Teach Us to Number Our Days
Notes
Transcript
Handout
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger,
and your wrath according to the fear of you?
So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!
INTRODUCTION:
Today is my 40th birthday.
And the world starts viewing you in different ways according to that age.
Ways that I am not prepared for.
Because I still feel like a kid.
I can still remember running around being a little kid and now my children are becoming adults.
Ryder just turned 21, Phoenix is about to be 15 and Magnolia will be 14 later this year. It is a bit disorienting, confusing and at times sad.
Because it makes me very aware that life is fleeting.
I’ll never experience these moments again. I’ll never be young again. My children will never be babies again. We are all relentlessly moving forward. Time marches on.
That is what happens in this world.
We are born and we start to grow physically stronger and mentally stronger, but at a certain point we start to decline.
Our bodies become achy and frail.
We remember less even as we experience more.
And no matter how hard we try to dismiss it, or avoid it, all of our lives are heading toward their inevitable end—death.
No matter our background, accomplishments, or strength, death awaits us all.
CHUNK #1 THE REALITY OF DEATH
Psalm 90:10 reminds us of this
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
We don’t enjoy thinking about death—and for good reason. The Bible calls death our final enemy. Yet it doesn’t shy away from talking about it. Instead, Scripture emphasizes its inevitability in a broken world.
We on the other hand, have made death distant and sterile. Hospitals and nursing homes have removed it from everyday life. But it wasn’t always this way—historically, death was common and close. Even children knew its reality. Take for instance the song "Ring Around the Rosie.” It was sang during the plague by children who were very aware that they could be the next ones to catch it. Death used to be common and close.
But we want happiness, not grief. Which makes happiness this vapid, wobbly leg concept and grief this unnamed monster under our bed which only increases its power over us.
We strive to build legacies that outlast us, ignoring the fact that most of us can’t even tell you our great-grandparents’ names.
We avoid death because it makes us acknowledge the thing that we fear the most, the world goes on without us.
Psalm 90 refuses to let us ignore death.
Forcing us instead, to face it—so that we might find hope in God.
CHUNK #3
This is the oldest Psalm that we possess. Written by Moses to God toward the end of his life.
And think about all he had gone through prior to this prayer.
He had taken Israel all the way to the promised land and was now not allowed to go in.
The thing he had worked toward for 40 years, he would never receive in this world.
Think of all the hard decisions he had to make during that time.
All the friends he lost.
All the people he buried.
Talk about someone who must have been grieving.
He could have been bitter, he could have been angry, he could have turned his back on God and never talked to Him again. But he chose to trust God.
Showing us that we might not be able to control everything that happens to us in this life, but we can choose how we respond.
And through this prayer, Moses shepherds us toward perspective by inviting us to do three things.
Contemplate our mortality.
Count our days wisely.
And Commit our works to God.
So let’s take those one by one.
Throughout history, memento mori was a call to remember death. It was a concept utilized by Greek philosophers, and Stoics, so that they could face death with bravery.
But this specific latin phrase, was popularized by the church as a reminder of God’s Word in Genesis 3:19,
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
In fact the Hebrew word adam or Adam, meaning man, is very close to the Hebrew word for ground, adamah. So God reminds us that the adam, which was created from the adamah will return from whence he came.
This is echoed throughout Scripture, most notably in the book of Ecclesiastes.
Where Solomon, the writer of the book, says this,
For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.
BUMMER.
Man and beast are the same, except for one distinct difference that Solomon mentions a few verses earlier.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
God has put eternity on man’s heart.
So often we attempt to ascribe worth to ourselves. Through our relationships and through the things we own, but our worth can be found in none of those things. Death reminds us of that.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return, but our hearts long for eternal things. Things that this world will never satisfy.
Our worth is found in whose image we bear. We are image bearers of the most high God with eternity on our hearts.
We long for more than this world can give us because we were made for more than this world can give us.
This is why Moses begins this Psalm in the way that he does.
Lord, you have been our dwelling place
in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.
Moses is giving us perspective.
Reminding us just who God is.
He is Lord of all and always has been even before He created a thing.
He has no beginning or end. He is from everlasting to everlasting. Which is another way of saying eternal.
A thousand years to Him is like a day. To put this in perspective America is about 250 years old, which is just a few hours in God’s time.
And then Moses puts the mirror on us.
You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
God is eternal, and humans are here today and gone tomorrow.
Like dreams. Like grass.
We have this tendency to make ourselves big and God small.
But Moses is helping us correct our perspective.
By putting our fear in its proper place.
In the book “When People are big and God is Small,” Ed Welch says “Anything that erodes the fear of God will intensify the fear of man. And Fear in the biblical sense…includes being afraid of someone, but it extends to holding others in awe, being controlled or mastered by others, worshipping others, putting your trust in others, or needing others too much.”
So if we have a limited perspective of God, we can have an unhealthy and unrealistic attachment to others. Which is the source for so many of our relationship problems.
Nowhere does God appear more important in our lives, than when we contemplate our deaths.
CHUNK
And you might ask, well if tomorrow we die, shouldn’t we all just do whatever we want today?
The apostle Paul says this in response
Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.
There are people in this world who do not know God. So if you know Him, you have a responsibility to live lives that show Him.
I love the way Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message,
Since God has so generously let us in on what he is doing, we’re not about to throw up our hands and walk off the job just because we run into occasional hard times. We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don’t maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don’t twist God’s Word to suit ourselves. Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open, the whole truth on display, so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves in the presence of God.
Brothers and sisters, if we are not living differently from the world around us, refusing to wear masks and refusing to play games, why should they ever pay attention to us?
And that is what Moses continues to pray,
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
Moses is saying, help us to not only remember our death, but to remember the reason that we die.
It is our sin.
Our whole world is tainted with sin.
The wrath of God is being revealed against sin.
The wages of sin is death.
Stop playing around with sin Christian.
Scripture tells us to flee from sin. Like it is a loaded gun ready to take us out.
But we like to get as close to the gun as we can hoping it won’t go off.
We are playing a dangerous game.
We need to stop playing around with sin.
Sin is so cosmically damaging that God stepped out of glory to judge it and defeat it.
Jesus became dust to defeat sin and death.
He became dust to redeem dust.
Such boundless grace.
Acknowledgment of our sin sets us apart from the rest of the world. As we confess it, we demonstrate our need for Him. And we humbly position ourselves to receive His grace.
Sin has eternal consequences. But so does knowing God.
He has called you to be holy, because He is holy.
He has set you apart to live a life that will help others know Him.
What you say and do and how you act has eternal ramifications. God is making His appeal through us.
One commentary on this Psalm says it like this,
Exalting Jesus in Psalms 51-100 Live Today for What Lasts Forever
When you know God is eternal and you know your time on earth is limited, then you make each day count for that which will last in eternity. You realize that how much money you make doesn’t matter; what matters is what you do with the money you make. You realize that the people around you are far more important than the things on your to-do list. You realize that, as a parent, the most important thing in the lives of your children is not the clothes they wear or the sports they play or even the grades they get; what’s most important is that they know God.
In your own life you realize that knowledge of God and obedience to God are far more important than the achievements you accomplish and the positions you attain. You also realize that every person in your life—at home, at work, in your neighborhood, in your city, and around the world—is either headed to an everlasting heaven or an everlasting hell, and the only difference is what they do with Jesus. So you speak about Jesus. That’s how you live today for what lasts forever.
So when we contemplate our mortality, it allows us to count our days wisely, which helps us to commit our works to God.
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
As Moses ends this prayer, he gives us permission to grieve. “Return O Lord, How long? Have pity on your servants.”
Your servants is a covenant designation.
And the covenant that God made with Moses is found in Exodus 19:5-6
Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”
Spoiler alert: Israel does not keep the covenant. If you have not read Exodus, Deuteronomy or Numbers, sorry.
But God does keep the covenant.
Because we serve a covenantal God, not a transactional God.
The temporal covenant that God made with Moses was eternally fulfilled in Christ Jesus.
The Mosaic covenant was centered on the law.
Both moral (like the 10 commandments)
and ceremonial (like rituals and washings).
And Jesus fulfilled them both perfectly. He fulfilled the law.
Which is what He says He came to do in
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
The people of Israel had to perform consistent rituals and sacrifices to be in good standing with a righteous and just God.
But their rituals and sacrifices were only a temporary substitute for the once and for all sacrifice God made in Christ.
He became for us what we could not become so that we might become like Him.
Holy, righteous, perfect, eternal.
That is who you are in Christ!
This is the grace of God.
This is what Moses asks for.
We see it in the next verse,
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Steadfast love is the Hebrew word “chesed,” which is best translated as grace.
Satisfy us in the morning with your grace, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
We cannot work to earn grace. That is what God showed us when He took the covenant upon himself.
And that is the only right way to commit our works to God. By continually remembering His grace.
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
And that experience of grace saturates the rest of Moses’ prayer.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!
Grace doesn’t just meet us at the finish line; it walks with us through every uncertain step we take.
Grace gives us joy even in our grief.
Grace gives us and our children the ability to see the glory and power of God at work all around us.
And grace establishes the work of our hands.
Through the grace of God, Moses knew that there was hope beyond this present moment. He knew the goodness of God despite the ugliness of death. He knew there was something more. What Moses knew by faith, we know by name.
We know that grace has a name.
That mercy has a name.
That goodness has a name.
That all of our eternal promises find their hope in that name.
Jesus the Christ.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
So, my prayer today is that we would contemplate our mortality, by remembering we are dust.
That we would count our days, making each one count for eternity.
That we would commit our works to God, trusting in His grace—not our strength.
Because death is real brothers and sisters, but His grace is greater.
May we live like it.
(Let’s pray)
(PAUSE)
So I want to do something a bit different today.
I want us all to go ahead and get communion and bring it back to our seats.
I just spoke of the Mosaic covenant, but I want to talk about the new covenant that Jesus instituted with the Lord’s supper.
And if you are not a baptized believer, that’s ok, I invite you to just observe rather than partake this morning. I will give everyone a minute to get back to your seats and then will speak the words of our Lord over us.
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
