God spoke creation into being, then made humanity from the earth and breathed it to life — the act that sets us apart from everything else he made. We were charged to care for creation and to worship alongside it.

Pastor Adam opens on sexuality with three readings rather than one, and the selection is the argument: humanity made male and female, everything made for its purpose, and what is plain about God from what has been made.

Romans 1 says God’s nature has been clearly seen in what was made. Pastor Adam takes that as a real claim about the natural world, then asks a question congregations rarely get: are you actually engaging nature as part of following Christ?

Pastor Adam returns to Psalm 23 and the observation that a shepherd does not run with his sheep. C.S. Lewis supplies the warning: take care when your outside is bigger than your inside — a structural problem, not a success story in progress.

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.

John sees a door open in heaven and describes the throne room. Pastor Adam opens on worship as a journey into what is actually the case, set against a moment where truth has been quietly reassigned to individuals as “your” truth.

God’s promise to David is almost entirely first person: I took you, I was with you, I cut off your enemies, I will give you rest. Pastor Adam does the arithmetic, then asks what you are aiming at, why, and whether doing more would answer the feeling.

The tribes make David king and cite not his lineage but that he led them out and brought them in. Pastor Adam builds on the difference between a king and a shepherd, and on the influence that comes from helping people win their own battles.

David finally moves, and the striking thing is that he asks first. Pastor Adam reads 2 Samuel 2 as a man refusing to chase a destiny already promised, with the mandate being only to seek, since revealing belongs to God.