Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.

I'm Dr. Dan Allender.

And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen.

We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.

And restoration for the heart.

Thank you for joining us.

Let's get this conversation started.

Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. Well, we have the privilege of having Dr. Chuck de Groote back with us to engage a number of the questions that you as listeners have offered. But before we launch into that,

let me just say that, you know, when we look at scripture, there's no direct category of

narcissists or narcissism. And yet, all you need to do is to look particularly in the

proverbs at the category of the fool. And you begin to see,

oh my goodness, there are so many overlapping categories. You see in the Proverbs that the fool is

impulsive, that there is this sense of deception, that there is a commitment to his or her own way and no other

way. There is a desire to, in one sense, wrap others up in their own violence. There's a deep

commitment to burning the house down to destroying anyone who stands opposed to them. So we've got categories clearly in the Proverbs.

If you just want to look at two chapters, Chapter 12, Chapter 26 in Proverbs, will give you a lot of

these remarkable, really revelatory categories about the nature of what it's like to engage a fool,

or in this case, a narcissist. But Chuck, Rachel, here's the difficulty. Proverbs 264 and 265.

264 basically says this.

If you confront a fool, you'll become like him.

But the next verse says, if you don't confront a fool, he will be wise in his own estimation.

So you've got really a very playful conundrum and

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