Teach Me to Number My Days

So this morning we're in The Cry of the Heart, which is a sermon series we're doing through this summer, uh, looking at our emotions in the Psalms.

And this morning we're gonna be in Psalm 90.

And so it's really kind of interesting that this is the Psalm that we get today because over the last five weeks I've taken some breaks, and four out of the five last weeks I've uh had other people come up and preach, and uh, I was really excited to get back into a regular rhythm.

I'm preaching the next four Sundays, and I'm like, all right, we're gonna kick it off.

I'm excited, I'm hyped up, and I get to study, like, what's in the text?

What are we gonna be talking about today?

And it's like, you're all gonna die.

That's basically the message today.

So I'm gonna try and keep my enthusiasm at a high.

Uh, but uh the thrust of this message is we're going to die.

So let's get excited as we can about that.

And read Psalm 90 together before we dive into the text.

Says this, a prayer of Moses, the man of God.

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 passed, or as a watch in the night.

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.

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, 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 might gain 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.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

And so, as we look at this psalm, we're entering into what is called Book Four of the Psalter.

And this is the final book of Psalms in this collection of writings and poetry and liturgical movements.

And what we see here is when we're looking at this psalm, this is actually the only psalm that's directly acclaimed to Moses's writing.

And now, while Moses is not writing in the about the current time period of where the psalm is placed, it's very important to try and understand why the psalm, this one specifically, was placed where it was at within the collection of the Psalter.

And so if we're looking at these men who are collecting these works and writings and they're trying to kind of build a canon, a collection of documents that paint a portrait for God's people of who he is and what he's done, it's vital to understand where the psalm's placed more than who's writing it and what he's writing it about.

You see, Moses wasn't around the time that this took place as far as the collection of the Psalms.

But what we see has happened is that if we read Psalm 89, the Psalm before, that ends the third book of the Psalter, we'll know that destruction has come to Israel's kingdom.

It's fallen.

Everything that they have worked to build, everything that they have their security and hope in, all the things that they put their trust in has crumbled and perished.

And so Psalm 90 should really be read in light of Psalm 89, not in light of its author's original writing.

They did this on purpose.

As they collected the Psalms and as they gathered them together, they put Psalm 90 here for a reason.

Because it's talking about a people who have nowhere else to go but to God.

That's all they have.

Everything they've ever hoped for has been destroyed.

Everything they've worked for, the kingdoms that they have labored and toiled to build are in ruins.

And so when we look at verses one and two of this psalm, what we see first and foremost is this that God is immutable, and in him is our only true comfort and refuge.

This is a summary of verse one and two.

You see, in God alone is their true comfort and refuge because God alone does not change.

Do you understand that?

We often, as people, put our hope, we put our trust in things that can change in an instant.

God is really the only being, the only person of whom we might put full trust and full hope into because God is the only one who will not change.

God is the same, everlasting to everlasting.

He is immutable in that he does not change nor cast a shadow.

So God is the only true thing of which we can put trust into.

We try to put our hope and securities in things that are perishing, things that can be stripped from us in an instant.

In judgment from God, Israel has lost the kingdom they built.

And now they're forced to look back to God in his kingdom to seek refuge.

And we're just like them.

We're just like them.

Truly reflect on the things we really put our hope in rather than God and his kingdom.

Think about it, church, things like a career, your bank account, parenting methods, school systems, politicians, economy, looks, health.

The list can go on and on and on.

But the reality is every single one of those things will perish with us if we're lucky.

What I mean by that is maybe they will last to the end of our days.

But many of us have seen the hope in relationships, the hope in marriages, the hope in careers, the hope in bank accounts, the hope in economies.

And they didn't last you all your days.

You saw their demise, you saw their perishing, you saw their destruction in the midst of living.

So if you're lucky, the things that you actually put your trust into will at least last you till you die.

But even then, they will perish.

The eternal God who does not change is the only place we will ever find true comfort and refuge.

Everything else is literally a moment away from destruction.

Everything.

Your children could be taken from you today, the economy could collapse.

Anything could perish and fade in a moment.

When we look at verses 3 through 11, what we see is that due to sin, God has actually cursed man to experience a short, finite life filled with work and toil.

And the psalmist kind of poses this question or puts this thought into introspective: what are the lives of men compared to God?

Time has no bearing on him, but yet time is an ever-present taskmaster over us.

God is outside of time, it doesn't dictate what he does.

Yet for us, it dictates every moment of our life.

When we sleep, when we wake, when we eat, when we work, when we rest, all of these things are dictated by minutes and seconds.

It is a taskmaster over us.

We are forever fighting against time and we find ourselves constantly wondering, where is it gone?

In verses 5 and 6, we see that the psalmist actually compares us to grass, right?

Grass that renews and refreshes and then withers.

But this grass that the psalmist is talking about here isn't like our Kentucky bluegrass stuff, right?

Where like we have seasons and lengths of months where we see green and fresh in health, and then we see seasons of dry ground or dead grass throughout our wintertime.

No, this is literally grass, this Palestinian grass that actually is green and fresh in the morning, and by nighttime it's withered and faded.

And then the cycle starts all over again the next day.

It's not these long extended seasons that he's referring to.

He's talking about moments and hours.

You see, we experience these timed restrained lives because we cannot hide our symphon from God and he has cursed us in it.

That's the curse of God that we discover in Genesis 3 in the garden that when he looks at man who ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, who rebelled against his commands and wishes, he looks at the man and he says that your life will be filled with turmoil, with labor and toil, and by the sweat of your brow will you work this earth.

So death and toilless work are brought about because of our sin and the cursing hand of God upon him.

In verse 9, the psalmist says that our life is like a sigh.

At the end of our life, it's like a sigh.

Think about that.

This when God made man, it says that he actually breathed into man the breath of life.

As we are born and as we experience the life of God, it's his breath breathing into us.

And then that very same breath is what sustains us in our labor, in our toil.

We go through moments of needing more of it.

We go through moments of being relaxed in it, but then at the end of our life, we give the breath back to the one who gave it to us.

And we're gone.

He talks about that maybe we'll have 70 years, if at best in our strength we'll have 80.

70 to 80 years is an unimaginable short time compared to eternity.

We can't do justice to try and build an analogy around it.

You might say it's like a blink or like a vapor or like a whatever in every analogy that you would try to put forth to understand time of 70 to 80 years and compared to eternity is an utter failure.

Our minds can't imagine it.

We can't grasp it.

And not only is our life short, but it's filled with toil and trouble.

It's not given to us to have 70 to 80 years of complete ecstasy.

No, it's to have it filled with difficulty, sorrow, pain, hardship.

And I'm not trying to just paint this portrait of despair and apathy and so forth like that.

There's beautiful moments of life.

God does give us pleasure.

God does give us these things that we can take such delight and rejoice in.

Oh, he gives us good gifts that we can enjoy.

But we know, we know that in our conscience and the way that we operate in our life and the conditions of our hearts are more determined by our hardships and toils and troubles than they are the moments of our pleasures and goodness.

How much more are we shaped by the wounds that we have incurred in life than we are the blessings we've incurred?

So in verse 12, this is kind of the turning point of the psalm.

This is kind of the climax where we start to plateau out as he's saying, Well, what about this?

What about this short life?

What about God being our only refuge?

We've lost everything.

What do we do now?

And the psalmist's prayer is this teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Teach us to number our days.

Reflection on our finiteness procures wisdom.

Let's look at this.

So he says, 70 to 80 years at best.

I actually, despite this sermon, I'm an optimist, right?

So I'm going to look at 80 years.

80 years.

If we were to number our days of 80 years, we would look at 29,200 days.

Seems pretty good.

Now let's think of this though.

One third of those days will be spent sleeping.

Another one-third of those days will be spent at your job.

And then roughly 2,190 days of those is spent making sure that you don't suffer from a fatal incident.

Basically, children, right?

One to six years old, you're just making sure they don't kill themselves.

That's basically it's hard, but you're making sure that they don't harm themselves.

You're saying things like, get your finger out of that, move away from the stairs, make sure that you are safe and comforted.

So those years are just useless.

They can't do anything for six years.

We were talking about how crazy that is with the kingdom of God.

When you look at all of his creation and you see these animals and insects and so forth and all of God's creation, these can come out of birth like hunting.

They can come out swimming, they can come out traveling, some of them can come out procreating, they can come out and just like kind of take care of themselves.

But God's most elevated creation, the one of which he put his own image on, the one of which he treasures, the one of which he sent his son to die for.

It takes us years to be able to take care of ourself.

It's beautiful to see how God instills and builds dependency from our very birth.

So the question becomes if you do the math on all of those, how will you spend the remaining 7,533 days?

How will we spend the remaining 7,533 days?

The psalmist declares that the purpose for us numbering our days is to cultivate a heart of wisdom.

That's why we number our days.

You see, we have an issue, and we'll talk about this in a little bit more, but the reality is that we don't reflect on our finiteness often.

Years will go by and we'll look back and say, Where did the time go?

I thought it was just January.

We'll look back in our children and we'll say, How did you grow up so quickly?

And sometimes we'll even be making the same behavioral patterns and methods in our finances, in our devotion, in our relationships, and whatever we're doing, and we'll say, Why has it been three, four, five years, and I haven't changed anything?

We don't number our days, and because of that, we don't procure the wisdom that God has intended for us to have.

So this base of wisdom is kind of ironically in the comparison to this psalm is the fear of the Lord.

To fear God in the midst of his infinite nature, in the midst of our finite nature.

When we look at God and his power and might and his immutable character and the fact that he never changes, that he is the same everlasting to everlasting, what we do, what should happen within us is this fear, this reverence.

If we do not fear God, we cannot have wisdom.

And James 3.17 gives us a portrait of what this wisdom should look like.

As it's built and established on the foundation of the fear of the Lord, it should then cultivate these things.

First off, it says that, but the wisdom from above is first pure.

And then it's peaceable, it's gentle, it's open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits.

It's impartial and it's sincere.

When we examine the way that we function in life, and when we really try to put a definition on what the outcome of wisdom is, I think that it would be making decisions and operating in life in a way that aligns itself to the will and commands of God, that we might glorify Him and love our neighbor better.

Right?

So many times within our life and our worldview and the kind of way that we shape it, and it's rampant in the secular world, and it's even rampant in the American church, is that the gospel message that we hear are the proclamation of the good news that we hear is to make yourself happy.

Do whatever it takes to make sure that you are happy, that you are pleased, you go get yours, you brush your haters off.

Anybody who comes against you and your happiness, you remove them from your life.

But that's completely opposite from everything that the kingdom of God preaches.

When Jesus was confronted with what are the two greatest commandments, you had nothing to do with them.

It was love God with all of your might, soul, heart, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Our loves and pursuits of good should be for us last.

It should be for God first and for our neighbor second.

And so wisdom actually reflects the obedience to those two commands that God might be glorified in our decision making and that our neighbor might benefit from the life that we live.

You see, when we take the time to reflect on our life, we invite wisdom to be developed in us.

And this last section, verses 13 through 17, really summarizes that in God's favor there is joy and purpose.

You see, the Israelites, they tried to put all of their joy and purpose in this kingdom that no longer even exists.

It's gone.

It's been taken from them.

In judgment, it's been destroyed.

And what they're doing is they're longing to return to true joy and to true purpose, found only in the favor of God.

Lord, we've forgotten.

Will you return?

That's what we want in life, right?

We want purpose.

We want joy.

We want to have these things, but so many times we try to put it in the wrong thing.

We put it in false gods and false idols and things that will only disappoint us in the end.

Right?

Look how many times we're restless with our jobs because where's the purpose in them?

That's probably the biggest thing that we talk about with people is that in my job there seems to be no purpose.

What in the world am I doing?

If a third of my job is a third of my life is spent at my job, what in the world am I doing?

And I get it, for some of us, it's challenging to find the purpose in the work that you do.

I understand.

As a person who cannot do monotonous work, right?

One of my first like big boy jobs was I did data entry for a finance company.

No, no, that does not, I got fired quick.

That does not fit my personality type.

I can't just sit there and just do the same thing over and over again.

Praise God for those of you who do.

You make the world go round.

You're the backbone of this country.

But uh, not me.

I can't do that.

And so it was it's challenging for me to find purpose in my work.

And praise God for me, that that passion and desire and skill set and gifting, I think, line up really great with what I get paid to do.

That's wonderful for me, but there's a lot of you who still sit and check in at 9 a.m.

and check out at 5 p.m.

and wonder, what did I do for the last eight hours?

We want purpose.

And I'm telling you right now that all legitimate work, all legitimate employment has purpose.

Here's where we get it wrong.

Fundamentally, when the job itself is our end instead of a means to a greater end, your job should just be a tool for a greater mission.

I don't care.

If your job is lame and boring and it's nine to five and you don't find any purpose in it, you've got to have purpose in the other time of your life.

You've got to have mission in the other time of your life.

You have to have a vision from God to advance his kingdom in the other time of your life that you're leveraging the finances, you're leveraging the resources, you're leveraging the opportunity of your work to see built.

If work is your end, of course, how futile is that?

But if work is a means to another end, all work can have true purpose.

So, what's our main idea this morning?

It's this that God's discipline of his people is an act of mercy for their good.

God's discipline of his people is an act of mercy for their good.

I think that's what we're seeing here.

God disciplined his people Israel.

They were turning away from him.

They were putting their trust and security in other things.

And in judgment, but I believe in loving discipline, he destroyed it all.

In mercy, he destroyed it all.

And look at the fruit that it's bearing in the Psalm Writer.

God, can we come back to you?

Can we find our refuge again in you?

Can we come back to you who are everlasting, who does not change, who is our dwelling place and source of hope?

They are in a better position now than where they were through God's discipline of them.

You see, it's often in the low points of our life that we actually pause to contemplate what our lives have become.

Why does it so often take that for us?

Why does it so often take us to hit a valley or hit a low point or experience tragedy or pain or loss before we actually stop and contemplate what our lives have become?

I think C.S.

Lewis really summarizes it well.

C.S.

Lewis is an author, most famous known for his work in the Chronicles of Narnia.

He says this we can ignore even pleasure, but pain insists upon being attended to.

God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

It is his megaphone to arouse a deaf world.

Isn't that so true?

If God gave us everything we ever wanted, without the power and work of the Holy Spirit transforming our hearts, we would never want Him.

And so God in His mercy brings discipline to His children.

Pain wakes us up out of this false ecstasy that we so continually find ourselves in.

We're not contemplating our finiteness, we're not numbering our days, we're not looking at what our life has become.

And for some of us, we've experienced such deep pain.

But I believe that God declares for those of whom He loves, Romans 8 says that all things, even the pain that you've incurred, is for your good.

And I'm not dismissing how hard it is to trust that statement.

I'm not dismissing the tears and the agony that you've experienced.

But praise God that he woke you up.

Praise God that he stands on the other side of it saying, You can have all of me, which is better than anything you could have ever imagined or desired.

Our story in the way that we often fail to understand and live this out is much like the Israelites.

I got two ways that I think we do this consistently.

Number one is that we live building kingdoms and storing treasures that will perish.

We live building kingdoms and storing treasures that will perish.

In many ways, this suburban culture that we find ourselves in does this over and over and over again.

Look at the time and resources that we put into things that will perish with us even if we're lucky.

Look at it around kids' sports, careers, social status, even like our lawns, right?

That's like a suburban thing, just to spend hours and hours on your lawn.

Nobody cares, man.

But we do this.

We build into things.

We'll spend hours and thousands of dollars in kids' sports.

Little Johnny's not gonna make it to college on a sports program.

He's short and chubby.

He's not gonna do it.

You can go ahead.

And guess what?

All of these suburban programs that will take your, they'll take your money.

Of course they will.

Thousands of dollars, countless hours, camps, private lessons, one-on-ones, all these different things that we'll just pour into our children trying to build some kingdom that's gonna perish when Johnny's 17.

If you're that lucky.

If you look at gymnastics alone, most gymnastics places in suburban cultures will tell you that maybe one to three of their students will actually make it into the university on a gymnastics level.

Out of hundreds of kids, and parents who will spend thousands of dollars in countless hours.

Look at our careers.

Look at the hours that we spend in our careers building up nice homes and fancy clothes and great cars and all these different statuses that we can attain.

It all looks so noble from the outside.

But we're some of the guiltiest in not building into the things that matter most.

Sin is rampant in the suburbs.

I don't know if you know that or not.

The facade of green lawns and nice houses and great schools, it's a sham.

We're perishing.

Our children are perishing before us.

Because while you might look noble to spend thousands of dollars and countless hours in their sports programs, while it might look noble for you to build your career so that you can have the home in the good school district, there's family after family after family who has children sitting at empty dinner tables wishing their dad was home.

There's husbands and wives in every home littered in your neighborhood wishing that they would just have deep and intimate conversations with one another.

It looks noble from the outside.

But at the end of the day, we just build kingdoms and store treasures that will perish.

The other way that we do this is that we live without wisdom, recklessly pursuing pleasure as if there were always be tomorrow.

We live without wisdom, recklessly pursuing pleasure as if there will always be tomorrow.

We suffer from a Superman complex that we can't face destruction.

It won't happen to us.

It won't happen to me.

We don't cultivate wisdom because we don't learn from discipline or the troubles of life.

We continue in our foolishness for unnumbered days and wonder where it all went to.

You all know this person, right?

That person who just never seems to have learned their lesson.

Maybe you have that relative, like that one cousin or weird uncle who's still living in high school even though they're in their 50s and 60s, who still tries to drive the sports car and dress cool or whatever it might be, right?

We all know that person.

Like, are you just, are you ever gonna learn?

Are you gonna continue living life in pursuit of pleasure as if there will always be tomorrow?

But it doesn't have to just look like that weird relative or that one guy who just can't seem to grow up, right?

Who has Peter Pan syndrome?

It's us two.

Think about your life right now.

There's something right now that you've been thinking about this whole sermon that you're like, it's been three, five years I said I was gonna change that and I haven't.

Maybe it's your health, maybe it's your finances, maybe it's a relationship with your children, maybe it's your marriage, maybe it's your commitment to a church.

You're three, five years pursuing some pleasure.

You've never learned from your lesson, and you in moments like this, God's megaphone to a deaf world, you're thinking, I should do something about that.

Right?

We continue in our foolishness.

We continue in our foolishness for unnumbered days, and at moments and at times, I wonder where it all went to.

I do this.

I do this.

As your pastor, I want to be transparent, I want to be honest with you.

I have not led my wife well in finances.

I'm the spender of the couple, if you didn't know that.

I like to buy things.

But I'm not like, I'm not like I I just I just like, I don't know how to explain it really.

I'm also a self-justifier if you haven't uh realized that.

So I'm trying to make a reason for why this is all good and purposeful.

However, the reality is I haven't.

And I have, when I say years, I literally mean years in cured and cultivated fear in my wife's heart because I was a poor leader.

And three weeks ago, we got kicked in the teeth.

And we have a budget, and we're working through that budget, and we're meeting every Monday night for two hours talking about that budget and what we're gonna do with our money and how we're gonna be more faithful, and how am I gonna lead better?

I've had to repent, I've had to ask for forgiveness, and I've had to lead my wife better.

And at times it just seems like such a shame.

Like, how can you get up there and talk about things and you fail to do it yourself?

Look, that's three-fourths of my job.

I'm preaching to myself every Sunday morning.

If any of you thinks I come up here from a position of I got it figured out and I'm doing it perfectly, stop.

Like a fool, I pursued pleasure for a numbered days.

And three weeks ago, we looked at our bank account and said, Where did it all go?

But the beauty of the gospel for us and for me is this that Jesus lived completely for the kingdom of God so that we might have his favor upon us.

Jesus lived completely for the kingdom of God so we might have his favor upon us.

It was Jesus' perfect submission to the will of God, to the establishing and building of God's kingdom, that we're able to actually experience God's favor that the psalmist cried out for.

God's favor.

What is that?

That's not an obscure thing.

If you look up through the church world, you trust, trust me, I Googled this earlier this week.

You'll get don't the first like three pages of Google searches of God's favor, don't click on those links.

They're all bad.

Put something else behind that, like Bible, like biblical, you know, uh, because you get all these prophets and YouTube videos.

I don't know.

But anyway, I was thinking about this.

Like, I like functional definitions.

Sometimes we use words that we don't even really know what they mean.

So I like functional definitions, and here's what I think God's favor implies to be intimately in relationship to God and have full benefit to all that is his.

To be intimately in relationship to God and have full benefit to all that is his.

Isn't that the relationship of a good father?

To know him, to be intimately in his life, and then a father who looks on their child and says, Everything that I have, it's yours.

Take it, whatever you want.

That's having God's favor.

And on the cross and through the resurrection of Jesus, he became the perfect son to that father who is fully in the favor of God.

You see, Jesus numbered his days.

He set his face like a flint to establish and build the kingdom.

The work of his hand found eternal purpose, and we are the great beneficiaries of his victory.

Through his death, burial, and resurrection, he eternally established a relationship with the Father where he lavishes all that is his on him.

And then he makes us brothers, co-heirs, to rest in the dwelling of our eternal Father.

You see, apart from Christ, apart from his death, burial, and resurrection in our place, we would never be able to experience the favor of God.

We would always be under his wrath, we would always be under his judgment.

But because Christ was the perfect son, is the perfect son, and the Bible says that he raised so that others may follow him.

One who was righteous made many more righteous.

We become co-heirs, we become those who participate in all the benefits of his perfect relationship to God the Father.

And so, because of Christ, we can experience intimate relationship with God and have full benefit to all that is his.

In the time God gives us, how much of it is used for your purposes, and how much of it is used for His.

Just think about that.

Don't think about what you're doing.

Think about how much of it you're doing.

How much of it's used for your purposes and how much of it's used for His.

If a third of our life is sleeping, a third of our life is working, we have 7,000 some odd days that we get to actually use like free time, like God gives us playtime, right?

To his children.

Okay, guys, you can play for 7,000 days.

Um how are we going to use that?

And are we constantly finding ways that we can use it for our purpose and for our pleasure and for our consumption?

Or are we actually putting in time and energy to see how we can use it for his?

How can you use your bank account for his glory?

How can you use your career for his glory?

How can you use the sports that you love for his glory?

And if at the end of the day you check your heart and you pray to the Holy Spirit and you seek the wisdom of God and the counsel of community, and it's dictated that you have to get rid of it, then have the strength and bravery to get rid of it.

Number your days.

What's the first thing that you can think of that you would change about your life right now?

You all have it.

You're all thinking of something.

And by my understanding of people, more than likely you've been thinking about this one thing for way too long.

What's the first relationship you can think of that you need to build into?

What's the first thing you can think of that God spoke to you about, but you dismissed it?

Church, our days are numbered.

And we have two options.

We cannot trust that God is good.

We cannot dwell and rest in the finished work of Christ in relationship with the Father, and in foolishness to pursue pleasure.

But in the end, it's gone.

Eighty years at best.

Or we can number our days.

We can live in light of the fear of God.

We can dwell and rest in the finished work of Christ.

No longer after striving for God's favor, but knowing that it's been freely lavished upon us because of Him.

And in numbering our days and living sober-minded, we can procure wisdom within our lives.

I want to do that more.

More faithfully.

More for the glory of God and for the good of my neighbor.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your word.

Thank you for the sobering reminder of our finiteness.

But more importantly, God, thank you that you are everlasting, that you are infinite.