JUN 23 2019 | Shame of Thrones: The Story of David & Bathsheba S1E2 | Bathsheba – It’s Complicated

Sea Change Church · Shame of Thrones: The Story of David & Bathsheba · "Bathsheba - It's Complicated" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · June 23, 2019
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning. Transitioning my hat to the scripture reading today. How do you, there's no backstage. This is how we do here, folks. This is how we do. Okay, ready? 2 Samuel 11, 1 through 5. In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, but David remained in Jerusalem. One evening, David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Iliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. Now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness. Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David saying, I am pregnant. The word of the Lord.

Thanks, Chris. You do it all. I know. Winning. Like a leopard thing going on. It's awesome. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we just love your word. I want your word just to be so radiant in this church. That's the wisdom we lean on. It's the hope we lean on. We love your word. And so bless it. Let us open our hearts to it, our ears to it. Let it fall on fertile ground, fertile soil. Take root in our lives and change our hearts. In Jesus' name, amen.

We are in one of the most well-known stories in human history. It is the story of David and Bathsheba. And it's part of the shame of thrones. And we've seen David, obviously, on the run. We've gone through the entire book, 1 Samuel. Here we are in 2 Samuel. And he has been on the run, and he did his best work on the run. He was the most faithful on the run. When he was running from Saul, when he was in the caves, when he was hiding in En Gedi, when he was fighting Goliath, when there was a struggle.

David did his best work. But now the time of struggle has ceased, and God has brought him into the season of blessing. A season where he has peace on all sides and freedom from all of his enemies. And what do you do with success? I said over and over again, I believe it's easier to live in struggle, even though it's very difficult. It's easier to live in struggle than it is to live in success, because struggle will immediately give you a purpose.

You have a purpose. You have to survive. But when you get out of that place and to live in your inheritance, living in the inheritance, the Bible talks a lot about squandering inheritance, is very difficult to do. And many people do not know how to manage the inheritance that they're given. If you look at different celebrities and stars, there is some statistic about professional athletes. Within just a few years of leaving the profession that they're in, they are broke.

How do you live in this inheritance? David gets to a point where he makes a decision that almost bankrupts him completely. He makes a decision that actually will have far-reaching consequences, and God rescues him from him. And it is one of the greatest stories of grace that we've ever seen in the Bible. God has incredible, incredible grace for David. And we're going to get into this idea of grace and repentance and forgiveness, because that's mostly what this story is about, although most people focus on the incident and not on the redemption.

And we have a tendency to do that in our own lives as well. We tend to focus on these, quote, Bathsheba moments in our life, and they don't all have to be in this genre. Or realm. But we don't focus often on the redemption and live in the redemptive work that comes after it. Now, we'll talk about how this decision has roots. It has consequences that David has to live with even after he's forgiven. And this is one thing as believers we need to understand, that just because God forgives us doesn't mean there won't be some time where we have to untwine or untangle, excuse me, the knot of twine in our lives.

And emotionally, physically, even spiritually, it takes a while to come back. And one of the things that we're working on here is how do we build a house? How do you build a home that is not based upon the foundation of your shame or the brokenness that has been in your life, but is on a new foundation, which is the foundation of Christ? How do we do that? And realize that it's not a microwave process. It takes years.

And as I look back, I think it's probably been about 30 years. I got sober 30 years ago. It's been about 30 years of house building to get to a place where I feel like God is beginning to solidify my house in the foundations of his love, in the foundations of his wisdom. And if we live according to the wisdom of God, the Bible's very clear that if you do that, that God will set you on a path and that all things will work together for your good.

Although even when we make mistakes, God can fix our mistakes. What is so interesting about the story of Bathsheba is most people know the incident with Bathsheba, but they don't know the end of the story. I asked at our staff meeting before the break, before we started the service today, how many of you know what happened to Bathsheba other than being the mother of Solomon? Does anybody have any idea what happened afterwards?

And other than that, I think one person raised their hand, but of the whole group, no one had an idea of what happened. Now with Bathsheba, the message today is called Bathsheba, it's complicated. And it is complicated. Not because of her, but because of David. David made an absolute mess of his entire household by this decision that he made. But the interesting thing is, not only is it one of the most well-known stories of all time, but the story of Bathsheba and what she does with her shame, because what happened was shameful for her to happen.

We're not placing any blame upon Bathsheba. We'll talk about that in a moment. But what happened was an immediate shame upon her and upon her family. And this is the thing, is she, if you read the rest of the story, never allowed her shame, or perhaps her victimization to define her. As a matter of fact, she has an incredible legacy that I want to share with you today so that you can know the end of a story and have the hope of a story that is changed and not defined by the most difficult and challenging moments of your life.

Question is when you think of a definition for yourself, and we all live, whether you're conscious of it or not, we have a definition of ourselves. God's beloved, unwanted, cared for, scorned, on and on. And we have these ideas of who we are. One of the things that the Bible, the biblical writers tried to do was to let us know who we are in God's eyes and to have to work from a place of a new definition. For you are a new creation in Christ, the scripture says.

How do we begin to live a life from a new definition? That you are not based upon what happened to you in college. You are not based upon the failure of a first marriage or perhaps a second marriage or perhaps even a third marriage or how they go. You are not defined by that, but can begin to build a new foundation on God's grace and upon the legacy of God. As Harry said a couple weeks ago, that our purpose, the challenge of our purpose is to understand who God has called us to be and who we are in Christ.

That's your purpose. Everything you do after that understanding is secondary to understanding who God has made you and who you are. And so my first question to you is, according to your definition, do you need a new definition? Do you need to take some time? Two, three days away. I just took a couple days away, took my daughter up to the mountains, and I spent some time just thinking about me and God. Giving yourself the time to think about the definition and how do you define yourself?

Sometimes we are unable to see without stopping and tearing for a while, like the word I used earlier, how we are building a foundation upon the lies that the enemy wants us to believe. Well, first of all, let's look at Bathsheba. And I want to do a character study of her today before we move on, because I could have just gone to the act, but I didn't want to go to the act. I wanted to go to the person, because behind every act, there is a person.

And God is always looking to get to the person behind the act. We live in a society that likes to look at the act. We live in churches that like to look at the act. What is right? What is wrong? And we lose our humanity oftentimes in that process. I want to say that God is looking to you in this moment. So the first thing is, who is Bathsheba? Well, it's interesting and it's ironic that her name means daughter of an oath.

It means daughter of an oath. It's interesting that this oath was broken not by her volition, but by someone who was in power, someone who knew better, someone who was much older than her. It is possible that Bathsheba is about 15, 16, or 17 years old at this time. She's married with no children. And so the reason that would be, because back in that time, one of the first things that you would do is have children, because a lot of, at this time, a family's worth was based upon their lineage.

This is why they had so many children. And having sons was a really big deal. And it was obviously a patriarchal society. But she did not have children, which points to the fact that possibly that, you know, her husband went to war, she was newly married, and possibly was in her teens, you know. And also we know that there's an age difference, because when David is so old, he can't even get out of bed anymore or keep himself warm, that she is able to still come to him, bow down, and is still living a very fruitful life at that time.

And so you have to picture her as a kid, actually a teenager. You have to picture, and I think that kind of changes our whole understanding of Bathsheba, and then looking at who she becomes. I don't want to give a spoiler, you know, to give it away, but we will get to it. Now, who was Bathsheba? Well, first of all, Bathsheba was the daughter of Eliam. Eliam, Iliam, everyone who pronounced it. He was one of David's mighty men.

David had a SEAL team. And if you read in the scripture, David had 30 to 37 men that are mentioned by name. And then it's really a fascinating, I would Google David's mighty men and read the scripture. It is fascinating. There's these whole stories of, like, guys that fight lions, and one dude who, like, fights 800 Philistines, and he's all by himself. And these incredible stories. It's like, you know, the Marvel comic movies that are coming out.

And he has these men that are incredibly loyal to him. Now, there's a three, and it always mentions, well, this guy was amazing, but he wasn't as good as a three. And this guy was amazing, but he wasn't as good as a three. Uriah the Hittite was one of the mighty men. But so was Bathsheba's father, Eliam. And if you look at Eliam here, you will see that him and Uriah were friends. Now, this is creating a bit of a mess because David goes and sleeps with the wife of one of his mighty men, who also happens to be the daughter of another of his mighty men.

This is not great strategy for business. The other problem is that the father of Eliam is Ahithophel. Now, if you know your biblical history, Ahithophel is the number one counselor in all of Israel. He is the guy that when you have an issue, you go to Ahithophel, and he will tell you what the Lord says. Now, you also have Nathan the prophet, but Ahithophel is up there. But what is interesting with Ahithophel is when David's son Absalom, which comes way after this and is a result of this event, Absalom, who comes from a different mother, not from a different wife, not from Bathsheba, turns on his father, and his father has to leave Jerusalem.

Actually, he leaves on a donkey on the same route that Jesus comes in, goes over the Mount of Olives. He would go down where it would be the, where Jesus, the Via De La Rosa, which is the road down to the Kidron Valley, crosses over the Kidron Valley where Jesus came, and then up the Mount of Olives on the same way that Jesus comes in peace. Ahithophel doesn't go with David when he leaves, when he's running from Absalom.

And we're going to get to that story next, and hopefully you're reading the scripture and you understand what I'm talking about. But Ahithophel stays and becomes the counselor of Absalom. Why do you think he did that? Well, probably because David, you know, committed adultery with his granddaughter, I'm thinking. That could be the reason. But when we have incidents in our life, there are far-reaching effects. Now, I want to put this in layman's terms because we want to be the most practical church in the world.

I think if I have one thing, I want to be really practical. Remember when you were in high school, right? So this would be the same as, you're the captain of the football team, and you have a star linebacker who's dating the prom queen. You cheat with the star linebacker's girlfriend, the prom queen, okay? Now, that's already a problem. Not knowing that the coach of the team happens to be her father. Now you have a real problem.

And you also forget that her grandfather happens to be the principal of the school. This is what David has done. This is exactly what has happened. He's the captain of the team, star linebacker, prom queen, football coach, principal. He is in an absolute mess. And we're going to talk in a couple weeks about what you do when you're in a fix, when you're in a bind. Because we all happen to have different things that happen in our lives, and how we react to those things will often define us.

How you react to your worst moments, your response to your worst moments, will define a legacy. You see people that have fallen, but their response was one of grace, and they were picked up because of that. God loves a great response. David doesn't have a great response here. Moving on. We want to question the text now. And this is really, really interesting. And this is a question that I had. I love questioning the scripture.

And I hope you ask questions of the scripture. And the questions that you want to seek out. I just saw A Case for Christ. I don't know if anyone has seen that movie. It was phenomenal. You know, there's a lot of Christian movies I've seen, and I thought, like, I hope no one sees that. Like, oh, I hope no one else sees that. Because that's kind of embarrassing. But this one was really, really good. And it talks about all these different questions.

And he is seeking to answer questions. One of the things I think Christians have stopped doing is asking good questions. Whenever you're having a discussion with somebody who doesn't follow Christ, I would say you don't always have to be the one that finds all the answers. Perhaps ask some great questions. And one of the questions that I want to ask of the text is, is God. Why did you use Bathsheba to honor her in the way you did?

Let me just read how I wrote it here. It says, why was Bathsheba... Oh, excuse me. Oh, I've questioned the text. I moved on real quick. Let me just go back one second. Apologize. Go to questioning the text. Was Bathsheba in any way responsible for this sinful act? The text puts no... If you look at the Bible, we want to look at the Bible. I mean, a lot of people have said, oh, she committed adultery with David. Actually, there's nothing in the Scripture that shows that she did anything to bring this on other than probably making a foolish decision of bathing on her rooftop.

Now, people have taken that and read into the text and say, well, she was obviously, you know, trying to be seen by David. The Scripture doesn't say that. We want to assume that she was innocent of anything. And obviously, David had a position of power as the king with this young girl. The devil obviously was the one who it falls upon. The next thing that we see is Bathsheba, as I said a moment ago, and I think this is the key for the day, is Bathsheba was not defined by her shame and she never identified as a victim.

Which I think is interesting. I think we are living in a culture that encourages people to take victimhood as an identity. Now, people are victimized, right? Jesus was victimized. But Jesus never took on the personhood or the identity as a victim. And while he was being victimized, even during the act of being victimized, Jesus was taking victory. You get to be very careful if you take on a position as a victim because victimhood brings on a lot of benefits.

And as you'll see, there's a lot of benefits. Obviously, people will rally around you. People will feel sorry for you. People will have pity for you, on and on. We're not saying that people who are victims shouldn't be cared for. They should have time to heal from that thing. But what we want to do is we want to create victors. And what we see with Bathsheba here is she was victimized, but she became a victor. As a matter of fact, to give you the spoiler alert, she became the person through which Jesus would come.

She became the very person that the line of Jesus would pass through. Now, here's another question for the text. Most people don't know that. Here's another question. And she's in the Matthew lineage of Jesus. Why would Jesus use this woman and a woman who had had this incredibly difficult thing, a woman who had been caught up in adultery, who marries the guy that victimized her and moves on, and David, you know, obviously this is the lowest moment of his life.

Why would God use her? Why would he not use, perhaps, Abigail? I believe it's Abigail, you know, the wife of Nahum. She was a great choice. David had many wives that the line could have passed through. But why did he use Bathsheba? I think that's a great question as we look into the text. As we say, I'm going to read Matthew 1, 6, that talks about the Lord's genealogy. After the murder of Uriah, she became the wife of David.

And this is out of Matthew 1, talking about the lineage of Bathsheba. The first died in infancy, so the child of the adultery died. But then she had other sons, and one of her sons was Solomon. Solomon obviously becomes the next king. You have to realize that all the wives of David are vying for their child to what? Become king. And you're going to see this as we go into the story of Absalom. Adonijah, his mother was Haggith, was trying to help get her son to become the king.

There was this rivalry. This is why you don't want to, you know, like Solomon, 700 wives. You know, you've got some issues going on there. And so they all wanted their kid to be the king. She had Shimei, Shobab, and Nathan. And then she is mentioned in the Lord's genealogy that she had been the wife of Uriah. That's so interesting. Here's the deal. So, 1,500 years later, and today, when you look at the record of Matthew in the scripture, and look, genealogy is a big deal to God.

Genealogy and how Jesus passed through, and the lineage, and the history of that. We won't get into all that. But it's a really big deal that proves the existence of Jesus and his work on the cross. In it, they don't skip over her. They don't skip over her. As a matter of fact, they validate her, and God uses her that the Son of God, that all redemption would come through the line of this woman. I mean, that is an amazing fact.

And if you have had something that has happened in your life, that you feel disqualifies you because of this thing that has happened, I want to say that the Bible is all about the redemption of the disqualified. It is all about the raising up of the lonely, the mending of those that are broken. And I want to say, perhaps you have put a discount coupon on your own identity. Perhaps you've looked and said, this disqualifies me, or this thing, or that thing, and you have marked yourself down in the eyes of God.

That God would say he wants to redeem your story. The entire scripture is about taking those that are broken, those that are downcast, and raising them up. I guess the question is, is do you want it? Bathsheba wanted it. And as we move on, why would God allow his son to be born through a family lying marred with betrayal, murder, and adultery? It's a great question. Here's the answer. Grace. I love grace. I hope you love grace.

Grace is on offer in abundance in the scripture. I know people want to focus on the rules of Christianity, but what makes the entire path viable is its grace. Grace that God says, no matter what you've done, you can come to the foot of the cross. No matter what has happened to you, you can come and be purified by the blood of Jesus. This is grace. And what does grace mean? Unmerited favor. It means that you get something that you don't deserve.

There is nothing you can do to merit the grace of God. God gives it because he's a loving God, and grace is in his nature. I'm going to read a couple scriptures here for that. First is Ephesians 2, 8 and 9. For it is by what? Grace that you have been saved. Through faith. That this is not from yourselves. It is what? It's a gift from God. Not by works so that no one can boast. In this story, you see the grace of God at work.

You see God taking probably the most broken of all the stories of David. Taking the wife, who perhaps could have been the most scorned, could have been a wife of shame, who he could have put away if he wanted. He could have put her in a tent, or he could have put her, because they had the ability to do that then, where he would never see her again and scorn her. But she has five sons by David. Probably more than any other of the wives of David.

There is perhaps, maybe Haggith had five as well. But she was well cared for in the line of David. It seems that David loved her greatly in the end. Redemption. This is the other reason why God would do it. Because God loves to mend that which was broken, find that which was lost, and redeem that which was taken captive. You know, all of us have something like that in your life. Perhaps it's your childhood. Perhaps you look back, and you just never had a childhood, because you were always on guard.

You always had to care for your family, or raise the kids, because your parents weren't able to raise the kids, so you were doing it. And as a nine-year-old, you were caring for four-year-olds. Or maybe you lost something that was taken away from you, or you've had this loss, or this brokenness. Or perhaps you just made decisions, and you have to own it, and say, I've made decisions. I'm the one who hurt people. I'm more of a David than a Bathsheba in this story.

And you just begin to own it, and say that I'm broke. I want to say, one of the best ways to come to God's vault of grace, is broke. Being broke, and just sitting before God, and say, I'm so broken. Thank you for your grace. I want to say, one of the beautiful things about grace, is you can't do anything to make it show up. You can't do anything to own it. You just have to receive it. It is unmerited favor from God, and redemption.

Joel 2.25, one of my favorite verses. And if you have a corpus of verses, that you live your life around, Joel 2.25 isn't a bad one. Joel comes to Israel, who has made decisions, and God has sent a plague of locusts amongst them, to destroy the crops, to destroy the fields. But then he gives a word of hope, a seed of hope, a shoot. And if you've ever, we learned about olive trees, and how hard they are actually to kill.

And you can chop them down, and try to kill them, and they can have no water, and you think they're dead. And then all of a sudden, they mention that you'll see, and amidst the big stump, will be this big, a shoot will come up out of the ground. I want to say that God wants to bring up, a shoot in your life, and maybe you have been torn down. You've been in a desolate land, a land that is thirsty, that is weary, that is longing for water.

And you're waiting for that shoot of hope. God gives this to Israel, and he says, I will restore to you, the years, that the swarming locusts have eaten. God is the God of time. And I want to say that he can restore to you, even years that were lost to you. I want to say, in the raising of my own children, God gave me my childhood back. Now I had a, look, we had some, some bits of it were ideal. It wasn't, you know, there's some bits of my childhood were ideal, but there was many bits of it, that needed redemption.

And I have to say that God is more than, but it's almost as if I were, had relived them, and got to quantify them by 10, by 12, by exponentially greater years than before. And as I look back now, what God has given me as I've raised my own children, is he's not only healed my own childhood, but he's brought it into a substance, and a reality that feels like it was different, than it actually was. I don't know if that makes any sense.

But if you've understood God's healing, and you've been a part of God's healing, you know that he can go back and heal, which was broken so much, that that broken moment of your life becomes redeemed. Or that you begin to live, and actually the moment that was your greatest hour of darkness, think Jesus on the cross, becomes the greatest moment of glory in your life. You see, the enemy wants to define you by the brokenness, and God wants to define you by the redemption.

He wants to define you by the mending. He wants to find those that are lost. He wants to heal those that are sick. And he wants to bind up the brokenhearted. Let's say God wants to heal you. And as you turn the next page, we see Bathsheba has a legacy now. And this is really interesting. Bathsheba has a massive legacy, as we come in for a landing here. Bathsheba has a massive legacy. First of all, she becomes one of the major voices in the entire Proverbs.

Have you thought about that? At the beginning of Proverbs, which most of them are written by Solomon, if not all, but most are written by Solomon. Solomon says, listen to the teaching of whom? Your father, and to the wisdom of your mother. Over and over again, he talks about the wisdom of women. It is actually believed that Proverbs 31 was a saying or written originally by Bathsheba. If you go look, Proverbs 31 talks about the godly counsel, the godly woman.

Solomon has a lot to say about women. And I imagine, as I've done the study, that most of what he had to say about women was being passed down from his mom, who was a woman. Because he says over and over again that wisdom cries out to you in the streets. She. And it calls wisdom a she. It gives women this high place that wisdom itself is in the feminine. That God calls out and over and over again, not only is Bathsheba redeemed by being one of the people that the line of Jesus comes through.

Imagine if through your lineage, through your children, that Jesus came through your line. That is a massive, massive honor. We see the same thing with Rahab the prostitute that comes out of the city of Jericho, which we were just, I saw it in the distance, not long ago. He has a prostitute. Jesus has a prostitute in his family line. He has this story in his family line. And not only if that wasn't enough, God says, I am going to take one of the greatest, if not the greatest books of wisdom in human history, and I am going to make you one of the co-authors.

Because Solomon himself says that these writings were inspired by his mother. Who's his mother? Bathsheba. Massive. Look at some of the things that it says. It says, Proverbs has a lot to say about women. Many believe that these sayings were inspired by Solomon's mother, Bathsheba. Proverbs 25, 24. Now this is an interesting one. Because if you think that this is written by a man, right, and this counsel just comes from a man, it's like, yeah, of course he's going to say that.

But if you think about who Bathsheba was, being with multiple, five to a half dozen to a dozen other wives, all vying to see who will be the king, all vying for David's attention, some of them very contentious, some of them causing upsetness in the home, then it makes a whole lot, it gives a whole different perspective. It says, better to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife. That could have been Haggith, whose son, as we'll see in a little bit, is competing for the throne.

Proverbs 3, 11 says, the wife of noble character, who can find? That, I gotta tell you, this is true. Men, this is true. A wife of noble character, who can find? She is worth more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. And one of the things that I've been trying to do and the Lord has really said to me, because the first 10 years of marriage, I was trying to fix my wife, you know, like, you know, I gotta fix them, right?

You know, you figure out your partner and you just gotta fix them. And then one day, like, I felt like the Lord said, do you believe your wife's godly? I'm like, yeah. Well, the scripture says that the husband of the godly wife has full confidence in her. When are you gonna start having full confidence in her? That changed the entire narrative of our whole marriage. Seeing my wife and saying, you know what? I trust that God, she follows God.

And the trust element went through the roof. And I gotta say, it brought so much more equity to the marriage. The husband of the godly life has full confidence in her and he lacks what? Nothing. Love it. Proverbs 120. Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud. Who? She. Raises what? Her. Voice. In the public square. Women. Teaching. Wisdom. And counsel. And finally, Bathsheba sits upon the throne. If you wanna know the end of this story, this is phenomenal.

It says, when Bathsheba went to King Solomon, her son, to speak to him for Adonijah. It's an interesting story. I suggest you read it. We'll get to it in the fall. The king stood up to meet her. He bowed down to her. The king of Israel bowed down to her and sat down on his throne. And he had a throne brought for the king's mother. And she sat down. Where? At his right hand. The right hand is a big deal in scripture. Sitting at the right hand.

Jesus sitting at the right hand of the father. Bathsheba now, 16 years old, called up to the king's house. Victimized. Adultery. Perhaps raped. Who knows? All of a sudden, God takes that story that she is not defined by it. She becomes the woman of Jesus' line. She becomes a woman who writes Proverbs that have lasted two millennia. And she sits on a throne and ends her life as a queen, so to speak, of Israel. This is powerful.

Do you think that your story of suffering and difficulty has more to offer than hers? Or it would be harder to redeem? Or is unworthy of redemption? I want to say God wants to redeem your story. He wants to build your house. And he wants to rise you up if you'll let him. If you'll redefine what is the definition of who I am. Amen? Amen. Let's stand if we would. I want to take a moment just to bless you today. One of the things we'd love to do is send you out with a blessing.

And I know after the blessing people start bouncing, so I want to give you a little heads up. We revamped our little food next door, so we got some awesome food. If you want to hang out, we want to just create a space. We're still working on that space over there, so check it out. And as we continue to do that, we want to hang out. Hopefully you spend some time talking, talking about the sermon. There are some questions at the end of the sermon you can sit and talk to people about.

We want to bless you, though, and give you a moment as Chris sings just to think about your story and talk to God. Just be honest. And if you need a new definition, I want to encourage you, go write a new definition of who you are. Don't let anybody define you. Don't let the culture define you. Don't let their definitions or their understandings or something that happened to you, a new definition of who you are and who God's called you to be.

Chris, just sing us through one time, and then I'll bless you. If you extend your hands, I want to bless you today. Lord Jesus, God, we thank you for this corner, God. We thank you for these people that hear a story of someone that was broke, that was mended and found and now sent out in redemption and will live forever, God, in the historicity of heaven, God, known as a person of wisdom, a person of grace, a person of royalty, a person of your very throne and the lineage of Jesus.

God, we want a new story. If you want a new story or the same story with another chapter, the next chapter will define the previous chapters and every chapter defines the previous chapter and the entire story hinges upon the next chapter. God, we want a new chapter. If you want a new chapter, say, God, I want a new chapter. I want a new story, Jesus. And I bless you now and I send you out of here with the grace of God and the courage of God that the tide of God may rush upon you that you would just find yourselves immersed in his grace and his mercy and his love and that this week that you would tarry, that you would have time to tarry, that he might tell you who you are.

We send you out of here, the beloved of God, the victors of God. We thank you, Jesus. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Hey, we love you. Go have a great week. Get some food. Go check out our food. We got some Kobani yogurt, all kinds of fun stuff. See you next week. Our Tuesday night.