Under the Knife

I almost didn’t want to hit record, because the words I needed to say weren’t “teaching” words. They were surgery words. Proverbs 11:9–12 met me like a scan that finds something you can’t feel yet but can’t ignore forever, and it turned the mic into a mirror. These verses about the mouth, blessing, and silence raise a question that won’t let go: are my words delivering people, or destroying them?

We talk about the kind of armor that makes men effective in business: decisiveness, drive, the instinct to fix what’s broken. Then we face what happens when that same instinct walks into the living room. I share a story I’m not proud of, where I confronted my daughter with a verdict instead of a question, convinced by information that later proved completely false. The moment I heard what my accusation did to her voice, I realized how fast trust can crack and how slowly it has to be rebuilt. The enemy may supply lies, but I still choose what I do with them, especially with my mouth.

From there, we work toward a different definition of wisdom and Christian leadership: not winning, not having the last word, but strength under control. We look at Jesus’ compassion, David’s tears, and James’ description of wisdom as peaceable, gentle, and full of mercy. If you’re wrestling with discernment, relationships, fatherhood, repentance, or hearing God’s voice, this conversation offers a hard but hopeful path forward: slow down, pray, ask instead of accuse, and let God shape the heart behind your words. Subscribe, share this with someone you trust, and leave a review telling us: where do you need silence to do the work your words can’t?

Transcript

Welcome And A Hard Confession

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All right. Well, good morning. We ready for a really fantastic day in Proverbs? Because this one's going to be a little more hit home on my correction and learning. And of course, when the Lord teaches me something, I don't mind sharing. So maybe I can help somebody else out. That won't fall into the same situation I found myself under. So this is going to be the Proverbs chapter 11, verse 9 through 12. And we'll title title this one called Under the Knife. So good morning. I'll be honest with you. Before we even get started today, I almost didn't want to turn this microphone on. For the last two days, I've been looking for any excuse to cancel this recording. I'm sixty four years old, I've built businesses, I've closed deals, I've made hard calls under pressure, and slept just fine that night. I'm the guy people come to when something needs to be fixed. When I sit down behind this mic, my natural setting is teacher. I want to hand you a principle, a strategy, three steps to walk away with. Today I'm not the teacher. Today I'm the guy on the table. I don't want to tell you why that scares me. Here's a picture of what it's been like with me all week. Imagine you feel completely fine. You wake up, the sun's coming up over a beautiful morning, birds are singing, and there's not one thing wrong with you that you can feel. No pain, no symptoms, nothing at all. But a few weeks back, a doctor ran a scan and found something, something quiet, something you can't feel yet, but if nobody touches it, it'll eventually take your life. So we schedule a surgery, and for some reason surgeons always want you there like at six in the morning. Picture that drive to the hospital. Somebody else is behind the wheel, you're looking out the window at a gorgeous day, and every instinct in your body is telling you to reach over, open the door, and run home. You don't feel sick. Why would you volunteer for this? Why would you let someone put you to sleep and cut something out of you? But you don't open the door. You know the surgeon sees something that you can't see. And if you trust him, you have to walk through a set of doors and you don't want to walk that you don't want to walk through. Lie down on a table you don't want to lie on, and let him take out something you don't even know was going to kill you. That is exactly where I am with God right now. I spent this whole Proverbs journey believing I was going to teach you something. Instead, I think Proverbs has been running scans on me, and this week it found something. I don't want to go through this door, but I've walked with the Lord long enough now to know what's on the other side of it. So

Proverbs 11 And The Mirror

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let's go together. I want to read you what stopped me in my tracks this week, which is Proverbs eleven verse nine through twelve, which says with his mouth the godless man destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous will be delivered. When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish there is glad shouting. By the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is torn down. He who despises his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding he keeps silent. I read that section the first time and if I'm honest, I did what we all do with scripture. I thought about somebody else. I thought I know exactly who needs to hear this. And then the Holy Spirit did what he does well. He turned the mirror around. Because a few days ago, before I ever opened this chapter, I told the Lord something. I said, I feel like I've entered a new season, not the end of my life, I don't mean it that way, but the last major chapter of it. I thought about a verse from first John where he writes, I write to you fathers, because you know him who was from the beginning. That word no has been chasing me around all week. Because I spent decades learning about God, learning what he can do, learning how he works. But John doesn't say fathers are fathers because they know a lot about God. He says because they know him. So a couple mornings ago I asked something different than I normally do. I usually come to God with a request. Bless the business, help me close this, show me what to do next. This time I just said, Lord, tell me about yourself. And he led me to four verses about mouths, blessing, and silence. At first I thought that's not what I asked for. Then it hit me. It was exactly what I asked for. Because if he's showing me what a righteous man looks like, he's showing me what he himself is like. We were made in his image. So this wasn't a lesson in a commun in communication. It was an invitation into his heart.

When Drive Turns Into Control

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I want to talk to the men listening for a minute, because I think a lot of you carry what I carry. From the time you're young, we get trained that our value is in what we produce, protect, and win. We build armor. We call it drive. We call it being decisive. We call it not being weak, and that armor works incredibly well in business. If a deal falls apart, you don't sit around grieving about it. You work harder. You find another angle. You force the next one together through sheer will. That armor made me successful. I'm not going to sit here and tell you a mission is a sin. God used my drive. He blessed it. He taught me to hear his voice in business and step out without fear. And a lot of good things in my life exist because I obeyed him in that. But here's what I'm beginning what I'm being shown right now. That same armor worn into my home becomes a weapon instead of a shield. When you run your family the way you run a company, your mouth becomes a tool for control. You see a problem, and your instinct is to understand it, is to fix it, correct it, eliminate it. You start treating the people you love like a deal that's gone sideways instead of a heart that needs tending. Look again at verse nine. With his mouth the godless man destroys his neighbor. And verse eleven, by the mouth of the wicked it is torn down. Same mouth that can bless a city can tear one down. The difference isn't vocabulary, it's what's governing the heart behind the words control or trust. I think that's why this hit me so hard this particular week. I spent my whole life believing decisiveness was a virtue in every room I walked into. Boardroom, job site, dinner table, didn't matter. Make the call, own it, move on. And for most of my life that instinct served the people around me. It built something they could stand on. But I'm starting to see that the very same instinct aimed at a heart instead of a spreadsheet doesn't build, it bruises. A business can absorb a wrong. You revise a number, you renegotiate, you try again next quarter. A relationship doesn't work that way. Words land and some of them don't come back out. Here's what I

Accusing My Daughter On Bad Facts

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actually did. I want to tell you something I'm not proud of. I've gone back and forth about whether to put this on the podcast at all, but I don't think this episode means anything if I sand off the edges. So here it is plainly. I have a daughter for twenty nine years of relationship with. She takes tremendous pride in being upright and being someone who does the right thing even when nobody's watching. That's not me bragging on her as a proud father either, though I am proud of her. It's just fact. Integrity is the thing she has built her whole life around. A while back a situation came up involving travel and money, and every single piece of information that came to me pointed the same direction. It wasn't one stray comment I overreacted to, it was several things from more than one source, all lining up, all confirming each other, all pointing straight at her. I ran it the way I run due diligence on a deal, cross check the facts, look for the pattern, trust the weight of the evidence, and the evidence, every bit of it, said she had done something that I felt was, you know, not dishonest, but could use some correction on to make her a better person. Well here's what I believe now looking back on it. I think that was a setup, or I was set up. I don't say that to sound dramatic on a podcast. I generally believe the enemy assembled a case against my daughter piece by piece, source by source, because he knew exactly what was going on. He wasn't trying to create one bad conversation. He was going after thirty years, or twenty nine to be exact. He knew that if he could get me, her father, to stand in front of her and accuse her of something she didn't do, he could put a crack in that one relationship in her life that was supposed to be unconditional. That's not a small target. That's strategic. First Peter says our adverse adversary prowls around like a lion, looking for someone to devour. And I think for a few days he was looking at me. But I want to be very careful here, because I will not hide behind that. The information being false does not make what I did okay. Somebody handing me a lie doesn't excuse what I choose to do with it. I had a decision in front of me, and I had it more than once. I could have gone to her with a question. I could have said, something doesn't add up to me, help me understand it. I could have prayed before I opened my mouth. I could have given her, my own daughter, twenty and nine years of proven character, the benefit of the doubt that a stranger gets in a courtroom. Instead, I walked in with a verdict already written. I wasn't looking for the truth, I was looking to be right. So I confronted her, not with a question, with an accusation, delivered like I already have the gravel in my hand. I was completely convinced. What was weird though is I didn't realize I was coming across that way. That's how she saw it, and as I looked more into it, well, like usual she was right, and I was completely wrong. Every piece of that evidence turned out to be false, all of it, and I have to sit with that, because it means the thing I was so certain about, the thing I felt so justified saying out loud to her was built on nothing. I looked at my own daughter, a woman who has spent her life trying to walk uprightly before God, who has never once given me a real reason to doubt her word, and I told her in effect that I didn't trust her one hundred percent. That her own father, who has known her twenty nine years, believed a stack of lies over her character in about five minutes. I can still hear what that did to her voice. I don't think I'll ever fully unhear it. That sound, the sound of your child realizing her father doubted her, is one of the worst sounds I've ever caused in my life, and I caused it. Not the enemy, me. He supplied the ammunition, but I'm the one who picked it up and fired it. In about five minutes with my mouth, I put a crack in twenty nine years of trust that took twenty nine years to build. We are rebuilding by God's grace, and we're talking again. I got on my knees in every sense of that phrase and admitted I was wrong and asked her to forgive me. Not I'm sorry you feel that way. Not I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, but I was wrong. I sinned against you. Will you forgive me? She had been far more gracious to me than I deserved, but something else happened to me in that moment that I didn't expect. I stopped trusting my own certainty. For sixty four years I've trusted my gut. My gut built a business, my gut closed deals other people walked away from. And in one conversation my gut convicted me of an innocent person on evidence that was manufactured to convict her. That'll shake a man to the foundation. It shook me badly enough that I've gone quiet. Not just about that situation, but about a lot of things. Because I genuinely don't know right now if my confidence is discernment or just habit dressed up as a discernment.

Certainty Is Not The Truth

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I used to think being sincere and being right was basically the same thing. I've never in my life been more sincere, yet more wrong. Here's the learning I keep coming back to, the part I actually want you to walk away with. Being deceived is not always a sin. The enemy is real, and he is patient, and he's willing to spend real time constructing a lie that looks exactly like the truth. But what I do with the information is in front of me, whether I run straight at it with my mouth loaded, or whether I slow down, pray, and ask instead of accuse. That part is entirely on me. I can't stop him from building a trap. I can't absolutely stop myself from walking into it and dragging someone I love in it with me. And then, right in the middle of me carrying all that, these four verses showed up. A man of understanding keeps silent. Not because he has nothing to say, not because the facts in front of him aren't compelling, because he's learned the hard way in my case, just like I did, that certainty is not the same thing as truth, and that not everything that feels obvious deserves to be said. Not right now, in that tone, with that much confidence anyways. Verse eleven says, By the blessing of the upright, a city is exalted. Same mouth, different heart. That question that question wouldn't leave me alone. Ed, what are your words actually producing? That's what I kept saying to myself. Look, no father wakes up wanting to wound his kids. We think we're protecting. We think we're speaking truth and love. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we're just speaking too fast, too sure, and too soon. That's when I thought about Jesus. Matthew nine thirty six says when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Think about who he was looking at a messy, compromised, wandering crowd. As a son of God, he had perfect information. He knew every hidden motive in that crowd better than they knew it themselves. If anyone ever had the right to stand up and correct people publicly, it was him. But that's not what compassion did in him. The word there is a strong one. It means being moved in your very core, to the point where it changes how you move towards someone. And notice, his compassion didn't always remove the problem. Sometimes he healed and sometimes he fed a crowd. Sometimes he simply taught, and sometimes he walked away, because it wasn't the father's timing yet. His compassion was never governed by emotion alone. It was governed by the father's will. That's the piece I was missing. I always thought compassion was softness, that if you cared about someone, you fixed their situation for them. I'm starting to think compassion is actually strength under control. It's loving someone deeply while refusing to seize the will of their life to control the outcome yourself. For a man wired to solve things, that might be the hardest sentence I've said all year. I also kept thinking about David this week, because David has always fascinated me. Here's a guy who ran straight to Goliath while grown men hid in their tents. He led armies, he built a kingdom. Nobody would ever accuse David of being soft, and yet when his own son Absalon turned against him, plotted to steal his throne, and ultimately died in the middle of that rebellion, David didn't respond like a king protecting his position. He climbed the stairs over the gate and cried out, O my son Absalon, my son, my son Absalon, when I have died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son. That's a warrior dash king weeping over his son who betrayed him. I used to read that and think it was almost a contradiction. How does the man who killed lions and bears and a giant fall apart like the one over the one rebellious kid? No, I don't think it's a contradiction at all. I think it's the whole point. David never stopped being a king in that moment. He just let the throne room see his heart. His strength and his grief were never actually in competition with each other. The strongest men of scripture are so often the ones who love the deepest, not the ones who felt the least. I think that's what's happening to me right now. But if I'm

Compassion As Strength Under Control

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honest, I don't love it. I built a life on being the guy who doesn't need to feel much to function. The armor served me well. It's gotten me through losses that would have leveled a lot of people. Now I feel things I don't know what to do with. And some days I resent it. I'll just say that plainly out loud on this podcast, which is not something the old version of me would ever have done. I'm not sure I want to live a life where I care this deeply about outcomes I can't control. There's a version of me that misses the bulletproof feeling, but I don't think that's really a choice that's being offered to me anymore. I think you either stay hardened and keep everyone at arm's length, or you let God soften you. And the softening hurts on the way in before it ever produces anything on the way out. There's a version from James that has become one of my favorites in the whole Bible because it asks the question I've been wrestling with. James write, Who among you is wise and understanding? That's the question Proverbs have been asking me all week too. But James doesn't answer the way I would have twenty years ago. He doesn't say the wise man has all the right answers. He doesn't say the wise man wins the argument or gets the last word. He says let him show it by his good conduct. Then he describes what real wisdom looks like pure, peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruit, without hypocrisy. Read that list again. Those aren't descriptions of a sharp mind. Those are descriptions of a surrendered heart, and that's exactly what's been unsettling me. I keep expecting God to hand me more information, and instead he keeps handing me more character to grow into. Knowledge you can pick up from a book on a plane ride. Character only gets built one way, this way I've been avoiding on the wheel under pressure being pressed. Jeremiah pictures God as a potter and us as the clay. I've read that passage for years and always pictured it as encouraging. God shaping me into more successful, more capable, more blessed. I don't think that's what it's about today. Or anyways what's happening with me today. I think sometimes the potter presses in specifically to remove something we didn't know was there. Pride we called confidence, control we call leadership, certainty we call discernment. And while his hands are doing the work, it doesn't feel like promotion. It feels like pressure, and it hurts. If you ever actually watched a pot of work, the clay doesn't get a vote on where his thumb goes. It doesn't get to tell him to shape this the shape end is fine. It just yields. Or it fights and gets thrown back on the wheel again anyway. Maybe that's what maturing in the Lord actually looks like at sixty-four. Not knowing exactly what he's doing to you, just trusting the hands that are doing it. I've noticed my prayers changing because of this. For most of my life my prayers were conquest type prayers. Bless this. Help me win that. Show me the next move. Lately prayers just been, Lord, show me your heart. That is a dangerous prayer to pray, it looks like, because once you ask God what he's like, don't be surprised when he starts making you more like that instead of just telling you about it. And I keep coming back to that verse in first John, Father's because you know him, not because you know facts about him, because you know him. The way you know someone you sat across as a table from the decades, the way you know their silence as well as their words. I spent so much of my life in a hurry to get to the next level of blessing that I skipped past just sitting with him. I think that's the part of what this season is correcting. It's less about earning a new title from God and more about finally slowing down long enough to actually know the one who has been walking with me this whole time. I'd like to be straight with you about something here because I don't think it helps anyone if I only tell you. I'll tell you the pretty version of this. I like the armor. I like the version of me that solves problems fast and doesn't lose sleep. If I'm wrong about a business call, I work harder and make the deal come together anyway. The outcome bends to my effort eventually. But this isn't that. When it comes to loving people and simply trusting God with what happens to them, I don't get to make the outcome bend. I have to actually let go and watch. My own free will and theirs and just pray. I keep asking myself how a man is supposed to run anything, a business, a household, a life while carrying feelings this deep. How do you lead an empire and weep like David at the same time? I don't fully know yet. But I'm starting to think the answer isn't choosing one or the other. I think the very same discipline that built my business is a discipline I now have to turn inward against my own flesh. Instead of outward against the marketplace. It takes real strength to hold a freight train back. It takes real strength to see something you hate. Feel the urge to smash it with your word and stand down because you love the person or more than you love being

The Potter’s Hands And Next Steps

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right. That's not weakness. Biblically I used to think it was. I think now it might be the hardest kind of strength there is. So here's where I want to land this week. I want to say it plainly because I think somebody listening needs to hear it as much as I need to say it. I asked God to tell me about Himself. He answered, not with thunder, not with some mystical moment, but with four short verses about mouths and silence and blessing. He showed me he doesn't delight in tearing people down, even when he'd have every right to, given what he knows about all of us. He's patient, he knows when to speak, and he knows when to let silence do the work that words could never. And if I'm going to look more like him, then wisdom isn't just information I collect. It's a heart I slowly hand over. I won't pretend this is easy. It's not. Every morning right now I wake up wondering what part of me he's going to put on the wheel next, and is he going to ask me to lay down? There's a real temptation telling him, I'm good where I am. Let's stop here. But I know better than that. Because I've been walking with him too long to believe that lie. Every single time, every time, I've trusted him into a season I was afraid of, the other side had been better than what I gave up to get there. Not easier, but better. So if you're listening today and you feel God has you in the passenger seat driving towards something you don't want to walk into, a hard conversation, a habit. He's exposing relationship he asks you to hold with open hands instead of a clinched fist, I just say this. Don't open the door and jump out. The surgeon sees something you can't see. The potter knows exactly where to press, and the father knows exactly who he's making you into on the other side of it. And if you've ever done what I did, if you've ever taken evidence I felt airtight and use it to wound someone you love, only to find out later the whole case was built on sand. Hear me say this to you the way I needed someone to say it to me. You don't get to blame the deception for your own mouth. The enemy may have built the trap, but God is still asking you to make your own choice. That's not condemnation. That's the doorway to actually healing what you broke. Maybe that's the real lesson underneath everything Provert has been teaching me this year. Faith is hearing God's voice and acting on it. Sometimes that means starting the business, sometimes it means running straight at the giant like David did. And sometimes it means speaking up when everyone else stays quiet. And sometimes, like this week, like today, faith sounds like a man who used to think strength meant always having the answer. Finally learning the real strength is keeping his mouth closed and trusting the one who never has to raise his voice to be right. Well, in conclusion, God bless you. Thank you for walking through this door with me. And if this is your first time hearing something like this, I always say don't act on it because you'll fail unless the Lord actually specifically mentions to you to do it. Otherwise, you're just eating the seed from my fruit. I have to act on it because this is what God spoke to me. That is what real faith is. And if you're still having trouble hearing his voice, I again mention getting the book, God, Why Won't You Talk to Me by Edward L. Carpenter. It'll save you a lot of time on trying to hear what his voice sounds like to you personally. Until next time, God bless and have a great day.