Kings of Summer – The Battle of Virtue and Vice

Christ invites us to reign with Him by ordering our lives through His grace.

Summer offers us a needed time of relaxation for time with family and leisure. But, if we are not careful, we can let down our guard spiritually. If we fall out of our rhythm of prayer and discipline, it will be harder to pick things back up when summer has ended. While we relax and embrace leisure, we can also stay vigilant, finding a restful balance in the struggle against sloth and pride. The battle of virtue and vice never relents, but the Lord still invites us to enter into his rest.

We will follow the stories of the Kings Saul and David in 1 Samuel, looking at how they responded to God’s will but also fell into sin. God called them both to serve his people. Saul fell into prideful disobedience, while David, despite his failures, remained a man after God’s own heart. Their examples help us to take in the ultimate stakes of our daily battle and how we can rightly order things within and around us in a kingly fashion.

Kingship may seem distant and remote from our daily lives, but kings are men who lead, seeking to create order and stability for those who depend upon them. To be a successful king, it is necessary to be a man of virtue and integrity. Supporting our biblical exploration of kingship, therefore, we will look at the practical example of the great Christian kings as models of holiness through the fulfillment of our duties. These are men of the world: fathers, who cared for others and fought battles, striving to follow the Lord in the joys and

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What to Expect

Together, we will feast and fast with the universal Church

Imitating Christian Kings

Like the kings of the Old Testament and throughout Church history, we can exercise vigilance, fight the necessary battles against vice, and lead others. Kingship may seem foreign in many ways today but kings model handling the responsibilities of life either in faithfulness to the Lord or badly by giving into one’s selfish impulses.

Keeping Discipline over the Summer

King David provides our model this summer as we look at his own descent into acedia and his eventual reemergence. We will be reading through Second Samuel, looking at how David rests in an unhealthy way after his triumph as king, taking his eye off of the battlefield and his family and turning it where it should not go, toward Bathsheba. This leads to chaos and even rebellion in his own family that eventually wakes him up to the need to engage in battle, both interior and exterior.

Cultivate a Habit of Leisure

While we relax and embrace leisure, we can also stay vigilant, finding a restful balance in the struggle against sloth and pride. The battle of virtue and vice never relents, but the Lord still invites us to enter into his rest.

The Virtues and Vices of King David

Second Samuel offers vibrant characters with whom we can relate. It offers an abundance of examples of virtue and vice, flowing from choices that Saul, David, and Johnathan must make in difficult circumstances.

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