in real pain, and firmly pro therapy. After several hours of solitude she came back and said she thought she had saved five to ten thousand dollars of therapy in three hours, because it had all been resistance. She knew what she needed to do and did not want to do it. "Jesus knows how to lovingly say, I love you, but we got to do this. And he took me by the hand and walked me to where I needed to go. He shepherded me." The flip side he wants to press: when someone says they need help with their marriage, ask whether they have prayed about it, whether they have spent any time asking the Lord how to treat their spouse differently, whether they have looked at what God's word says about parenting or marriage. You may well need tools to obey those commands in a healthy way. The question is whether you started with what God wants. The Spirit is the parakletos, the counsellor, the one who comes alongside, and he loves to give wisdom. James says God gives wisdom generously to those who ask without being double minded, and double minded means you have already made up your mind, so you are not actually open. You want someone to co-sign. You want validation, not revelation. "Don't build a life where you protect yourself from hard things that can help you grow." Andy's closing prayer asks that Restored would become a humble people who can receive, and a contemplative people able to sit with an idea or a thought or a passage of Scripture and weigh it in God's presence, rather than running to social media or ChatGPT or a podcast or a friend. Clinical tools can help us do that, but those tools are a sail on a sailboat. We still need God's wind. And it asks that we would believe God's word is better for us than the word of any expert or of ourselves, that his word is not handcuffs but guardrails on a path, keeping us from going off the side of a mountain. Verses referenced: Genesis 3 Proverbs 9:8 Proverbs 9:10 Proverbs 14:23 Proverbs 18:2 Proverbs 20:5 Proverbs 27:5-6 Proverbs 28:13 Proverbs 29:25 Romans 12:2 Philippians 4:8 James 1:5-8 James 4:1-2 1 Peter 5:7

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