Number Our Days Right — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

Ethel Barrett wrote a book called It Only Hurts When I Laugh. It’s a good book, she tells a story about a high school teacher in Los Angeles who had a unique way of getting her students to think.

What she did from time to time, she’d write a brief message on the blackboard. The comments were completely unrelated to the studies that the students were involved in.

And one morning when the students entered the room, they found the number 25,550 written on the board, and they thought about this, they were a bit puzzled, and one of the pupils. Raised his hand and asked the teacher why that particular number was there, and she explained that 25,550 represented the number of days in the life of a person who lives to be 70 years of age.

Now what the teacher was trying to do was to impress her pupils with the fact that life is brief.

Now, when you think about it, reducing the number of days rather than years, the span of our life doesn’t sound very long at all, does it? So if you live to be 70, that’s 25,550 days. Now, if we were truthful, many of us don’t like thinking about the facts like that. We certainly hope that we’re going to be around more than 70 years.

Someone has worked out that by the time you’ve reached the age of 72, you’ve slept 23 years and 4 months, you’ve worked 19 years and 8 months. You might have been to church or recreation for 10 years and 2 months, and spent, eating and drinking 6 years and 10 months. You probably have travelled 6 years, spent 4 years sick, and on it goes. That person, after making the list, ended with the words, no wonder we’re tired.

Did you know that the psalmist has something to say about the time and days that we have left? This is in Psalm 90:12. It says:

Teach us to use wisely all the time we have.

Now everyone, of course, has a certain degree of pressure in their life, and the psalmist, this was Psalm 90, he recognised that God has given us every day as a gift, and his prayer is that he’ll have the wisdom to use the hours correctly.

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Life has been defined today as a, a bit like a pressure cooker. We never seem to have enough time to do what needs to be done. One person I know about complained, I have 36 hours of work on my desk and 90 minutes to get to it. Well, we’re thinking today about that Psalm 90:12, and another version says:

Teach us to realise the brevity of life so that we may grow in wisdom.

Another one says:

Teach us to use wisely all the time we have.

And another version of Psalm 90:12 says:

Teach us to number our days aright that we might gain a heart of wisdom.

If we knew, for example, how much time we had here on this earth, I think we would be careful about using it wisely, at least the latter part of our life, wouldn’t we.

Perhaps that’s the point.

How do we do it? For example, little children, they don’t number their days. They don’t think of death. It doesn’t enter their heads that someday they’ll die. And teenagers, they don’t think of death either. In fact, teenagers think of the opposite. They think that they’ll never die and that they’ll live forever. They’re indestructible, immortal, and adults, well, many of us don’t like to think about our eventual death either, but there comes a time in every person’s life when we must consider the possibility that we will die, and when that time comes when we start to think about it, we might start to number our days.

So the psalmist in this tremendous Psalm, have a look at it sometimes. Psalm 90 gives us an answer at the beginning and the end of the Psalm. This is what he says, Lord, through all the generations you’ve been our home before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world from beginning to end. You are God, our Lord and our God. Treat us with kindness. Please let all go well.

That’s verse 17 and 1 and 2.

And so when we realise that the Lord is our home and God is God, I think we can see our days far more clearly. When we allow the Lord to establish the work of our hands, we can see our days more clearly.

So how long are you going to live? Well, I guess most of us would agree that somewhere between 70 and 80 years, maybe a little older. Well, we need to remember that our life, says James, is a mist that appears for a little while before it disappears. Teach us to number our days aright.

Let’s Pray

Well, Heavenly Father, we know your thoughts are very deep. Day by day we pray that you’ll increase our knowledge of our plan for our lives so that we can plan aright. This, I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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