From the Heart of the Pastor: Teach us to Number Our Days
By God’s gracious providence, you are days away from entering the new year of 2019. And as divine providence leads you toward welcoming another new year in your life, and you continue doing what you have planned to do and accomplish in the year 2019, how does your approach towards receiving a new year looks like? Are you taking the winding up of the old year (2018) and the entering of the new year of 2019 for granted? Do you live as if the law of nature or chance makes it possible for you every year, or as if you somehow manage to stay alive through a good habit of eating and physical exercise in order to advance from one year to another year?
As a fellow believer who confesses the God of the Bible as the creator of the World and everything in it— including the years, days and times that we take part in— you would agree with me that without the Creator’s will and approval, all helpful human efforts that we do in life such as balancing our diet, visiting our doctor regularly, gymnastics, managing our savings well and becoming a law-abiding citizen will not guarantee the preservation of the days of our lives in order to move from an old year to a new one.
I am sure you are familiar with the story of Job. After Job lost everything he had, including his own children, under the attack of Satan but the hidden will and permission of the Sovereign Lord, for God’s glory and Job’s sanctification, Job uttered these instructive words, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
What do we see in Job’s righteous response? Job understood that God was the source and giver of life. Not only that, the Lord gives life (breath) and when He wants to do so He takes it away in the year, day or time that He appointed before eternity. Like many unbelievers and skeptics today, Job was not a fatalist who believed in a god of chance or a universe that was created by a supernatural God but after he created it he detached himself from it and left it to take its course by itself. No, Job believed in the God of the Bible who created the whole universe by the power of His word and one who governs and preserves it and everything in it till the end.
What Job recognized and declared about God who gives life and dispenses it to people as He wishes was also acknowledged by a pagan king. After King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon saw the mighty power of God delivering Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, from the burning fiery furnace into which he throw them he bowed down before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and declared God to his entire kingdom with these words, “I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation: all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand or say to him, “what have you done?”
As you can see in the testimonies of both Job as a confessing believer and King Nebuchadnezzar, at first a heathen but then a repentant king whom the Lord humbled to give God glory due to His creating and governing power over the life, days and years of the inhabitants of this world (which includes you), the years of our lives are in the hand of the Sovereign God.
The Evangelist Luke confirmed this truth to us by the words of Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Because of this biblical truth, as you enter the new year of 2019, you really need to pray the prayer of Moses the servant of God in Psalms 90: 12, “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.” According to Moses, what does numbering our days mean? In that remarkable prayer that Moses presented to God, we see that Moses acknowledged the Lord as the ruler of life and to whom we will give an account on how we lived out our life here on earth. In his prayer Moses first teaches us that the days and years of our lives are the gifts of the Creator to us, and that the Giver, on the day of judgement (reckoning), will have us stand before His throne to give an account on how we used them for His glory and the good of our souls.
Because of this, we should count every day of our lives in relation to eternity and the God of eternity. Towards Him we are answerable. But what does counting your days mean? It does not mean that you count them to know how many they are. No, because you don’t need divine instruction in order do that. You just need to know your math. But even if you know how to count days, that was not what Moses meant, because being a mathematician doesn’t give you knowledge and insight to know how many years you will have here on earth. No one except the Creator knows that (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
And that is the reason why we need wisdom and instruction from God on how to count our days, and again, not to know how long we will live in this world, but to understand its value, and by the grace of God make it a life well lived. To count our days means to count and treat our days as if they will be the last ones. As if they will be days on which the Lord will require our souls from us. That is the first lesson that Moses teaches us through this petition.
The second valuable lesson that we must learn from it is knowing that life is a precious gift from God, and as we don’t know how long we will live here on earth, we should always ask the Lord in prayer to give us wisdom to count every day of our lives in relation to God and eternity. King David did the same thing in Psalm 39:4-5 when he prayed this prayer to the Lord “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few hand-breadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!”
You see, my friend, all the godly that we are considering: Moses, David, Luke, Solomon and even the pagan king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar, were not being solicitous to know from the Lord the mystery of how many years they will live on earth in order to boast about their tomorrow and forget and live their lives without worshiping and honoring God. But they were very serious about meditating and reflecting on the shortness of their days and how they should glorify God with the brief time that the Lord gave them here on earth.
Are you like them, my friend, as you now approach the receiving of another new year in your life? Are you boasting about it, saying, “Yes, I made it to the year 2019!” or “Lucky I am, I am about to enter to a new year and I am going to enjoy life more than I did in 2018!” Well, James calls this kind of approach to receiving a new year in life— PRIDE. Let me refresh your mind with James’s exhortation on this very issue, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes, instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.” (James 4:13-16).
According to God’s word, to approach and receive a new year with a boastful heart and attitude is sinful. But we are to welcome and receive it with a thankful heart that recognizes God as the giver of it and embrace it as a tool given to us by the Creator to be used for His glory and the well being of our own lives and all people around us.
My dear friends, after reading this article, if you ever wonder on how to receive the year 2019 as a gift from the Lord, to be used for his glory and your happiness, consider putting these godly habits on your plans for this coming New Year.
- Fearing the Lord— which is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10)
- To treat prayer like breathing— pray unceasingly (1 Thessalonians 5:17)
- To love corporate prayer with the saints in your local Church (Acts 2:42)
- To grow in your life of private and public worship (Psalm 42:1-5)
- To dedicate your whole Sabbath for the worship of God (Exodus 20:8, Isaiah 58:13)
- To read and meditate on the Word of God daily (Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2, 1 Timothy 4:13-15)
- To pray for your earthly and spiritual leaders faithfully and often (1 Tim 2:1&2, Heb 13:7)
- To partake the Lord’s supper faithfully (Acts 2:42, 1 Corinthians 11:25)
- To grow in your love for the preaching and studying of God’s Word (Psalm 119:97, 1 peter 2:2)
- To allocate time for personal witnessing (Mark 5:19, Matthew 5:16)
- To love the saints, show hospitality and assist the needy (Hebrews 13:1-3)
I pray that the Lord would give each one of you a heart of heavenly wisdom that Moses prayed for to consider applying the eleven qualities of the Christian life that I recommended above in your own daily Christian walk in the year 2019.
A very blessed and productive new year of 2019 to you all!
Your friend and Pastor,
Zecharias