Heart of Kings - David 20: Bathsheba

Second Samuel chapter eleven, verses one through thirteen.

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah.

But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.

And David sent and inquired about the woman.

And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Iliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?

So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.

Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.

Then she returned to her house, and the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, I am pregnant.

So David sent word to Joab, Send me Uriah the Hittite.

And Joab sent Uriah to David.

When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing, and how the people were doing, and how the war was going.

Then David said to Uriah, Go down to your house and wash your feet.

And Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king.

But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house.

When they told David, Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, Have you not come from a journey?

Why did you not go down to your house?

Uriah said to David, The Ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my Lord Joab and the servants of my Lord are camping in the open field.

Shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?

As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.

Then David said to Uriah, Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.

So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next.

And David invited him, and he ate in his presence and drank, so that he made him drunk.

And in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his Lord, but he did not go down to his house.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Welcome to Redemption Church Denver.

This is our very first, our inaugural 4 30 p.m.

service.

Thank you for joining us.

We did it.

We did it.

Yeah.

Clap the button.

Uh so yeah, church in the evening.

Things are getting crazy.

This is like the cosmic bowling of church.

Uh it's just like regular church, but more black lights.

Uh so we uh first off, before we get started, we ran into our first new 4 30 p.m.

thing.

Uh if you drive a gold Toyota tundra or Tacoma, uh, you're blocking someone in in Mako.

So go move that.

That was our first 4 30 p.m.

thing.

Uh we didn't do that in the mornings because there's nobody at Mako.

So exciting stuff here in the 4 30 p.m.

service.

Um got some really exciting things to announce to you uh uh for this morning.

Um but first one thing that we are changing with this move to the 4 30 service.

My voice is terrible because of Garth Brooks.

Yeah.

It is just has vanished.

I sang shameless, shamelessly.

Um so we uh uh one new thing that we are starting with the 4.30 p.m.

service is we are doing a call to worship.

So this will be done likely by a deacon or someone on the welcome team, and with two minutes to go until 4.30.

So at 4.28, if my math serves me correctly, they will stand downstairs on the stairs right here where you enter in the center, and they will say, There's two minutes, come up to the service.

Then you'll know to come up here to the service.

The purpose of this is we would like to begin with all of us here in the room.

And what we're going to begin our liturgy with is uh a prayer for our for our church.

We are now officially in our time, call it what you want.

This is our wilderness time, it's our exile time.

This is our, we got six months to find a permanent place, the clock is ticking, time.

So, what we're going to do as a church during this season is pray for our church body to begin each service.

So, we're going to have a call to worship and come up and do that to participate in that prayer with us.

Our church, our gathering.

This is a liturgy.

This is something that we do together as a people.

This is this can't be replicated by watching it online.

It can't be replicated by listening to a podcast throughout the week.

This is something that we're coming together as a liturgy, an offering that we do all together to the Lord.

And it is actually that worship that we do together that changes us.

It's our worship that changes who we are, that makes us more like Christ.

We change by worshiping.

Uh at the concert last night, 84,000 people losing their minds over a 90s country singer.

And I turned to my sister and I said, you know, we're meant to worship.

And she was like, Shut up, can we just enjoy the concert?

We so desire to praise.

We're we're having more fun than the people on stage because we're we're designed to be praising something.

And it's that act of praise, praising the right things that changes our hearts.

So that's why we gather here on Sunday evenings and we praise and worship together.

We're made into a body and we're changed by this act of worship.

So, all that to say, uh we're we're really aiming to be starting on time as a body.

This is not a this is not a show to be consumed.

This is an act of worship to participate in.

So uh I watched a video online about how to start uh uh how to do a better job of starting your church services on time and make sure everybody gets in the room.

And they said, don't announce it from the pulpit, because it'll just feel like you're braiding people.

So I decided to announce it from the pulpit.

Uh so with this change, we have a lot of turnover in our volunteers' capabilities.

So if you were in a rhythm of volunteering in the mornings, that's really been shaken up.

So we've developed a need across the board to repopulate our volunteers.

Uh the first place where this typically springs up is with our redemption kids.

Redemption kids is so important.

This is not just an opportunity for our children to be away so that we can be up here worshiping.

This is an opportunity to be forming the hearts and souls of our children while uh while ours are being formed as well up here.

So this is a generational impact.

We talk a lot about you know wanting to redeem the culture and see that Christ is interested in bringing cultural redemption.

Well, that's not something that happens just by us making better songs and movies.

That happens by us making people.

And that means we need to invest in a generational impact.

We we want to see our kids developed.

So, uh, a way that you can be a part of that process, a really tangible way, is by volunteering downstairs in Redemption Kids.

Uh, and you can sign up for that in the app.

If you download the app and tap connect, there's all sorts of things you can sign up for.

We need help with security in this transition.

We need help uh kind of across the board.

So please sign up for those things.

Um immediately following today's service, there's uh going to be ice cream.

Uh yeah.

I love how exciting that was to two people.

Um there's going to be ice cream immediately following the service.

Look, don't get used to it.

It's just the first evening service.

Um okay, now uh some some church polity, which is a place we're going to be living for quite a while.

Very excited to announce that next week our service will be dedicated to the confirmation of our first elder board.

You can clap, yeah.

That's great.

So uh this is these are the names of the elders who will be confirmed next week.

Thank you to everyone who participated in that process.

Uh it's uh it's a very exciting thing.

This is there's a lot culminating together here uh as our church moves into this next season.

And uh I think the Lord led us to precisely the people to lead us through this time.

So I'm very excited to be a part of that board and to serve with those with those people.

So uh after this series is over, we're going to be moving into a series on 1 Timothy, in which we are going to be covering a lot of what does eldership mean?

What does it mean to be a church?

Uh, and I'm just gonna preach a lot about showing up on time.

All right, there's so much going on.

My head is in a million places.

So uh, and you know, that's probably going to be more so the case as we meet at 4 30 p.m.

We decided to put our services right in the middle of the Sunday scaries.

So uh let's pray, and then we'll get into our text for today.

Father, I pray that you would open up our eyes to see your word, that we would trust that it is your word that shapes us.

Lord, by your spirit, would you apply it to our hearts?

We're here with open hearts before your word.

Lord, show it to us that we might be changed.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we're continuing on in our series on David, and part of what we're seeing in this study is proper interpretation of our own lives often relies on proper interpretation of the patterns of the stories in scripture.

And we've seen David move through a lot of these story patterns that God seems to use over and over again to show us the way that he moves people through their lives.

And we're at this moment, which has been honestly kind of a nice break.

The past three weeks, David's kingdom has been established.

We've seen God form a covenant with him and enter into uh it accelerate the covenants that he had made with Abraham and with Moses.

And we've seen David last week show an incredible kindness to his old enemies, uh, which is uh Jonathan's son Mephibosheth, who he brought to his table.

And so we've had a really nice break from what was for David uh a constant time of being on the run ever since having killed Goliath.

And uh now, today we're going to see this sort of uh moment of Eden have its fall.

The kingdom has been established, it's like we see a new creation start.

But today we witness the fall of David.

Into this wonderful new kingdom, sin creeps in into David's heart, and David ends up doing things that seem so different from what he had been doing before, and his kingdom is never the same afterwards.

It becomes corrupted in these horrible ways.

Today we're going to see David commit adultery, try and cover it up, and then commit murder.

All in the attempt of keeping his sin secret.

And in doing so, we see that this sin of David's becomes probably the most famous sin in the world.

So, we're going to look at David's adultery, David's cover-up, and then David's murder.

That's what we'll see in our text today.

So let's go ahead and jump into our story.

In 2 Samuel 11, verses 1 to 2 begins, and it says, In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah.

2 Samuel 11:1–2

But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.

So here's the context.

It's spring, and the text lets us know this is typically the time that kings would go out to war.

But David has not gone himself.

Instead, he sends his second in command, Joab, who has been with him for a very long time, and Joab is off at war, but David is back home in the palace in Jerusalem.

And the text says, It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof.

Here's the context for David.

It's the afternoon, he arose from his couch.

That means David was just sitting on his couch while his army was off at war.

And then the word that's used for walking is a word that means to just wander aimlessly, which of course must be true because he's walking on the roof of his palace.

That's not like how you get from point A to point B, is start on the roof.

So he's just what he's just walking around aimlessly, and then he sees beneath him a woman bathing, and the woman that he sees is very beautiful.

And he inquires who is this woman?

He's informed by someone in his own court that her name is Bathsheba, and she is the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah.

Eliam and Uriah are both or are each uh one of David's 37 mighty men.

This is David's SEAL Team 6, his elite fighting force.

And both this woman's father and her husband are in that team of elite men.

And David hears this, and then he asks for that woman to be brought to him.

There's two things that are happening here.

David sees that Bathsheba is beautiful, but that's not the only attraction that he has to her.

He also sees that the mightiest of my men who are off fighting a war for me right now are in some ways validated by her.

What if I were validated by her?

What if I was the one who, of my 37 men, your wife chose me, and your daughter chose me?

You see, this is not a purely sexual temptation.

This temptation is not just carnal, it's not just physical, it's not just that he sees her beauty, but it's also social.

David is for the first time at the height of his power.

And yet, in this temptation, we see this embarrassing insecurity of the king.

He has everything.

He is the king.

And yet, he still sees, you know what could make me more of a man?

If this woman, of whom my best fighters, she's the daughter and she's the husband of them, well, I'll take her and she'll be mine.

You see, these temptations are not just isolated to sexuality.

But there's a particular temptation of David here at his height, where he's still seeking this sort of validation.

We see this all the time.

It's such a typical story.

Jeff Bezos, the year that he becomes the richest man in the world, also divorces his wife because of adultery.

Loses half of it.

There's something about being at the top where the next temptation that someone faces is to throw it all away.

And so David continues on in this mix of wanting to slight his own men and affirm himself sexually with this woman, see her beauty.

And in 2 Samuel 11, 4, it says, So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.

Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness, and then she returned to herself.

So we need to see in this relationship that there's an interplay of power going on.

Because she excuse me, he takes her in the words, sent messengers and took her, and she came to him.

She responds of her own volition.

You know, it's typical often to see that there's a power dynamic at play here.

And the power dynamic that is at play is that David is the king, and he could summon whoever he wanted.

And so he summons her.

He's the one with the power, she's the one without the power.

So we have an oppressor and we have a victim.

But that's not the way the text lays the story out.

He takes her, but she comes to him.

There's a mutuality of engagement between David and Bathsheba because there's two types of power that are being exposed here.

The one is David's power as the king to be able to summon her, and the other is Bathsheba's power to undermine someone so powerful as the king merely by bathing in the right spot.

There are several parallels that we'll see as this story continues.

And one important feature of this story is being at the base of a castle's walls.

You don't go to the base of a castle's walls because that is where you are most vulnerable.

That is where you are most exposed.

And Bathsheba is bathing at the base of the castle's walls, where she is most vulnerable, most exposed.

She's bathing to be seen.

And so we see these two types of power exchanged and used to sin together.

Both of them conspire to sin against the Lord.

David's lust for power is in his gaze at her.

Bathsheba's power is harnessed in her exhibition.

Both of these things interplay.

This is a cautionary tale for men and women.

So in 2 Samuel 11, 5, it says, and the woman conceived and she sent and told David, I am pregnant.

And we know that it is from her and David laying together, because in the previous verse it says, Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness, which means that she had just been menstruating.

And so she is going through this process of purifying herself, which means she wasn't pregnant going in.

The text wants to draw our attention to that.

So there's no question in our minds.

Royal bloodlines are very important things, and so this needs to be called out.

David receives word that she is pregnant, and David does not respond to Bathsheba.

Instead, he immediately launches a plan for the cover up of his sin.

In 2 Samuel 11, 6 through 9, that plan starts to take shape.

It says So David sent word to Joab, that's the general who is in command of David's army.

And he said, Send me Uriah the Hittite.

Bathsheba's husband.

And Joab sent Uriah to David.

When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing, and how the people were doing, and how the war was going.

Then David said to Uriah, Go down to your house and wash your feet.

And Uriah went out of the king's house and there followed him a present from the king.

But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.

So the plan is: I got Bathsheba pregnant.

What if I got her husband back here and they slept together?

And then it would look to Uriah as though it was his child.

So he sends to his commanding officer, to his general, and he has Uriah sent to him, and he uh basically asks Uriah a bunch of questions, peppers in with all these questions.

And do you notice the way that uh the answers are recorded to uh Uriah's questions?

They're not recorded.

And that's because David is saying, like, yay, how's the war?

How's Joab?

Which is a very casual way to talk about a war.

How are all the people doing?

And uh yeah, great, great, great, great, great, great, great.

Hey, why don't you go down to your house and rest for the evening?

A big question for interpreters throughout this whole process is whether or not Uriah knows.

And to be honest, I'm torn.

Uriah's responses through this, I can't tell if he knows what's happening, but it seems as though he knows something strange is going on.

And so uh there is uh excuse me, I lost my I lost my place on this page.

Uh so he says uh to Uriah, go home and eat.

All of David's plan is based on this hope that Uriah will act as David has acted.

It continues on, 2 Samuel 11, 11 through 12.

And Uriah said to David, The Ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my Lord Joab, and the servants of my Lord are camping in the open field.

Shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?

As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.

Then David said to Uriah, Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.

You see how Uriah's reasoning is a direct rebuke to David?

It says, How dare I go back and enjoy a pleasant life when Joab, my commander, is in the field right now trying to besiege Rabbah, and everyone's living in tents, and we're having this terrible wartime existence.

How could I possibly go?

And not to mention, the Ark of the Covenant is there with us.

Do you remember the last time that the Ark of the Covenant was sent into battle?

It was early on in our study.

So this is like five years ago, I think.

We've been in this passage a long time.

No, it was early on in our study of 1 Samuel.

And it was the sons of Eli, that wicked priest, who took the ark into battle and that allowed the ark to be captured by the Philistines.

And the sons of Eli were subsequently killed in that battle.

But you know what?

At least the sons of Eli didn't send the ark out alone.

David sends the ark and he doesn't even go with it.

The ark is where the Ten Commandments are.

It's where God promised to meet with his people.

And David sends the law of the Lord away so that he can rest at home.

Well, Uriah doesn't go down, and David says, Remain here today also.

Tomorrow I will send you back.

And he brings Uriah to his own table, the table that Mephibosheth would have been sitting at with them.

And he his plan is to get Uriah drunk.

And maybe if he gets Uriah drunk enough, he goes down.

So the villain in our story remains sober while the hero of our story gets drunk.

The Bible is a strange book.

But David remains foiled by Uriah.

Because Uriah, even in his drunken state, is better than David sober.

Uriah won't go down to be with his wife.

Not in the midst of the war.

He won't act like David is acting.

Uriah is a Hittite, which means he's not an Israelite by birth.

He's a convert.

And when he converted, he likely took on a Hebrew name.

And the name that he took on is this name, Uriah.

And Uriah means to dawn or to illuminate.

You know, David chose a man whose name means illuminate to try and cover him in darkness.

It was a bad choice.

You don't choose the guy named Illuminate to help you hide.

So David switches his plan.

And he decides that his best case of action is to murder Uriah.

So in 2 Samuel 11, 14 through 15, in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it, get this, by the hand of Uriah.

In the letter, he wrote, set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him that he may be struck down and die.

So he sends by Uriah's own hand the orders to kill Uriah.

But he trusts that Uriah is such an honorable man that he won't open them, he won't look at them, and Uriah doesn't.

He takes them to Joab, and Joab executes the plan.

Now what's strange about the text as it carries on is that it gives almost, it gives just two verses to the actual description of how it is that Uriah is killed in the battle.

And then it shifts all of this, all of its emphasis to uh Joab planning how to tell David that Uriah has been killed.

What happens is we get this sense that Joab knows that David has done something terrible.

Joab knows this secret that David is trying to keep.

Well, there's a lot of messengers involved, and their seals are starting to leak in the kingdom.

And so Joab starts thinking very politically, and he's trying to think, okay, how can I send a message back to David that describes this terrible defeat that we've now experienced outside the walls of Rabbah?

And how am I gonna get David off my case for that terrible defeat, but still let him know that Uriah died?

And here's his plan.

Joab sent this and told David all the news about the fighting, 2 Samuel 11, 18 through 21.

And he instructed the messenger, when you have finished telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then if the king's anger rises, and if he says to you, Why did you go so near the city to fight?

Listen to this.

Did you not know that they would shoot from the wall?

Who killed Abimelech, the son of Jerubasheth?

Did not a woman cast an upper millstone on him from the wall, so that he died at Thebes?

Why did you go so near the wall?

So if David says that, then you shall say, your servant Uriah the Hittite is also dead.

That's the way you'll get David off your case.

Look at the example that Joab uses.

Joab uses this example from a battle that took place in Judges 9.

And in Judges 9, Abimelech goes too close to the city's walls, and a woman pushes a millstone over and kills him.

So he's killed by a woman.

He uses a story where he's killed by a woman too close to the wall.

Joab knows.

Joab knows what's going on.

So he uses this example to say to David, look, we're I'm playing this sort of political game with you because I can't trust you.

You're not the moral authority that you have been.

And it starts to seep through his whole kingdom.

Joab will take the city of Rabbah.

And you know what Joab says when he finally takes the city?

He sends a message to David and he says, You better get here quick, because I'm gonna name this city after me, and I'm gonna make myself king of this city if you don't come quick and claim it.

Why do you think Joab, David's loyal servant, had all of a sudden the, to use a Hebrew word, chutzpah, to do that?

It's because he sees that David is no longer the just ruler that he once trusted.

David's whole kingdom starts to fall apart here.

You see how this sin seeps into everything?

It colors every aspect of this kingdom.

We talked last week about thick views of grace and thin views of thick views of sin and thin views of sin.

This is a thick view of sin.

How this one sin creeps into every aspect of David's kingdom.

So Uriah the Hittite is killed.

Joab, in so many words, tells David that he knows.

The messenger comes to David and explains, just as he was instructed by Joab, and David's response to the failure in the battle, but the death of Uriah the Hittite is all of a sudden this sort of K Surah, Surah, what will be will be.

2 Samuel 11, 25.

David said to the messenger, Thus shall you say to Joab, do not let this matter displease you, for the sword devours now one and now another.

Strengthen your attack against the city and overthrow it, and encourage him.

David, the one who would once put himself in terrible harm's way, where he's totally outnumbered, because he thinks that God chooses who wins and who loses.

He trusts in the faithfulness of God to determine the outcomes of battles.

Now that David, in light of his sin, has had a complete worldview shift.

Now he says it's just chance.

There's no one determining anything.

There's no real moral higher order.

There's nothing that determines victory or defeat in battles.

It's just chance.

And you know what?

I think David is expressing a hope here.

He hopes that maybe if it's just chance, then the injustice that I have brought into the world is something that I can just cover up.

But if God is the one who's really in control, if it isn't just chance, then David must know that it would be illuminated.

Chapter 11, verse 26 to 27.

When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah, her husband, was dead, she lamented over her husband.

And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.

You know, he's not living in a world dictated by chance.

Because of that last sentence.

The story ends with a lament for the old husband, but he's dead, so we got married and a child is born.

A new life has started.

We got away with it, right?

But the thing displeased the Lord.

There's not chance.

You know, this story is an incredible cautionary tale, and it's a description of how sin corrupts every aspect of our lives.

You know, we want to be like Uriah.

We want to be honorable people.

We don't want to be like David is in this.

We don't want to be made into the type of person who is hiding and covering up and retreating from the responsibilities of their lives.

But this story of David's fall is a part of a bigger story.

A couple weeks ago, we looked at the covenant that God makes with David.

And the covenant that God makes with David is that he will uphold his kingdom, he will be with his offspring.

And do you know who he continues on the line of David with?

It's Bathsheba.

He continues on his promise through this terrible relationship between David and Bathsheba.

In Matthew chapter one, he begins his description of who Jesus is, Matthew does, with a genealogy.

And in that genealogy, he he lists all the people that were preserved in this line up until Jesus.

And he says, and this person fathered this person, this person fathered this person.

And in Matthew 1.6 it says, and Jesse, the father of David, the king, and David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.

Isn't that interesting?

See, what does God use to bring about and fulfill his promise for the redemption of the whole world?

God uses people as terrible and corrupt as David and Bathsheba.

And he doesn't gloss over how terrible and corrupt they were.

He highlights it in his genealogy of how he's going to bring that salvation.

When we zoom out and we see the bigness of this story, and we see the terrible nature of the sin that was brought in, we also need to see the utter unstoppableness of God's steadfast love to his people.

It should have been thwarted.

It should have been removed with such a sin as David and Bathsheba committed.

And instead, God uses that as the very means of his rescue.

So what do we learn?

What do we hold to then?

We learn that we we look for these examples and we pray that God would change our hearts to be someone more like Uriah than like David.

But then we learn beyond that that what is our only hope?

It is not in an earthly king like David.

Our only hope is to be constantly turning back to Christ.

Because it is only his steadfast love that is unstoppable.

Only he provides the hope for the world that can't be thwarted by sin.

Why do we keep getting let down by these earthly rulers, by these earthly kings?

It's to show us that Christ is our only hope.

And because Christ comes through a line that includes David and Bathsheba, because that's the line that God uses to bring him, then we can hope in the midst of terrible things.

Because the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

We hope in that in Christ.

You know, this is a low moment in David's life, perhaps the lowest.

One of them.

It leads to the lowest, at least.

This is a strange way to bring about the salvation of the world.

But it seems as though God really likes weird beginnings.

You know, our church has been through a lot in the past couple of years.

Through this transition.

Look, transition's hard.

And right now it can feel perhaps like okay, we've entered this six months, but where are we gonna be after this?

And where are we headed and where are we going and what does this look like?

And I only know two of the names of the elders, or I don't know any of them.

Where are we headed?

But I think when we learn the patterns of Scripture, God calls us to not neglect the day of small beginnings.

God can bring about incredible things, even from times just like this, where quite frankly, they're perhaps less certain that they're good.

Something that I've prayed for our church consistently is in Matthew 12, 20, Jesus is applying to himself this prophecy of Isaiah.

And it's describing him, and it says, a bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench until he brings justice to victory.

At this time in David's kingdom, the kingdom becomes just a bruised reed.

A smoldering wick.

And you know what?

Jesus perfectly uses those things.

No questions today.

Alright, would you pray with me before we move in to celebrate?

Holy Father, we praise you for your care, for your oversight.

Lord God, you have protected and guided and cared for us.

You've drawn close.

You've brought us into a place of consistency for the only length of time that we need it, which is for the present, for today.

God, I pray that you would work in our hearts to make us a people throughout this new season that trusts in you more deeply.

Lord, that holds fast to you and to each other, that you would build us up in love, that you would use this time to establish us as a church that is not a building but is a people, that is a movement for your glory in Denver.

God, I pray that you would move in this way, and we trust that you will, because we know that nothing stops your steadfast love toward us.

Father, I pray that we would see that above all, that we would take the rebukes of the story in David and Bathsheba, and that we would bring those into our lives, and that that would drive us to repent to you.

And above all, we would see your steadfast love demonstrated in it.

We trust in you.

We praise you, Lord, in Jesus' name.

Amen.