Speaker: We're gonna kick off a year together, opening our Bibles of Psalm 90.
So as I begin to open up the text, I'd love for you to be there.
We're gonna spend some time in Psalm 90 this morning as we kick off 2026.
This is gonna be a year of, of good things.
You know, when I was younger.
I thought I had a superpower.
At least that's the way my mom made me feel.
We were looking at, I don't know, it must have been a photo on the wall, an image
at least, and the image was something that you, you may not know the name of
it, but I promise you you've seen it.
It's a stereogram.
We were looking at a stereogram, and I looked at it maybe for the first time,
I'm not sure, but I saw the image and I was quickly able to see what it was.
And people around me were struggling, my mom included.
And she looked at me and she says, you're able to see that?
And I said, yeah, can't you?
I see exactly what's there.
And she says, how are you seeing it?
I don't know.
I'm just looking at it.
What are you looking at?
Anyway, she, you know, gave me some praise and probably motherly
love and affection, but it was, I didn't have a lot to boast about.
So maybe she was like, alright, we'll just try to help him out with this.
You.
You could see that?
Yes, I can.
That's fantastic, son.
I'm glad you, that's incredible.
Can you guys see this?
And everyone around, at least the few people that were there
were saying, I can't see it.
How are you doing it?
I'm like, I don't know.
I'm just looking at the image.
Secret to the image is that you have to kind of soften your focus and they,
they encourage you if you wanna see it for the first time, you get your nose
really close to it, and then you kinda slowly back away and then you can start
to see the image pop out of the center.
Uh, it turned out that I'm not all that unique.
Apparently 80% of you in this room can see this image.
Is that about right?
No.
About, no.
Can you see, oh, you can't see that?
I promise you.
There is an image there, looking at a stereogram is not all too
different from from looking at life.
You look at the stereogram, it takes a little, it takes a second
or two to really see what's there and, and it takes a bit of patience
if you're not quick at the draw.
But as you give time looking at the image and you soften your
focus, you back up a little bit.
You start to see the image more clearly, or at least that's
the, the theory behind it.
When you look at your life, one of the challenges is that you
only see it from one perspective.
You're looking at your life from the perspective of, I
gotta go to work tomorrow.
I show up to church on Sunday, they start at 10.
They're fairly prompt.
I've got this thing to do on Thursday.
I've got this meeting or this doctor's appointment on Friday.
And so it goes with the whole of your life as a young person.
You think about life and time in terms of school.
When is summer break?
When is winter break?
When is Christmas break?
All those things.
As adults, you suddenly absorb a lot of responsibilities and you start
to take on new, uh, things that you have to be accountable for, including
family and jobs and schedules and family dynamics and all the like.
The problem with this is that we get bombarded with normal everyday life
such that we forget what's happening.
We lose sight of the context of our lives, and we only see all
the things that have to get done.
We have these wonderful things called watches and clocks,
which help us slice the day into seconds and hours, which is good.
It's good that we're all on the same time.
That's how we can do church pretty reliably at the same time every week.
But again, the problem with that is that we begin to conceive of time
only in our temporary understanding.
What God wants us to see in this text that we're gonna look at this morning is that
telling has to be looked at in both ways.
We have to be able to look at the clock chronologically and say, okay, this
takes an hour, or this takes 20 minutes.
But also to step back and look at the clock seasonally and to say, how much
time do I have with my life to spend it the way God wants me to spend it?
Some people call this big picture thinking, looking at your life from the
whole of it, and not just the slices of time that you presently have In
Psalm chapter 90, Moses is concerned that we see life rightly, and of course
rightly in Moses' mind is eternally.
We have to see life from the eternal perspective and not only the
perspective of what time of day is it.
The challenge for most of us is that we don't often have times
a way to to do that very thing.
We get sidetracked, we get distracted.
The pace of life keeps us from spending a lot of time in reflection, and what
that ends up doing is causing us to just go through life almost on autopilot.
You're cruising, you're getting things done, but you might be missing
out on what's really happening.
It's like looking at the stereogram.
Yeah, there's a few people who can see it the way it's supposed to be seen,
but they have to take time to do that.
They have to readjust their focus and say, okay, what am I looking at here?
Well, lots of people can look at the image and and miss what's really
there, and that's my concern for you this morning, that you look at your
life and miss what's really there.
Miss the significance of what happens day by day, hour by hour.
Moses is gonna say in our psalm today, verse 12 in particular, he's gonna say
this remarkable phrase that I really hope sticks with you not only today in
this week, but the rest of this year.
Should God Terry, and should he give you the time to do this?
If we get this right, we live life really well.
If we understand what the Bible teaches us this morning about how to steward
our time, we will make good choices.
With the time that we have, we'll have a crystallized sense of what
we're here to do and what we're about as a church, and we'll have
a holy sense of urgency about it.
We'll do life not hurried, but busy, but we'll do life with a holy ambition.
Not casually, not pa, not haphazardly, but with a sense of awareness
that we know what season it is.
We know the picture Christ is gonna return.
He's gonna establish his kingdom.
We just sang about it.
He's the king of kings.
He will establish his throne.
And our job is to know what time it is Every season of our lives,
no matter what the time of the clock is, we get this right.
We get a lot of life right?
We get this wrong.
We may find ourselves floating.
Shifting through hour after hour without recognizing how significant
the hours are and how fleeting and temporary and transient they are as well.
Psalm chapter nine is gonna help us with that this morning, open
your Bible, take a look with me.
You'll see first of all, that this psalm is called a Psalm,
a Prayer rather of Moses.
And so that would make this Psalm one of the oldest Psalms in our salter.
The book of Psalms is divided in five books.
This Psalm begins book four, and what we have in this Psalm is an account of
Moses' reflections after God had issued the judgment that they would be judged by
God to stay in the desert for 40 years.
Numbers Chapter 13 and 14 are the context of the Psalm.
Very likely at least, and probably numbers 20 in those chapters, God told Israel.
Enter into the promised land, and so they send spies from each
tribe to stake out the territory.
The spies come back after 40 days and they tell people, man, it's a land flowing with
milk and honey, you guys won't believe it.
It's amazing, but we shouldn't go
because there's scary things there.
There's scary people.
The villages are strong.
The people are big.
Let's not do this.
And those 12 spies infect the hearts and minds of all of Israel.
And so they tell Moses and Aaron, we're not gonna do it.
We're gonna stay here.
Far better for us to be destroyed in the wilderness than for us to go into the
Promised Land and be destroyed there.
God is unhappy with this response, to put it mildly.
And numbers Chapter 14, he says, if in the wilderness you wish to die, then so be it.
In the wilderness, you will die.
For any of you who are 20 years and older, you will spend the next 40 years
of your life wandering aimlessly in the desert until you die and die, you will.
No one over 20 will step foot into the promised land is God's judgment.
And so Moses is now responsible for a people over the next 40 years while
he will wander the desert with them.
And approximately a million people, give or take, if we're gonna be
conservative here, a million people are going to die in the wilderness.
And if you take a million and divide that by 40 years, you're
looking at about 70 people a day.
So Moses will see death after death.
It will become a common, a common way of life for him and for
everybody else around Moses, Penn.
Psalm 90 some point after that.
Likely thinking about the brevity of life and the judgment of God, and what he's
going to encourage us to do is to count our days in order to make our days count.
That really is a summation of what he's getting at.
But let me show you starting at verses one and two, what he says
and why it's important for us as we think about stewarding our time.
Well, he starts in verse one saying this, 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.
And so Moses now pauses and starts by saying, look, in the midst
of life and death from before, time began till after time ends.
Lord, you are God.
You are in fact the place that our hearts dwell.
You are a dwelling place.
And this is fascinating because Israel was about to become nomadic.
They had recently left Egypt because God delivered them in about 1445 BC
and they wandered the desert only for a brief time by God's design.
They were meant to go under the promised land, conquer it, and
to make that their habitation.
It was a land flowing with milk and honey.
And Moses says, even though we were promised the land, it's actually
you who is our dwelling place.
God, you are God.
And we are not.
You are our dwelling place in all generations.
Uh, from the beginning of time till the time that time expires,
at least on the earthly clock.
You are our dwelling place.
You are our God.
It's a little akin to a, a statement you might have heard in church history.
Our souls are restless until they find their rest in God.
And this is what Moses is pointing out.
No matter where we live, whether Texas or California or some state in
between, our home is not where we live.
Our home is the Lord.
He is our dwelling place.
He is the one who our souls take satisfaction in.
That markedly points us away from our temporary existence.
Even if you have a really nice home and you have your dream place with
all the cool accoutrements in your home, Moses is pointing our attention
to the durability of God himself.
The only one for whom we can say he is eternal.
You and I are immortal, but we're not eternal.
You know the difference?
Immortal means you have a beginning, but you do not have an ending.
Eternal means you have no beginning and no ending.
And so it makes perfect sense that Moses would begin to anchor the Psalm and
saying, look, you have to put your hope in your help and your home in God himself.
That's where you must start and not in you, not in something else.
So many times we make our dwelling places other substitutes, alternatives.
Our dwelling place can be our financial standing.
Our dwelling place might be our actual home.
Our dwelling place might be family members.
We put stock and trust in people.
Our dwelling place could be any number of things.
And yet, for Moses, he would encourage us, encourage us.
Your dwelling place should be the Lord.
That is in fact what our dwelling place is.
The Lord he says in verse two is timeless.
He transcends time before the mountains were brought forth.
Think about the largest mountains you can ponder in your mind.
God is bigger.
He is more reliable.
He's more durable.
He is more permanent than the most permanent things we can often imagine,
which in this case would've been mountains before he had formed the world.
He is God.
We begin our time thinking about time by recognizing the
God who is outside of time.
If you're going to live your life well and make your days count, you have to
start with God, and that starts with recognizing your humble position.
You are not God.
You're not meant to be God, and that is honestly freeing.
God has given you limits a start date and an expiration date.
He's given you limits in terms of what you're responsible
for, and it's not everything.
It is the things that he's given you.
You're given limits by God's good design.
This is a feature and not a bug as software engineers often say, so
point number one, I'm just gonna put it like this, and know that your
limits glorify our limitless God.
Your limits are by his design.
You're limited.
You're not meant to find your home anywhere else but the Lord.
You're limited.
You're not given a million years to live.
Praise God for that.
You're given a short life that is meant to be highlighting his eternal life.
Your home is God.
Your help is God.
Your limits point to his limitless capacity.
I've been working really hard to get stronger physically.
I go to the gym trying to lift heavy weights, putting on all the calories.
You know what I can to get stronger.
It's not working.
I, I've been trying really hard ever since I was a teenager.
I was, I was trying to do the thing that all the guys were doing.
There was this one guy named Ey, it was his last name, not his first name.
Toy was really strong and I thought, someday I'm gonna be like toy.
Two E in high school is still stronger than me in middle adult life.
I'm trying, and every time I try to lift a heavy weight and I don't
make it, I think, man, I'm just gonna, it's gonna keep at it.
I don't know if I'm ever gonna get to where I want to be.
Hopefully lifting two plates someday.
For now, I'm gonna be happy with my plate in a half.
My limits remind me that I'm mortal, not as strong.
I don't.
I may not even have the genes to do what I want to do.
I have limits, and those limits are God defined and those are good.
I have a limit I can't see without glasses.
At least not very well.
That limit is a good thing.
I praise God that I have glasses 'cause that surely helps my limits.
Remind me I am not God.
I can see partially he can see fully and completely without trying.
And God has vision, he has strength, he has capacity that I don't
have, and that's a good thing.
Or sometimes we go wrong is that we try to be responsible for things that
God has not made us responsible for.
We spend our time fretting and worrying and being anxious for
things that we have no control over.
Isn't that true?
We waste our time fretting over things that God does not want us to fret over.
We lose precious moments to things that we ought not to lose.
Time over.
If you're gonna look at the stereogram of your life and look at it rightly,
you have to start by recognizing, okay, the framing of this whole
image is, I'm not enough, but God is, I can't do it all, but God can.
I'm not sufficient.
He is sufficient.
So I'm 90 reminds us that he is the Lord and he alone is sufficient.
What this should do for us is help us to embrace our limits.
It should help us to recognize, I, I can't go all day, all night.
I need sleep.
I need rest.
I need good food.
I'm a creature and out to honor my creatureliness.
I need to take vacations.
I need to do things that help my physical constitution and my spiritual constitution
do what I'm designed to do, which is to enjoy God, to have him be my home.
Jesus says in John 15.
He says, look you, you can't do anything in your own strength and power.
He says, if you're going to be fruitful, you must abide in me.
If you abide in me and I in you, he, it is that bears much fruit.
Jesus says, God is our dwelling place.
He must be the way that we think about our time and our place in human history.
Honor your creatureliness, steward yourself.
Stewarding your time means honoring that you have a short time and your opportunity
is to use that time for God's glory.
By honoring your needs.
I was reading a book about Dick Van Dyke.
Uh, just one of those random books that I just thought, this looks fun.
I'll pick it up.
It's a hundred lessons from a hundred years.
Do you know Dick Van Dyke's gonna turn a hundred?
He's already a hundred, I think he's a hundred years old.
He's incredible.
And in the beginning of the book, he talks about one of the.
Experiences that he had in, in one of the movies that he
played, he played an old man.
He was actually in his early or late thirties at that time, but he put on
makeup and he pretended to be an old man.
He says, I took inspiration from old people that I saw.
So he moved in a certain way.
He, he looked like an old man.
He talked like an old man and he was grouchy as sometimes old men
are stereotyped, and he says, I learned that there are some
things I got right about that.
He says, I'm not grouchy.
He says, but my body does betray me.
The things I used to be able to do with great ease, I can no longer
do, and two things stood out to me.
One of the things he said is he said, I can only spend about an hour with people
before I'm exhausted and I have to go.
I thought, well, why?
That's terrified.
Like I, I wanna be around people.
I wanna love people, and he can't spend more than an hour
without losing his marbles.
That's also another thing he talks about too, says he can't remember
anything in the short term.
He says he really struggles to remember things and then he said, I will as often
as I can throughout the day try to steal a nap because I'm tired all the time.
He says Being a hundred is hard.
You know, learning to manage your body, which at one point used to
be sprightly and energetic, is now so incredibly challenging.
And so he begins to reflect on his whole life and some of the
lessons that he walks away with.
And I haven't finished the book, so I can't.
Recommend it to you, but at least that part was really helpful for
me to hear because you often don't remember that time is wasting away
and that we are limited creatures, and this is again, by God's design.
All of these features are meant to point us to God himself,
which speaks to the point the features point us to God himself.
Sometimes we, we can go about our lives, thinking about us
as being the, the center stage.
Some of you know this, but I'm just gonna tell you anyway.
Uh, in high school, I was in the drama club.
That was my thing.
I did football, so I, I I wasn't picked on, but I did do the drama club, and
one of the things I learned is that the, the, the B players are really important,
you know, the people that are on the side of the stage, there's, they're
doing a job to help the center player look what they're supposed to look like.
And so there's always the kid or several kids who wanna be part of the team.
And the best that they're gonna get is you're gonna be a tree.
We're gonna put you over here, Johnny, and you're gonna be a tree.
Just don't move.
Right?
Stay there.
And a lot of us have a hard time being okay with being the tree.
Jesus is the star of our show, is he not?
He's the star of our show.
He's the one that should get the glory, honor and praise.
He's the one that the spotlight of all human history points to our job
might be to be a very good tree.
Like you're not the point.
From everlasting to everlasting, he is God, not us.
Now, our job is to contribute to the star player getting all the
glory and honor that he deserves.
My limit as a tree is to glorify the limitless star of the show.
Jesus himself.
Gotta be okay with that and recognize that my life, I'm not gonna be able to do all
the daring things that I hope I should dare to do good things for God's sake.
But I'm gonna do it with the eye tort.
I wanna do this to make Christ look great.
Be a good tree.
Honor your limits.
You are not God.
God is God.
And be okay with that.
Take a nap.
Recognizing God's God under control.
Your life's not gonna fall apart.
Honor your time by starting with the perspective that this is about God,
everything about your life is about God.
And if we could start with that, we we're in a really good place.
Okay, these next several verses are not gonna go that slow.
I needed to give you the frame, the context and point of reference, but
now I want to, I wanna show you some of the meat of where Moses goes.
Verses one and two are really the introduction to the Psalm.
He starts with framing it.
God is God, I am not.
God can do what he wants to do, and I'm here to support that, that show.
But then he moves into the, the, really, the meat of the Psalm, and this
is where it can be a bit difficult.
Follow along with me.
Verses three through 12 will stop at different points to take a breath
and, and notice what we're looking at.
He says, you return man to the dust and say, return o children of man.
That's a reference to Genesis chapter three.
The curse of sin is death, right?
The wages of sin is death.
Pulse says, and so he's saying about God, you return us to the dust, you return us
back to where we started, which is dust death for a thousand years in your sight.
Our, but as yesterday, when it is passed or as a watch in the
night, does God experience time?
Well, yes and no.
In one sense, he experienced that he enters human history with us.
Jesus, uh, we just celebrated a month ago, became a man entering human
history in a real, tangible way.
Jesus experienced time from the perspective of a human, but
God himself transcends time.
And that's what this verse is saying.
God doesn't experience time the way that you and I do.
He interacts with it, but he is above it.
He transcends it.
And so as God, we're looking at time, Moses imagines a thousand
years in God's eyes is not a lot.
It's kind of a drop in the bucket.
Speaking of lots of people, Moses says, are like a drop in
the bucket in God's economy.
That's Isaiah chapter 40.
When God looks at time, it's short.
When God looks at our lives, those are also similarly short.
Verse five, how short you sweep them away.
That is humanity.
You sweep man away as with a flood.
They are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning and the
morning it flourishes and is renewed and in the evening it fades and with.
Moses uses three images for you to think about your life.
Your life is like a flood and not a flood.
Like a think of flash flood.
A flash flood that moves swiftly, quickly, reach, destruction, and goes along.
That's kind of what Moses is saying here.
Your life is quick like a flood.
He says, your life is also like a dream.
It's vivid, it's real.
It's exciting.
I had a dream recently where I was arrested.
And my L for me, I was in, it was real like this was happening.
I thought about like, what's my church gonna think?
Who's gonna take care of my fa?
I was just, I was losing it.
I was so upset.
I was crying.
It was one of those dreams.
I was crying and then I woke up from the dream and I realized
it was a dream and I thank the Lord that it actually, I
don't even know what happened.
I can't tell you what I did.
I don't know, but it was terrifying and I thank God that it was over.
Our lives, Moses says are like that.
They're fleeting, they're ephemeral, they're quick, and, and if you're
older than a few in your teenage years, you, you know what this feels like?
Life goes very quickly and it feels to accelerate as you get older.
Your life is like a flood.
Your life is like a dream.
Your life is like grass.
Your life is short in that it's fleeting like grass.
It grows up in the morning.
It goes away in the evening.
Moses recognizes here that the transient of your life ought to be noticed.
It'll be noticed because he's saying, and this is not accidental.
This is what God is doing among humanity.
Verse seven, we're brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath.
We are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins,
and the light of your presence.
Moses is pointing out the fact that everybody dies because of our sin.
It may not be your direct sin.
That is to say that it's not because you, you know, took the chocolate
from the store shelf and hid that and left that God kills you.
It's not necessarily that, but the wages of sin is death.
And consequently, because all of us have sin, both secret and open, God will
deal with that by taking our lives away.
Verse nine, for all of our days, all our days pass under your wrath.
We bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are 70, or even by strength of, uh, by reason of strength,
80, live 70 or 80 years at the most.
Yet their span is, but toil and trouble might live a long life, but
the, but the longer you live, the more you realize life is painful.
Sin makes a big mess of things If you live long enough.
I always think about John MacArthur.
He said once, and this there's a lot of things that John
MacArthur says that stick with me.
But this is one thing that for the rest of my life, I don't think I'll ever forget.
He was asked in an interview, why are you not as funny as he used to be?
One of those, okay.
Um.
He answered it honestly.
What a sincere man.
He answers it on.
He says, you know, it's interesting because, because the guy was saying like,
when you were young in ministry, you were just so energetic and so humorous, and you
just, you just so much fun what happened?
And he answers,
life isn't as funny as it used to be.
And the older I get, the more I recognize that.
Life is full of pain and heartache and sin and cancer and tragedy and accidents.
You, you live to see a lot of painful things.
If you live long enough and that's Moses' Point here, you live long enough,
you're gonna see you might live 80 years, but they're full of toil and trouble.
Another thing Dick dang Dyke says, he says, I've outlived
all of my closest friends.
He says, and it is as lonely as you think.
Oh, I thought Dick needs to be in church.
He's a church family.
Okay.
Side note, Moses is saying life is short.
It's full of trouble.
And then he says, our years are gone.
We soon fly away.
Uh, your life is so fleeting and lights.
You're here, you're gone.
And it, and people probably won't remember you.
Just think about that.
You, you don't know the name of your great, great grandparents.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what other people think about
us, and that's not always wrong.
You should think about the way that you impact people, but often
we let that weight influence our decision making, and yet Moses
saying, look, you're gonna fly away.
And a lot of what makes you, you, the things that you count very
significant are are not gonna be as important as you might imagine.
This is why we gotta think about what he says here.
Verse 11, who considers the power of your anger and your wrath
according to the fear of you?
Who considers the fear of God?
Who's thinking about God as they should?
Who's spending time concentrating on what God has put us to do here?
And what it means for us when we stand before him.
I don't think Moses is saying, Hey, no one thinks about this.
We don't ever spend time talking about God.
No.
We come every week.
We talk about God, we sing about God.
He's not saying that we never do it.
He's saying, really, who's spending sufficient time adequately feeling
the weight of my life is short.
I'm gonna meet God.
Am I ready for that?
Am I ready?
And I guess a question that you might ask yourself is, if I knew I had
a week left to live, what would be different about my life this week?
It is that kind of mental clarity that gives us the ability to make
decisions about what's most important with our lives, and you'll find that
that kind of clarity is enormously helpful in making decisions daily.
If I thought I knew I had a week left, suddenly things are clear.
The bills matter and I'm gonna pay the bills, but my
relationships matter far more.
Getting to work on time matters and I'm gonna do that.
I may still go to work.
I love my job.
If I had a week left, I'd still come to church, obviously,
but now I have a different mo.
Now I know with a fleeting amount of time I'm gonna say
things I may not ordinarily say.
I'm not gonna be rude, but I'm gonna say like, I care about you.
Thank you for the privilege of serving you.
I mean, I'm gonna bear my heart to people because I've got a little bit
of time and I think this is one of the points here that Moses is saying,
who considers you're gonna face?
God, are you ready for this?
Are you ready to see your maker?
Are you confident that your trust is in Christ and not in something else?
Is your dwelling place the Lord or is it some other ephemeral manufactured
thing that ultimately will fail you?
Make sure your hope and your help is in the Lord who considers the
power of your anger or your wrath according to the fear of you.
Now, it gets really heavy.
I'm not gonna lie to you here.
This is a heavy section.
Well stay with me though, because this does turn and
it turns in a surprising way.
But before it turns, he says in verse 12, this is the one of the verses that
I really wanted you to feel and hear.
He says in verse 12, all of these thoughts, all of these percolations,
all the way he's thinking about God.
Amen.
And he says in verse 12, so concluding, so teach us to number our days that
we may get possess a heart of wisdom.
One author says We number our years, but it is wiser to number our days
where we live one day at a time.
Psalm 39, 4.
David echoes this.
He says, oh, Lord, make me to know my end and what is the measure of my days.
Let me know how fleeting I am.
And when we think in these ways and we recognize I have to do business
with God and my life is short, however short, I don't know, but this creates
a heart of wisdom, and I think what he's getting at is that it gives you
urgency and it gives you clarity.
I now know my life is urgently lived, not hurriedly, but urgently.
There is a sense of awareness that my life really matters.
The insignificant decisions that I make are actually far
more significant than I realize.
There's urgency and there's clarity.
I know what I'm here to do.
I wanna get that done, and I don't wanna wait.
I wanna wait to reconcile with my family or friends.
I don't want to hold back in caring for people that I really care
about, my neighbors that have yet to hear the gospel from my lips.
Man, I'm not gonna wait anymore.
I gotta week left.
I got a short time.
Point number two, I'd love for you to feel this verse and live like you're
running outta time because you are.
What's challenging about passages like this is that I can't tell
you how much time you have left.
You ever played one of those board games where they have those hourglass timers?
Those are fun.
I've always wanted to get a really obnoxiously large one or Nate's and
Big, and then put it on my desk.
If you come to my office, you'll see that I have a skull.
It's not a real one, but it's a skull and it sits there somewhere in my office.
I often move it.
'cause if I don't, if I don't move it, it just becomes background noise.
I often will move it just to remind myself, time is short, I'm gonna die.
People at my church are gonna die.
I need to take every day seriously.
I can't afford to just let another day go past.
When you play a board game and you pull out that sand timer, I want
you to think about that sand timer.
Like the duration of your life, you turn the timer upside down, of course, and the
sands begin to move from top to bottom.
But the interesting thing about your life's timer is that it's not that clear.
In fact, it's totally not transparent.
You can't see how much sand is left on the top of your timer.
You know that time has passed.
You see the effects of it every time you look in the mirror.
But you don't know how much time you have left, and that's Moses' point here.
You, you don't know, 70 years, maybe 80 by reason of strength.
Teach us to number our days, Lord.
Let us count each day.
As it as though it really matters because I, I just don't know when
my last opportunity will come.
I do know that someday it's gonna be my last, and for most of us death
doesn't make an appointment with you to say, can, next Tuesday is
gonna slot you in for two o'clock.
Death just shows up.
And we, we know that.
We know that it used to be back in the day that churches, when they had
their buildings, in fact, some churches around Texas, you could still see this.
And I like this.
I don't know that I can promise we're gonna do it, but I do like
the idea the church would be parked behind a massive garden.
It's not really a garden, actually be a massive graveyard.
So you would walk to church between Aunt Sally and Uncle John over there.
You'd be walking past them every day you went to church as you
walk through the church doors.
That's good because it tells us, man, life is short.
These saints that have gone before us who have lived faithfully, I want them
to remind me that my life matters.
Every day counts.
Every hour counts.
I don't wanna waste it.
I wanna live like I'm running outta time.
I want the Lord to remind me about these things.
Remember your life is an hourglass turned upside down.
You don't know how much sand is left.
If God gives you several years, fantastic.
Praise God.
Make those days count.
But don't, don't bank on that.
Don't bank on the 80 years Plan for it.
Be wise about it.
But James, the brother of Jesus in the flesh reminds us you
shouldn't make business plans.
I say, I'm gonna go here.
I'm gonna make a prophet.
I'm gonna go over here and do this.
He says, yet you do not know.
What will happen tomorrow?
He says, what is your life?
Think about who you are.
You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
Instead, you ought to say, James says, if the Lord wills we'll do this or that.
We'll go over here.
We'll do this.
If the Lord wills, if he wants me to live and do this or that, we'll do that.
But otherwise, man, I'm trusting the Lord to make provision for me.
I'm gonna let him lead.
I'm gonna make good plans.
I'm gonna trust him to do it.
But if it happens, it happens.
And if it doesn't, it doesn't.
I let him live, let him teach me how to live.
I guess, again, heavy sermon.
I know I'm not trying to come down heavy.
I want you to feel the, the, the holy urgency and the
clarity that comes from this.
A simple thing that you might wanna do.
Just a, just a suggestion, just an idea.
One way to think about this is to start, okay, you probably can't see this.
It doesn't matter that you can't see it.
What is important here is that you have some way of reflecting on your life.
If you know that time is of the essence and that life is fleeting
and your time is short, then I wanna make sure that I'm living well.
Well, how do I do that?
I have to find time throughout my week to say, how am I doing?
What's happening?
What's working in my life?
What's not working?
How's my relationship with my kids, my spouse, my employer?
How's my life going?
Am I doing well behind, uh, with my neighbors?
Am I serving them well?
You have to find time to ask yourself questions, and you have
to know what you're aiming at.
Uh, I, I got from a, you can't see this either.
Again, not important.
You gotta have a vision for your life that says, I know what I'm here to do.
Death clarifies what you're here and what you're about.
If my life is ephemeral and fleeting and yet the next life is permanent and
enduring, I wanna be ready for that by asking myself, what's my life about?
What am I here for?
And I'm not saying you need to become a pastor or a missionary.
Certainly that's not everybody's call.
God has called some of you to be accountants and lawyers and doctors
and fast food counter employee.
Whatever you're doing, God has called you to do your vocation,
to his glory and his honor.
Praise God.
Do those things, but at least in your understanding of what God
has given you to do, you have to think about, what am I here to do?
What's my life about?
What's the target?
I've read books where business type books where they say, make sure that
when you climb the corporate ladder.
That the ladder is leaning against the right building and don't live your whole
life pursuing the whatever it is, only to realize, oh, I didn't wanna get here.
It's not what I wanted.
What I really want is to live for God's glory.
I wanna do this in the in, in the right way possible and the best way possible.
And that means I have to feel my sense of urgency.
I don't wanna put off till tomorrow what can be done today.
Ephesians chapter five, Paul says, look carefully then how you
walk, not as unwise, but as wise.
Making the best use of the time because the days are evil.
Think about the way that he phrases that making the best use of the
time the best use best puts us in the realm, not of right and wrong.
Right best tells us good, better, best.
So we're not talking anymore about saying, is this sin or righteousness?
Paul is saying, make the best use of the time, which tells us it's
a matter of wisdom and judgment.
Now, whether you go to this party or whether you go and move over to
California or something else, it's a matter of making a godly decision.
You make the best decision according to what God has put in his word.
Your job is to discern the best use of your time according to
how God has given you your life.
So here's what I mean by that.
Let's say for instance.
You're a new mom.
You had a baby.
You're, you're in month three of that new baby.
You're probably not sleeping a lot.
You're probably doing all sorts of things.
Your, your, your hair is not put away anymore.
You're barely eating.
You're eating when your child eats.
You're just, you're frantic all over the place.
I'm not talking to that mom and saying, Hey, you should be reading
your Bible every three hours.
You should be memorizing scripture.
You should be praying.
I mean, I'm gonna say, Hey, do what?
Do what God gives you the ability to do, but honor the season.
Make the best use of the time.
Can you listen to the Bible instead of read it?
That's good.
That's fine.
Can, can you make it to church?
I'd like, would like to see you there.
Your church family would like for you to be there.
That's a good thing.
You should prioritize that.
But I think we, you also, when you're making the best use of the time,
it does mean that you have to think about, well, what season am I in?
What's happening in my life?
Am I an empty nester where I have a lot more opportunity to serve?
Or am I a, a growing family with three kids and I have kids to look after?
Am I in graduate school and now I'm having to study more things?
Am I running a business?
If I'm running a business, my time is less my own than if I were
just employed in the business.
If I'm employed in the business, I have a little more free time after
work, I have more opportunity.
You gotta look at your season of life and make decisions as to what is the best use.
So when I say live, like you're running at a time.
When I say teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Wisdom is not a matter of right and wrong so much as it is a, a
question of good, better, and best.
And you have to decide that.
You have to know what am I aiming for and how do I get there.
If my, my goal is to, I wanna raise a godly family.
I wanna be godly in my business.
I want people to know that my business is to glorify God.
Well then I, those are my targets.
I have to aim for that with shrewd wisdom.
Can't just assume that it's gonna happen.
I have to trust that God's gonna use me for those things,
and I'm gonna aim at that.
This requires you to constantly review your life.
There's just no way around it.
You have to think about your life.
That's why the words that we're memorizing together as a church is.
Let us consider how to stir up one another.
That word consider is important.
It means I'm actively thinking about it.
I'm not just going like a bull in a China shop.
I am considering how to stir up all of us to love and good deeds.
That's not just the pastor's job.
It is certainly his job, but it's also yours.
It is our shared responsibility to consider how to stir up one
another to loving good deeds.
And when we do that well, we provoke one another in all the best ways possible.
Live like you're running outta time.
Think about the way that you're using your time audit.
Consider it and when you do this, this helps us to, in some ways defy
the temporary nature of our lives because it shows the Lord, I'm
ready if you come and take me this.
Become ready, living to the best of my ability by faith in Christ and
let the chips fall where they will.
He might bless my business.
He might bankrupt us.
He might give us a long and healthy life.
He might give one of us paralysis quadriplegia.
Before I came out to Texas, I was making these grand plans
about what I was gonna do here.
Lord, thank you for giving me an opportunity to work planting a church.
I can't wait to do this.
I'm gonna be the worship leader.
It's gonna be so good.
The Lord paralyzed half a V accord in my life.
He paralyzed me.
Literally paralyzed my vocal cord.
I lost my voice after getting sick and I thought, okay, this will kind of go away.
And the Lord said, no, it's not.
You can't quite hear it probably, but I partial, my left vocal
cord is partially paralyzed.
Which doesn't affect me a whole lot.
I don't, I can't park in the handicap spot, but it does bother me.
And I thought, oh Lord, I was doing this for your sake.
What do you slow me down?
And the Lord does what the Lord does, and our job is to say, okay, whatever
you want, Lord, I'll use whatever you give me to honor the to honor you.
The only way that I can make the best use of the time.
Audit your time.
Think about the way that God has gifted you, your season, your
time, and let him lead you as as he sees fit, because time is short.
And when you kill time, a w Towser said, remember that it has no resurrection.
Time is of the essence.
Okay.
I wanna show you these last few verses because it really turns.
We need the right perspective about time.
That's where God enters the picture.
He helps us define the right priorities, which is to tell us number our
days, examine your time, and then now we move to the right response.
Okay, I have the right priorities, I have the right perspective.
Now I'm gonna have the right response to God.
And what this, what this prayer of Moses has led us to so far might lead
you to feeling a bit of resignation.
Well, if that's all life is'.
I, what am I gonna do then?
I can't define, God's gonna do what God's gonna do.
I'm just gonna go through life.
And whatever he does is what he does.
But Moses interestingly turns the, the Psalm into almost a celebratory psalm.
He's petitioning God now for saying, uh, saying to God,
please help me with these things.
Help us.
But there's, there's something of, as one preacher put in a note of
triumph here it's not resignation.
There's more here.
Take a look.
Starting at verse 13, he says, return to us.
Oh Lord, how long have pity on your servants?
He's asking God to show up with favor.
He's not saying God disappeared on them.
He's saying, please show, uh, show mercy relent relent against us.
Help us to love you well, verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with
your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
You, this almost doesn't make sense.
It almost doesn't make sense.
Satisfies in the morning with your steadfast love doesn't feel
like it fits in all the thrust that Moses just went through.
But what what it, what it does tell us here is that in Moses'
perspective, God's steadfast love and his judgment are not at odds.
They're not different in the sense that they come from a different deity.
You have an angry God and then you have a loving God.
You have the Old Testament God, and then you have the New Testament.
Jesus who is gentle, meek, and mild, he's saying no, God's love
and his justice all work together in one singular person called God.
And so he says, show us your steadfast love.
Satisfy us.
And that honestly is part of the problem of our human condition.
We are far too often satisfied with things that are not bred.
We feast on things that empty our soul as opposed to satisfy our soul.
And so Moses says, Lord, in the morning, beginning of my day, maybe
even the, the early hours of my life, satisfy me with your love.
Let me understand who you are.
Feast on Christ and let him be my all in all.
Let him be my dwelling place.
Satisfy me with your steadfast love.
And then he goes further.
Even though life is full of pain and heartache and sin, he says that we
may rejoice and be glad all our days.
This is a direct defiance against the curse of sin.
He's saying, God, be gracious, and even though life is hard,
let us rejoice in your goodness.
Let us love what you are doing.
Let us trust you.
Verse 15, make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us.
There's no denial of reality.
He's saying, we know you're, you afflict us.
You bring difficulty into our lives, but make us glad for as many days and
as many years as we have seen evil, help us to rejoice even at the dark
providences that you bring into our lives.
Help us to love you even though things don't go well.
Verse 16, let your work be shown to your servants and let your glorious
power be shown to their children.
This is so provocative because it tells us that we're often blind.
I, I like the way one preacher put it.
He says, God is often doing 10,000 things in your life, which
of course is an understatement, and you're aware of maybe three.
You see the activity of God in your life.
You see some of the things that he's doing, but you miss all of the
billions upon billions of things that he's doing at any moment.
And so Moses prays, let us see that.
Let your work be shown to your servants.
Help us to be spectators to the work that you're doing.
Let your glorious power be shown to their children.
Moses is preying on behalf of his people.
Let the children see God's faithfulness.
Verse 17.
Let the favor of the the Lord our God be upon us and
establish the work of our hands.
Yes, establish the work of our hands.
He's asking God, let your grace be upon us.
Help us to make life successful.
Let us intend to do the right things, but we rely on you.
We can't do it.
We can't even see what needs to be seen apart from your.
Your care and concern, and so he's asking God for the, for
the people, a man of prayer.
Please bless my people.
Help my people know you, love you, trust you.
Help them be satisfied in your love, not in the sinful things that
are, are ephemeral and fleeting.
Let us love and trust and honor you.
This is the heart of Moses for his people.
And this ought to help us recognize what our job is.
Now, the perspective God's eternal my life is short.
The priorities I need to set my life on, doing the, the things that I can while
I still have time, number, my days.
Time is short.
I want a wise heart.
And now Moses shows us what it looks like to go to the Lord and see here's my
life, Lord I I long to do good with it.
Please make it count.
I want you to point number three.
I like Moses de independently resolve.
So not defiantly dependently.
I trusting him.
I'm not doing it apart from him.
Dependently resolve to make your life count for Christ
dependent dependency.
I couldn't think of a better.
A better illustration of dependency than my caffeine dependency.
I used to be pretty good at this actually.
And in fact, recently I, I did a season of less caffeine.
But Jordan Lowe introduced me to Monster Drinks, and it was so wise 'cause
he gave us several cases for free.
And now I buy them,
I buy them with joy.
I love, I love monsters and, and they're really a part of my day.
I love, I love caffeine.
That's part of my day.
I, I usually have it multiple times a day.
I measured it.
Uh, I, I'm usually around 600 milligrams a day.
I know it's a lot.
It's a lot.
When I hit the 800, I start getting tired.
That's when I back off.
But I make decisions around my dependency because my dependency drives my behavior.
In the morning, one of the first things I'll do is I'll make myself some caffeine.
That's part of my morning routine.
I depend upon it to get into the, to the groove.
It helps me with my Bible study and all those things.
Dependency drives my behavior.
Yeah, if you're, if you're driving a car, dependency on
the fuel drives your behavior.
If you're driving a smart car or a a, an electric car, you can't just drive
across the country any way you want to.
Your dependency upon battery power determines your route.
You have to stop at certain places, which is gonna change your destination, change
your, your, your pattern to get there.
So all of these dependencies fuel our motivation.
And what I wanna point out to you is that you are fully dependent
upon God, and if you knew it.
That will change your behavior.
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love tells us.
I need to make sure that I recognize I am fully dependent upon the Lord.
I can't live, I can't think.
I can't serve.
I can't do anything.
Well, apart from his enabling grace, I depend upon him far more
than I depend upon my caffeine.
Remember, the devil came to Jesus and he tempts Jesus, and Jesus responds back
with three incredibly powerful responses.
What does Jesus say?
Does anyone remember He says.
It is written.
Written.
So he doesn't even argue with the devil as though as he was the equal.
He just says, here's what God's word says.
Here's what God's word says.
Here's what God's word says, and then the devil flees, and then
Jesus is ministered to by angels.
Jesus says It is, is written man does not live by bread alone, but by every
word that comes from the mouth of God.
How good would it be for you to prioritize your bread in the word
over your bread for your belly?
And how good would that be?
When I was a teenager, I, I, I made myself rules.
I was a little legalist at that time, but nevertheless, here,
here's what God led me to do.
And I thought it was helpful, at least for the season.
It was a dangerous one.
I made a commitment that I would read my Bible before I brushed my teeth.
I had to do it, I'm sorry, to all the people that I had
to let down several days.
'cause sometimes the, the, the teeth brushing never came 'cause I was too busy.
I'm better at that today, I promise.
I do it all the time today.
I di I knew my dependency though, and I needed to force it to make
sure that I didn't skip it because I knew how important it was.
I would love for you to re resolve this year to not only count your days, but to
make sure that you make your days count by saying, I'm gonna do what I need to do.
I'm not gonna wait.
I can't say I'm gonna do it next week or tomorrow 'cause I
don't know if I have tomorrow.
I'm gonna make the day count so I will dependently, resolve to
make my life count for Christ.
I'm gonna do what God calls me to do because he calls me to do that.
Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love.
Oh Lord, what a good thing for you to pray.
Finally, as he says here in this last verse, he says, let the
favor of our Lord be upon us and establish the work of our hands.
Yes, establish the work of our hands.
Moses is praying that God will allow them to be productive in their lives,
and I don't mean productive in a business sense, like, oh, let's get profits to
this much, this many pennies or whatever.
That's fine.
Moses is, is saying, Lord, help us to do good.
Help us to be effective with the life you've given us.
It sounds a little bit like Paul, where he says, at the Thessalonians,
he says, man, you guys have learned how, how you ought to walk in,
please God, just as you're doing.
He says, but do it more and more.
Don't be satisfied with just doing a little bit.
Keep going the furthest degree.
How?
How good would it be for your life to be?
I'm gonna live to the maximal glory of God, whatever that looks like.
Pray for that.
Establish the work of our hands.
I need to, I need to qualify something, man.
I got so in my mind, I think I can think of like 10 qualifications here.
Things that you're probably thinking and things I need to clarify.
Uh, let me just, let me just address one.
A sermon like this can have one effect on you that you say, oh man, I, I better
get on my calendar and my, my planning list and make sure that I make, I, I
have all these things that I gotta do.
I need to make sure I write it down.
And if I fail in these, man, I'm a failure.
I'm a worm.
All those things.
I'm not talking about efficiency, you understand?
But I am talking about effectiveness.
I am saying you, you should be efficient as you can, you know, make time,
plan, schedule, all those things.
That's, IM, that's important, but I'm talking less about efficiency more
than I'm talking about effectiveness.
And what I mean by that is that you are hitting the target that you're aiming at,
and that requires you to be intentional.
So I'm not talking about efficiency going by your calendar.
I'm talking about effectiveness, aiming at the right target.
I want to live to glorify God, and here's what that means.
Often if you're, if you're aiming at that target, I can promise you your
schedule will often be put to the side and be inefficient because God has
better things for you planned that day.
You have people show up to your doorstep, you get a phone call.
Now you're, your whole schedule that you planned is disrupted because God
has a better plan for you that day.
You're not efficient that day for sure, but you are effective.
You praying to the Lord to say, Lord, help me.
Help me establish the work in my hands.
Doesn't say, Lord, and I've got plans.
Let me have you bless my plans.
Proverbs 16, three says, commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be
established, but they'll be his plans.
So I'm, again, I'm not saying efficiency, not a bad thing,
but I'm saying effectiveness.
Living your life for what it's worth, being intentional
with your time and letting God dictate the terms of your life.
For many of us this year is gonna be a hard year.
I'm not a prophet, but I know this.
'cause they know how life works For many of us, this is gonna be a
hard year for, for a lot of reasons that you don't even know yet.
God's gonna introduce difficult things in your life.
For some of us, God's gonna introduce great things to us.
You're gonna have stuff show up in your life that you, oh
man, what a blessing this is.
Thank you God.
And when you expect that God's gonna do what God's gonna do, you can be
thankful and every season and say, Lord, I accept what you're doing.
I'm gonna count my days and make this day count.
By trusting that you're doing all the things, you are God everlasting
from the end of the beginning.
I trust what you're doing.
Radical perspective change.
Resolve dependently, resolve to make your life count for Christ.
That's, that's the goal here.
Not efficiency, but effectiveness.
When you look at the picture of your life, I, I really hope that you see what's
there, not just the calendar seven days on the week and you're nine to five.
Not just the events that you've planned and committed to, not just the bills
that you have to pay the HOA fees or you know, whatever the tax is.
I want you to see what's really there, eternity on the precipice.
Your foot stands one step away from whatever that life looks
like, which introduces and bursts incredible significance in
every single day that you live.
Things like this suddenly become so important.
I'm never gonna get 1116 on Sunday, January 4th, 2026 back.
We are spending it together.
Thank you for that, by the way.
What an incredible honor.
But we don't get those minutes back.
We don't get the 50 minutes back.
We spent it, we've invested it better said.
And so I want you to think about this throughout your year.
I'd love for you as a, as a, as a member of this church, as a part of
this body, to say, Lord, how, how?
How will you have me use my time?
Where would you have me invested?
That's a good question to ask the Lord.
See the picture of your life.
Eternity is soon.
The sands of your life are turned upside down.
They're already going, and I don't know what time is left for you.
Dunno what time is left for me.
So let's make it count this year.
Let's, as Moses prays, let's pray together.