Forgiveness arrives and so do consequences. Pastor Adam gives four hard-edged instructions, and notes what David does that his servants find incomprehensible: while the child lived he fasted on the ground; when the child died he got up and went to worship.

Pastor Adam preaches Psalm 51 by asking whether anyone should be forgiven, and treats it as a real question. The pastoral core is the part after forgiveness: a believer who has been forgiven and cannot function as though they have.

Nathan tells a story about a stolen lamb and David pronounces sentence on the man who did it. Pastor Adam notices that David’s moral judgment is working perfectly — it is simply not pointed at himself — and that the parable is a mirror held at the one unavoidable angle.

At the time when kings go off to war, David stayed home. Pastor Adam builds on that one clause, on a legitimate season of rest curdling into stagnation, and on the fact that a plan for temptation has to exist before the moment rather than during it.

Pastor Adam spends a whole message on Bathsheba before returning to David, noting the text never blames her and that Matthew’s genealogy declines her name, calling her the one who had been the wife of Uriah, keeping the wrong in view generations later.

The series opens well before the roof, with a king finally at rest in a house of cedar. Pastor Adam begins with what three decades of struggle produced — and with the fact that settled rest, a genuine blessing, is also the condition David is in when everything turns.