By Chris WittsThursday 7 Sep 2023Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
Transcript:
Ethel Barrett is an author who’s written an interesting book. “It only hurts when I laugh”. She tells the story about a high school teacher in Los Angeles who had a unique way of getting her students to think. And from time to time, she’d write brief messages on the chalkboard that were completely unrelated to the studies of that day.
And one morning when the students entered the room, they found the number 25,550 written on the board, it had them a bit puzzled. So one pupil finally raised his hand and asked the teacher why that particular number was there. And she said 25,550 is the number that represents the number of days in the life of a person who lives to be 70.
So the teacher wanted to impress her pupils with life’s brevity. When you think about it, reducing the number of days rather than years, the span of our life on earth doesn’t sound very long at all, does it? And to be truthful, many of us don’t like thinking about it. We certainly hope to live to be more than 70.
Someone has worked out that by the time you’ve reached 72 you’ve slept for 23 years and four months, worked for 19 years and eight months. You may have been at church and recreation for 10 years, traveled for six years and spent four years in sickness. The person after making that list ended with the words, no wonder we’re tired. It was the psalmist. In fact, Moses in Psalm 90 verse 12, in the Bible who said,
“Teach us to use wisely all the time we have,” everyone’s got a certain degree of pressure in their life. And Moses recognized that God has given us every day as a gift and it was a prayer that God will give us wisdom to use the hours correctly. And there’s another interesting version of Psalm 90 verse 12, teach us to realize the brevity of life so that we may grow in wisdom or another way of putting it, teach us to use wisely all the time we have.
Another version says, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. So if we knew how much time we had on this earth, I’m sure we’d use it wisely, wouldn’t we? Now? Perhaps that’s the point. How do we do it? Much of life has been defined today as pressure. We never seem to have enough time to do what needs to be done.
Little children. I notice don’t number their days. They don’t think of death. It doesn’t enter their minds that someday they will die. And most teenagers don’t think of death either. They think of the opposite. They think they’ll never die. They’ll live forever. They’re indestructible. And us, adults, too many of us don’t like to think about our eventual death, but it will come when that time comes.
Have we numbered our days?
But the psalmist may give us the answer at the beginning and the end of that Psalm – 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. Oh Lord, our God treat us with kindness and let it all go well for us. Please let us go. Well. That’s verse 17.
When we realize that the Lord is our home and that God is God, we can see our days more clearly when we allow the Lord to establish the work of our hands. We can see those days with this knowledge we can appreciate. And we realize that life is brief, that things can change in a split second. Since we don’t know how much time we do have, we’ve got to learn to use what we do have.
Mostly to take advantage of opportunities. So how long will we live? Most would agree. I think with the psalmist that it’s somewhere between 70-80 years now. That may sound encouraging to the young, but it’s pretty disturbing to us. We’re getting older. Well, the simple fact is nobody knows for sure how long we’re going to live. But when we read and believe these warnings in scripture, there is little doubt that life is short. It was James who pulled no punches when he wrote, “Your life is a mist that appears for only a little while before it disappears.” James 4:14, this psalmist was talking about numbering our days ar why he says that we might gain a heart of wisdom. What is that? A heart of wisdom means a heart filled with Jesus.
Those who number their days are right, know that someday they will die and they make sure their relationship with God is secure. Have you answered the question? What is important in your life?
Let’s Pray
Heavenly Father today, we do know that we can waste a lot of time on things that are not important. Will you help us to understand what it is that you want us to do with our life so that we can be people of wisdom, maturity and understanding to see that we’re not just living for ourselves and for our own enjoyment. But there are others that who look to us for support and love for companionship and for understanding, amen.