How Men Destroy Their Households

Apathy, Anger, and Addiction

For the last several weeks, we’ve been studying the book of Proverbs. Not chapter by chapter, but guided by one question: What does it mean to be a wise builder? That’s a question worth asking, especially here. We’re a young church, not even five years old, filled with young families. Day in and day out, we are building: careers, households, and reputations. We can’t help it. God made mankind to worship and to work. It’s in our bones. Six days of labor, one day of worship. It’s the rhythm of creation itself.

When God placed Adam on the mountaintop in Eden, He told him to subdue the world: to bring it under control, to shape it for God’s glory. That’s why little boys dig in the dirt. God made them to shape the dirt. That’s why we want to climb to the tops of trees and mountains. That’s why we build bridges across creeks or carve wood into a flute or a guitar. It’s why we want to harness and master this world for some good and productive end. That’s dominion. We were made for it. We were made to build.

But not all builders build with wisdom. As we’ve said, wisdom is the art and skill of living in harmony with God’s moral, social, and spiritual order. God has made the world to work in a certain way, and wisdom recognizes and submits to that reality. It even knows how to deal with a cursed world where things don’t work as they were first designed. Wisdom navigates that brokenness in a way that still honors God. Folly, on the other hand, disregards God’s order and acts as if creation has no King.

So the very first step toward wisdom is bowing before the King Himself. To know Christ is Lord. As Proverbs 1 tells us: The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.

Proverbs shows us what it looks like when a soul who fears the Lord builds with wisdom. That’s why it’s so helpful. But Proverbs also gives us the negative examples—the fools who don’t build, but destroy.

Life is not neutral. Nothing stays stable for long. Your house is either improving or declining. Your finances won’t take care of themselves. You’re either managing them or they’re wasting away. Your children must be disciplined and trained; if you’re not doing it, something else is. Maybe it’s media. Maybe it’s their peers. Maybe it’s simply the godless world around them. But one way or another, they are being formed.

Life is always moving; it never stands still. A house must be maintained. The lawn must be mowed. Leaks must be fixed. Roofs must be replaced. Ignore these things and your home falls into disrepair. That’s what we call entropy; everything in creation moves from order to disorder. Things rot. They break down. They require attention and effort.

And so it is with our lives. Many start out well. They build with energy and purpose in the beginning. But they don’t finish that way. Some fall into neglect. Others plunge into outright foolishness. Often it’s arrogance... they think they can coast. And when they do, everything they built begins to crumble.
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. Take the 2017 Super Bowl. The Atlanta Falcons were up 28 to 3 in the third quarter. Victory looked certain. But then the Patriots rallied, the Falcons crumbled, and what looked like triumph ended in overtime defeat.

Or consider Bernie Madoff. He built a reputation as a brilliant financier, even chaired the NASDAQ. To the world he looked like a model of success. But behind the façade, he was running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Billions stolen. Thousands ruined. And when the house of cards collapsed, he lost everything: his freedom, his family’s name, his place of honor. He died in prison as a cautionary tale of greed and ruin.

We’ve seen the same pattern in the church. Pastors who became household names, authors, conference speakers, men who seemed to start so well. And then it all came crashing down. An affair. Embezzled funds. Secret sins that burned their ministries to the ground.

The lesson is sobering: you can spend years building, and tear it all down in a moment. Sometimes it happens slowly, through neglect. Other times in one reckless act.

Proverbs 11:29 says, “Whoever troubles his own household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart.”

Last week we looked at how women tear down their homes. Today, we’re going to look at men and how they can trouble their own households. There are three major areas I want us to consider: apathy, anger, and addiction.

Let’s begin with apathy.

Proverbs 24:30–34:

“I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.”

By apathy, I mean indifference. To be apathetic is not to care. The sluggard of Proverbs 24 is a picture of this. He’s lethargic, which is a form of practical apathy. He doesn’t give things the attention they warrant. His vineyard goes untended, and he becomes comfortable with it falling apart. It doesn’t happen all at once—it happens little by little. He sleeps when he should be working, and when he works, he doesn’t work with the vigor he should. He lacks drive.

To be a man, to be a laborer, is to work hard... not just in one area, but across many. Maybe you don’t have a vineyard. I don’t. But your life is a vineyard. Your household is a vineyard. Your wife and children are a vineyard. Your vocation is a vineyard. You cannot neglect these things. They require your energy, your care, your discipline.

Many men lose the hearts of their wives and children little by little. Not all at once. You don’t lose your son’s heart because you missed one baseball game. You don’t lose your wife’s heart because of one argument or a short rough patch. But a consistent pattern of apathy and lethargy will hollow out your household.

Children left without discipline will grow proud and reckless. Finances left unmanaged will eventually collapse into sudden poverty. Health ignored will decline beyond recovery. A wife denied tenderness will harden or turn elsewhere. This is the slow decay of a man who will not hustle.

The faithful life is a busy life. And I know some of you are thinking, “But I already work hard. I just don’t have enough time.” I get it. I’m sympathetic. But the truth is, you’ve got to be wiser. You’ve got to pick and choose what you spend your time on. Paul says in 1 Corinthians that when he became a man, he put away childish things. What are the childish things in your life? I don’t mean sinful things. Childish things aren’t necessarily bad. Kids need to play. It’s how they learn. But as a man, you don’t have the same time to play. You still need some recreation, but you also need to pray like David in Psalm 119: “Turn my eyes away from worthless things.” Some of your distractions are killing your time and starving your household.

If you really want to know where your time is going, track it. Track your money, track your hours. You’ll find you probably have more time than you realize... time you could be spending sleeping well, working diligently, and investing in what matters. Here’s a practical tip: I call it stacking. Stack tasks together. If I need to fix a fence but also want to connect with one of my kids, I take them with me to Home Depot. We grab a burger, then come back and fix the fence together. That way, the work gets done and the relationship grows. That’s how I make bivocational ministry work too—I use travel time for audiobooks, sermon prep, and phone calls. So ask yourself: what can you cut? What can you stack? What are your real priorities?

God gave us six days for labor and one for rest. That pattern is not arbitrary. It’s a calling. Work hard six days, rest one. Most of us are blessed to work Monday through Friday, with Saturday free for our homes and Sunday set apart for worship. But don’t miss the point: coasting will destroy you. Indifference, neglect, and laziness will dismantle your household piece by piece until there’s nothing left.

So look at the sluggard. Look at the apathetic man. And learn: you cannot afford to live like that.

Next, let’s talk about sinful anger, a lack of emotional discipline. Proverbs 16:32 says, “Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”
Anger itself isn’t the problem. Anger is a good emotion; it’s that internal protest that says, “I’m against that.” When you see lies and evil, you should feel angry. That’s good. Don’t suppress it. But anger must be regulated by God’s truth. Otherwise it spills into sin. That’s not a call to moderation but to obedience. God’s Word is the leash on our emotions. It keeps anger aimed at the right targets, under control, and used for righteousness.

Consider two examples of ungodly anger. In Genesis 4, Cain became very angry when God accepted Abel’s offering but not his. His anger was essentially directed at God Himself. This was self-righteous, delusional anger. Another example is Moses in Numbers 20. God told him to speak to the rock and water would flow, but Moses, frustrated with Israel’s constant complaining, struck the rock twice in fury. He was right to be angry at their grumbling spirit, but his intensity was wrong.

Righteous anger, on the other hand, is anger at any violation of God’s law. It is not anger at the world for being the way God made it. Moreover, righteous anger is fitted to the situation. It is the right intensity at the right time. Sometimes you may be just in your anger but wrong in how you express it. That’s why James says, “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

Notice the difference with Moses when he came down with the Ten Commandments and saw the people dancing around the golden calf. God did not punish him for that outburst, because it was a right reaction. We see the same with Jesus: He drove out the money changers from the temple, and He looked at the Pharisees with anger because of the hardness of their hearts regarding the Sabbath. Scripture tells us, “Be angry and do not sin.” Like all emotions, anger is powerful, and it must be harnessed and disciplined.

I didn’t learn that quickly. Growing up, I had a short fuse. I wasn’t always angry, but when the pressure built, I’d snap like a twig. That’s one of the reasons I got sent to live with my grandparents in southern Indiana. They didn’t tolerate outbursts, and their discipline beat most of it out of me, but not all. Anger still lingered. By my teenage years, it was dangerous. I was bigger, stronger, and when I lost control, it could get violent. Then I became a Christian, and that changed things. My fuse grew longer. But once it burned down, the explosion was still there.

In marriage, that temper collided with Emily’s. Two angry young people under one roof makes for fireworks, and not the good kind. But about a decade ago, the Spirit convicted me deeply. Scripture elevates self-control as a fruit of the Spirit, not a personality perk. Emotional discipline is holy. It’s part of sanctification. From then on, I chased it with purpose. And over time, God answered. I still get angry at sin and injustice, as I should. But the old, explosive wrath has mostly died. Not by my strength, but by God’s grace.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t failed. Years back, one of my older boys was bullying a younger sibling, and I lost it. I yelled, punched a wall—and broke my finger. It could’ve been far worse. The wall didn’t give way, but my hand did. The tendon tore, the finger stayed crooked, and I decided to leave it that way as a reminder. A scar that preaches: anger breaks things. It breaks trust, relationships, bones, and peace. That bent finger reminds me every day that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).

Yet here’s the mercy: scars can turn into memorials. By God’s grace, as I’ve taken responsibility for my emotions, I’ve watched my sons learn to take responsibility for theirs. They still battle anger, it’s part of growing up as boys, but they’re mastering it years sooner than I did. Our home is increasingly marked by peace instead of rage. And that’s one of the best gifts you can give your family: a home where problems get solved with steady heads, where restraint is praised, and where your children are trained to face a world full of angry men and devils who want nothing more than to provoke them.

Brothers, maybe you have every reason to be angry. Maybe your dad was harsh, your mom overbearing, your mentors disappointing. Maybe the economy failed you, the schools lied to you, the church betrayed you. Your anger may make sense—but is it righteous? Is it rightly aimed? Or is it splashing acid on your wife, your kids, your church—destroying the very things you’ve been called to build?

Here’s the way forward: pray. Take your irritations to God. Sit in Philippians. Sit in Hebrews. Watch Christ. He flipped tables in righteous fury, but when mocked, He didn’t revile in return. He entrusted Himself to the Father, even unto death, for the sake of His enemies. That’s the pattern. That’s the air you need to breathe until the Spirit makes you like Him.

Maybe you can take a city. Maybe you’re powerful. Maybe even mighty. But you can’t hold it. You can’t keep it. Only the man who is slow to anger and rules his spirit can. The angry man may win for a moment, but his success is short-lived. In the end, he tears down his own house.

Lastly, let’s talk about addiction: a lack of physical discipline. Proverbs 31:2–5 says, “What, my son? and what, the son of my womb? and what, the son of my vows? Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings. It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.”

Addiction is the opposite of strength. It’s slavery. The proverb warns that rulers who give themselves to lust or strong drink forfeit their calling. Instead of discernment and justice, they inherit confusion and shame. And what’s true of kings is true of every man. God gave you a body to rule and passions to govern. If you refuse that discipline, the bottle, the pill, the bed, or the screen will rule you.

In Proverbs 31, you don’t just have the Proverbs 31 woman. you also have the Proverbs 31 man. He’s the man who listens to the wise word of the queen mother. He doesn’t give his strength to women, and he doesn’t cloud his judgment with addiction and alcohol. It’s a warning against being controlled by your desires—by your passions, by your consumption.

Addiction, in most cases, is simply a powerful, destructive habit. Men destroy their lives by giving themselves to pornography, to gambling, to drugs of every kind. The strength that should be spent on their wife and their household gets wasted on forbidden women. The money that should be invested in children and grandchildren is blown at the casino, on sports betting, or on foolish, expensive hobbies. The clarity of mind it takes to rule a home well, to see the needs of your daughters and sons, is ruined by drinking too much, abusing painkillers, or chasing more devious and destructive drugs.

Even time gets swallowed up. Hours that should be spent managing and leading the household are burned away on compulsive commitments like video games. There are countless ways this principle of wasted strength and clouded judgment plays out. We label them “addictions,” but at root they are powerful habits that can be broken.

And here’s the hard truth: a lot of addiction is nothing more than a way to avoid facing reality. It’s a manifestation of cowardice.
I grew up in a household full of addiction, and I came to see it most clearly through watching my father and siblings. Before I say anything negative about my dad, you need to know this: I love him with my whole heart. He has given me permission to warn people by using his story.

My dad was a gambler. He gambled a lot. There were times he even gambled our rent away. His gambling was one of the chief culprits that destroyed his marriage to my mother. As a boy, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just stop. But as the years went by and I listened to him, I began to realize something: he was weighed down by regrets.

We grew up in poverty. We grew up in deep need. I used to tape my shoes together and go to school like that, only to be mocked and teased. That wasn’t the life my dad wanted for me. I think in his mind, if he won the lottery or hit it big at the casino, he could finally give us what we needed. He could erase all his failures. He could erase all his regrets. But instead of facing those regrets honestly and dealing with them in biblical ways, he dug himself into a deeper hole.

That’s the nature of addiction. Instead of working on your marriage so that intimacy is restored, the man turns to pornography. Instead of learning discipline and budgeting, he turns to gambling. Instead of facing his regrets, he numbs himself with food, alcohol, or video games. Addiction promises escape, but what it really does is enslave you to cowardice.
I know the pull of regret because I’ve wrestled with it too. When I was 37—the same age my brother died—I had a recurring dream. In the dream, I woke up as my 19-year-old self. Life was simple then: I was strong, debt-free, leading Bible studies, and dating Emily. But in the dream, I carried all the knowledge of my 37-year-old mistakes—student loans, delayed children, wasted money, aligning with the wrong churches. And I thought, “Now I can fix everything.”

But then I realized: if I changed even one thing, I wouldn’t have this family. Not Hudson. Not Athanasius, Caedmon, Nicaea, or the others. To have them, I’d have to perfectly recreate my life—every stumble, every sin, every word. That’s impossible. And that’s where the dream turned to nightmare. I’d wake up in a cold sweat.

But the dream taught me something: regret is a tyrant, and nostalgia is a killer. Christ has forgiven my sins. God has used even my mistakes to give me the family and life I now cherish. I can’t go back, and if I could, I’d ruin it all over again. So I repent, trust God’s providence, and press forward.

Conclusion

I want to end with a tale of two men, a tale of two Sauls. They had very different beginnings and very different endings.
The first Saul was Israel’s first king. He began with humility, shocked that God would call him to lead His people. At the start, he looked like a man who might build something lasting. But the longer he reigned, the more the cracks showed. Pride, jealousy, fear, and disobedience ate away at his soul. He set up monuments to himself, disregarded the word of God’s prophet, and was consumed with envy toward David. Tormented and unstable, Saul ended his own life on the battlefield, and with him, the line of his household collapsed. His legacy is remembered not for the kingdom he built, but for the house he tore down. He is a cautionary tale of how a man can start well and still finish in ruin.

The second Saul we know as Paul. He didn’t start out well—his pedigree was impeccable, his zeal unmatched, but he used it all to fight against the very people of God. He dragged Christians to prison, even stood by in approval as Stephen was stoned. He was a man tearing down the household of God. But on the Damascus road, the Lord stopped him, knocked him flat, and remade him. Saul became Paul, a builder, not a destroyer. He planted churches, raised up leaders, wrote letters that still feed Christ’s people today, and became a spiritual father to many. Unlike the first Saul, this Saul finished well: he died a martyr, but he left behind a household of faith that still stands two thousand years later.

So look, it’s not how you begin, it’s how you finish. Maybe you stumbled out of the gate. Maybe apathy, anger, or addiction robbed your children of the father they needed. You don’t have a time machine to rewrite the past. But you do have today. You can repent. You can ask forgiveness. You can start building again. God’s grace is here for you, brother. His mercy is new every morning. He will strengthen you, and He will give you what you need to overcome sin and rebuild what has been broken. Don’t live paralyzed by regret, live remade by grace. You don’t have to finish like the first Saul. By Christ’s power, you can finish like the second.