Well, I want to bring you a message this morning. I have entitled it "Numbering Your Days." There's something of a conclusion to the Christmas theme messages we've had in this past month.

Psalm ninety, and in particular the words of verses ten through twelve, seem to me an appropriate portion of scripture to cap off the year as we gather for the final time in 2025. This Psalm is a prayer of Moses, and it's a prayer of Moses yearning for heavenly wisdom on how to face this life in mortality and in an evil and sinful world in which we live. It's a prayer which acknowledges the fact that the years and days of our lives are fleeting and they are fading away in light of our eternal and everlasting God. And so these are, I think, things that we need to hear as we close out this year and open a new year.

This new year will hold numerous joys and sorrows for us all, but the question for God's people is what perspective are we going to have to walk through those joys and sorrows that are awaiting us in the new year?

The days God says here are evil, and Moses is showing us how to pray for wisdom; how to live so that our time is not wasted and our lives are not counting for nothing. We want, as George Swinnock, the Puritan, said, "Rock of Ages and Everlasting Father, teach me to so number my remaining days that I may live every day in the fear of the Lord. Since every day may be my last, may it be my best. My life by is by your providence," he says. "Oh, that it were according to your precepts."

Our Mortality

The first point I want to show you in these words of Psalm ninety is that of our mortality. See how the text says, "As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years; or if due to strength, eighty years." What we have here is a reminder of the shortness and brevity of human life. For this new year, this is exactly what we as Christians must have before us if we are to live with godly wisdom. We must understand our mortality, or we will be deceived into somehow thinking that our lives just go on indefinitely.

John Calvin said here, "We foolishly imagine that we shall nestle in this world forever," and that is true. That's what we do. We forget our mortality. Now, if we keep in mind what has already come in the Psalm, we see that Moses is actually presenting us here with a great contrast. If you look back at verse two, just for a moment, it says, "Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God."

The contrast here could not be any more pronounced. On the one hand, we have at the beginning of the Psalm our Creator who is eternal, who is without beginning, whose being is without cause, before time, before worlds. And then on the other hand, here down in verse ten, we have you and I with our measly eighty years, if due to strength we even make it to that. We are mortals, you see, in our present condition. We are those who, as in verse three, are called back to the dust from which we were taken at God's command.

Now, for some of you older folk here, your mortality is more apparent than those of us who are young and often naive to the limited nature of our days. You might feel the weight of this text a little bit more than the young do. You see that your body is slowing down; everything creaks a little bit more; there's less hair or there's greyer hair; and the memory fades. You make more doctor's visits as the years go by. Your energy drains faster and is restored slower than when you were young. And each Christmas, you begin to think, "How many more Christmases do I actually have left?"

Yet it is not simply the old who need to be reminded of this reality of our mortality, but the youth as well. The young still die young, and it is we who often take our mortality for granted. Yet before we know it, life has vanished behind us. Our years are truly few.

The point of this scripture is just this: it's a reminder of man's mortality and the futility of his life in this perspective. We are shown to be full of pride and misplaced boasting if we think that we are owed by God a certain amount of years. So even if you are blessed with a normal life, Moses says, maybe you'll make it to seventy years. If due to strength, maybe to eighty years. If you take care of yourself, then maybe you can extend your life another decade, he's saying.

But the point is, what's the difference? How pathetic and how vain; how measly our lives are in light of eternity. If you secure for yourself an extra decade beyond that of others, what true advantage do you have? For before you know it, your mortality will be realised, and to the dust you shall return. In Job 14:1-2 it says, "Man who is born of woman is short-lived and full of turmoil. Like a flower, he comes forth and withers. He also flees like a shadow and does not remain."

I'll illustrate it this way. The longest straight section of road in the world, I'm told, is in Saudi Arabia. It's two hundred and fifty-six kilometres. Just pure highway. Now imagine you're standing at the very beginning of that road and you're peering into the distance where the road goes, and you can't even begin to hope to see the end. It's just too far and it feels like it could go on for infinity. And then you pull out a little tape measure one metre long, and you put it down on the road and you mark off a metre. This is something of a comparison of the brevity of our lives. Our lives are short and they cannot be held on to as we'd like. We're here one day and we're gone the next.

In the light of eternity, Moses is saying, what is a man's life? And you see, our problem of mortality is why Jesus has come. Jesus promises to all who believe in him that he will, at the last day, resurrect our mortal bodies and instead give us immortal bodies fit for heaven.

You see, our mortality and death are, in the biblical view, a reminder of our sinful condition, and it's not as man was designed to live. Our immortal souls were designed to be paired with immortal bodies, but as Romans tells us, "the wages of sin is death". Now, because of sin, we hardly know ourselves, let alone God. Because of sin, God has cursed man and placed a limit on his life, and we die. We are lowered into caskets, into the dirt beneath our feet, because of sin; because of Adam's sin; because of our sin. In Genesis chapter five, we see this repeated phrase: "and he died; and he died; and he died." But it was not to be this way from the beginning.

But the good news of Jesus Christ is for us, that through faith in him we can experience the reversal of this curse and so have eternal life again through him. And Jesus said in John 6:40, "For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in him will have eternal life, and I myself will raise him up on the last day."

To do this, Christ identified with our mortality. He took on flesh and blood. He became a man. He took to himself a nature and a body with the capacity to die. Hebrews 2:17 says, "Therefore, he had to be made like his brethren in all things." And so Christ became sympathetic to our condition so that, as 1 Corinthians 15:53 says, "For this perishable must put on the imperishable and this mortal must put on immortality." That is what Christ brings to those who believe in his name.

Our Sorrow

The second thing I want to show you in this text is our sorrow. We see this where it says, "Yet their pride is but labour and sorrow, for soon it is gone and we fly away." The meaning here is not only that we are mortals subjected to death, but our lives are full of immense sorrow and toil and struggling and suffering.

We all should understand something of this. There is much grieving that we have to live through this side of eternity. Our lives can sometimes feel like death on our way to our graves; hardships of all kinds; brokenness; trauma; addictions; every kind of evil. All of us in some way live through this as children, as youth, or as adults. And there is an endless sea of things in the world making up what Moses says here.

And when he says in this passage, "Yet their pride," in other words, he's saying at their zenith, our lives at their very best are still full of sorrow and toil and suffering, and it is common to man. And the great tragedy of our mortal lives of sorrow is then all of a sudden it's over. "For soon, it is gone, and we fly away," the text says. With that, it's over. Life is done. The heart stops beating. The lungs stop taking breath. The blood stops pumping through our veins, and life is over.

Now listen to this sober way that Solomon puts it in Ecclesiastes 4:1-2: "Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. Behold, I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them. And on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun."

But what does the gospel say about our sorrows? Well, it says that one has come who was himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Jesus, who identifies himself with the experiences of his people. However, we must first realise that one implication here is that without Christ, our lives are truly lived in vain if we do not know him. As my English teacher at school used to say, quite a depressing sort of a saying, "Life sucks and then you die." She didn't know Christ.

So if you do not know God, you will live this mortal life. You will die as the wages for your sins. You will forfeit your soul and perish eternally in hell under wrath. And truly your life would be lived in vain if this is your story, because there can be no return, no rerun, no start-overs.

But when we come to know Jesus Christ, the opposite is true. The gospel breathes new life and meaning into our lives. Remember at the birth of Noah, his father said in Genesis 5:29, "This one will give us rest from our work, from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed." Well, in Christ, we have one who is Noah's greater descendant. We find this rest from our sorrows is found in Christ, our peace in the storms of our short and mortal lives.

In our sufferings and war against sin, we see God using our experiences to make us more and more into the image of his Son; to equip us for use in his kingdom and his world. And so through many sufferings, the likeness to Jesus is recreated in the believer. He who has suffered for us, who was tempted in all the ways we are, he is being created in us.

So as Paul and Barnabas said in Acts 14:22, "Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God." So now we know that our labour is not in vain if we are in Christ. We sorrow, yet not without hope. Our lives take on true meaning and purpose in the gospel. The time can now be fully redeemed. Each moment has new meaning breathed into it because it can be used for God.

This is why Paul exhorts the believers in 1 Corinthians 15:58: "Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord."

Our Depravity

But next in the Psalm, I want us to see our depravity. Verse eleven says, "Who understands the power of your anger and your fury according to the fear that is due to you?" Here we find the explanation for the cause of our mortality and the sorrow-filled life that we have to live. It is because of the presence of sin; our sin and the sin of the world. It is the anger and fury of God against sin.

In fact, look back a few verses from verse seven. "For we have been consumed," he says, "by your anger. By your wrath, we have been dismayed. You have placed our iniquities before you. Our secret sins in the light of your presence." Our sins, he says, are in the light of God's presence.

This is the Bible's view of the depravity that is in the human heart. Our secret sins, yet alone our public sins, are all totally transparent to God, and his wrath is kindled against man because of it. Because of this, God has fixed the day that he will judge the world.

But notice here that Moses asks a question. He asks, Who understands this anger? Who understands this fury of God that is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men? Who understands it? Who are those who understand the wrath of God? Moses is asking.

Well, I agree with Calvin here, who says the faithful alone; that is the born-again believer, "are sensible of God's wrath and, being subdued by it, they acknowledge that they are nothing and with true humility devote themselves wholly to him." Only, you see, the person that has come to know God in the face of Jesus Christ understands something of God's holy and burning anger against sin. The world does not stand in awe of God, as Calvin goes on to say, and so it does not know anything of his almighty wrath that is signalled against them in their own death and mortality.

And so the lesson is for us that we are not to live in ignorance as believers on the hatred of God against sin. And this hatred of God against sin was displayed in no place more clearly than when the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was crucified on a cross for us. There was the full story of God's anger against sin manifest. There, Christ made propitiation; that is, a turning away of wrath for us.

The weight of punishment that was due the believer was instead directed upon Christ, and there the certificate of our debt of sin was nailed to him. It was credited and counted to him that it might be diverted from us. Jesus was punished for our depravity, and what a comfort it is to know that all wrath has now been extinguished against the believer. There is no longer any condemnation for all those who are in Christ Jesus.

You see, if we have believed upon Christ, we are standing truly in a state of justification. There's no more wrath against us. Even when we sin, which we still do, it has all been counted to Christ. And this is the amazing thing: we have been freed, in a manner of speaking, to live in awe and fear of God all of our days because of what he has done to remove the condemnation that was due.

Our Need

Finally, I want to show you our need in the final verse. It says, "So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom." Here is the sum total of all we have said. We find a prayer seeking from the Lord help to understand our own lives in light of our mortality, our struggle, and sin.

The numbering of days here could be stated this way: teach us to use our time with wisdom. In other words, our days in this life are finite. Every breath we take is slowly counting down the number of final breaths that we have before life is over. Our time should be thought of as precious, as a finite commodity, not to be gambled with or traded in for that which is of little return.

Caitlin and I have been thinking about purchasing a new bed lately, and we're torn. We're not sure. Do we just replace the mattress on our current one? Do we get a whole new bed? What do we do? And as we looked into it, we're thinking, well, we spend about a third of our lives, a third of our lives, asleep in a bed. We probably want to have a good one for that reason.

Well, when we think about all the other things that we spend our time doing, how much of our lives is just flitted away? If we added up the amount of screen time that we have on our devices every day, we might find that a decade of our lives is spent looking at devices. We have to be careful with our time.

But know too that the world uses similar language, yet it means something entirely different by it. You'll hear non-Christians say things like, "Make the most of your time because you never know which day will be your last." However, the biblical view is concerned with the use of our time as far as spiritual things go. The world's thinking in this regard is one of accumulation; it's one of pleasure; it's one of temporary fulfilment. But these are two very different things.

This has nothing to do with living in a self-gratifying way because our lives are short, nor does it have anything to do with trying to discern how long we're going to live for. We've seen that that's irrelevant already. Our lives, whether seventy years or eighty, if we're granted such by God, result ultimately in our death. Our lives occur as a drop in the bucket in the ocean of eternity. And so what's the difference?

So the answer to what is meant by this numbering of days is given in the second clause of the verse. It's a prayer seeking to know how to live before this eternal transcendent God with wisdom. It's a request linking back to the start of the Psalm. Psalm 90:1 says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations."

To live with wisdom, then, is to make Christ the whole focus of our lives. Whatever days he gives us before we return to the dust of the earth, we are to live acutely aware that, while our lives come and go, their start and end are both unknown to us. Still, there is a life available where we can contribute to a lasting kingdom; Christ's kingdom.

So we must be wary of spending our mortal and limited years on earth building kingdoms that are detached from Christ and will soon fade away, as Psalm 90:5 says, "swept away like a flood." Paul said it this way in Ephesians 5:15-16: "Therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of your time because the days are evil."

Conclusion

The old saying of C.T. Studd still rings true: "Only one life, 'twill soon be past; only what's done for Christ will last." So may we each strive with the prayer of verse seventeen of Psalm ninety, that God would "confirm the work of our hands". The work of our hands is that which is suitable for those who know their time is measured in the light of eternity; that our sole desire is to cut stones for one kingdom only, and it's not our own.

May we pray, "Lord, use all of my time, my energy, so that it not be frittered away on wasteful things." So it is God and Christ we are to live for, brothers and sisters. The resurrection of Christ has made all the difference to these mortal lives of ours. Immortality is before the believer.

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed."

Let's pray that God would give us a heart of wisdom, that we would number our days and so live for him.