This post is my personal reflection of a sermon I prepared. You can also download the message: God is Present and Powerful to Bring Us From Our Darkness to His Morning

Rouault - Landscape

I was originally just going to post a summary of the sermon I gave last week on Psalm 46, but then got to thinking. This venue has a little more freedom and even different expectations than a person sitting in a church on Sunday. So I think it would make more sense to give kind of a background of what I am wrestling with in light of the message I gave. Kind of like me preaching to myself.

Last week was the first week of Advent, and did not want to miss out on tying in the whichever text I chose to anticipating the coming of our Lord, looking back at the anticipation the birth of the Messiah. I was originally going to preach from 1 Tim. 1:15:

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

I had done a message like this before and planned on using a lot of previous research, saving some time, but also excited to present it in a new way. And this is an excellent text for Advent, God taking on flesh, leaving the perfect love of the Trinity, coming to this earth, hanging out with those who do not want Him, but coming with a plan – and following through with that plan – saving sinners. But God had other plans with me for the sermon.

The more I was reading in my own devotional and prayer life, the more I felt God directing me to Psalm 46. It’s a psalm that most people know or have heard before, especially part of verse 10:

Be still, and know that I am God.

But in wanting to do justice to the text as I have studied it, it seemed the climax of this psalm, and therefore the sermon, was in verses 4 and 5:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.

The dawning of the morning is what all creation is waiting for and longing for and this is the climax of the psalm. It’s in Jesus, in His coming to the earth, making all things new, taking the disorder and creating order, taking all that’s crooked and wrong and making it straight and right.

You can also download the message: God is Present and Powerful to Bring Us From Our Darkness to His Morning