Restored Church

In the third message of The Church Jesus is Building, Grant Clark turns to Jesus' letter to the church in Pergamum (Revelation 2:12-17), a church that endured persecution well but quietly absorbed the beliefs and practices of the city around it. Grant argues that compromise is one of Satan's most effective weapons against the church because it works slowly, feels loving, and eventually leads us to accept what we once rejected, and that Jesus, who carries the sharp double-edged sword of his word, loves his church enough to pick a fight with it in order to call it home.

## Compromise and Accommodation

Grant opens with the story of the first book he gave his future wife, a biography of Keith Green titled No Compromise, a worship leader who played with his head down so that every eye stayed on Jesus. The letter to Pergamum, he says, is a story of compromise and a story of accommodation, and he defines both terms.

Compromise: to weaken your principles or to lower your standards or morals. To compromise is to act against your own convictions, your own moral code, your own beliefs.

Accommodation: to make space for something. To create space for something new, something different, someone else, to change or adjust to suit them, to make them feel at home.

The church in Pergamum compromised on what they believed and how they lived, and accommodated other teachings, faiths and philosophies in their community. Grant asks listeners to remember not their biggest compromise but their first one, and tells the story of pocketing a Looney Tunes cardboard tag from a t-shirt as a child, the first time he knowingly took something that was not his. Compromise, he says, normally starts small. At first our conscience bothers us, but over time it becomes easy, our hearts harden, and we become the kind of person who can do that sort of thing without thinking. The message is less about the act itself than about how repeated compromise shapes who we become, individually and as a community.

## Revelation 2:12-17

Grant reads the full letter. Jesus, who has the sharp double-edged sword, knows where they live, "where Satan's throne is." He commends them for holding on to his name even when Antipas, his faithful witness, was put to death among them. But he has a few things against them: some hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to place a stumbling block before Israel, eating food sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality, and some hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. "So repent. Otherwise, I will come to you quickly and fight against them with the sword of my mouth." To the one who conquers he promises hidden manna, a white stone, and a new name inscribed on it that no one knows except the one who receives it.

Working through the seven letters, Grant has been asking what Jesus' letter to Restored would say, and a second question:

"Which of these seven Churches is the most similar to the Western Church today?"

Many writers, he says, think Pergamum best represents the church in the West in our time: a church increasingly influenced by the world around it, compromised in some of what it believes and how it lives.

## The City of Pergamum

Ephesus was resisting false teaching, Smyrna was enduring persecution, and Pergamum was facing both. They were enduring persecution well while taking on board the false teaching and thinking of the world around them.

Pergamum was a political powerhouse, the former capital of the Attalid kingdom and later an administrative center of Roman Asia. It was an intellectual hub with a library of 200,000 volumes, second only to Alexandria, and Pliny called it by far the most distinguished city in Asia Minor. Grant compares it to a modern Washington, D.C. Yet Jesus calls this celebrated city "Satan's throne." Cities carry nicknames, the Big Apple, Beantown, the Windy City, Sin City, but imagine a sign that reads, "Welcome to Pergamum, where Satan's throne is."

Grant cites a recent WalletHub ranking of America's most sinful cities, scored on anger and hatred, jealousy, excesses and vices, greed, lust, vanity and laziness. The top five:

1. Las Vegas, Nevada

2. Houston, Texas

3. Los Angeles, California

4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

5. Atlanta, Georgia

San Diego came in 33rd overall, but second in the nation for vanity.

Why would Jesus call Pergamum Satan's throne? Grant offers several possibilities from the commentators, with pictures of the city's acropolis, which sat on the plateau above the city and was thought to resemble a throne, and the great altar to Zeus on the mountain, a structure that epitomized idolatry and paganism. There was also the cult of Asclepius, whose symbol was the snake and who was worshipped as a savior; people slept in his temple hoping the snakes slithering across the floor would heal them. Most commentators think the title refers to the city's loyalty to and worship of Caesar. Whatever the reason, Pergamum was the opposite of the Bible Belt.

## Jesus with the Sharp Double-Edged Sword

Each letter contains a revelation of Jesus that the church needed to hear. Here (Revelation 2:12) he is the one with the sharp double-edged sword. The sword was a symbol of Pergamum itself, because the city held the Roman right of capital punishment; the sword stood for the city's authority over life and death. Jesus is saying that his authority is far greater than the state's.

In Revelation the sword comes not from Jesus' hand but from his mouth. It is the sword of his word. God speaks and creates in Genesis; Ephesians 6 calls the word of God the sword of the Spirit; and Hebrews 4:12 says the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. As we read his word, his word reads us, getting under the skin to our desires, motives and hearts, bringing truth, correction and comfort.

Grant quotes John Stott on the church in Pergamum:

"Here a pitched battle was being fought, in which the soldiers were not men but ideas." - John Stott

Jesus' word, other religions, other philosophies and other worldviews were clashing in this church, and Jesus writes to say that his word carries ultimate authority. The central message of the verse: Jesus, not Rome, has the ultimate authority, and Jesus is building his church on his word, his way and his will, not the words, wills and ways of the world.

To illustrate the voices shaping imaginations today, Grant lists some of the most popular podcasts in America this week, with a one-line summary of what each represents:

1. The Joe Rogan Experience: questioning conventional wisdom, distrusting institutions, thinking for yourself

3. The Daily: understanding the world through journalism, current events and informed analysis

4. Call Her Daddy: embracing your sexuality, prioritizing self-empowerment, living authentically

5. SmartLess: life is better when we laugh together, practice friendship, stay curious and enjoy human connection

He wonders what would come up if we could ask AI to list the top five messages shaping our own thoughts and hearts.

## Three Voices in Pergamum

Jesus names three influential voices in the city and the church, one positive and two destructive.

Antipas. Almost nothing is known about him; tradition says he was roasted alive in a bronze bull. Jesus calls him "my faithful witness," the same language used of Jesus himself one chapter earlier. Jesus was God's faithful witness unto death on the cross, and Antipas was Jesus' faithful witness in Pergamum, an example of a man who would not compromise even when compromise surrounded him.

The teaching of Balaam. Balaam appears in Numbers 22 through 31, a prophet for hire and pagan diviner. When the king of Moab hired him to curse Israel, God would not allow it and blessed his people instead. So Balaam advised the king to seduce Israel through participation in feasts made to idols and through sexual immorality tied to pagan worship, the same issues that resurface for the early church in Acts. Balaam could not curse God's people, so he chose to seduce them through compromise.

The teaching of the Nicolaitans, also condemned in the letter to Ephesus. Both groups spread the same ideas: immorality and idolatry, breaking God's law and worshipping other gods.

The church in Pergamum loved Jesus and held on to him, but with a shallow theology and low doctrine. They embraced the city's view of sexuality, enjoyed the feasts to other gods, and built a bespoke faith, a customized Christianity that took a little of Jesus, a little of the feasts to Zeus, and a little of the Roman sexual ethic.

## Syncretism

Syncretism is the merging or combination of different religions, cultures, philosophies, or schools of thought.

Grant compares it to synchronized swimming: different people learning the same choreography and moving together. In syncretism, a collection of different beliefs are made to do the same dance in a person's life. Scripture warns against this again and again. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 11:3-4 that he fears, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, their minds may be seduced from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ, because if someone comes preaching another Jesus, a different spirit or a different gospel, "you put up with it splendidly." That is Pergamum to a tee: their worship is no longer pure, their devotion eroded over time.

"Satan doesn't need to persecute the church if he can seduce it." - Jen Wilkin

Last week was opposition from the outside; this week is a church eroded from the inside. Some in Pergamum held to Jesus, some to Balaam, some to the Nicolaitans, and some to all three at once. In Christianity the hope is Jesus; in Pergamum the hope had become Jesus and something else. For the word nerds, Grant notes that Nicolaitans is Greek and Balaam is Hebrew but they mean roughly the same thing: nikan (conquer, lord) plus laos (people), and baal (lord) plus am (people). Both teachings are about conquering the minds of the people so that they are faithful to another god and not to Jesus.

## How Compromise Works

Compromise is one of Satan's most effective strategies to hurt the church, make it ineffective, and lead people away from the fullness of life in Jesus. Grant gives four reasons it works:

1. It works easily and slowly. It starts small and you hardly notice the change, like the frog in slowly heating water.

2. It lowers the standards that used to matter to us, so gradually that we only notice when we look back and ask who we have become.

3. It is seldom offensive because it is perceived as loving. Some in Pergamum would have found Jesus judgmental toward their Nicolaitan friends, but Jesus is not condemning people, he is saying the teaching is dangerous.

4. It eventually leads us to accept the things we once rejected.

"Doctrine mattered little and behavior mattered even less. With each passing day the distinction between this church and the world became more blurred and less clear." - Daniel Akin

## When Jesus Picks a Fight with His Church

In Revelation 2:16 Jesus says, "So repent. Otherwise, I will come to you quickly and fight against them with the sword of my mouth." He will come to the whole church but fight against the group causing the compromise. Some struggle with the thought of Jesus fighting his own bride, preferring gentle Jesus, meek and mild, to a Jesus who comes with authority, judgment and correction. But he warns them fairly: he does not like what he sees forming among them, and he will not shrug and let the corruption continue. He wants his church pure and devoted to him. Every letter celebrates and corrects, but here Jesus says this cannot continue without him getting involved.

## Repentance: A Renewed Mind

Repentance is a change of mind that leads to a change of heart and a change of life, and it starts with the mind, because so much of this chapter is about what the church believed and thought. Grant reads Romans 12:2: do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. "Transformed" is the Greek metamorphoo, the root of metamorphosis: not a caterpillar trying hard to be a better caterpillar, but a caterpillar changed into a butterfly by the Spirit of God speaking through the word of God. Repentance for Pergamum meant taking captive the beliefs they had let in and replacing them with the truths of Jesus.

He then reads Romans 12:1-2 from The Message: take your everyday, ordinary life and place it before God as an offering; don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking; fix your attention on God and you'll be changed from the inside out. The sin of Pergamum was fitting in without thinking. Are we thinking about what we believe, what we do, and why?

## Hidden Manna, White Stone, New Name

The letter ends with a strange encouragement in Revelation 2:17 that Grant unpacks as three promises:

Provision: Hidden Manna

Acceptance: White Stone

Identity: New Name

The hidden manna points back to Israel's daily dependence on God in the desert; Jesus, the bread of life, invites them to feast on him and his word rather than looking elsewhere for satisfaction. The white stone has at least nine interpretations, almost all about acceptance: in the ancient law court jurors voted with a white stone for innocent and a black stone for guilty, and a white stone also served as a token of admission to a banquet, a ticket to the heavenly feast. The new name, known only to the one who receives it, speaks of identity, belonging and allegiance, an intimate relationship with God that lasts forever. If Pergamum refuses to compromise and keeps its allegiance to Jesus the King, he will give them a place at the table, assurance of acceptance by God, and a new identity in him.

Grant closes with the gospel. Every one of us has compromised; every one of us has our own version of that cardboard Looney Tunes card in our pocket. The good news is that Jesus is the one who never compromised. He was faithful when we were unfaithful and obedient when we were disobedient, so through his death and resurrection compromised people can be forgiven, restored, accepted and welcomed into the family of God. The Jesus with the sword in his mouth is not scolding this church; he is warning them and calling them home. So much of Pergamum's compromise happened around a table, eating food sacrificed to idols, but the meal Jesus offers, the hidden manna and the ticket to a better banquet, is far better.

Verses referenced:

Revelation 2:12-17 (CSB)

Revelation 2:12 (CSB)

Revelation 2:16 (CSB)

Revelation 2:17 (CSB)

Hebrews 4:12 (CSB)

2 Corinthians 11:3-4 (CSB)

Romans 12:2 (CSB)

Romans 12:1-2 (MSG)

Ephesians 6:17

Revelation 1:16; 19:15

Numbers 22-31

Acts 15:28-29

Genesis 1

In the third message of The Church Jesus is Building, Grant Clark opens the second of Jesus' seven letters, the letter to the church in Smyrna in Revelation 2:8-11. Smyrna was a faithful, resilient church that was also poor, slandered, and afraid, and it is one of only two churches of the seven that receives commendation from Jesus with no correction. In this letter Jesus pulls back the curtain on the visible and invisible realities of their lives, and the whole message can be summarized in seven words.

Today's Sermon in 7 Words:

- I Know.

- Do not Fear.

- Be faithful.

## Two Types of Warfare

Grant opens with World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history. About 70 million people died, around 16 million Americans served, and one in five American men went to war. The war touched everyone at home too: A League of Their Own tells the story of the women's baseball league founded in 1943 because so many young men were away, and Rosie the Riveter stands for the millions of women who went into factories to build airplanes and ammunition. You did not have to be a soldier to be affected by the war. The whole nation had a wartime mentality, and it was impossible to ignore that a war was going on.

There is a different type of warfare happening right now that we can be unaware of: information warfare. In September 2024 the US Department of Justice announced it had disrupted a Russian-backed disinformation campaign known as Operation Doppelganger, which built fake news websites one letter off from legitimate ones and used fake accounts, paid ads, and influencers to shape public opinion. There are no tanks in the street and no soldiers going away, but thousands of people in troll farms are producing content designed to divide and polarize. It is an unseen war that is very real and impacting people's lives. In Smyrna, Jesus wants to show the church not just what they can see with their eyes but what is going on behind the ordinary things of life, so they can understand the spiritual war they are part of every day.

Grant reads Revelation 2:8-11. The people of Smyrna were ordinary people who woke up, made coffee, went to work, ran errands, and went to bed, and Jesus is highlighting that in the middle of those realities there is a war going on around them all the time.

## The Church in Smyrna

Smyrna was a vibrant, resilient church, but it was marked by fear, and for good reason: it was going through persecution, slander, and violence for following Jesus. Along with Philadelphia, it is one of only two churches that gets commendation and no rebuke. The city, modern Izmir in western Turkey, was a beautiful harbor city with paved streets, a library, and a gymnasium, one of the most prosperous cities in Asia Minor and known as the Crown of Asia or the Flower of Asia. It was religiously diverse, with temples to Apollo, Asclepius, Aphrodite, Cybele, and Zeus, and politically it was all in on Rome and emperor worship.

Smyrna takes its name from myrrh, a perfume made from the resin of thorny bushes that grew in the area and produced their fragrance when wounded. Myrrh was one of the gifts given to Jesus at his birth. The name of a city that suffered and endured so much comes from a plant that, through wounding, produces something beautiful. That is one of the big ideas of the text. When you hear Smyrna, think myrrh.

## The First and the Last

In each of the seven letters Jesus reveals something about himself that the church needs to hear. To Smyrna he says in Revelation 2:8, "Thus says the First and the Last, the one who was dead and came to life." Jesus often speaks in hyperlinks to the Old Testament, and these words point back to Isaiah 44:6: "This is what the Lord, the King of Israel and its Redeemer, the Lord of Armies, says: I am the first and I am the last. There is no God but me." Between Isaiah 41 and 48 that name for God appears four times. Jesus never explicitly says "I am God," but again and again he says things that take us back to these prophecies. He is calling himself God.

The phrase highlights at least two things: Jesus' authority, and his power over time, over life and death. Our lives are bookended by Jesus. Wherever you are in your life, Jesus is bigger, not Caesar, not the Roman Empire, not any president or country or power. Jesus is above all rulers and all powers. Although the church in Smyrna faced very real persecution, Jesus comforts them by reminding them who he is, and some of us facing very real things today need the same reminder.

## I Know

Grant reads Revelation 2:9-10. The first thing to see is that Jesus says "I know" twice: I know your affliction and poverty, I know the slander. As we saw last week, Jesus walks among the lampstands. He knows the church, he knows our lives, he knows you, he knows what you are going through.

The word affliction is the Greek word thlipsis, which means pressure, but not everyday pressure. It is crushing pressure, like a huge boulder put on your back that you cannot carry forever. The disciples in Smyrna were living out their faith and feeling crushed by this weight. Imagine receiving this letter from Jesus and hearing him start with "I know." They must have felt relief, expecting him to say that the weight would soon be lifted. But that is not what Jesus says.

## Do Not Fear

Instead, in Revelation 2:10 Jesus says, "Don't be afraid of what you are about to suffer." It is going to get worse before it gets better, which is a gift, because it is a gift when someone is honest with us about what is coming, even when it is not an easy truth to receive. Sometimes we suffer because of our own bad decisions, but that is not what is happening here. The church in Smyrna is being faithful, wise, and godly, and they suffer because of it.

Paul puts it this way to Timothy, the pastor of the church in Ephesus we looked at last week, in 2 Timothy 3:12: "All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." This is part of the Christian faith, and we need a theology of suffering so we are prepared when it comes. The presence of suffering in our lives does not mean the absence of God in our lives.

Thlipsis is a technical word in the New Testament, almost always used about spiritual warfare and the advance of the kingdom of God rather than ordinary hardship. It is about the clash of kingdoms.

"Thlipsis is the pressure experienced as the kingdom of God comes up against the kingdom of human beings in rebellion against God." - Darrell Johnson (Discipleship on the Edge)

The religious powers, the political powers, God's will and plan, the devil's will and plan, and our own will all come together, and there is friction as they clash over whose kingdom will advance. This is why Jesus cannot simply say "I know, and I will take it away." To follow Jesus means there will be thlipsis at times, because to follow Jesus is to enter a spiritual battle. Jesus is encouraging Smyrna and us to have a warfare mentality: not to live scared, but to live aware of the war we are really in.

## Persecution and Poverty

Revelation 2:9 says the church in Smyrna was known for persecution and for poverty, and the two were linked. In a wealthy city it was not normal for a whole group of people to be poor. These believers were working hard, but faithfulness to Jesus excluded them from public and economic life. There were ways of doing business they could not agree with, and they lost deals, money, and opportunities because of it. The Christians in Smyrna were poor because they had not given in to the pressure to conform to the ways of the city.

Understanding the background is a good Bible study, but it is not enough. We have to personalize it. The big question coming out of this text is: are we willing to pay the cost to follow Jesus? We do not face the persecution Smyrna faced, but would you still serve Jesus if it meant earning less money, never owning a home, a lower standard of living, no more vacations, being rejected by people you want to like you, or being made fun of by coworkers and neighbors? Is following Jesus something we would continue to do if it became uncomfortable, inconvenient, and really costly? Is Jesus more valuable to you than those things?

Why were they persecuted so severely? Smyrna was one of the great centers of emperor worship. One of its mottos was "Rome first," and in AD 26 it won a competition among eleven cities for the right to build the first temple to the emperor Tiberius. Caesar was not just a political force but a religious one, seen as divine. Rome was open to other religions, so Christians could worship Jesus as long as they also pledged allegiance and said "Caesar is Lord." The problem came when you could not say it because you were saying someone else was Lord. "Jesus is Lord" was not a private religious belief in Smyrna; it was a political, cultural, and economic declaration. It is much the same in the West today: no one minds a personal faith, but as soon as "Jesus is Lord" enters the public square it becomes offensive and causes problems. The Christians in Smyrna were persecuted and poor not because they were lazy but because they were courageous, and not because they did not work hard but because they were bold about their commitment to Jesus.

## The Synagogue of Satan

One line in Revelation 2:9 needs addressing: "I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan." Sadly, throughout church history and even recently, this verse has been taken out of context to endorse anti-Semitism, which makes no sense for a follower of Jesus. We cannot be anti-Semitic and faithfully follow him.

"[Anti-Semitism] has seemed amazing to me because Jesus was a Jew, and all the 12 apostles were Jews, and the whole of our Bible was written by Jews (except for [possibly] Luke), and Jesus said, "Salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22), and to be Christian is to be grafted into the covenant made with Abraham the first Jew (Romans 11:17-24), and to become a Christian is to become "Jewish"—a child of Abraham by faith (Galatians 3:7)." - John Piper

This verse speaks about a small, specific group who had aligned themselves against God and become hostile to the Christians of that day, apparently because being associated with Christians was costing them their privileges in society. It is not a generalization against a whole people, and following Jesus never means speaking negatively of people of the Jewish faith.

## A Real Enemy

Grant reads Revelation 2:10 again. Behind the political and religious forces and the persecution is the power of evil, the personalization of darkness, out to fight against Jesus and his kingdom. There is more to reality than meets the eye. The words that stand out are "the devil is about to throw some of you into prison": an unseen spiritual being doing something physical and tangible. Jesus is speaking about the seen and unseen realities of our lives.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." - The Usual Suspects

Part of what Jesus is doing is saying, do not forget there is a real devil, a real enemy who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Ephesians 6:12 says, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens."

Two clarifications. Not everything bad that happens is from the devil, and not everything is a test; there is not a devil behind every bush. And recognizing spiritual forces at work does not remove human responsibility. Jesus speaks to the church about faithfully following him while also making them aware of their enemy, so they can live in the spiritual war with a wartime awareness. The devil wants to throw them in prison because he thinks he can take the church out, discourage them, and break down their faith. But Jesus says he can use it to form and strengthen them, just like the tree in Smyrna that was wounded to produce perfume. Satan is real, Satan is against us, but Jesus is in charge.

## Why Would I Do This?

Some might ask why anyone would sign up for a faith that includes suffering. It is a good question. The Bible, in a book like Job, rarely gives us a why. Instead of an answer it gives us a who. It gives us Jesus and says, hold on to him, and more encouragingly, he is holding on to us. He gives us himself and he gives us his cross. Like the plant in Smyrna, Jesus was crushed and wounded on the cross in our place, and he wants to bring that perfume out of our lives.

For those going through crushing pressure now, Grant shares three things from a sermon Jonathan Edwards preached on Christian happiness at the age of eighteen:

Our "bad things" will work out for good (Romans 8v28)

Our "good things" cannot be taken away (Romans 8v1)

Our "best things" are yet to come (Revelation 22v1).

Romans 8:28 says God works all things together for good. It does not diminish the pain, but God can weave those things together and make them beautiful, like the back of a tapestry that looks like a mess of threads until it is turned around and the picture takes your breath away. Grant grew up in South Africa and has had many things taken away, including two cars, but in Christ our good things cannot be taken: our salvation, our forgiveness, our new identity, our adoption as sons and daughters. And the best things are yet to come. This world is beautiful and also broken, but one day there will be no more sickness, suffering, hardship, or pain, and we will be with Jesus and see his face.

## Three Things Jesus Says About Suffering

I know your suffering. (v9)

I too have suffered. I've suffered on the Cross for you. (v8)

I will reward those who faithfully endure this suffering. (v10-11)

## The Crown of Life

Jesus promises a reward to those who endure, the crown of life. Smyrna regularly held athletic games known across Asia, where competitors raced for the stephanos, the victor's wreath. Our world has plenty of accolades: an EGOT, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a championship ring, a magazine cover, being called the greatest of all time, an Olympic gold medal. A crown or a medal is what you give to someone who wins. One day you will stand before Jesus, and for those who endure he will put this crown on your head and say, you won at life. Maybe not by the metrics of our world, but the King of kings will look you in the eyes with fondness and say, you did it, you endured to the end, here is the crown.

This is why Jesus can say "I know your poverty, but you are rich." To the church in Laodicea, in a few weeks, he will say the opposite: you think you are rich, but you are poor and pitiful. In Smyrna, those who look like losers, the weak, the poor, the defeated, the unimpressive, really are the rich, the strong, the victorious, the glorious. Grant would hate to win at life in this world and fail at life eternally. Smyrna helps us see what Jesus sees and realize that not everything is as it seems.

## The Second Death

Revelation 2:11: "Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will never be harmed by the second death." We will all die once, but Jesus is saying there is a death after death, a separation from God forever. For those who conquer there is death and then life, eternal life with him. Jesus ends the letter by zooming out from tunnel vision on present hardship to an eternal perspective.

Polycarp was the pastor of the church in Smyrna, believed to have been discipled by John the Apostle. He was arrested because he refused to say "Caesar is Lord" and kept proclaiming that Jesus is Lord. The Roman proconsul offered him an out: renounce your faith and go live a long, happy life. Polycarp answered, "Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" An old man standing before the most powerful empire in the world said, Jesus is better. Jesus was worth more to him than his own life.

The question for us at the end of this letter: is Jesus more valuable to us than anything else? Is he Lord, or is there another fill-in-the-blank we could not renounce? Is he worth it when it costs you something, when it means less money, being misunderstood, rejected, slandered, or mocked, surrendering comfort, reputation, financial security, maybe even your life?

## The Hero Is Jesus

The point is not to be like Polycarp or like the church in Smyrna, good as that encouragement is. The hero here is Jesus. Revelation 2:8 again: he introduces himself as the first and the last, the one who was dead and came to life. Jesus is saying to them and to us, I have been there. I have suffered, been rejected, falsely accused, beaten, and killed, but I am the one who was dead and has come to life. Jesus does not stand at a distance from our suffering; he enters into it with us. On the cross he suffered the greatest injustice in history, the only truly innocent man condemned to death, and through his death he took our sin on himself and through his resurrection he defeated sin and death. For those who trust in him, death is no longer a threat and no longer holds the final word. The one who calls us to be faithful to death is the one who has already walked through it, and the one who promises us the crown of life is the one who has already conquered the grave.

"Jesus lost all his glory so that we could be clothed in it. He was shut out so we could get access. He was bound, nailed, so that we could be free. He was cast out so we could approach. And Jesus took away the only kind of suffering that can really destroy you: that is being cast away from God. He took so that now all suffering that comes into your life will only make you great. A lump of coal under pressure becomes a diamond. And the suffering of a person in Christ only turns you into somebody gorgeous." – Tim Keller

Verses referenced:

Revelation 2:8-11

Revelation 2:8

Isaiah 44:6

Revelation 2:9-10

Revelation 2:10

2 Timothy 3:12

Revelation 2:9

John 4:22

Romans 11:17-24

Galatians 3:7

Ephesians 6:12

Romans 8:28

Romans 8:1

Revelation 22:1

Revelation 2:11

In the second message of The Church Jesus is Building, Grant Clark opens the first of Jesus' seven letters to the churches of Asia Minor, the letter to Ephesus in Revelation 2:1-7. Ephesus was a forty-year-old, hardworking, Bible-loving, outwardly successful church, and Jesus commends it for almost everything it does. But he names one thing he holds against it: it has abandoned the love it had at first. The message asks whether we love Jesus or have settled for serving him, and traces Jesus' three-word remedy: remember, repent, return.

## Seven Letters for All Churches

Grant picks up from last week's text, Matthew 16:18, where Jesus promises, "I will build my church." For two thousand years Jesus has been doing two things: praying for his church at the right hand of the Father, and building it through people who confess him as Lord. The seven letters of Revelation 2-3 show what the church he is building looks like. In John's world the number seven meant completeness, so these seven letters carry what every church in every age needs to hear. Grant quotes Darrell Johnson:

"In addressing these seven particular churches Jesus is addressing all the churches. It turns out that the seven churches of Asia embody every major issue with which the church has struggled in every age in every cultural setting." - Darrell Johnson (Discipleship on the Edge)

## The Church in Ephesus

Paul founded the church in Ephesus and stayed about two and a half years, the longest he was based anywhere. Thirty years before Revelation, he closed his letter to them with a single, ordinary encouragement, Ephesians 6:24: "Grace be with all who have undying love for our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul ended there because he knew they needed to hear it, and because we drift from this most basic thing.

The church began with about a dozen Jewish believers and their families, meeting with Paul in the lecture hall of Tyrannus in the heat of the day. Acts 19:10 records that this went on for two years, "so that all the residents of Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the word of the Lord." Six more churches sprang up across the region.

Forty years on, Ephesus was a big, respected, hardworking church with a leadership dream team: Paul, John, Timothy, Apollos, Priscilla and Aquila, and, by church tradition, Mary the mother of Jesus, who spent her last years there with John. Grant asks what Jesus could possibly have to say to a church like that, then reads the whole letter, Revelation 2:1-7.

## Jesus Walks Among His Churches

The letter opens with Jesus holding the seven stars in his right hand and walking among the seven golden lampstands. The stars are the "angels" of the churches, which may mean guardian angels, human messengers (the Greek angelos means messenger), or the churches' leaders. Whatever they are, they are safe in his hand. The lampstands are the churches themselves. Jesus is not on the outside looking in. He walks among his churches, knows their struggles, joys, prayers and needs, and speaks from intimate knowledge of their circumstances.

## What Jesus Commends

Revelation 2:2-3. Jesus knows their works, labor and endurance. They have toiled for forty years in a hostile environment and have not grown weary. They are a Bible people who have tested false apostles and rejected teaching that would have damaged the church. In verse 6 he adds that they hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which he also hates. Clement of Alexandria described the Nicolaitans as abandoning themselves to pleasure like goats and living lives of self-indulgence; Tertullian said they lived lives of lust and luxury. Grant notes how familiar that sounds in San Diego in 2026: comfort over holiness, idolatry, sexual sin, living for pleasure rather than to serve God. Ephesus had not given in to any of it.

But, Grant says, they also were not believing the truth that Jesus satisfies. They rejected lust and luxury, and they rejected satisfaction in Jesus. The closest parallel is John 5:39-40, where Jesus tells the Pharisees, "You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. But you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life." The Pharisees knew the Scriptures inside and out but never came to the one the Scriptures pointed to. Ephesus had become a church that loved books more than people and theology more than God.

## What Jesus Confronts

Revelation 2:4-5. "But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. Otherwise, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent."

This was a church that could answer every hard question, run every apologetics class, and show up at the drop of a hat to help you move. But their love for Jesus had cooled to duty. The Greek word for abandoned can mean to give up. Jesus praises them for not giving up through forty years of persecution, then tells them they have given up on the one thing that matters most.

Grant's picture is a forty-year marriage where the love has drained out. It began with passion and chemistry. Four decades later the structure is still there, the dishes and groceries and tax returns are handled, they sleep in the same bed, but the intimacy is gone. From the outside, friends think the marriage is fine. From the outside, a service at Ephesus would have earned a five-star review. Jesus looks underneath the surface and says the love is gone, and he warns that unless they repent he will remove the lampstand, which means closing the church.

Grant recalls an open letter from an elder of a large, well-known church, written after a toxic leadership crisis, saying that church was like Ephesus and that if it did not repent God would remove its lampstand. The church averaged more than ten thousand people across fifteen locations and seemed too big to fail. Two months later it closed its doors. Jesus warns because he is jealous for his church. The Message renders verse 4: "But you walked away from your first love. Why? What's going on with you anyway?" Ephesus had become a cold and loveless church, and commentators think the lack of love for one another and for the gospel all flowed from a lost love for Jesus.

## Getting the Love Back

What does a church, or a person, do when they lose their first love? Grant turns to 1 John 4:19: "We love because he first loved us." The wrong response would be to try to drum up love for Jesus and for other people. The right response is to be reminded of his love, to meditate on it, to encounter and receive it in a fresh and deeper way, so that we are changed by love and able to love. Grant is explicit that the answer is not more Bible, more prayer, more worship, more trying harder, but freshly encountering and receiving his love.

For anyone marked more by duty than delight, Grant points to Paul's prayer for this same church in Ephesians 3:17-19: that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God's love, and to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. He asks us to pray it every day this week and this month, until his love warms our hearts again. 1 John 4:19 once more: we love because he first loved us.

To those who have followed Jesus a long time, Grant asks if they remember the early days when the gospel first connected: the explosion of joy, the sense that it was too good to be true. He describes his own experience at eighteen, learning that God loved him, chose him, called him his son, and knew everything about him and still wanted him. He shares a definition of the gospel that has shaped him:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." - Tim Keller

Ephesus, forty years into dutiful service, was working hard without joy, going through the motions. Grant tells of a recent podcast interview with Paul McCartney, who speaks fondly of the Beatles as his first band and first love, and then is overcome with tears remembering his late first wife Linda nearly thirty years after her death. That, Grant says, is what Jesus is doing in Revelation 2: reminding us of our first love, of him, of what he is like and what his heart is.

The warning is that we can get very busy doing good things, look great on the outside, and have hearts drifting away from him. The beauty of the passage is that even though Ephesus abandoned its first love, Jesus has not abandoned them. He is still walking with them, speaking to them and calling them back. The warning itself is an expression of love: come back before it is too late. Jesus does not just want our service. He wants us, our hearts, our love.

## Remember, Repent, Return

Jesus says three things to this church and to us:

1. REMEMBER. Remember what it was like when you first encountered him, what truth took your breath away, when time with Jesus was a delight rather than another item on the list.

2. REPENT. Turn around, change direction, come back home to him. Whatever has taken his place, comfort, convenience, busyness, turn from it and come back.

3. RETURN. Return to the works you did at first: time with him, his word, prayer, worship. Not to earn his love and not as a chore, but to freshly receive his love.

Jesus is not trying to whip up an emotional religious response. He is inviting us to remember and respond to the love that brought him from heaven to earth, took him to the cross, and has never stopped pursuing us.

Grant closes with something he had never noticed before. About twenty years after this letter, Ignatius of Antioch, a prisoner on his way to die, wrote to the Ephesians, and what he remarked on was their love and unity, which he said were like a song to Jesus. The church that was told it had abandoned its first love had heard Jesus' words, remembered, repented and returned, and church history records that it continued for centuries.

## The Promise

Revelation 2:7: "To the one who conquers, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God." In Genesis 3 humanity was driven from the garden and lost access to the tree of life. At the end of the Scriptures Jesus promises to bring his people back into God's presence, back to the tree of life, back to the fullness we were made for. The Christian life begins as we receive the love of Jesus, is sustained by his love, and for eternity we will enjoy him and his love together.

The closing question: Are you in love with him? Are you still in love with him? Have you experienced his love for the first time? Do you need to freshly receive his love today? Not just are we serving him and doing the right things, not just does everything look okay on the outside, but do we love him and delight in him? The ultimate thing we offer in this place is Jesus. He is our hope, our treasure, our satisfaction.

Verses referenced:

Revelation 2:1-7

Matthew 16:18

Ephesians 6:24

Acts 19:10

Revelation 2:2-3

Revelation 2:6

John 5:39-40

Revelation 2:4-5

1 John 4:19

Ephesians 3:17-19

Revelation 2:7

Genesis 3

Grant Clark opens a new series, The Church Jesus is Building, which will walk through Jesus' letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Before the first letter, this message lays the foundation from Matthew 16: Jesus asks who people say he is, Peter confesses him as the Messiah, Jesus declares "I will build my church," and then shows Peter that following him means the way of the cross. The central claim is that Jesus is building his Church through people who confess who he is and who follow him on his terms.

Jesus loves the Church. Grant begins with the big idea behind the series: the church is imperfect and many people have been hurt by it, but Jesus loves individual churches like this one and the global Church around the world. An architect friend in Durban who designed church buildings asked every church the same first question, "Are you going to play basketball in the auditorium?", because everyone has an idea of what a church is and what it should do, whether they follow Jesus or not. Jesus wrote seven letters to seven churches to encourage, correct and challenge them, and the same kinds of churches are in San Diego today. Before looking at what a church should be or do, Jesus starts with the foundation.

"I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH." - Jesus

Matthew 16:13-15. In the region of Caesarea Philippi Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" and then, "Who do you say that I am?" A street-interview video of San Diegans answering "Who is Jesus?" shows how wide the range of answers is: a good guy, a carpenter, a link between all religions, someone who tapped into something. Jesus asks the first question about the crowds and then turns it on the disciples who have walked with him, heard his teaching and seen his miracles up close.

Matthew 16:15-18. Simon Peter answers straight away: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Caesarea Philippi matters to the story. It was a Greco-Roman, mostly Gentile city with a long history of pagan worship, renamed by Philip the tetrarch to honor Caesar and himself, with a temple to Augustus and an enormous rock face holding a cave of Pan, shrines and temples, a strip mall to the gods. In that place Jesus asks, "Who do you say that I am?"

Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, his favorite title for himself, which is a hyperlink back to Daniel 7.

Daniel 7:13-14. One like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven, is escorted before the Ancient of Days, and is given dominion, glory and an everlasting kingdom so that every people, nation and language should serve him. When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man he is claiming to be that King. Those are wild claims, and C.S. Lewis argued that we have become too familiar with them:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." - CS Lewis

Liar, lunatic or Lord: Jesus called himself Lord, God, King and Son of Man, so if he is not Lord he must be one of the other two.

Matthew 16:16. Peter does not say "I think" or "to us you are." He answers with another prophetic title, Messiah. Messiah and Christ are the Hebrew and Greek words for the anointed one, God's anointed King from Daniel 7. The Jewish people, living under Roman oppression, had waited for centuries for a King from David's line who would deliver Israel, restore God's people and bring in a new age of righteousness, peace and justice. Peter is saying: you are the one we have been waiting for, the living God with the power to do it.

Grant answers the question for himself, describing a life of faith as a series of surrenders: a first response to Jesus at twelve, a faith that became personal at eighteen, an act of obedience at thirty-five in leaving his home country to plant a church, and a new, deeper surrender in a hard year now. "Don't waste a good valley." In the valley Jesus the shepherd is with him and leading him, and Psalm 23 holds true: my cup overflows. The question is not who Jesus was to you in an earlier season, but who Jesus is to you right now.

Matthew 16:17-18. "On this rock I will build my church" is one of the most debated passages in the Bible. Jesus is playing with words: Peter (petros) means rock, petra means rock, and the rock face of Caesarea Philippi stands behind them. Is the rock Peter, the place, the revelation, something else?

Jesus is building His Church through people who confess who He is, and follow Him on His terms.

The rock is the confession and the people. Jesus wants to build his church through men and women who have had a revelation of him and say, use me in whichever ways I can be used.

There is a difference between confession and response. Confession is what we do with our words; response is what we do with our lives. In Matthew 16 Peter makes a confession, and at this point he has the gospel about half right. He sees clearly who Jesus is, but he has no idea what the way of Jesus is, or that the shape of so much of Jesus' ministry is the shape of a cross.

Matthew 16:21-24. From then on Jesus begins to tell his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed and be raised. Peter takes him aside and rebukes him: "Oh no, Lord! This will never happen to you." Jesus turns and says, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me."

Matthew 16:23. "For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." What is your mind set on today?

Getting one answer right seems to have gone to Peter's head. Peter had a culturally informed picture of how the kingdom would come: the Messiah would overthrow Caesar, the Roman garrison and the Sanhedrin. He is Christ-centered but not cross-centered. He wants Jesus, but a Jesus who avoids the cross. He has probably already pictured the good life in Jerusalem for himself, James and John. His words to Jesus are not a friend encouraging a friend; they are a moment of pride and control, grabbing the steering wheel from Jesus. Satan means adversary or opponent: Peter is getting in the way of what God is doing. One encouragement from this: Jesus' best leaders can get it badly wrong, and God redeems it. Our faith is a series of surrenders, and this is a moment where God forms a new groove in Peter's faith. Peter wanted Jesus, but he did not yet want the way of Jesus.

Matthew 16:24. "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Jesus is telling his disciples what they must do to be disciples, and teaching us to continually pay attention to our relationship with him and make sure we are following him. His death on the cross is necessary to save us from sin, and he calls every disciple to a cross-shaped way, and it is for our good.

Matthew 16:25-26. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Jesus' sake will find it. If we try to save our lives with our own plans we will lose them. If we trust his cross-shaped way, walking with him into confusion and uncertainty and giving up our plan for his, we find life to the full. Peter does not learn this at once: in John 18 he draws a sword when they come to arrest Jesus, and then denies him three times. Old habits die hard. The way of the cross is formed in Peter slowly, again and again, as Jesus works in his life.

Jesus is building His Church through people who confess who He is and who follow Him on His terms.

In one exchange Peter gets it so right and then so wrong, moving from confessing Jesus as King to telling the King he does not know what he is doing. This is what Jesus builds his church on: imperfect, flawed, willful people like Peter, like us. Jesus knew exactly what Peter was like when he made the promise, and he said it anyway. He will do his work in San Diego and in each other's lives through ordinary, broken people.

The message closes by returning to the architect's question. Jesus' questions to us are different: Who do you say I am? Will you follow him? Not who you used to think he was, but who is Jesus to you right now, and will you respond to him and obey him, letting him build his way rather than ours?

Verses referenced:

Matthew 16:13-18 (CSB)

Daniel 7:13-14 (CSB)

Matthew 16:21-24 (CSB)

Matthew 16:23 (ESV)

Matthew 16:24 (ESV)

Matthew 16:25-26 (ESV)

Psalm 23

John 18

Revelation 2-3

John 10:11, 14-15, 25, 27-28 (CSB)

Grant Clark closes the Proverbs: How to Build a Life series with the story of the man who wrote most of Proverbs. Solomon asked God for wisdom, received it, became famous for it, taught it to others, and still ended his life as a fool. The message holds his example up against Jesus' parable of the two builders in Matthew 7 and asks what we are going to do with ten weeks of wisdom.

Grant opens with the everyday gap between knowing and doing: ordering food late at night, putting off exercise and saving, another evening of scrolling, the hard conversation we keep avoiding. He tells the story of author James K. A. Smith, who sat down to read the books on healthy eating his wife had recommended and realized he was doing it in a Costco food court. In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith says much of Christian discipleship looks the same: we know what to do, but there is a dissonance between what we know and how we live. That sets up the big idea for the morning.

"Knowing the right thing to do, is not the same as doing the right thing."

Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with the wise and foolish builders (Matthew 7:24-27). Both men heard his words. Both were building a life. The only difference is that one acted on what he heard and the other did not. The foolish builder may have admired Jesus' words, memorized them, even liked them, but he never built on them. At the end of a series on wisdom, it is not enough to know wisdom or to have heard the sermons. It is easy to be wise for a day or a week. The aim of the series is to be wise for a lifetime.

Solomon wrote at least 26 of the 31 chapters of Proverbs, including the ten fatherly discourses of the opening chapters. He was the son of David and Bathsheba, a reminder that God brings beauty out of ashes, and David chose him to be the next king. In 1 Kings 3:1-14, Solomon loves the Lord and offers a thousand burnt offerings at Gibeon, yet the passage also notes his marriage alliance with Pharaoh and his sacrifices at the high places, breadcrumbs that point toward the lowest point of his life. When God appears to him and says "Ask, what should I give you?", Solomon admits he is a youth with no experience in leadership and asks for a receptive heart to judge God's people and to discern between good and evil. It pleases the Lord, who gives him unmatched wisdom plus the riches, honor, and long life he did not ask for. God delights to answer prayers for wisdom, which is why the series has returned again and again to James 1:5: if any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives generously and ungrudgingly.

News of Solomon spreads, and the Queen of Sheba comes to Jerusalem to test whether the hype is real (1 Kings 10:1-7). He answers everything on her mind, and the sight of his wisdom, his palace, and his worship takes her breath away. She tells him the report she heard was true, and that she had not been told the half of it. 1 Kings 10:23-24 summarizes it: Solomon surpassed all the kings of the world in riches and wisdom, and the whole world wanted an audience with him. Grant imagines every major podcast host lining up to interview him.

That would be a good place for the story to end. It does not. The very next chapter, 1 Kings 11:1-10, records that Solomon loved many foreign women from the nations God had warned Israel not to intermarry with, seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and they turned his heart away. The man who built the temple built high places for Chemosh and Milcom on the hill across from Jerusalem and did the same for all his wives' gods. The Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the God who had appeared to him twice. The kingdom he led for forty years begins to unravel and splits in two. It does not matter how wise we are or what spiritual experiences we have had. If we do not guard our hearts, we are in danger of drifting too. The series has come back repeatedly to Proverbs 4:23: above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Solomon walked in wisdom for decades, then stopped guarding his heart, and little things got in until he was a completely different kind of man.

God had given Israel's kings a safeguard long before Solomon was born. Deuteronomy 17:14-20 tells the king not to acquire many horses, not to send people back to Egypt for them, not to acquire many wives so that his heart will not go astray, and not to acquire large amounts of silver and gold. Solomon broke every one of those. The same passage also tells the king to write a copy of the instruction for himself and read it all the days of his life, so that he learns to fear the Lord, does not become proud, and does not turn from the command to the right or the left. It was a daily rhythm for remembering who he was and what he was called to do, and it is a practical rhythm available to us in daily time in the scriptures and prayer. Solomon would have read that scroll for years. Somewhere along the line he stopped reading it, stopped listening to it, stopped doing it, or stopped believing it applied to him. He lost the fear of the Lord slowly, then all at once, and lived for his own power, wealth, and pleasure.

Proverbs 1:7, from the first week of the series, says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and fools despise wisdom and discipline. Solomon ends in the place he warned his son against. The wisest man to live outside of Jesus becomes a fool, because knowing wisdom is not the same as living it out.

Proverbs does not leave us admiring Solomon, and that is a gift. His life shows we need something more than knowing wisdom. Hundreds of years later Jesus stood before a crowd and said that something greater than Solomon is here. Solomon had extraordinary wisdom but did not live it; Jesus is the wisdom of God in the flesh. Solomon's heart turned away; Jesus remained faithful to his Father to the end. Solomon built the temple and then altars to other gods; Jesus' body was the temple of God, broken in our place. Solomon's kingdom fell apart after his death; Jesus established a kingdom that will remain forever.

Grant closes back at Matthew 7. The house stands not because the builder's life was perfect, but because of what it was built on. The question at the end of the series is: what are you going to do with what you have heard? Where has something stood out in these ten weeks that has not yet become practice, in your money, your marriage, a friendship, your words, your work, or how you treat the poor? Don't make Solomon's mistake. Don't assume that because you know God's wisdom you are walking in God's ways. Guard your heart, stay close to Jesus, keep listening to his words, keep putting them into practice, and keep building your life on the rock.

Verses referenced:

Matthew 7:24-27 (CSB)

1 Kings 3:1-14 (CSB)

James 1:5 (CSB)

1 Kings 10:1-7 (CSB)

1 Kings 10:23-24 (CSB)

1 Kings 11:1-10 (CSB)

Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)

Deuteronomy 17:14-20 (CSB)

Proverbs 1:7 (CSB)

Matthew 12:42

Grant Clark continues the How to Build a Life series through Proverbs with a message on wisdom, mercy and justice. Caring for the poor and oppressed comes up more than forty times in Proverbs, and Grant uses four of those verses as a springboard into a biblical theology of mercy and justice that runs from Micah 6:8 through the life of Jesus to Paul's commission in Galatians 2. The argument is that God identifies himself with the poor, that the gospel makes his people into a community defined by mercy and justice, and that this has to translate into concrete action: praying, listening, speaking up and acting.

## Proverbs on the poor and oppressed

Grant opens with stories from Durban, South Africa, where he grew up and planted a church before moving to San Diego: the country with the highest income inequality in the world, a wealthy family whose crane business shaped the city skyline, students who could afford one meal a day, and a financial advisor in his church who drove across the city during xenophobic riots to bring a Congolese nurse working as a car guard into his home, waking him each morning with a cup of tea like one of the family.

He then reads four proverbs on the poor.

Proverbs 31:8-9

Proverbs 14:31

Proverbs 19:17

Proverbs 21:13

One striking theme across these verses is how closely God identifies himself with the poor. When we are generous to those who lack, we are being generous to the creator. When we oppress or mistreat the poor, we insult God. And when we ignore the poor, God will ignore our prayers. Grant cites Matthew Henry's commentary: God will be deaf to the prayers of those who are deaf to the cries of the poor. By his count this is one of eight ways in Scripture that God will not answer prayer.

## Micah 6:8: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly

Micah 6:8 (NIV)

Grant grew up singing this verse in a small Pentecostal church, and one of the commentaries he read says of it:

"This is one of the most significant and profound verses in the entire Bible… Here God condensed the spirit of the entire Old Testament law down to three simple principles."

Other commentators call it the finest summary of practical religion in the Old Testament, and early rabbis called it a one line summary of the whole law. Proverbs is a father showing his son how to walk, and Micah 6 does the same thing in one line.

Mercy is the Hebrew word hesed. Daniel Block defines it this way:

"Hesed cannot be translated with one English word. It is a covenant term, wrapping up in itself all the positive attributes of God: love, covenant faithfulness, mercy, grace, kindness, loyalty. In short, it refers to acts of devotion and loving kindness that go beyond the requirements of duty." – Daniel Block

Justice is the Hebrew word mishpat, a concept based on God's character. God is just, so he wants his people to be just. In Micah 6 the word for justice puts the emphasis on action, and the word for mercy puts the emphasis on the attitude underneath the action. Justice without mercy produces self-righteousness: ticking all the boxes and looking down on those who don't, which Grant connects to shame, cancel culture and virtue signaling. Mercy without justice is false love. Love has to translate into doing something, whether praying, serving, giving, or inconveniencing yourself for someone else. Just as faith without works is dead, love without action is dead.

To walk humbly is the opposite of sinful and selfish pride. Humility says, I believe God, I trust God, so I obey God. It is walking carefully in God's ways, in line with the design of the universe and of ourselves, a theme that has run through the whole series. Grant illustrates it with his son Elliot taking every favorite toy into the bath, including the ones not designed to go in water.

## Jesus and the more important matters of the law

Matthew 23:23

Jesus seems to have Micah 6:8 in mind when he rebukes the scribes and Pharisees. He honors their careful tithing, down to the spices, but they have neglected the more important matters of the law: justice, mercy and faithfulness. They were doing all the right things on paper, but their hearts looked nothing like the heart of God. We don't want to do all the right things on paper and miss the things God cares about most.

## What is justice?

Justice became a polarizing term in recent years. Western society thinks of justice mostly in legal terms, but the Hebrew vision of mishpat, mentioned over two hundred times in the Bible, is a vision of order and flourishing for all of life, personally, socially, globally and cosmically. It means treating people fairly and impartially regardless of race, gender or background, and bringing God's order into the disordered and broken realities of the world. Picking up last week's message on work, each of us has a sphere of influence where we can be salt and light.

"Justice is what love looks like in public." – Cornel West

Justice is not an obscure niche concept. It is at the heart of the biblical vision of the Kingdom of God and of what God our King is like.

Psalm 9:7 (ESV)

Isaiah 61:8 (CSB)

Zechariah 7:9-10 (NIV)

## God identifies with the vulnerable

A word study on justice in the Old Testament turns up the same groups again and again, known as the quartet of the vulnerable: the widow, the fatherless, the immigrant and the poor. God identifies with them directly.

God is called the "father of the fatherless" (Psalm 68:5), the husband to the widow (Isaiah 54:5), the provider for the poor (Psalm 140:12), and the refuge for the immigrant (Psalm 146:9).

Jesus was born to a single mother, into a poor family (we know this from the offering they brought to the temple in Luke 2), became a refugee in Egypt immediately after his birth, and was most likely the son of a widow, since Joseph is absent by Mark 3.

In the Old Testament, God identified with the marginalized; in the New Testament, God came down and became one of them.

Our God can identify with the poor and oppressed because he has been the poor and oppressed. If you are in that space right now, you are not alone. Jesus then displayed justice in the most shocking way on the cross: the perfectly righteous and just one died in the place of the wicked. The judge took the place of the judged. The just took the place of the unjust.

## The gospel creates a people of mercy and justice

Seeing his grace toward us changes how we see the people around us. The gospel gives us eyes to see people the way God sees them, because we were those people. We were the poor, the broken, the needy, and we experienced his grace. We don't do good things to earn God's love, to avoid punishment or to earn an identity. We do them out of what Jesus has already given us. God saw us when we were poor and broken, saved us, and gave us a new heart, a new life and a new identity, and from that place we take those same things to the world.

## Remember the poor

Galatians 2:9-10 (CSB)

After Jesus called him, Paul went to the pillars of the first church, Peter, John and James the brother of Jesus, to check his calling against theirs. They recognized the grace of God on him and commissioned him to the Gentiles, the way a church commissions and sends a new church plant. They asked only one thing: remember the poor. The word "remember" is an active, ongoing remembering, not a one-off thought. Paul says that was already something he was eager to do.

Grant illustrates with an episode of The Studio (not an endorsement of the show), where Adam Scott, accepting a Golden Globe, spontaneously thanks Sal Saperstein, the unimportant friend at the back of the room who let him sleep on his couch when he first moved to LA. Winner after winner then thanks Sal, and the spotlight keeps landing on the powerless man in the dark at the back until he is all anyone is talking about. In Proverbs and in Galatians 2, God shines a spotlight on the people at the back of the room who no one was going to notice. Peter, James and John say: we are talking about the Kingdom of God, so let's not forget the people who have no voice, who can't advocate for themselves, who have no power in this room. Freely we have received his grace, and freely we give.

Romans 15:25-27

Paul kept that commitment. Years later he was carrying a collection from the Gentile churches in Macedonia and Achaia to the poor among the saints in Jerusalem, and he describes it as a debt gladly owed: those who have shared in spiritual blessings owe it to share their material ones.

## How do we respond?

The world's brokenness can feel so overwhelming that we withdraw. Habakkuk felt the same way.

Habakkuk 1:2 (CSB)

Habakkuk's protest prayer brings the injustice and evil of the world before God as a petition: would you move, would you help, would you save? Grant lays out several ways to respond.

Pray and lament. Begin with prayer and lament over the brokenness around us, ask God to move and to use us, and pray as Jesus taught in Matthew 6: your kingdom come, your will be done, in this city and this world as it is in heaven. When Grant lived in Durban he would look out over the city and pray about the gap between what he saw and what he knew God's kingdom looks like.

Listen. Listen to the stories of people who are different from us and of people who fall into these categories of poor and oppressed. Christians can be quick to talk; James 1 calls us to be slow to speak and quick to listen. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this the ministry of listening.

Speak up.

Proverbs 31:8-9 (CSB)

Most of us don't have the authority or platform to speak for the nation, the state or the city. But in which rooms can we speak up? In which groups? Where do we have a space where we can speak?

Act.

Proverbs 21:3 (CSB)

Each of us needs to prayerfully consider what response God is calling us to make to a message like this. We can't do everything, but we can do something, in small or big ways.

"The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves." - Bruce Waltke

There is a heart to serve in this church, and over the coming weeks the church will look at concrete ways to give, pray and serve people in the city who don't have a voice, power or influence. Supporting a new church plant, a community transformed by God's grace and mercy forming an outpost of the Kingdom, is one of the ways we remember the poor, seek first his kingdom, and act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

Micah 6:8

Grant closes in prayer that God would teach the church the breadth and depth of his love, help us understand the gospel in fuller and deeper ways, and show us how to act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with him, whether in small responses this week or bigger ways he is stirring.

Verses referenced:

Proverbs 31:8-9 (CSB)

Proverbs 14:31 (CSB)

Proverbs 19:17 (CSB)

Proverbs 21:13 (CSB)

Micah 6:8 (NIV)

Matthew 23:23 (CSB)

Psalm 9:7 (ESV)

Isaiah 61:8 (CSB)

Zechariah 7:9-10 (NIV)

Psalm 68:5

Isaiah 54:5

Psalm 140:12

Psalm 146:9

Luke 2:22-24

Mark 3:31-35

Galatians 2:9-10 (CSB)

Romans 15:25-27 (CSB)

Habakkuk 1:2 (CSB)

Matthew 6:9-10

James 1:19

Proverbs 21:3 (CSB)

Alex Cottrell continues the How to Build a Life series through Proverbs with a message on wisdom and work. Starting in Genesis and landing in Proverbs, he argues that work was part of God's original design for people made in his image, that it was broken by the fall, and that it remains a means of serving God and others. He closes with the reminder that a Christian's identity is secured by Christ and not by a job, which frees us both to work hard and to rest.

## What is work for?

Alex opens with a recent job posting: Snoop Dogg's ice cream company is hiring an ice cream tester, ten thousand dollars a month, fully remote, travel included. An unusual job raises the question behind the whole message.

What is work for?

Is it for money?

Is it where we should find a sense of purpose?

Is it a mechanism for serving people? For serving God?

Is it a result of the curse in Genesis 3?

The pragmatic answer is that work is mostly for money, and purpose or service is icing on the cake. Alex tests that with a thought experiment: a $350K salary with full benefits and a pension, for sitting in a chair and doing nothing eight hours a day. He thinks he could last a month. If the money is on the table and we still could not stand a pointless job, then we do not work for money alone.

He admits this is the most uncomfortable topic he has taught in years, because he has bought into many of the culture's ideas about work, and he names two that contradict each other.

The first is that we draw who we are from what we do. An Oxford study of American culture found that Americans treat work as the end rather than a means to something else, with a heavy emphasis on individual merit: our job equals our value. Pew found that 39% of Americans say their job is extremely important to their overall identity, rising to 53% among those with a postgraduate degree. Another study, from the Center on American Life, found that 56% say having a job they enjoy is the most essential thing to living a fulfilling life, ahead of having kids, being married, their relationships, and earning a lot of money.

The second is that we hate work and want to stop as soon as possible. For those who cannot quit, that leads to slowly growing bitter until sixty-five. For the rest it leads to hustle culture.

"Hustle is the most important word in the English language." - Gary V

Hustle culture says a high-paying job is not enough: you need multiple income streams so you can make a lot of money and quit early. Alex cites the line popularized by Dave Ramsey, that if you make the sacrifices now that most people are unwilling to make, later you will be able to live as they never can, and the FIRE movement (Financially Independent, Retire Early), whose goal is to quit before forty and vacation for the next fifty years.

As Christians we reject both. Our identity and value come from our adoption into God's family through Jesus, which cannot be earned or lost by the job we hold or don't hold. And financial independence at a young age is something to praise God for, but it is not a reason to spend the rest of life in leisure mode, because work was part of God's original design in Genesis.

## 1. God himself works

Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Alex calls it the fastest first point in sermon history. In the opening line of the Bible we see God working. He creates and then he organizes, a master designer, and it is in his nature to work. Genesis 2:2-3 confirms it: on the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work.

Genesis 1:26-28. God sets mankind apart from the rest of creation by making us in his image and giving us his communicable attributes: like God we have the propensity to love, a conscience that guides us toward justice, and a capacity for compassion and mercy. The Hebrew word for image is translated idol or statue. Cultures placed a statue of their god in its temple as a visible representation, and in the temple of creation we are meant to be the visible display of who God is. The phrase "image of God" was also used of kings, who ruled as the visible representative of their deity. God is telling us that we are his rulers and representatives in the world, reflecting his character and his care for everything. Walking into the office, that means representing who God is to coworkers, to an industry, and to customers.

Verse 28 gives the first commands. "Be fruitful and multiply" is more than population. Alex cites Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth: it is a command to make families, which in turn form communities, cities, churches, and governments, a building out of the entire world. The second command, to govern the earth, is clarified in Genesis 2:15, where the Lord God places man in the garden to tend and watch over it. To tend is to cultivate, working the garden so that it is healthy, beautiful, and fruitful. To watch over is to protect, the same word often used for the priests' duty to guard and care for the temple. Together the idea is stewardship. Pearcey applies it outside the garden: we are to plant crops, but also to build bridges, design computers, and compose music. The passage is sometimes called the cultural mandate, because it tells us our original purpose was to create cultures and build civilizations.

## 2. Work was part of God's original design for mankind; before the fall

Contrary to popular belief, work is not a curse, which means it will always be a large portion of our lives as we cultivate the world God has made. It is not only for gardeners. It applies to any positive effort put into any work that makes the world what it is. Alex recommends Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor as the single book on the Christian faith he would hand his coworkers.

"We are called to stand in for God here in the world, exercising stewardship over the rest of creation in his place as his vice regents. We share in doing the things that God has done in creation—bringing order out of chaos, creatively building a civilization out of the material of physical and human nature, caring for all that God has made. This is a major part of what we were created to be. . . . Work has dignity because it is something that God does and because we do it in God's place, as his representatives." - Timothy Keller (Every Good Endeavor)

Work, for the purpose of this message, is wider than what we do to collect a paycheck. Alex does analytics at a mortgage bank, coaches soccer in his community, and is beginning to serve in youth ministry. All three fall under work, and all three are things to bring to God and ask how to steward. A stay-at-home mom or dad raising kids is working. So is a student at school, or one who is serious about a sport, an instrument, or art.

"The material creation was made by God to be developed, cultivated, and cared for in an endless number of ways through human labor. But even the simplest of these ways is important. Without them all, human life cannot flourish." - Timothy Keller (Every Good Endeavor)

All work carries dignity. During Covid a line was drawn between essential and non-essential work. In the terms of this message, any work that contributes to the stewardship of the world or the flourishing of its inhabitants is essential.

## 3. Work is broken as a result of the fall

Genesis 3:17-19. The ground is cursed, and work is now toilsome. Christians live in the tension: God made work in the garden and called it good, and it is also hard and frustrating. The garden now produces thorns and thistles, and the most prolific plants are the weeds that need no water or care. In corporate life the toil looks like the coworker who cannot find the mute button, or the reply-all to 1,500 people.

Alex pauses on a question this raises: if work is good, is retirement unbiblical? His answer is yes and no. Neither the word nor the concept appears in Scripture. If the question is whether someone who is physically or mentally unable to continue, or financially able to stop, may stop working for a paycheck, the answer is of course. But retiring from a paycheck does not mean retiring from work. Retirement years can be spent enriching the lives of family and friends, serving in ministry, and being intentional with younger believers. He points to a retired member of the church who spends one day a week working on the church building.

Turning to application, Alex shares the list he first wrote down for working as a Christian: share my faith with coworkers and classmates, invite them to a gathering or youth group, and stand out with uncommon integrity, wisdom, and a posture of service. Proverbs says yes to all three. God's desire throughout Scripture is to conform us to the image of Christ, whose character set him apart. Proverbs 10:2 and Proverbs 28:6 both tie character to how we work and how we gain wealth. But some thinkers push further.

"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. [go to] Church by all means, and [enjoy] decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth." - Dorothy Sayers

Beyond our commitment to church and the effort to rid ourselves of obvious sin, the priority is to do our jobs well. That includes working hard, but the point is skill: to become an expert. Proverbs 22:29: "Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings."

Alex tells the story of his air conditioning failing in a heat wave. The highest-rated company sent a technician who announced on the walk up the driveway that he would recommend a full replacement, spent thirty seconds with a gauge, and then twenty minutes pitching a $15,000 system that included a new furnace the house did not need. A friend of a friend who owns an HVAC company then spent forty-five minutes on the phone walking Alex through whether he needed a new unit (he did not), drove to a supplier for refrigerant with leak sealant, installed it, and would not take money for the labor. He served instead of exploiting the situation, and he is the one who will get the call next time. A world where people are excellent at their jobs and honest in their business is a picture of renewal, one of the church's values, and of the kingdom to come where everything is made new.

The questions for us: would you consider yourself highly skilled at your work, or at least heading that direction? When coworkers, customers, or classmates find out they will be working with you, are they glad?

Colossians 3:23-24 names the true audience: "Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people." Why work with honesty and integrity when others clearly do not? Why maintain contentment instead of a culture of complaining and gossip? Why become the best at your job when you could coast at your current skill level? Because we are working for the Lord.

## 4. Work is a means to serve God and others

Mark 10:42-45. Before turning to what Jesus says, Alex notes how Jesus lived: about thirty years, the large majority of his adult life, doing carpentry, and three in ministry. Many of us wonder whether our jobs make any impact at all, and we would probably assume the same of a carpenter. Jesus was faithful to his Father in work that might have felt unimportant, and then faithful in ministry. If we are faithful with what God has laid before us in every arena of work, God will accomplish what he wants through us. That lifts the pressure to make a massive impact on the world.

Jesus had more authority than anyone on earth and could have told people he had no time for their petty issues while he handled the salvation of humankind. Instead he stopped in the crowds to talk to the one person, corrected his disciples over and over, and took time to serve. Anyone with authority in their work should use it to improve the lives of the people they work with, the lives of their customers, and the performance of their company in legitimate ways that benefit everybody.

Proverbs 11:10-11: "The whole city celebrates when the godly succeed... Upright citizens are good for a city and make it prosper." Churches often ask whether the city is better because the church is in it. Alex presses the question closer: is your company better because you work there? Are your customers and coworkers better off because you are in their lives through the week? Ask God how you could affect change in your space of influence, large or small, and be faithful with what you have.

## 5. Work is a reminder that we are part of a bigger story

A message like this can leave a person with a long to-do list and the pressure to do everything and do it well. Some of that may be legitimate and worth praying through. For many, Alex reframes the whole subject as a reminder that we are part of a larger story, and that God is using all of us together, in our different roles, to do what he wants. Remembering that we ultimately serve Jesus motivates us to work hard on a Monday morning regardless of the emails, the boss, the customers, or the teachers. And the same God who calls us to work commands us to rest.

Proverbs 23:4: "Don't wear yourself out trying to get rich. Be wise enough to know when to quit." Proverbs has plenty to say about hard work and how it often leads to wealth, prosperity, and generosity. It also says to have the wisdom to know when enough is enough. A Christian's inheritance is secured by Christ, so there is no need to wear ourselves out getting rich, or to overwork to prove ourselves to a boss, to coworkers, to ourselves, or to God. We are credited with Christ's righteousness when we put our faith in him, and we cannot improve on that. We work out of an overflow. Whether the job is prestigious or simple, whether it touches millions or a single person, God's love for his children is secured by Jesus and is not contingent on what they do day to day. We act as co-laborers with God to make this slice of earth a little more like the kingdom to come.

Alex closes with two reflections. First, a hard question to ask God: what part of your story do you want me to play, and can I be content to do just that? The most extreme version of the answer is a career change. It may also mean dropping something voluntary that takes time it should not, or picking up something in the community that has nothing to do with a paycheck. Second, from coaching soccer: five- and six-year-olds chase the ball in a mob, and older kids have to be taught positions and reminded that they have a job, the other players have theirs, and they need to trust their teammates. Those who are overworking, serving on every team, and never slowing down to rest are part of a body with many gifts. The task is to ask God what part of the body you are, be faithful in it, and trust your brothers and sisters to do their part.

He ends in prayer, thanking God that he is a God who works (John 5:17), that work is a gift through which we participate in his world, and that we have nothing to prove: before Jesus had done any ministry, the Father said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17).

Verses referenced:

Genesis 1:1 (NLT)

Genesis 2:2-3 (NLT)

Genesis 1:26-28 (NLT)

Genesis 2:15 (NLT)

Genesis 3:17-19 (NIV)

Proverbs 10:2 (ESV)

Proverbs 28:6 (ESV)

Proverbs 22:29 (ESV)

Colossians 3:23-24 (NLT)

Mark 10:42-45 (NLT)

Proverbs 11:10-11 (NLT)

Proverbs 23:4 (NLT)

John 5:17

Matthew 3:17

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)

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

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