News and Announcements

Bible study class for Wednesday, February 10, 2010 is cancelled and the office will be closed.

Please be advised that due to the snow storm, church school and church services at Metropolitan AME Church have been cancelled for Sunday, February 7. Communion will be served on Sunday, February 14.  Please spread the word.

Rev. Ronald E. Braxton, Senior Pastor, Metropolitan AME Church, Washington, DC
Sunday, January 31, 2010
www.metropolitanamec.org

Scripture:  Psalm 71:1-6: 71:1 In you, O LORD, I have taken shelter! Never let me be humiliated!71:2 Vindicate me by rescuing me!Listen to me!  Deliver me! 71:3 Be my protector and refuge, a stronghold where I can be safe! For you are my high ridge  and my stronghold.71:4 My God, rescue me from the power of the wicked, from the hand of the cruel oppressor!71:5 For you give me confidence, O Lord; O LORD, I have trusted in you since I was young. 71:6  I have leaned on you since birth; you pulled me from my mother’s womb. I praise you continually.

Life has a way of testing our relationships – with each other, and with God – and it spares no one.  It sometimes leaves us in troublesome, unsettling, difficult places where everything we depend on is turned inside out. We become distressed, and stressed.  But in the scripture, despite all the pain and devastation he is experiencing, there is no doubt in the Psalmist’s mind about his relationship with God.  Five times, the Psalmist refers to God as “my God.”  He knows that his relationship with God is the only REAL thing that he can lean on. 

Regardless of the type of storm you are going through, be clear about your walk, your relationship with God.  No matter what you are going through, be clear in your mind that God is undergirding you.  Jesus was very clear in the end about his relationship with God.  At the end, he said:  “You wait here.  I need personal time with my God.  I need to work this out with God.”  There comes a time in your life when only God and you can work it out. There comes a time when you need somewhere you can go and cry out: “My God! My God….”

God brought you through the last time; and He will bring you through again.  In his book, the Norwegian biblical scholar Sigmund Mowinckel takes a different take on Psalm 71; he suggests that the Psalmist is not necessarily in a crisis at the time of his writing.  Rather, Mowinckel’s take is that the Psalmist is seeking protection FOR THE FUTURE.  He is asking God to “be there for me the NEXT time, just like you have been my rock in the past”.  The Psalmist has CONFIDENCE IN GOD; he knows that God is the God of the next time; that God is the God of tomorrow.  Because of your relationship with God, there ought to be confidence that your God of yesterday will be your God of tomorrow. When you look back over your life at the last time the Lord saved you, you can be secure about the future. I put my confidence in the same God who brought me through the last time.

Be confident; praise God, and CELEBRATE.  Finally, Psalm 71 is not a lament, but a CELEBRATION of the God of the next time.  The Psalmist says: “My praise is continually of you…because you are God; you have known me from my birth; you have been there in my hard times”. He is saying, Lord, you have been my rock in a weary land. You woke me up yesterday.  You did for me what I couldn’t do for myself. I am praising you, not because of what you’ve done but because of what you are doing.  I am praising you for the next time.  The next time I can’t see my way, I want you to be my rock in a weary land.  And when that next time comes, you ought to be able to cry out:

Father, I stretch my hands to Thee,
No other help I know;
If Thou withdraw Thyself from me,
Ah! whither shall I go?

What did Thine only Son endure,
Before I drew my breath!
What pain, what labor, to secure
My soul from endless death!

The God who blessed you, who brought you through the last time will bring you through the next time.  When you look back over your life, didn’t He bring you through?  Didn’t He make a way for you? The same God who delivered you the last time will bring you through the next time. Be confident…praise God…and CELEBRATE.