Let us turn to our Bibles to 1st Timothy chapter 6. 1st Timothy chapter 6. As you know, I’ll take a larger section of verses that are related and then occasionally drill down into some of the verses. I want to drill down into verse 15, 1st Timothy 6, 15. Let us listen attentively to the Word of God.
This is speaking of Christ. He who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Let us pray.
And so here, Lord, we read of this great doxology in which Paul rejoices and extols your name on high to the young pastor Timothy. And it’s recorded with us and for us today by the power of the Holy Spirit to encourage and strengthen us in our walk as believers to know that you are not only our prophet who instructs and guides us in the will of the Father and our priest who intercedes for us day by day, but also our King who protects and guides and governs us, our Lord and Savior. And there is a kingdom and we are in that kingdom.
We pray for the full revelation of that kingdom to come quickly, Lord. And as we learn this truth anew, may we be, we pray, strengthened to stand firm, to be bold in the power of your Spirit. Amen.
There was a movement in the 80s known as the carnal Christian doctrine. It was a way of theologically justifying people who made superficial claims of being Christians but were never really committed to Christ and so they lived a life of debauchery. They claimed to hone in on Jesus as priest, insisting that that was all that mattered for the believer.
Christ died for their sins. Their moral debt was discharged, they claimed. Now they can decide to follow Jesus as their Lord or not and follow his will or not.
It did not matter. There’s another theological claim that acknowledges Jesus as Lord of salvation but not Lord of the world. His reign is only and ever invisible in the hearts of believers and within the church.
Any talk of Christ’s reign or rule outside the church, some teach, is only for the future millennium and not really for any benefit of the church. Both positions misguided. Jesus is priest and Lord and that should be preached to unbelievers.
But as Lord, he reigns not only in the church and in our hearts but across the entirety of the cosmos, right here and now. And not just a little, but a lot, all of it. Our Lord exercises this dominion and might even now as we hear this sermon.
So let’s learn exactly what that looks like, his rule in our lives, the kingdom of God. First, I want to offer a short summary of what it means for Christ to be our Lord and King. This is from this description here in the Larger Catechism question 26 that I use or Shorter Catechism question 26 that I use this breakdown of my sermon.
So it asks, how does Christ execute the office of a king? Question 26 of the Shorter Catechism. Christ executes the office of a king in subduing us to himself and ruling and defending us and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies. So from there I get two points, about us and about the enemies, right? Jesus subdues and defends us and secondly, as our king, he restrains and conquers his and all our enemies.
Jesus Christ Our King Subdues and Defends
So for the first point, Jesus our king subdues and defends us. Christ as king is an important point, important theological point. The prophecies of the Old Testament under the reign of David is one of the classic passages that remind us of this fact and is a proof for this.
2 Samuel 7, in which prophecy is given to King David. I will set up your seed after you who will come from your body and I will establish his kingdom, we read. He shall build a house for my name, verse 13, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
I will be his father and he shall be my son. If he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men. But my mercy shall not depart from him as I took it from Saul whom I removed from before you.
And your house and your kingdom shall be established forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever. So a few things are mixed in there, of course.
That is, it speaks of the immediate posterity of his children, such as Solomon, that he will discipline them, and he does. But he also emphasizes what? That it will be forever. Your house, that is your rule, your kingdom, that’s the way they spoke back then, will be forever.
That clearly points to an eternality of a king that will last forever. And that is Jesus Christ. Psalm 2 7, and this is a glorious psalm.
This is God speaking to his son. Clearly a prophecy of the Son of God becoming man and our king. Because he’s in eternity with the Father.
And they make an agreement, as we know, the covenant of redemption to save his people. And part of that is Jesus becomes a man, not just the God-man, but a God-man that is also prophet, priest, and king, and a ruler. And that’s this language here.
I will give you the nations for an inheritance and the ends of the earth. That’s what a kingdom, that’s what he’s talking about. That’s what he’s describing.
He will control and rule all these things, and indeed he does. The New Testament expresses this fulfillment in many and sundry ways. I will just highlight a few of them.
Peter, in his Sermon on Acts 2, speaks of this, referencing of David speaking to my son, that is Jesus Christ. But other texts are also explicit as well. Speaking of Christ having a kingdom, Ephesians 5.5, it describes the kingdom of Christ and God.
2 Peter 1.11, the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. If he, and indeed he does, have a kingdom, and Peter and Paul and others describe Jesus as having a kingdom, that it is his kingdom, what does that make Jesus? A king. The language in 2 Peter, of course, is Lord, the everlasting kingdom of our Lord.
It’s just another title. He has all the titles. He’s called a prince, a king, a lord, a master.
They’re all his. And Jesus, in his reign prophesied of old, fulfilled in his person and work 2,000 years ago, didn’t just stop there. He’s reigning right here and now.
It’s not a future reign of 1,000 years. We are in the millennium. 1 Corinthians 15.25, we read of this.
In this language here, we talk about the resurrection, Paul does to the Corinthians. We read, he, that is Jesus, must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet. So it’s an ongoing description.
He must, and he continues to do these things until it is finally fully manifested and revealed to the whole world, and he has all his enemies under his feet. That’s the second coming of Jesus Christ, when it’s fully accomplished and fully revealed and seen by all and nobody can deny it. In fact, we know from the other text of the Bible that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess.
That’s a picture of submission to a king and a kingdom. That’s the context of his rule for us, and indeed is ruling right now. He must reign until he has put all enemies.
So he’s continuing to do it right here and now. But what does that reign look like? We got the text. It says that he doesn’t specify here in 1 Corinthians 15 what that looks like.
What does that mean that Jesus is reigning now? Are we expecting to have a throne for him to sit on it? Some people teach that in the future millennium, that he will literally sit in Jerusalem in the temple. Some even teach that people will bring sacrifices to him. They’re going to reinstitute the sacrifices.
That’s not the case at all. On the other hand, people have a tendency to think that his rule is completely invisible. There’s no way you can ever really see it.
It’s just simply in your heart, and you believe, and that’s sufficient. But it is seen in the church, especially, and it’s subduing and defending us. This is a way in which we experience and manifest it to ourselves and the world that Jesus reigns over us.
But before I get into him and the description here of him subduing and defending us, I want to give an explanation, a theological breakdown of his reign. The way we describe his reign in theology from the biblical text and what that means for us. So his reign is both divine and mediatorial.
His reign is both divine on the one hand and mediatorial on the other. By divine, we mean that as God, because the Son of God, the second member of the Trinity, had always existed. He is God as much as the Father and the Holy Spirit.
He reigns and rules. He was there at the beginning and sustains all things. John 1, of course, as we know, the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
That’s the divine. He was always divine. He’s never less divine now that he became a man.
But the mediatorial emphasizes the fact that he is man as well. He’s God and man. The language of theology is he’s the God-man.
One divine person and two natures, man and God. In that mediatorial reign, so you got the word there, mediatorial, because he came to mediate and to be our Savior, to emphasize the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that he came to earth. There was a difference and he became a man that wasn’t there before.
Hence the New Testament era. That mediatorial reign, here is the God-man, has two parts to it, the universal reign and the particular reign. Divine, mediatorial, mediatorial, universal and particular reign.
Universal reign is his rule over all things in creation. Ephesians 1.22 we read, and he, that is the Father, put all things under his feet, that is the Son, and gave him, Jesus Christ, to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. As God, Jesus already had all such authority, so what’s going on here? The difference is, now he’s the God-man.
He’s fulfilling Psalm 2 that we read, I will give you the nations as your inheritance, as your kingdom, and now he is head over all things. And not over all things in just kind of a vague way, but in a very specific way. He gave him to be head over all things to or for the sake of the church.
Because his mediatorial rule is for his church. He’s not mediating for the unbeliever, the unregenerate, the non-elect, he’s mediating for his people. And so his universal rule is for the sake of his people.
And it says, to head over all things to the church. And then, that’s the universal reign, but there’s a particular reign of the God-man, and that’s over the church that we think of typically. The church reflects and shows the kingdom of God.
That is the clearest manifestation of his rule on this earth. So that’s the theological construct, the way of describing this category of Christ as king, specifically his mediatorial rule and reign, that’s what we’re going to get into in the remaining parts of this sermon. The creational, that is his divine, is just assumed he sustains and holds all things in providence.
So he subdues us. He subdues us. That’s strange language, I suppose.
And again, given the American scene in which it’s all about free will, and I have to decide, the Shorter Catechism uses the word subduing, and I think that’s a very good word. Because we are lost in trespasses and sins, yes, but that lostness is more than that. We are at enmity with God.
We had hatred outside of redemption. We who were at one time not saved and now are saved, when you were not saved, you didn’t want anything to do with God. It wasn’t just passive.
When it was brought up, you actively stayed away from him. You didn’t want to go to church. You didn’t want to hang out with Christians.
You didn’t want to read the Word. It’s not like you’re lost in the dark. We should feel pity for you in that sense, as though you just need a little more illumination.
There is an aggressive resistance to God, and he has to, therefore, as he’s designed things in creation, he will overcome you by his sovereign power. He will subdue you and change you. 1 Peter 2.9 is one way to describe this.
But you are a chosen generation, we read, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. We didn’t call ourselves. He called us, and when he calls us out of darkness, that harkens back to the picture and the theological claim that God brought light into this dark world.
Genesis 1, and in John 1, the Gospel of John. So it’s omnipotent, creational power that has come upon us and called us from death into life, from darkness into light. It’s the power of God into salvation.
Bestowing saving grace upon us as priest and king, of course. Acts 5.31, we read, To him God has exalted to his right hand to be prince and savior, to give repentance to Israel, forgiveness of sins. So there, we read, both offices are being exercised by Jesus for our redemption.
So in other words, salvation is not just Christ the priest, it’s also Christ the prince. Now, today when we hear, use the word prince, at least perhaps I do, I think, well, that’s not the king. King, prince.
That’s not what it means back then. It’s prince with a capital P. He’s using, we have this often in the New Testament, the Holy Spirit uses all kinds of titles, titles of royalty to show that Jesus has it all. He’s king of kings, lord of lords, princes of princes, masters of masters.
And it emphasizes, of course, that this is a powerful thing that he’s doing, to give repentance, the omnipotent power of the Holy Spirit to grant us regeneration and repentance. That’s subduing us. Because without God’s grace upon us, we simply resist.
And defending us, as king, Jesus Christ subdues us and defends us. Matthew 28, 18-20. Matthew 28, as you probably recognize, is where you’re going to read the Great Commission.
Verses 18-20. And Jesus came and spoke to them, that is, the apostles and the disciples, saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.
And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. What do we read here? We typically think and read and run across this, as I did, I’m sure. Right to verse 19.
Go therefore. You must not stand still, but go and do God’s will. Make disciples of the nations, baptize them, teach them, and disciple them.
But all that is done based upon what? Fact. The fact of verse 18. Jesus says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.
I’m not just an earthly king, I’m a divine king. It is Jesus, as the great prince, the great king, the great lord, the majestic one, with all power and might and royalty, commanding his church, in particular the church officers, the apostles there and the preachers now, to herald his coming and of his kingdom, to warn people, call repentance, and to encourage people of the greatness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. John 17.2 As you have given him authority over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as you have given him.
All power, again. A simple, raw power. In the American system, we think of power as democratic.
It’s the majority in other words. This is the old fashion description of a king and a monarch. What we would call an absolute monarch in political theology or political philosophy.
Colossians 1.13, another classic passage. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into what? The kingdom of his son. Of his love.
Conveyed us. Carried us. Because of what? His power and protection in defending us from the devil.
That’s this idea of defending and preserving us here. He has the power to do it and he does do it. And he does it through calling us from the darkness.
He does it by discipling us, by baptizing us, by teaching us to observe all things. That’s how we’re defended and protected. A spiritual deliverance.
And in particular through the church ordinances. You get this from the larger catechism. I think that’s question 45.
On Christ’s office as king. Officers. Pastors, ruling elders and deacons.
Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12. Those passages we’ve gone over. Heard many times.
God gave officers in the church for our good. To help us. They’re a blessing, we’re told explicitly in Ephesians 4, 11 and following.
That God ascended on high and gave gifts to men. Those gifts being church officers. And they are given to us to defend us.
To preserve us. To show us Christ. Laws.
Requirements for the church and church members to follow. Isaiah 33 22 emphasizes Christ as the lawgiver. And that’s what he is.
The lawgiver is the king. Remind you again that in the ancient Near East and overall the whole world for thousands of years, the king was also the judge. You may have individual judges like you had in Israel.
There’s a judge here and there’s a judge there. But it would work its way up to the courts of the king as you recall in 2 Chronicles 19 and the king was at the head of that for appealing. And that was common back then.
You might have lesser magistrates, lesser judges and on its way to the king. In other words, the king was a judge. The judge was a king.
The great judge was the great king. We have a distinct and separate system. That’s not what it was.
It’s not what it is in Christ. It’s not distinct. The same man, Jesus Christ.
The same God man, Jesus Christ is both. And he has given us his word, his will and the word of God to rule, to subdue, to protect and to guide us. Censors.
The church censors as well. That’s church discipline. Matthew 18 is that classic passage.
1 Corinthians 5 is the one which the Corinthians were not dealing with the bad marriage issues there. And they’re supposed to. And so these things, note here, the officers, the laws, the censors are unique to the church.
They are church censors. They are church officers. They are church laws.
Although the laws include laws that the rest of the world have to follow. The Ten Commandments. I mean, it’s not just only Christians you shouldn’t murder and lie and steal.
Everybody has to do that. But there are specific law things, that is, for example, the law or the commandment to what? To worship him on his day, the Lord’s day, the Fourth Commandment, the sacraments, baptism, the Lord’s Supper. That’s part of his ordinances or laws or commands for us.
The world is not supposed to have baptism unless they repent and become a Christian. They’re not supposed to have the Lord’s Supper either. So that is uniquely ours.
But there are there these things, the officers and the censors, in particular are more outward forms. You can see the pastor, you can see the ruling elder and the deacon, the things they do. The church discipline that’s done, if sins are serious enough, they have to be dealt with in a public fashion, are outward means to help us with our spiritual growth.
They are outward manifestations of Christ’s rule and reign as king, which is to say visible manifestation of his kingdom. And this has significant import in the American scene because we have this interesting approach in some circles of Christianity where they severely downplay the church. That’s just the outward stuff.
Real Christianity, the real rule of Christ is in my heart, and you can’t read my heart, but God can, and that’s good enough. So I don’t want anything to do with this church membership, this church baptism, this church whatever, although often by God’s grace, thankfully they still believe in baptism, but there’s a lot of this it’s invisible, it’s invisible, it’s invisible and you can’t really, church officers aren’t that significant. Why do I even need them? Because I have the Bible, I have Christ and I have my heart, I’m born again.
And there’s degrees of that in my experience. And that is simply wrong. We see it again, over and over again.
God has literally given us outward ways of expressing his rule, exercising his rule. The church is a visible institution. Officers are visible institutions.
Censors are visible activities of discipline of God’s kingdom. That’s Christ our King who subdues and defends us, and has given us these tools for our growth as Christians and believers. Jesus Christ, the second point, our King restrains and conquers as well.
Jesus Christ Our King Restrains and Conquers
He restrains the enemies of God. It is question 45 of the larger catechism. How does Christ execute the office of the King? As you know, the larger catechism is much longer.
I’m not going to go through all of it. I’m taking a little bit of it. We read, part of the answer is, powerfully ordering all things for his own glory, and for their, our good.
Or your good. Powerfully ordering all things for his own glory. What does that echo? I hope it reminds you of Ephesians, where it says he’s Lord, he’s head over all things, to or for or unto the church.
And they specify ordering all things. Romans 8.28 is a good passage in this regard. And we know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.
And if we believe that God is sovereign over all things, when he says all things here, he means all things. The good and the bad. The small and the grand.
Are directed by the mediatorial rule in a universal sense. Talk about the universal rule and the particular rule, for your good. It’s directed for the good of the church.
And a concrete way of expressing this, because it’s very broad, right? The Confession, the Catechism says, powerfully ordering all things for his own glory, and for your good. Ordering all things like what? The fact that you have police protection. That you have a stable government instead of chaos and war.
That would be part of all things, wouldn’t it? And that would be certainly for your good, isn’t it? The good of the church. That’s part of his mediatorial rule. It describes it here in our Confession, summarizing what the Bible clearly shows that Christ is not just Lord and King for the church, over the church, but over the whole world for the good of the church.
Question 191 of the larger Catechism with respect to the Lord’s Prayer, what do we pray for in the second petition? In the second petition, which is Thy Kingdom Come, acknowledging ourselves and all mankind to be by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan, which is to say under the kingdom of Satan, we pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, and it continues on through a few other descriptions, and that he would be pleased to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world as may best conduce to these ends. So here we have again another description of his power in the world, the kingdom of his power in all the world to be redirected towards the good of the church. We would say as best conducive, they say conduce in the old KJV, to these ends.
Of course, he’s the great wise one, so he knows what’s best for us. It’s very broad language again as it is for the question 45 of Christ’s rule, and it’s right out of the Bible in Ephesians 1, all things, his head over all things. We read elsewhere his kingdom was over all things.
He’s ruling right now, reigning until he has all his enemies under his feet. It’s very broad language here, but power in all the world as best as conducive, conductive, helpful to the end of growing the kingdom. It says best conducive to these ends, these ends being the list that just went through, the gospel propagated, the kingdom of Satan destroyed, all his power and might over all creation is directed towards these ends.
And one and part of that list, as I use as a summary of many, many Bible verses, and I’ve gone over a lot of Bible verses, part of the summary of this petition, the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer is that countenanced and maintained, countenanced and maintained by the simple man. That is, that God, Jesus Christ, the God-man, would direct and guide things, not just the church itself, but things around the church, because we live in an environment, we can’t get around it, we need money, we need people, we need resources, we need some kind of protection at times, or we’re going to go to heaven real quick. All these things as best for the kingdom of God and to protect his church.
And the proof text for this is Isaiah 49, a classic proof text, that God, the God-man, Jesus Christ, is mediatorial rule, not just as God, but as the God-man. King shall be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers, and they shall bow down to you with their faces in the earth, lick up the dust of your feet, and you will know that I am the Lord, for they shall not be ashamed to wait for me. Kings as foster fathers, and their queens as nursing mothers, which is what? A picture of nurturing, protecting, protecting what? You! You as the church there in Isaiah.
That God has used, and he has, we know historically, here and there, protected the church by the magistrate protecting the church. We pray that God will preserve the church, yes, but God does that through means, and one of the means is he gives us a stable government with police protection, with medical help and the like, and that’s certainly helpful for the church. You want that, I want that, we have it now.
So I want to put that in the context, that this is part of his rule and reign, it’s not just this narrow idea of being in the church and preaching the gospel. Imagine how hard it is to grow a church in the middle of a war zone. You don’t, people flee war zones, that’s what typically happens.
How about drug infested inner cities with high crime, etc, etc. The churches shrivel up and they eventually leave. We see this over and over again.
Death threats that are unfortunately carried out, very relevant today. Restraining evil, in other words, is a tool and a method by the God-man, Jesus Christ, the mediator, not just people can say, yeah, well, as God he does all these things, yeah, but it’s as the God-man, what we teach, what the Bible shows. Giving him power, well, he didn’t have it before, he didn’t as a man.
The man part could change, but he’s always been God. And that man part means there’s the church, there’s mediation. But the way to describe this rule over the world and over the kingdoms and over your county for the good of your family as a Christian and good of the church, the language I use is the indirect manner of supporting and preserving the church.
It varies by time and circumstances. In early America, for example, we had a much more hospitable environment for the church, didn’t we? We actually had Sunday laws and companies wouldn’t think twice about making you work on Sunday. I think that’s a good thing.
We have blasphemy laws. So these are conducive and helpful ways which helps the church and Christians, because we know how strong peer pressure is upon kids and adults. And you don’t want to hear these things and you want to have access to worship God and being with the saints.
And that looks a little different here and a little different there, of course. At a minimum, we want peace and safety and security. That’s what we’re supposed to pray for, as 1 Timothy 1 reminds us.
Pray for our magistrates to maintain peace and purity. And that we not have death threats for being a Christian and saying what is true. Now I’m not saying it’s going to happen all the time.
We’re especially blessed. That’s a prayer. That’s something to work for.
And if that’s something to work for, that’s a good thing. We want just laws and swift punishment and freedom of speech, even. It is not wrong, therefore, to work in secular matters as a believer, your job and maybe work in politics on the side I know voting is the minimal thing we can always do to these ends.
Because we want to have a conducive society for the church to grow and to be able to preach and not to be shut down or shot down. And that’s not wrong. It’s not ungracious.
It’s not being too aggressive by using secular power for good ends. That’s another way of looking at it. But of course, by secular, I don’t mean evil.
I just mean non-church power. I don’t have power to enact a law. The secular government does.
It just means common. The old word is common. I don’t mean godless secularism.
That’s what we maybe have to find another word. That’s what I mean. And they don’t have to be Christians.
I want them to be Christians. I want to pray for them and preach to them if they let me. But if they’re going to take and protect the church, amen.
I’m going to work to that end. That’s a good end. And we should not be ashamed or afraid to use power for good, godly ends.
Don’t we want to stop abortion? You’ve got to use power. You pray and God’s like, keep praying, but you’ve got to keep working. That’s part of sanctification.
That working would be to exercise power to shut down evil. So Christians can help. It’s not just being a church officer is the only true way to be in God’s kingdom.
You’re in God’s kingdom working in the secular realm. And even if you’re a magistrate and you can do things that will be helpful to the church, often indirect, but still helpful nevertheless. And we should not look down upon that, but be thankful for that.
That at all levels the magistrate would suppress evil for the good of the church. And lastly, conquering enemies. Conquering enemies.
The language here of Psalm 2, 6 and following is pretty broad. Yet I have set my king on my holy hill of Zion to exalt him. I would declare it a decree.
The Lord has said to me, You are my son today. I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession.
And you shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall dash them to pieces like the potter’s vessel. Now therefore, be wise, O kings.
Be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve the law with fear and rejoice with trembling. Who is he talking to? The kings of the earth and the judges.
They’re called to serve the Lord and to submit to him lest they be smashed into a thousand pieces. That’s something again to work and to pray to that end. So he conquers.
He conquers by conversion. He conquered our soul and subdued us. He conquers us providentially by bringing punishment upon those who harm the body of Christ.
Acts 12.21 is a famous incident. So on a set day, Herod, arrayed in royal peril, sat on his throne and gave an oration to them. And the people kept shouting, The voice of a God and not of a man.
And then immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give glory to God. And he was eaten up by worms and died. But the word of God grew and multiplied.
Well, that’s interesting. He didn’t preach. Why was the word of God multiplying and growing? It’s the next verse.
But the word of God grew and multiplied. Of course, it’s not the words that the Bible kept multiplying. It’s shorthand for saying it’s power and might went out in more and more conversions by the word of God, by the speaking and preaching of the gospel.
In the context of what? The civil magistrate, in this case, being removed was for the good of the church. And if that’s true for a bad leader, how much more is it true for God raising up a godly magistrate to defend and protect all the more to pray for? And of course, the final way in which he conquers is the final judgment. When Christ Jesus shall return, 2 Thessalonians 1.8, in flame and fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power when He comes in that day to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe because our testimony among you was believed. Is Jesus Christ your Lord and King? He already is whether you acknowledge it or not. It’s best to acknowledge it now and submit to Him.
Pray for the protection of our bodies and souls for the good of the church. Pray for more to submit to His righteous rule especially among our leaders. Let us pray.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, glorious three in one, we’re thankful for your Son not only being a priest and a prophet, but a King who rules and conquers and subdues us and protects us. Our God and Savior, may your kingdom continue to reign and rule and may you reign and rule over the nations themselves and guide them so that they would make a good conducive environment for the gospel to grow, for Christians to be protected, to live a peaceful life. We ask these things by your glorious namesake.
We pray. Amen.