Proverbs 3 is if-then wisdom, and Pastor Adam names the trouble with that before preaching it. Acknowledgment brings direction, fear brings health, honor brings provision — and on tithing, the cross removed the obligation without removing the blessing.

Proverbs 1 opens the year, and Pastor Adam starts with a premise instead of a point: God is always speaking, so the difficulty is discernment, not hiddenness. Three assignments follow — cancel the noise, live in the questions, and name an actual council.

The Proverbs run closes with thanks to the volunteers who put on most of the service, and an invitation to be part of the family rather than an audience for it — wisdom literature applied to the question of how a person actually spends a year.

The third message takes up friendship, and Proverbs is strikingly unsentimental about it — the friend who sticks closer than a brother, wounds from a friend against the kisses of an enemy, and the danger of the company a person keeps.

Proverbs does not generally promise or command — it observes, and the observations hold most of the time rather than always. Reading it as guarantee produces disappointment; reading it as accumulated pattern produces something usable.

The Sunday after Christmas opens with Sinatra, and a stated purpose: wisdom to set 2022 on a different trajectory than the two years before it. Proverbs suits that — wisdom literature is a distinct genre, accumulated observation rather than promise or command.

Pastor Adam opens on sexuality with three readings rather than one, and the selection is the argument: humanity made male and female, everything made for its purpose, and what is plain about God from what has been made.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Pastor Adam preaches joy at the point in December when many can least manufacture it, describing hope as the long road joy travels before arriving, and refusing either to diminish pain or to let go of hope.

Pastor Adam puts the weight on the first verb: honour the Lord with your wealth. Generosity is an overflow of honour, not a formula, and Isaiah 61 widens what “favour” even means, since almost none of what it promises is financial.