Ps 90
Series: First Psalms
Title: Living Wisely When Time is Short
Text: Psalm 90
Introduction:
My favorite movie of all time is a relatively new movie titled, The Bucket List. Jack Nicholson stars as a corporate billionaire who meets up with an auto mechanic, played by Morgan Freeman, when they share a hospital room after both have been diagnosed with cancer. As their relationship develops in the hospital they come up with a “bucket list” – a list of things they want to do before they die. Their list contains things like: sky-diving, race-car driving, visiting the pyramids, climbing Mt. Everest, kissing the most beautiful girl in the world, going on an African safari, helping a complete stranger for a common good, witnessing something truly majestic, and laughing until I cry.
When they both go into remission, they take off on their journey, and accomplish many of the items on the list before heading home. Along the journey, they both find out the value of friendship, Freeman’s character, Carter Chambers, remembers how much he loves his wife after decades of being together, and Nicholson’s character, Edward Cole, discovers that all the money in the world can’t buy you as much happiness as being reconciled to your estranged daughter, and of course, kissing the most beautiful girl in the world, your granddaughter.
In the end, Carter dies and Edward gives the eulogy at his new friend’s funeral. He tells the people gathered that though he did not know Carter three months ago, the last three months were the best he ever had. With that he pulls out the bucket list from his pocket in church and crosses off “helping a complete stranger for a common good.” The two end up being buried together on Mt. Everest fulfilling the final item on the bucket list.
I think I like the movie so much because it is packed with values I appreciate . . . like there are many things more important than money; that friendships are worth making and keeping; and that there is nothing more valuable than your family.
The sad part of the movie is that sometimes people don’t realize what is really important, or valuable, until their time is short – until their days are numbered.
This morning as we continue our series in First Psalms we are going to hear from a very famous Psalmist who will instruct us in how to live when time is short. This man watched an entire generation of people live out their lives when they knew their days were numbered. His name was Moses, and he watched nearly everyone around him live out the last years of their lives, since this entire generation had to die before God’s people could enter the Promised Land. From this experience, Moses learned some important principles about making every day you have count, and that is what we will look at this morning.
Perhaps you are surprised that Moses wrote one of the Psalms. Psalm 90, our focus this morning, is the oldest of the Psalms. But for as old as it is, it still speaks to us today. You would think people would have learned the lessons Moses teaches long ago, but I am afraid we haven’t. We still get caught up in this world and live for the things that pass away. Instead, Moses will show us how to make our days count. First though, there are two truths we have to wrap our arms around.
I. We have to recognize that our life is short.
The first truth we have to come to grips with is that our life is short. Now, many of you are young, energetic, and full of hopes and dreams. God bless you. It may seem like you have a full-life ahead of you, but trust me, time passes quickly.
I work with a number of young men who are just starting their careers and just starting their families. It seems like only yesterday that I was where they are. I blinked and now I have been married for 32 years (to the same wonderful woman), and my boys are both big (almost 25 and 21).
The deception we are all prone to is thinking that there is such a thing as a full-life. We might think that living to seventy, or eighty, or even ninety is a long time. But we have to get some perspective here. What is 70, 80, or 90 years in light of eternity?
Listen to the way Moses compares the length of our days with those of the Lord.
1 Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were born
Or You gave birth to the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.
3 You turn man back into dust
And say, "Return, O children of men."
4 For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night.
5 You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep;
In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew.
6 In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew;
Toward evening it fades and withers away.
You have to consider the significance of the context from which Moses is writing. The people of God decided not to follow the Lord and take the land that was promised to them because the obstacles seemed to great to overcome. As a result, the consequence o their lack of faith was that their entire generation, everyone over 20 when the spies entered the land, would die in the wilderness.
As one author said, Moses ended up leading the “longest funeral march” in history. Hundreds of people were dying each day. Somewhere approaching two million people would die in forty years. To be exposed to so many friends and loved ones passing would make you pause and think. It might make you a little morose. It seemed to Moses like this mass of humanity was just trudging through the desert to their demise. One day someone is here, the next they are gone. One after the next, each one taking the spot left by the previous one, but all headed toward the same end in death.
But God, our Father, has always been there. He alone is eternal. We have boundaries to our lives. He has none. God has been there throughout every generation. Before world with all its mountains was born, he was there. From everlasting in one direction, to everlasting in the other generation, God is there. To him a thousand years, is like yesterday, or it passes as fast as a watch in the night (about 4 hours).
The point is simple. If you are ever to make your days really count, you must begin by realizing you have very few of them. No matter how long you live, your lifetime is brief. In the whole sweep of history, you are here today, and gone tomorrow.
And to make things even worse; to get even a clearer perspective, we should realize that sin, in one way or another, has soured even the few days we do have.
II. We have to realize that sin sours the short time we have.
The idea Moses attaches to the first one, of the brevity of our lives, is the idea that even the days we are given are tainted by the effects of sin. Listen to Moses as he continues:
7 For we have been consumed by Your anger
And by Your wrath we have been dismayed.
8 You have placed our iniquities before You,
Our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
9 For all our days have declined in Your fury;
We have finished our years like a sigh.
10 As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,
Or if due to strength, eighty years,
Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow;
For soon it is gone and we fly away.
11 Who understands the power of Your anger
And Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?
Again, remember the context. Moses was writing this while he watched a couple of million people die off in front of him. Every last step of their lives was lived in the shadow of their sinful disobedience to God.
The reality is that all of us live out each day of our lives dealing with the consequences of sin. You understand, if you think about it, that we were not created to experience death. When God made the first man and woman, death was not part of the original picture. Death only came about as a result of the Garden sin. If Adam and Eve had not disobeyed God back there, death wouldn’t be part of our story right now.
But death is not the only consequence of sin that we live with daily. If the consequences of sin were not a part of the picture none of us would get sick, we wouldn’t impale each other with our words, we wouldn’t ruin our relationships because of our self-centeredness, or our jealousy.
I would dare say that each of us can look back and remember some bad decisions we have made. Decisions that hurt us, hurt others, and have consequences that ripple into today.
I have an annual meeting with a long-time friend of mine who cheated on his wife a number of years ago. Talking to him breaks my heart, for he faces the consequences of his sin every day. Every day on his way to work he has to drive into the city that he and his wife made their home for decades. Every day he wonders if his relationship with his daughter can ever be put back together again. Every day he faces the pressure of making enough money to pay his alimony and to try to figure out how he is ever going to retire. Every day, he trudges through the hours battered by the consequences of his sin.
And then there are those of us who live every day with the consequences of sin that was committed against us. We have been victims of another’s disobedience to the Lord. I think of my friend’s wife. We are friends with her too. Every day she wonders what she did to make him walk out on her Every day she wonders how he could have treated her so badly. Every day she wonders if she will ever have a close sense of family again. Every day she wonders how she is going to make ends meet. Every day she wonders if the pain will ever stop.
We all sin and live with the consequences. We are all sinned against and live with the consequences. So our lives are short, and not necessarily sweet.
Don’t lose sight, however, of what Moses is doing. He is about to tell us how to make our days count. He is setting the stage for us here. First, we have to grab hold of the fact that no matter how you count it – you don’t have much time left. Second, the time you do have is fraught with pain, hardships, and suffering.
He is not trying to throw some cold water on our party. He is trying to move us to the edge of our seat in anticipation. So how can we make our time really count, considering it is short, and often filled with pain. He now moves to his wise counsel.
III. To make our time count, resort to prayer.
Isn’t the word “resort” and interesting word. We can resort, as in making a last ditch effort at something. Or a resort is a place to retire to, in order to find some peace and recharging. I suppose, in all honesty, prayer if often both for us.
Moses’ counsel, however, is not just to pray, but to pray very specifically. Here are three things we should all pray for the moment our feet hit the floor in the morning. Summed up, they are that we ask God to teach us, to satisfy us, and to use us.
First, we should ask God to teach us. And the one thing burning in the mind of Moses is – we need God to teach us to number our days.
12 So teach us to number our days,
That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.
The idea is simple, we need help keeping track of our days. Now I am not talking about using a calendar or your PDA more consistently. It is more important than that. It is, rather, the understanding that time is short, and we don’t have time to trifle.
Thomas a’Kempis, the author of The Imitation of Christ in the year 1418. The book is a classic on Christian devotion. A’kempis said this, “Happy is he that always has the hour of his death before his eyes, and daily prepares himself to die.”
I know that sounds strange, but only because we are so far from numbering our days. In our culture, we rarely think or talk about death until it sneaks up on us, or rips someone we love from our hands. We give only passing thoughts to our own death, and consider it to always be decades away, instead of tomorrow.
The truth is, none of us have any guarantees about the length of our life. Only God knows the number of our days before there was yet one. The truly wise person lives each day with the idea that their days are numbered.
For several years I have attempted in my own feeble way to take this to heart. On my desk at home is this clock. It is a countdown clock. I have it set s that it is counting down to the day I turn seventy (since the Bible says, we get three score and ten = seventy). I don’t know whether I have that much time left or not. But what it does for me, is every time I see it I watch my time slipping away. My days are numbered. I want to maximize what God has for me in the time that I have left.
Some of you will likely not go right out and order a countdown clock, so think of your own way to number your days. And we may not die, but the Lord might come to take us home before then at the rapture(v. 13). Either way, ask God to help you to keep in mind that your days are not limitless, there isn’t always “tomorrow”. Live well today.
The second request is this, that God would satisfy us.
14 O satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness,
That we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad according to the days You have afflicted us,
And the years we have seen evil.
It is the prayer that we will find our satisfaction in God, not in the things of this world. We are constantly tempted to buy into this world and its trinkets. Advertisers tell us we can’t live without their product. Our financial planners tell us how much money we need to accumulate in order to retire in a satisfactory manner. We talk ourselves into thinking we have to make a name for ourselves at work or in the community in order to find life satisfying. But what we saw last week is still the case. We need to see that God is enough. Just having a relationship with Him, having Him in our lives is the greatest of all blessings. Every day we should ask God to satisfy us with His lovingkindness, with His mercy. Our greatest satisfaction should be the knowledge that God loves me, and that He gave His Son to die for me. He lived the life I could not live and paid the price that I could not pay – all so that we could be together. If I have the Lord, what else do I need?
Easy to say – hard to believe – so we pray daily for God to satisfy us with himself and all that He gives us; knowing that whatever may come today is father-filtered – it comes from the good hand of God.
Finally, the third prayer request; we pray for God to teach us, to satisfy us, and then to use us.
16 Let Your work appear to Your servants
And Your majesty to their children.
17Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;
And confirm for us the work of our hands;
Yes, confirm the work of our hands.
I would have completely missed the point here if one of the scholars I was studying in preparation for this morning had not pointed out how these two verses start, and how they end. They start with “Your work” and the end with “the work of our hands.” That captures the entire thought. We pray every morning that God will use us to accomplish His work through our hands.
How great would it be to lay your head on the pillow every night knowing that you did exactly what the Lord wanted you to do? That would be a great feeling wouldn’t it? You can know it! If we pray this prayer request, we know this is God’s will, and if we pray according to God’s will, it will be done. Why do we doubt then whether we have done today what God wanted us to do? Why do we twist ourselves up in knots about this? Why not pray this prayer, trust God to use us just as he sees fit, and then thank him at the end of the day that we were able to do exactly what he wanted you to do. Don’t you think he is big enough to change your course, or bring things into your day, or take other things out – in answer to this prayer?
The point is that this should reflect our heart. Our genuine desire must be to do what God has for us today. So pray this way.
Conclusion:
This oldest of Psalms is so simple, and yet so powerful. It comes from the pen of a man who gained incredible wisdom throughout his life. Hey, this guy talked to God, and watched God’s people. He knows how both work. His wisdom here is applied toward helping us to maximize the time we have to walk this earth. He knows that to walk wisely we need to do three things – recognize that our time is short, realize that sin sours our days, and resort to prayer – pray for God to teach us, satisfy us, and use us.
Here is a challenge – how about every day this week, when your feet hit the floor, you pray these three things – we can’t begin to imagine what God would do in us an through us.
