How many of you have been following the Olympics? How many of you watched the opening ceremonies last week? What I liked about the opening ceremonies is how the British were able to creatively incorporate some of their royalty, their celebrities into the opening ceremony. If you watched the ceremony you might have seen Queen Elizabeth jump out of an airplane with Daniel Craig from 007. You might have watched Mr. Bean do his own rendition of Chariots of Fire. You might have watched David Beckham come down the Thames in a speedboat and deliver the Olympic torch. If you stayed up until the end you got to see Sir Paul McCartney singing and playing Hey Jude. Did anybody get to see that? That was awesome. I was sitting here watching that and I was thinking about the crowd and the kids swinging back and forth. I was thinking most of those kids weren’t even born when that song was made in 1968. Does anybody remember the 60s? Does anybody remember The Beatles? The Beatles were this popular group from England. It consisted of four men. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. I think Ringo was my favorite. I think he is going to outlive them all because they didn’t like Ringo but he is going to stick around the longest. Anyway, you look at the 60s and we see this song was 1968. I began to think how Paul McCartney has changed. To show you how much he has changed, I thought I would find a picture on the internet of Paul McCartney when he actually was a Beatle. A handsome young man. This is in the 60s. Then I thought to contrast it a little bit I am going to show you a more recent picture of Sir Paul and there he is. Paul looks like he has aged a bit. He has because Paul McCartney is 70 years old. I am a baby boomer so I like seeing all these old rockers performing the Super Bowl and the Olympics and that sort of thing, but really, at some point, these rockers have to put down the guitar picks. They have to put down their drum sticks and they might think about picking up the hearing aids and Pepto-Bismol and heading off to Happy Valley Villa with the retirement people. All kidding aside, time marches on. Time marches on not only for us but for celebrities and for everybody.
That is what we are going to look at today as we look at Psalm 90. Thinking about Psalm 90, the good news we see is that Moses lays out a strategy for reversing the effects of aging. We see that in Psalm 90. Before I get into it, I want to give you a quick rundown on where we have been. We are still in the summer of the Psalms. We looked at several Psalms but the summer is winding down so we will be winding down looking at the Psalms. Last week, we looked at Psalm 49. You may recall that that Psalm was about riches without understanding. The main idea in that was if you spend your entire life pursuing riches without a real understanding of riches, you are going to get to the end of you days and you are going say I spent all my life accumulating these things and now I have to leave them to somebody else. You can’t take that stuff with you. On the other hand, as we saw, if you invest a certain amount of your riches in things that do not perish, in other words if you invest a certain amount of riches in heavenly treasure, things that moths will not get at, rust will not get at, thieves will not break in and steal, when you cross over to the other side you may not be able to take your earthly things, but you are going to be able to take your heavenly things. In other words, your heavenly things are going to be there waiting for you. You are going to have treasures in heaven. We looked at treasure last week. We looked at possessions.
This week we are going to look at this idea of time. We are going to look at Psalm 90 because Moses teaches us a lot about time. A little context here. We know that Psalm 90 is a Psalm of Moses. You say how do you know? If you have the NIV Bible and look at the very top, remember we talked about the superscription. It is those little words at the top that tell you who the author is and sometimes they tell you the circumstance. In this case it just says the prayer of Moses, the man of God. Unfortunately, we don’t know the circumstance. You might remember a few weeks ago we looked at Psalm 51 which was a Psalm of David following his sin with Bathsheba so we knew the circumstances of David writing that Psalm. We really don’t know it here so we have to speculate. Even though we don’t know the exact circumstances that caused Moses to pen this Psalm, we do know quite a bit about Moses. We know that Moses was a man of God. A man of God called by God for a specific purpose. His purpose was to set the captives free. To free the Israelites from the hand of the wicked pharaoh. They had been in slavery for 400 years. God saw their plight and he sent Moses the deliverer to free the people. Moses went there and demanded of pharaoh to let my people go so that they might go out to the desert and continue to worship their God. After several attempts, finally the pharaoh allowed him to go. Moses went out and he came to the Red Sea. God opened the Red Sea and he got to the other side. We also know when they got to the other side, the people began to complain about things. We don’t have enough water. We don’t have enough food. We are tired. This and that. They became disobedient. So disobedient that God wiped out a certain portion of them and he wouldn’t allow a whole generation to go into the Promised Land, including Moses because Moses had sinned against God. Because he sinned against God, he was not able to go into the Promised Land. He was only able to see the Promised Land from a distance. Given that setting, we could get the idea that there were probably periods in Moses’ life where he was a bit down. He was feeling depressed. He was angry with God. He was angry with the people. Probably angry with himself feeling like a bit of a failure. With that context, we are going to read through the entire Psalm 90 to get an idea of why he wrote this Psalm and then we will go back and look at some practical tips on how we can get the most out of our time. So reading from Psalm 90 beginning at verse 1. We will be reading all the way down to 17. (Scripture read here.)
A lot of good information here. Too much to cover in one sermon, but we can clearly see it goes along with the theme of time. We have Moses here that I believe is actually making an appeal to God to redeem the time. We see that in the later verses. Before we do that, we want to look at some of the few verses in the beginning to get an idea of Moses’ approach to this prayer. What he does first is he puts time in the proper perspective, which basically is from the perspective of God. In the first couple lines there he says “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” Think for a minute about this idea of dwelling place. We don’t think about where we live that much but Moses was thinking about it. He was thinking about the dwelling place. In fact, all the Israelites would often think about their dwelling place. Where are they going to live because they were a nomadic people. There were an itinerant people. They were constantly on the move going from one place to another. In fact, you may recall back in the book of Hebrews where it says that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all lived in tents. They were never comfortable. They were never settled. What they were looking forward to was a city with foundations whose architect and builder was God. They would never settle. I think about Americans. We tend to move a lot. I was trying to think about how many times I have moved in my lifetime. It is probably about nine or ten times when I look back on it. Some people move a lot. Some people move every single year. Some people have moved probably 30, 40, or 50 times in 30 years or so. But I began to think about it. Although that might be a problem for some people, it really is just an indication that God has imprinted us with a restlessness. We were never designed to be settled in this world. Why? Because we don’t have a fixed address here. Our fixed address is in heaven. Our fixed address is eternal. Why? Because we serve and worship an eternal God. A God who has been forever and ever. A God who has an unlimited past and an unlimited future. That is the context that our space is found in in the eternal space and place of God. What Moses does is make the setting the eternity of God. He says “Everlasting to everlasting you are God.” He takes this grand perspective of God and what he does is contrasts it with us. He basically goes on and says you guys are dust. That is what you are going to be turned back to. Speaking to God he says “You turn men back to dust saying ‘Return to dust o sons of man.’” If you are familiar with your Bible, back in Genesis I think the third chapter of Genesis about verse 19 what is it that God says? He says you are made of dust. “For you are dust and dust you shall return.” That is the situation that is going on here. You are dust and you are going to return to dust. We think about that and it is frustrating because especially if you think about the original word, it actually means be pulverized. You pulverize men back into dust. When you think about dust, we don’t like dust around the house so we vacuum it up or we sweep it up. That is basically what he goes on to say. He says “You sweep men away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass in the morning: in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.” You sweep away a generation. You just keep sweeping away those generations. They hit the sleep of death. Sweep it away and then you spring up a new generation like new grass in the morning, but in the afternoon it is withered. The imagery he is trying to evoke is the idea that in the Middle East you would have days where you would have so much rain that the grass would come up really quickly and really green. By the afternoon, because of the heat, it would be scorched and withered. That is the picture here that he is trying to get across. The brevity of life in comparison to the eternal God. We are but dust. We are but grass that starts in the morning and is withered by the end of the day.
As I have said already, this should not come as news to any of us. We look around and we look on TV and we know that everybody seems to be getting older. It used to be that you had to go to your high school reunion to see how much people have aged. You go back to the 10, 20, 30-year reunion. Nowadays you don’t need to do that. You can just go on Facebook. The thing about Facebook is you get this friend request from somebody from the 70s or whatever and you say sure I will take that Facebook request. I will be your friend. You open it up and you say whoa! Life has not been kind to this person at all. I think that is why all many 50+ people are saying that they want nothing to do with Facebook. It has nothing to do with not liking technology. It is about the fact that they don’t want people to see their aging face.
All kidding aside, Moses was trying to get across the point that life is brief. It is short. “You sweep men away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass in the morning. In the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.” Then to make matters worse, he goes on to basically say if it is not bad enough life is short, but it is also extremely hard and difficult. Especially for Moses and the Israelites because they lived under the wrath of God. He goes on to say “All our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our days with a moan. The length of our days is 70 years or 80, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow for they quickly pass on, and we fly away.” Moses and the people had to experience God’s wrath. They saw it firsthand. When we look at the Old Testament, at least on the surface God doesn’t come across as very friendly back then. But you have to remember God was forming a whole new nation. The chosen people. He was trying to weed out all the bad habits so he was not going to tolerate sin and disobedience. He would zap the people and basically said I am going to put you down with a plague until you figure this out. The people are going through life and feeling the covering of God’s wrath going over them the whole time in the wilderness or wherever they happened to be wandering.
Fortunately for us, because of what happened on the cross, we do not live under God’s wrath. Because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross who paid the penalty for our sins, we live in the period of grace. In other words, a period where God has withheld his wrath. You say what is going on here? Why doesn’t he just pour down his wrath? Even though his wrath is withheld, we see sin and sickness. We see all these things going on. It is just a hard environment to live in. People are sinning. People are making bad choices. Accidents happen. Disease and all that sort of stuff. You think in the back of your mind Lord maybe why don’t you just pour out your wrath on these people? The reason he wouldn’t is because we would probably all be consumed. Not only that, he wants to give people the opportunity to accept him. The same problem we have today is the same problem people had in the first century. In fact, they said to Peter what happened? What is going on here? Why have you not poured down your wrath? Here is what Peter says. This is in The Message version. He says “Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change.” God is holding back his wrath because he desires that no one would perish. He is giving them space and time. The unfortunate thing is no one knows how much time they have. That is the kicker. You can’t just say I will wait because you don’t know how many days you have. We live in this period what they call the time between the times. The time between the first coming of Christ and the time between the second coming of Christ where you have all this messy stuff going on. Sin still reigns. Sickness still happens. Where people die. Where people do mean things to each other. That is the period that we are living in. Like the Israelites, we can get to the end of our days and we too if we are not careful we end up getting ready to die and all we give out is a moan or a sigh. It is kind of like is that all there is? I worked my entire life. I went through all these troubles. All these trials. I went through this and now all I get is death. What was the point in all this?
Moses is painting a very depressing and somewhat negative picture but in the same sense what he is doing is starting to put it in context and begin to show that although this is a negative aspect of life, the brevity of life, the hardness of life, what he wants to show is that there is a solution. Although the first 11 verses have to deal with the bad part, the remaining few verses beginning with verse 12 deal with his strategy for overcoming or redeeming the time. I want to focus on in the remaining minutes three quick things that he gives us because I think they are as applicable today as they were back several thousands of years ago when Moses walked this earth.
The first strategy for redeeming the time is pretty simple. He says to God “Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” He is not saying pull out the calculator and try to figure out how many days you have left. He is not talking about a literal count. There is actually a place on the internet where you can figure this out. Anybody familiar with deathclock.com? You can actually go in there and put in all your demographics. You can put your age, your weight, your height, whether you smoke or not, whether you drink or whatever and it will tell you the day of your death. I have been there. The good thing is you can tweak it a little bit. If you don’t like that date just lower your BMI or whatever and you will be fine. The idea is not to depress you. It is really not. It is actually to inspire you to make some changes in your life. What it does is then refer you to a health site so you can begin to figure out what do I need to do? Do I need to eat better or exercise and that sort of thing so I can add more days to my life? Really this is what Moses is trying to do. Moses is saying God just teach us to number our days aright. Show us how to do it. Help us to appreciate the brevity of life so that we may use our days wisely. You think where is he going to teach us that? We look around and we see people aging. We look on TV. We see people dying, but I think we have become kind of insensitive to that. We see death so much that it really doesn’t even affect us. It doesn’t get us to think so much about own mortality. What really works, a good place where we learn our own mortality is at a funeral. If you have been to a funeral, you can’t help but reflect on the brevity of life. There is a passage in Ecclesiastes 7 that I have quoted before. It says “Better to be in a house of mourning than a house of feasting because death is the destiny of every man, so a man will take it to heart.” Actually I got the modern version in The Message says “You learn more at a funeral than at a feast, after all that is where we will end up. We might discover something from it.” You are going to discover the brevity of life. You are at a funeral and watching your loved ones go away. I do a lot of funerals. I am standing over that grave watching that coffin go into the ground and in the back of my head is that someday somebody is going to be standing over that coffin and I am going to be the one going into the ground. It is a reality. So Moses is asking God to teach us to appreciate the shortness of life. But it is one thing to understand the brevity of life. It is quite another to be satisfied with those remaining days of your life.
That is his next request of God. He says “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.” We can have all the days we want, but if we are not satisfied in those days what good are they? Thinking of another old rocker, has anybody heard of Mick Jagger? Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. He is going to be 70 next year. I was going to put a picture of him up there, but he looks really bad. He looked bad in his 20s. Him and Keith Richards. They looked old when they were born I think. Remember Mick Jagger sang that song “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”. He sang “I can’t get no satisfaction but I try.” The reason he couldn’t get any satisfaction is because he was looking for it in all the wrong places. The whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He thought he could find satisfaction in fame. Then these old rockers get to a certain point and pretty soon their fan base is going away. Yes, some members of the younger generation like them. But many of the fans that really liked them are all dead and gone. They are fading away. That fame becomes fleeting. They are sitting back trying to evaluate their life and realize their life doesn’t have a lot of satisfaction to it at all. What Moses is telling us is the only satisfaction we are ever going to have is in the unfailing, never ending love of God. We have to get this. I was thinking about love in general. We all love to be loved by our family, our friends, by relationships. Whatever it is. I really think it is the love of others and our love towards them that motivates us to keep on living. We like to do things together. It is hard to go to a movie by yourself or go out to dinner by yourself or whatever. We like to do things with the people we love. It is the people we love that are the reason we get up in the day because we want to do nice things. We want to earn money so we can take care of the people we love. Love is a great motivator. What happens when we get to the point in life when maybe that love fails? Maybe a relationship ends for whatever reason. Maybe you devoted all this time to one person and that person walks away. Maybe that person passes away. A lot of people become widowed and all of a sudden they lose their motivation for living because they don’t feel loved any more. If they don’t have grandkids or other people, they don’t have a motivator out there. They don’t have something out there that tells them get up in the morning because you have something to do. The good news about God’s unfailing love is just that. It will never ever fail. It is not contingent on your behavior. Whether you are good, bad, successful, or achieved anything, whatever you have done, you know that that love is unfailing. That is the thing that keeps you going. That is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. You know that you will never ever be separated from the love of God if you are in Christ Jesus. We see that in Romans 8:38. Paul is writing and he says “I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Do you believe that? That is the motivating factor. When you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have a God that loves you no matter what and he loves you forever and ever, not just temporary, ever and ever and ever that motivates you to get up and begin to want to join with him, partner with him, work with him and help him accomplish his goals in life. You begin to think what was his goal? We will talk about it in a minute but basically what I mean is that he will help establish your work. He will help determine what it is that you are supposed to do.
In fact, the final point is Moses goes on to say “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us. Yes establish the work of our hands.” When we love God, we are going to be motivated to work for God and it is God who is going to establish the work of our hands. When we talk about the idea of establish what God establishes cannot be shaken. Cannot be moved. We want God to establish the work of our hands. As a side note, I was thinking about the Israelites when they left Egypt and went out into the wilderness. They got out there and you might recall that they didn’t go out there without stuff. They were able to take a lot of stuff from the Egyptians. They were able to plunder the Egyptians. They were able to bring a lot of gold and treasures with them. You have to remember they had been slaving away for several hundreds of years. Now they get out in the wilderness and all they have is time and money on their hands. What happens? They have too much time and money so what do they do? They build a golden calf and they decide to worship the golden calf. They decided to create an idol because they had way too much time on their hands and too much resources. Likewise today we see people that get to retirement age. They invested all their hours and time in work 20, 30, 40 years in the same job. They have saved all this money and what happens is they get to retirement and they have time and money on their hands. If they aren’t careful they are going to be idle or they are going to fall in some sort of other trap. There is an old saying that says idle hands are the devil’s playground. I think that is very true. We saw a few weeks ago when we looked at the Psalm of David. David was supposed to be with his men, but he had time and money and power on his side so that is when he got himself in trouble with Bathsheba. It is the same thing if we have too much time on our hands, given enough time we are going to get ourselves in trouble. I say that all the while knowing that this does not just pertain to the retirement people. This does not just pertain to the people that are approaching retirement or are in retirement. This really applies to every one of us. As I mentioned last week, we all have a lot of stuff. There are few people in America that are really truly poor, at least in relation to the rest of the world. We are quite wealthy. The same thing goes with time. We all have a lot of time on our hands. In fact, if we were to sit down and write out our time and see where we spend our time, we would see that we waste a lot of time. You say Chuck I don’t waste a lot of time. I get up in the morning and write it all out. I know exactly what I am going to do. I schedule every minute. Well you have to look at how you are spending your time because you may be busy but you might not be productive. In other words, you may be spending time on the things that you think are important while ignoring the things that are really important. If you have ever taken a time-management course one of the basic things they teach you is called the tyranny of the urgent. It is the idea that the reason we don’t get our goals accomplished in life is that we put too much focus on the urgent whether it is a phone call, answering email, answering Facebook, running errands, doing things for our kids, whatever it is. That becomes the tyranny of the urgent. What happens is we never get around to the things that are very important. What they say you have to do before you do anything in time management, before you even open your day planner, you need to understand what is really important to you. What are the things you really want to accomplish in life? Those things that are most important it would make sense that you try to schedule them in your day. For some people it is like I want to write the greatest novel or I want to win an Olympic gold or pursue a career or get a degree or that sort of thing. Those things are important so what they say is make sure that every single day when you make your to-do list of all those urgent things you have to do, take the things that are important and make sure you incorporate one of those items or a step to completing one of those items in your daily routine. Over time, you will not only get through your to-do list, you will get through the things that are important in life. It is a very simple principle. Really that is what Moses is saying here. He is saying God don’t allow us to spend all our time on meaningless things that have no permanent value. Instead, establish, make firm, make strong the work of our hands because the things that you put your hand on, the things that you set to work will not go away, will not be shaken. They will last for all eternity. That is what he is saying there.
You say Chuck that is all well and good but what is the work that we are called to do? We can find that by simply looking back at John 6 where it says people were asking Jesus “They asked him ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’” In a nutshell it is basically to spread the gospel. If you wanted to break it down we can go back to Luke 4. Last week we talked about Christ’s agenda when he opened up the scroll and said “The spirit is upon me and anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the captives free.” All that is part of our agenda. All that is part of our works that is going to have a permanency to it if we were to engage in it.
In closing, when I think about the Olympians out there you watch them and you can’t help but be inspired by how great they are. The work and hours they must have put in to earn a medal. You get guys that earn 18 golds like Michael Phelps and you get other people that earn a gold and you get some people that don’t earn anything but they all put in a lot of hours. For some it comes easier but a lot of them put in those hours and didn’t walk away with any sort of medal. They spent years. I think Michael Phelps spent 20 years training. I imagine there are other people like that who spent all this time. They ignored their friends. They ignored school work. They ignored so many different things in relationships because they were going after the gold. That was the thing they were trying to do. When they get there what they find out is maybe that it is not satisfying. Especially if they didn’t get a medal. They are thinking I put all this time in there and I didn’t get a gold. What do I do with the rest of my days? There are probably Olympians like there but the good news is there are also ones that are more balanced. The guy that comes to mind is Eric Liddel. He was a Scotsman. In fact, they called him the Flying Scotsman because of his unorthodox style of running with his head back. He was a hero of Scotland because he won a gold medal in the 400 meter back in 1924. That was the movie Chariots of Fire that they kind of made a farce of at the beginning of the ceremony. That movie was about the life of Eric Liddel. It is a great movie. I highly recommend it. It wasn’t just about the fact that he won a medal. It was how he won it. You might recall that he was supposed to be in some other events, but he would not run in the qualifying heat because the heat was on Sunday. It drove the Olympic committee crazy. He wouldn’t run in it at all. He was remembered for that. Because he honored God, God honored him and allowed him to win a gold medal in an event he didn’t even think he was going to run in, the 400 meter, so he became a hero of all Scotland. The story doesn’t end there. The movie Chariots of Fire ends there but the story goes on. The next 20 years they don’t even talk about. They don’t talk about the fact that he gave up his running career and decided to be a missionary in China during a very difficult time right around World War II. While he was there he got placed in a Japanese internment camp, but he didn’t squander his time. He took his knowledge and gifts and became to start Bible studies. He began to organize sporting events for the other prisoners because they had too much time on their hands so he wanted to keep them occupied. He wanted to keep their mind, body, and spirit occupied. He made good use of that time. Eric Liddel understood this idea that yes God gives us work to do on earth. If anybody knew that it was Eric Liddel. You might remember the line in the movie when somebody asks him why he runs. He says God taught me to run. God gave me the gift of running and when I run I feel his pleasure. In other words, I know this is a gift from God because he gave this to me and I enjoy it and I know that God made me to run and he made me to run fast. But even though he knew his earthly gift was to run the race on earth, he knew the better race to run was to run the race of faith. One of scenes in the movie where he just finished a race and goes out to the track and it is raining and all the people start coming around him. They want to hear from this Olympic hero. They want to hear about his race. He uses it as an opportunity to talk to them about the race of faith. I found some lines from the movie that I thought I would read because to me this really sums up what Eric Liddel was about. It sums up what Moses was about. It sums up what we need to be about. He is talking to the people and he says “You came to see a race today. To see someone win. It happened to be me. But I want you to do more than just watch a race. I want you to take part in it. I want you to compare faith to running a race. It is hard. It requires concentration of will, energy of soul. You experience elation when the winner breaks the tape, especially if you’ve got a bet on it. But how long does that last? You go home. Maybe your dinner is burnt. Maybe you haven’t got a job. So who am I to say believe, have faith in the face of life’s realities? I would like to give you something more permanent but I can only point the way. I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way or his own way and where does the power come from to see the race to its end from within? Jesus said ‘Behold, the kingdom of God is within you. If with all your heart you truly seek me, you shall ever surely find me.’ If you commit yourself to the love of Christ then that is how you run a straight race.” Isn’t that awesome?
In closing, when we think about the prayer of Moses, he kept saying us. Satisfy us in your unfailing love. That is really what he is talking about. He is not talking about himself. He is talking about the people. He knows that he can change all he wants but if he doesn’t get the community to change, really nothing is going to happen. My prayer for you is the same prayer from Moses. It is the same prayer I would have for myself that God would teach us to number our days, that we would appreciate the brevity of life, and not only that but that we would satisfy ourselves not with all the worldly desires, but that we would satisfy ourselves with God’s unfailing love. It is God’s unfailing love that would motivate us to do the works of God. To establish the works of God. The things that are permanent. The things that are lasting so that when we get to heaven we know, just like our possessions, our time has an eternal, immortal stamp on it. Let us pray.
