Sunday 06 • 03 • 18

Worshiper and yet, he experiences injustice in his own hand when he orders the death of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, in order that he might take Bathsheba for himself. Later in life, he experiences great brokenness and injustice when his son, Absalom, rises up in rebellion against him.

If you think about the life of David, his life was marked by incredible turmoil, incredible strife, incredible brokenness. And at the end of his life, when he's about to crown his successor, his son Solomon—his son from Bathsheba, by the way—he has this earnest, heartfelt prayer that his son's reign would be marked by peace.

My heart resonates with this prayer, and I know that for many of you, your hearts resonate with this prayer. I've increasingly, as I've gotten older, grown sick and tired of brokenness and injustice. Whether it's a function of getting older or improved media and social media, being more aware of what's going on in the world—I don't know. But in the evenings, when I get on my cellphone and scroll through the news feed, my stomach churns. I feel uneasy. I feel sadness. I feel anger. I feel frustration. I even feel it sometimes at myself because I look at ways that I contribute to some of the injustice that I see.

I'll be honest with you: I've lived a pretty privileged life. I don't really have a lot of personal experiences of injustice to complain about. But as I see the injustice in this world, as I come face to face with it, as I get to know other people who have experienced it more and more increasingly, I'm just frustrated and sick of it.

David was sick of it, and he prayed that God would give his son a life marked by shalom—fullness, completeness, righteousness, justice, prosperity, no longer brokenness. He prayed with expectation that God would give his son that. But he didn't just pray it for his son. He prayed it also for his kingdom. Having seen the way rulers and their unjust ways, including himself, had ravished the kingdom of God, he prayed this earnest prayer that God would deliver his people from rulers like himself, from rulers like Saul, that He would give them a ruler who would rule out of shalom, whose rule would be marked by all of the words of this prayer.

We see that in our world. We see that injustice, and we too long for it.

The Coming King

Spoiler alert: there's a reason for the title of this sermon series. Solomon wasn't the solution to all of David's prayers. He didn't find the fulfillment of all of David's prayers in his life. Solomon ruled, and he was a wise and just ruler, at least for the beginning of his reign. Over time, he got worse and worse, and it became clear that he wasn't really the solution for all of David's prayers.

The Jewish community, seeing that from a very early time, recognized Psalm 72 to be a psalm not so much about Solomon but about a coming king. They referred to it as a prayer for King Messiah. It is a prayer for Christ. We could go, if we had time, line by line through all of the different aspects of this psalm and see how Jesus fulfills all of them. We could see how only Christ is the one who can rule with justice and righteousness. He's the only one that's going to fulfill these lines.

Give to the king your justice... and your righteousness to the royal son. — Psalm 72

Who can claim to have the justice of God Almighty except for Jesus alone? Who can claim that except for Christ?

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor. — Psalm 72

Jesus alone can claim to have that kind of righteousness and justice in his administration.

Peace. Verses five through seven. Only Christ brings perfect shalom. Think about sin in the world—it's almost mind-boggling to think about how you address all of it. Sin doesn't go away. Once you commit a sin, it has an impact. That impact ripples. It expands. It impacts other people. And as it impacts other people, sometimes other people are prone to respond in sin and create cycles of sin where there's just continual injustice and war and strife and brokenness.

Jesus is the only answer for that. You can't bring about peace by bringing about more war.

Jesus Christ coming as a very human, taking on all of the sin of the world onto himself and taking on the penalty of that, and offering justice to all who would have faith in him is the only way to break that cycle. Him identifying with the oppressed, taking on all of the unjust suffering that he took on is the only way in which the oppressed can find relief and hope, and that they have a savior who himself has been treated unjustly. And yet while he was on the cross he said, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." Jesus Christ is the only king that can lead both the unjust oppressor and the unjustly oppressed into peace with one another. He's the only one that can do that because of his work on the cross.

Dominion

It talks in verses 8 through 11 about David praying that Solomon's dominion would increase not just to the nation of Israel but that it would expand to other areas. That it's not just the oppressed in Israel that would find relief but that the kings of other nations where others were being oppressed would come and bow before this new king. And that the oppressed in those far off kingdoms would find relief. He prayed for dominion.

Jesus Christ, his message has been spread the world around. It continues to spread. It continues to advance. It continues to find new converts every day. New people come to Christ and God's kingdom through Jesus Christ. Jesus's kingdom continues to expand. It's constantly growing. It's now the world's largest religion, Christianity. But more than that, every day a new heart—which is its own kingdom in and of itself—falls to its knees before our savior and lord.

The prayers of David have been answered in Jesus. They're being answered in Jesus. And at the end of time, when Revelation describes the worship service that occurs in the new heavens and the new earth, it says, "Every knee bows, every tongue confess. There are people from every tribe, tongue, and nation kneeling before Jesus Christ." His kingdom's dominion knows no equal.

Mercy and Prosperity

And what about mercy and compassion in verses 12 through 14? Jesus Christ is so merciful, right? I mean, read the gospels. He inaugurates his ministry by talking about how he's come to set the captive free, how he's come to give sight to the blind, how he's come to give relief to the poor, to the oppressed. That is what he came to do, and that is what we are. We are the poor and the oppressed that he's come and given mercy to.

And finally, prosperity. Christ has prospered. He's grown in glory and shares his prosperity with his people. But his prosperity isn't maybe what we thought, right? When David was praying this, he was thinking about the prosperity of a great king, right? And to be sure, in heaven, Jesus will experience prosperity beyond any earthly king. But his kingdom was inaugurated while he was on the cross. He was crowned with a crown of thorns, and the sign above him in his crucified state was "King of the Jews." That was the beginning point of his kingdom.

And has it prospered since then? Yes. It's prospered in that all of us have come into the kingdom. It's grown in its dominion as I said, but it's also grown in its majesty as more and more glory is given to him because of his finished work on the cross. More and more of our lives are grafted into the great story of his story, his narrative. More and more we come before him and give glory to his name.

The fullness of this prayer finds its identity in Christ. I'm sure that comes as no surprise to any of us. And here's where I want to charge us though: as we think about what does it look like to live life in this kingdom under this great king, our king Jesus, there are a couple things that I want us to see that we are called to do.

Called to Submit to the King

First of all, we're called to submit to the king. Verses 8 through 11:

May he have dominion from sea to sea and from river to river to the ends of the earth. May desert tribes bow down before him and his enemies lick the dust. May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute. May the kings of Sheba and Siba bring him gifts. May all kings fall down before him and all nations serve him.

That's where we first find ourself in this Psalm. We who are not mostly, I assume, Jewish, we are the far off kings. We are the ones who come with our individual kingdoms, with our individual desires to create our individual realms, with our individual even good intentions of building up justice and righteousness but fall short.

We must do what the Psalm calls us to do and we must fall down before the great king Jesus. We must submit to him. And what that means is that we have to let go of all that we have that we claim to be our own. We need to let go of our desire to be our own king and allow him to be king over us.

And this is good news. This is good for us because this means it's not on us.

It means that we recognize that we have a king who's greatly better at discerning what is just and what is righteous than we do. We can let go of all the wrestling through—how do we judge? How do we know what's right? What's wrong? How are we going to pull off justice? We don't have to feel like all of that is on us. We can rest and believe and trust that our great king is going to do that for us.

We can come before him and submit and say, "Lord God, I hand over all of our attempts to be just or righteous on our own, and we give them to you. We submit to you and we follow your plan for what justice and righteousness looks like." And that's so freeing.

One of the things that makes my stomach churn when I see injustice in this world is the sense of helplessness—how do I address it? There's also a sense of ownership, recognizing that some of this is my fault. But I'm freed when I recognize that I can submit to the just king, that I can enter into it and trust that he's at work in and through all that he's doing in the world. All that he's doing through me—even unjust me—he can work through.

Two Steps Forward

Our first step is that we must submit. We must bow down before him. We must recognize our inferiority and submit ourselves to his plan for justice.

Secondly, we need to live out the kingdom. There's a sense in which the kingdom of our Lord Jesus is already here and a sense in which it's not yet here. It is already here in the sense that Jesus has already died, he's risen, he's defeated death. He's given us justice. He's given us this perfect kingdom where peace reigns. Shalom is complete in him.

Yet there is also a sense in which it is not yet. There's still a news feed with lots of injustice. I still struggle with sin. There's still brokenness in my life. It's not yet. But we are called to live out of this kingdom that he's inaugurated, to walk in it, to speak of it, to rejoice in it.

Let me tell you what this looks like. It looks like those of us who have been justified in Christ not simply being satisfied with our status, but going into the world and seeking justice. And not seeing that as something we have to do out of guilt because it's on us, but seeing it as an opportunity that we have because we have been set free in our just king and given marching orders to go and, as Elliot said, kick Satan where it counts and take his stuff.

We're called to go into the unjust corners of this world to find and seek out brokenness. We're called to find the poor and the needy, the widow and the orphan. We're called to live out Christ before them and rejoice in the salvation and justification that we have, and offer that to others. We're not called to just sit on it for ourselves and preach it to one another. We're called to think about where it's not being preached. Where on that map, around the corner of this curtain, is the gospel not being preached? Where we can go and find systemic injustice, where we can find brokenness, and offer them the hope of Christ—because we know about a king and we know about a kingdom that we can offer them. We live in that kingdom. Our hearts have been redeemed and we can live out of that kingdom as we proclaim that gospel to others and as we live out that gospel in the relationships that we have with those around us.

This is our call, church of Jesus Christ. This is what we're to do. This is not something that's an obligation. It's a joy because we are in the kingdom of the great king, the one who has finally brought the shalom that David yearned for, that our hearts longed for. It is the kingdom that God has broken into this world through his son and offered to all of us.

And that's hard to do, isn't it? It's hard to live that out. It's hard to see those things as opportunity.

Let me give you an example of what it looks like. A couple months ago, I was here at the church working. Jeff Bradford was in his office working, and I'm kind of a practical joker. I don't know if you know that about me, but I decided to go in and scare Jeff Bradford. He didn't know I was in the building. I was going to jump into his office and say something like "boo" and he was going to freak out.

Well, I did that. When I did, I knocked the door back into the little shelf behind his door accidentally and knocked off this piece of pottery that his parents had bought for him in Jerusalem like twenty years ago. It shattered. I felt terrible. I spent the next three days online searching everywhere to try and find some sort of replacement from Jerusalem for this piece of pottery that came from Jeff's parents, hoping that somehow that would replace it. There was nothing that was going to replace that pottery.

I finally found something that was like $300 and I went to Jeff and I said, "Jeff, I'll buy you this pottery." And Jeff said to me, he said, "James, I want you to stop this right now. It's ridiculous. You know, that piece of pottery was valuable to me. It meant a lot to me but you know what means more to me? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and him crucified. And he has forgiven me and I in turn forgive you. The piece of pottery doesn't matter. I erase the debt because it's pinned upon Christ himself."

I felt so much relief in that moment. At that time, Jeff Bradford was living out of the kingdom. He was living out the kingdom in his life. We have the opportunity to do that and that's just one way that we can do it. There are so many different other ways that we can live out the kingdom. There are so many different opportunities that exist in this world.

Church of Jesus Christ, our call is to find them, to go to them, and to kick Satan where it counts and take his stuff to bring in the kingdom of light, to live out the gospel before the world. Just practically speaking, we can have great hope that God is going to work through us because the Bible says that the gates of hell cannot stand against us. So as we find situations of injustice, of poverty, of brokenness, we find people who need to hear the gospel, we can have great confidence that Satan can't stop us because Christ, our great King, is leading us into this.

There's a great hymn, "Lead On, O King Eternal." And the verse of the song says: "It's not with swords loud clashing or roll of stirring drums but by deeds of love and mercy, the heavenly kingdom comes."

There are all sorts of different opportunities for you to get involved in deeds of love and mercy in this church. We have all kinds of different teams that have been established by our deacons. There are all kinds of initiatives. We have Safe Families. We have a refugee ministry. There are rescue missions that we're connected to in this church. We have a relationship with Mount Pleasant, an African American church in the Southeast, and they're doing a soccer ministry advancing the kingdom, advancing the gospel in places where it's not been. There's the care team. There's the missions team. There are all these different opportunities for you to get involved in.

We've just hired Dax Palmer to be our director of development. He's helping lead with this and we just ordained three new deacons and they're helping lead with this and we have a host of other deacons. But it's not on them. It's not just up to them. It's not just their opportunities, it's all of our opportunities.

The church will not be the church until each of us recognize that Jesus is our King and that we have residency in his kingdom and we start living that out in our individual lives. Because, as many opportunities as I just listed off that we have as this church, as many missions opportunities as we have, each of you have more. Just next door. In every sphere of your life, there are cracks and crevices of darkness and injustice that King Jesus would call you to go into boldly and confidently.

Yes, we rejoice that we have great leaders and they're here as a resource to you. Jesus himself sent them to encourage you. But don't let them take your ministry away from you. Live out your calling as believers in Jesus Christ and livers in his kingdom.

Worship

And finally, I want to call us to worship. The Psalm series is meant to ultimately get us worshiping, get us rejoicing. The end of this Psalm, verses eighteen and nineteen, says:

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever. May the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and amen. — Psalm 72:18-19

This is a song of worship. Even though David was praying it out of eager expectation, he was praying it in faith, trusting that God would fulfill it.

The most beautiful worship service that I have ever been to was a funeral service in Philadelphia. When my late mentor, Terry Trailer, passed away, there was this incredible service and it was so beautiful because it wasn't sad. We were sad to be losing Terry but it was beautiful because there was so much hope and expectation. So much hope and expectation in that worship service.

I can think of another funeral service that I've been to recently that was similar. Funeral services, if they really are Christian funeral services, are filled with hope and expectation. Why? Because what we experience in this life—all the injustice—that's not where our hope is. Our hope is in heaven with Jesus Christ himself.

And we can be assured that the kingdom that is already advancing will be complete in the not yet. And we will celebrate for eternity with our great king.

And when we gather for worship on Sundays, we should reflect that. We should rejoice in that. We should mirror that to the watching world. We should worship because we have a great king—a king who can address all of the injustice, all of the oppression, all of the heartache, all of the brokenness, all of the lack of shalom that this world can throw at us.

He can address all of it, and he can take it all on himself, and he can restore all of it, and he promises to do that, and he will. Amen and amen.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.