The Transience of Time

[0:00] A prayer of Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born, or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

[0:17] You turn people back to dust, saying, Return to dust, you mortals. A thousand years in your sight are just like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.

[0:31] Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass of the morning. In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and writhled.

[0:44] We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.

[0:55] All our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.

[1:08] Yet the best of them are the trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.

[1:22] Teach us to number our days, that we may gain our hearts of wisdom. Relent, Lord, how long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.

[1:35] Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, and may we 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.

[1:49] May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord, our God, rest on us. Establish the work of our hands for us.

[2:02] Yes, establish the work of our hands. Thanks very much. Yeah, so as Martin said, my name is Darren.

[2:14] I'm part of the congregation here. I work for the Navigators in this city. So I'm going to quickly pray, and then we're going to think about this Psalm of Moses. Father, I thank you for the gift of life.

[2:25] I thank you that's a gift that every one of us sitting here has. And I pray that as we listen to your word tonight, you'd help us to dwell on the reality of who you are and who we are in light of that.

[2:37] I ask that in Jesus' name. Amen. So as Martin said at the beginning, I'm sure all of us have seen in the news about the passing of the Queen, and I was struck this morning as I was looking at the news.

[2:49] The Archbishop of Canterbury was leading a memorial service in London, and he described the feeling of losing the Queen as losing a near-eternal point of stability for the nation.

[3:00] That was the words he used about what it was like to lose her. And I've been quite interested by how shocked people have been because of the consistency of her presence in life, this idea, as Martin was saying, that it's like she's always been around.

[3:14] And so when something you take for granted has always been around and then suddenly goes, it causes you to reflect, doesn't it? You get these moments in life where something unexpected happens, and you stop and pause and start to ask questions that cause you to reflect.

[3:31] And sometimes when we do that, I think it can cause us to ask those questions that are maybe slightly haunting and not at the back of our minds as what is this thing called life? Yeah, at the same time, those questions are kind of level-setting.

[3:44] They help us think about direction and where we're headed. And Psalm 90 is a reflection, as Martin said, on time. Psalm 90, I think, is supposed to help us do that.

[3:54] It's supposed to help us reflect on the nature of our lives and think about what are we doing with them. Because I don't know about you, but sometimes as somebody is hurtling through what's left of my 30s, it feels like time is evaporating.

[4:06] It's falling through my hands. And at points you stop and you think, how did I get here? What are the things I hoped for my life, for my relationships, for my family, for my career?

[4:17] Is this what I wanted? Is this where we've got to? And Psalm 90, I think, will push us into some of that stuff. So Psalm 90 was written by Moses. So as a guest makes it the oldest Psalm in the scriptures.

[4:29] And it's likely from the tone of it written towards the end of his life. So the end of his life, he's seen so much. He's come through the Red Sea. He's escaped Egypt. He's seen famine. He's seen poverty.

[4:41] He's seen victories. He's seen tragedy. He's seen God at work. And he's seen the rebellion and the depths of sin. He's seen it all. And at that, he pens this Psalm and looks back.

[4:53] And I think there's a deliberate cause and effect reality to this Psalm. I think it's deliberately trying to shake us. It's trying to shake us to awaken us. It's like provoking us in order to kind of pay attention. But it does that for a reason.

[5:06] The scriptures are always provoking to point us towards life, to point us towards God. And this Psalm, while you might read it at first and think, well, that's a depressing Psalm. I think its point is it's supposed to point us towards something bigger, something bigger than ourselves.

[5:19] It's to point us on paths of righteousness, which is a massive theme within the Psalms, about how do you wake up and pay attention. Because what you do with this brief spell of life we have matters.

[5:32] And so to take account of that. So maybe as we go through it tonight, it could be for some of us an opportunity just to stop and think, where is my life headed? And is in the reflection of who we are and how we understand reality, is that where I want to be?

[5:45] And who is God in relation to that? So we're going to just look at three basic things tonight, which are in the notice sheet if you want to use them as a guide. The first is this idea of perspective.

[5:56] The Psalm gives us perspective on life, the transience of life in light of this eternal shelter. Then I think it goes deeper. It's a kind of reality about what that life is like. But then I think it turns and doesn't just leave us with those two things.

[6:10] It points to something bigger. That's something being God himself. So let's just get into the Psalm right at the beginning in verses one and two. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.

[6:25] Before the mountains were born, or you brought forth the whole world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. Now, we don't know much about the context of this Psalm, but verses 13 and 15 imply that there's some sort of disaster happening in the background.

[6:41] And it's a community lament. So the Psalms are songs and poems and hymns written by God's people to try and understand how they're experiencing reality and who God is in the midst of that.

[6:53] And because it's written by Moses, I think we're supposed to picture Israel around the time of Deuteronomy. They're about waiting to get into the promised land. But the generation before who have seen all this amazing stuff that God has done and all the way he's led them out of slavery have rebelled against him.

[7:09] And so God says, he punishes them. He says, you will not enter the promised land. And that generation do not enter the promised land. And Moses starts this reflection as he looks back and he addresses Lord, God is Lord, which is the word Adonai, which essentially means master, ruler, sovereign, eternal.

[7:28] And he reemphasizes that eternalness in verse two, everlasting to everlasting. He starts a very solid place. You are a God who is present always. And you're not just present, you're like solid.

[7:40] You see and you hear and you engage. He also says this God is a dwelling place, or it can be translated as a refuge. So this is the image that while God is eternal and he is all over all things, he's a safe, stable place.

[7:55] It's a place you can run to. God is a home for all people in all generations because he himself is constant. As we'll come to see in the temporality and the transience and the liminality of what life is like, God is not like that.

[8:10] He is different. He is present. He does not change. So Moses starts right from the start with this idea of God as some sort of eternal sovereign shelter, safe, established, stable, welcomes us in.

[8:26] But he's also different from us. He's in charge of all things, rules all things, oversees all things. It's a firm place Moses starts. And you can imagine in Moses' life as he's wandered through the desert and seen all of his stuff, the idea that God is present and not changing and with him and will be there all the time must have been a huge promise to him.

[8:44] It's a huge promise to all of us that this is what God is like. This is his character. It is constant. But Moses, I don't think, is just setting up a contrast to say, look, God is different. Of course he's different because he's God and we're not.

[8:55] I think in the difference, he's pointing to that actually that difference is a place of hope. It's not just that we're different, but as we look at that difference, we can hope because he's nothing like us. And that's actually a good thing. It's a positive thing.

[9:07] And I think frames the rest of when Moses starts to delve into the depths of what it means to experience life. And that's when you really start to get into the transience of time.

[9:19] And verses three to 11, there's no other really way of saying it. They're hard verses. They're weighty verses, aren't they? The imagery here is pretty graphic because the psalm tries to express this kind of brevity of what life is like.

[9:34] It is like dust, which comes up and then is gone. You turn people back to dust saying, return to dust, you mortals. I think this is a deliberate echo of Genesis.

[9:46] He's saying, this is not the way life was supposed to be. This is not what it was intended to be, death and the way we experience it. The brevity was not the way it was intended. In fact, one of the results of the fall that you see in Genesis three, when the creator God sets up ideal conditions for all of humanity, for him and all his creation, and humanity chooses autonomy and to rule themselves.

[10:09] One of the consequences of that is Genesis 3, 19, for dust you are and dust you will return. It's been there since the beginning of the fall, that this idea that we kind of return into this nothingness.

[10:23] Because dust is just, it's like the stuff all over the place. It's, it's, it's nothing. You want to get rid of it, don't you? The psalm speaks of how the human experience is like a piece of grass, full of life and vitality.

[10:35] It shoots up, but then the sun starts to beat down on it. And then by the end of the day, it's gone. The life and vitality of this grass is disappeared. He also describes it like a flood.

[10:47] It just appears out of nowhere and swashes it away. Life can just disappear in a moment. And that picture of a flood, again, you think of the life Moses lived.

[10:58] He literally walked through the Red Sea. He saw people just being, by the Jordan. It comes perhaps uninvited, unannounced, and when it comes, it can cause times of damage.

[11:12] In contrast to this everlasting God, we see humanity is frail. And life is brief. It's like a dream. Dust, grass, floods, dreams.

[11:25] There in the morning, so much potential, but by the evening, it's gone. Moses is saying, this is what life can be like. It's here, and then it's not.

[11:36] I think you're supposed to feel the weight of that as he gives you these images and pictures. The psalm is supposed to engage in our hearts and be like, this is what life is like. Like, and it's not a positive picture.

[11:47] He's deliberately not playing this down. He's leaning into it. And do you feel the weight of that? The sorrow of it? You feel like the sting of what that reality is like. Now, most of us, if we've lived any life, will have felt that if you've lost people.

[12:00] The sting of the language we use of, it was too soon. It was too quick. And Moses is capturing at an older age. He's like, it doesn't really matter what age you're at. There's a brevity to who we understand life, to understand life to be in result of who God is.

[12:17] So what do you, like, what do you do with that? Do you, like, deny it and hide it? I think it's easy and safe to say that we live in a culture that essentially does not like the idea that death exists. We funnel, rightly, a lot of our money and time into trying to help people's health.

[12:31] So I'm not arguing against that at all. But the idea of our mortality, I think, has resulted in a very short-term, ageist culture where we do not like to think about death. But Moses leans full into this reality.

[12:46] Or do you just make light of it? Or do you let it crush you and be like, oh man, I live with the anxiety of that so much. I've got mates, and I've had that at my own point in life from, like, the anxiety of the coming of time drives you in a negative way.

[12:59] It becomes a God to you almost. And the psalm, I think, is wanting us to sit in that. You might not like to sit in that, but I think he's encouraging us to sit in that idea of time is short.

[13:12] So what do you do with it? How do you use it? Where is it going to go? And then he kind of moves on to not only is time short, but our next point, which is the transience of life.

[13:28] If while time is short, it's also in relation to God's anger. And he starts to talk about the reality of this life in verses 7 to 11. So in verse 7, we are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.

[13:47] You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins, in the light of your presence. So not only is Moses saying, look, life is short. It can just appear and disappear.

[13:58] But they're also experiencing real pain and trouble that has something to do with their sin and God's anger at that sin. And this psalm is encouraging the people of God to reflect on the unfaithfulness of the past generations, where they harbored iniquities and secret sin, which I assume Moses would understand exists in his life and everybody that's around him at the time.

[14:23] And that God's response to that is one of anger. And it's too much for them. It says they're dismayed in verse 7. Now Moses has seen God's anger firsthand.

[14:35] After God rescues them, restores them, provides them, walks them, does all these miracles, produces food literally out of nowhere when they're hungry, the people still rebel against God.

[14:46] And God does something about that. He doesn't just let it go. He intervenes and punishes the people. And as I said, he does not let a certain generation enter the promised land.

[14:58] God responds to their sin with anger. So if we're going to talk about God's anger, I think we have to think about that a bit. Because as soon as you say the phrase, I don't know, sometimes you walk down certain parts of the street and you just hear people shouting at you, God is angry at you.

[15:12] So what do we make of God's anger? Well, anger is powerful, isn't it? It's like the dynamite of the soul. It has the power to destroy, especially your body.

[15:23] The Proverbs talks about how anger can literally destroy your body. I work as a therapist and I've seen the amount of people who've been referring to me for anger issues is incredible. It consumes. And I think, you know, medically, doctors can correct me later, it seems to do worse on your heart than stress or anxiety, that anger, when it gets, it's like fuel.

[15:44] It destroys communities, it destroys relationships, it's definitely the enemy of wisdom. I don't know if you've ever made wise decisions in the heat of an angry moment, but usually the path of wise living, which the Psalms are definitely about, anger is not one of the ways to go.

[15:58] I think when we think about anger in our culture as humans, we often think of our anger and project it onto God. And I think, I kind of feel caught between two very different cultures of how anger is talked about.

[16:09] You've got anger in a very kind of modernist, modern individualistic society, where anger is like really good, it's the force to get, you know, just get angry. I think we live in one of the angriest generations and ages.

[16:21] Get angry and get what you need done, done. Let that anger fuel you. And sometimes that's good, but we're told to express our anger all the time. Just find healthy ways to express your anger. There is healthy ways to express your anger.

[16:32] But usually, the more you let anger take over, you just get angrier. And you get angrier and angrier and angrier. Yet, there's a kind of more traditional culture where I guess things are defined by external moral behavior where, I don't know if any of you were brought up in a way where you were told good people don't get angry.

[16:52] So if you're angry, you hide it, you repress it, you get rid of it. Just don't let it peek its little head up. The Bible has nothing to do with either of those approaches to anger. It has a unique approach where it sees the kind of goodness of anger, yet it's very aware of its destructive potential.

[17:11] So the ideal in the Bible is not no anger and it's not reactive, explosive anger. It's what the Bible describes as slow anger. It's something different. It is neither of the two ways we often experience it.

[17:23] And that's why it says things in the Bible like in Ephesians 4, in your anger, do not sin. It doesn't say don't be angry. It's just like in your anger, don't sin. And why does the Bible speak in this kind of odd way about anger?

[17:35] Because it's a reflection of who God is. In Exodus 34, when Moses is on Sinai and he asks God, tell me who you are, show me who you are.

[17:46] And you have this kind of miraculous moment where he sees God pass by and in it he hears God say about himself to Moses, I am the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

[18:02] Slow to anger is a defining attribute of God. It's not no anger and it's not just I'm angry all the time but it is a presence and it's part of his character. Now most of us, I'd imagine, at points in our lives have real trouble thinking about the idea of the anger of God maybe.

[18:18] Maybe you're fine with it but for a lot of people I know that would be the thing they really struggle about the idea that God has anger, he has wrath. A loving God, absolutely, we're fine with that but an angry God, no thank you.

[18:30] But when you think about it, if you have a God who never gets angry, you kind of also have a God who can never fully love because if you never get angry about anything then you probably don't particularly love anything.

[18:44] I'll just try to explain that a wee bit more. So if you love something or someone and you see that thing threatened, what's your natural response? Usually it's one of anger. You want to get rid of the thing that is causing harm to the person or thing you love, don't you?

[18:57] And if you're indifferent then it might mean you don't care. So actually the absence of anger, what would that really say about God?

[19:09] Here's how Rebecca Pipper oh, Rebecca Pipper phrases this in a way better way than I can. It's a very good book that I can tell you about if you want to read this later.

[19:22] Think about how we feel when we see someone we love ravished by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with a benign tolerance as we might towards strangers?

[19:34] Far from it. Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is. And the final form of hate is indifference. The more a father loves his son the more he's angry at the drunkard, the liar, the traitor in the son.

[19:49] And if I, a flawed, self-centered woman can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition how much more a morally perfect God who made them. Here's what I think she's saying, that true love actually can get angry because anger in its uncorrupted origin is a love moved to deal with the threat to someone or something you love.

[20:12] Anger in its uncorrupted origin is a love moved to deal with the thing that you love. Now for God, that's his name and his reputation and it's also his people. The two are intrinsically linked because we're a reflection of who he is.

[20:27] And so this is not some picture of maybe, unfortunately, maybe a slightly schizophrenic picture where you can be taught about God that he's an eternal shelter one moment, very living, very loving, and then the next minute he's suddenly flying off the handle and punishing sin and left, right and center.

[20:44] But he looks at his people and has a right response which is anger at what he sees of the many, many different things we do of how we've engaged in life.

[20:57] And the reason the Bible talks about angry is because he is also loved. The two work together. If God didn't care about Israel, he wouldn't get angry probably.

[21:07] He just let them do what they wanted. Now Romans does seem to suggest that one of the ways God's wrath is displayed is fine, if you really want to live your life this way, off you go. You'll find that that is a form of God's wrath as well, but it's not because he does not care.

[21:22] It's an expression of his character. So not only is Moses encouraging us to reflect on the transience and brevity of life, he's encouraging us to reflect on the reality that not only is it brief, but it's also experienced as something which is broken by sin and God is not passive at that reality.

[21:40] He is rightly and proportionately and deliberately slow to anger but angry still and acts upon that. Now, as I said, you could get to verse 10 where it says things like, all our days pass away under your wrath.

[21:57] We finished our years with a moan. It's kind of like saying our years can finish with a sigh. It's gone. Our days may come to 70 years or 80 if our strength endures, yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow for they quickly pass and we fly away.

[22:14] As I said, it can sound like a pretty bleak outlook on life. It's brief and he's like, even if you get 80 years out of it, you're lucky but if you do, it's going to be hard.

[22:27] Yeah, I think a bit of a shift in the psalm for me is, and he is encouraging to sit in this reality is verse 11 where he prays something I think is pretty interesting because his conclusion is not, well, that's it so, you know, stiff upper lip and get on with it.

[22:43] It's brief, it's rubbish and it's hard so you just need to man up and deal with life. That is not where Moses takes us. He says in verse 11, if only we knew the power of your anger, your wrath is as great as the fear that it is due.

[23:03] And Moses starts to make a connection between God's wrath and a response of fear. There's something about how those two things are connected. I think what Moses is saying is that if you actually consider this reality, if you consider and dwell in it, the brevity of time, God is an eternal shelter, the brokenness of life, his wrath and anger at sin.

[23:25] There's a genuine, appropriate fear response as to who God is. And the fear is not about getting scared of God so you run away. This is a prayer to God.

[23:37] Moses is praying and expressing this stuff to God. But he's recognizing the contrast of who he is as both eternal, his power, his posture towards a sin that disconnects us from God and from one another.

[23:50] And so in reverence and awe and sometimes in celebration and joy, we move closer to God because of that reality of who he is. The starting point was God is an eternal shelter and he is expressing this reality to God.

[24:05] God is an eternal shelter. And that takes us into the second, the final third of the psalm from verse 12 onwards where I think you start to build this picture of the purpose of life in light of God's compassion, this idea of redemption.

[24:22] So Moses does not conclude that he thinks that God is done with him. Instead, knowing the reality and the brevity of time, God draws closer and he prays in verse 12, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

[24:36] So there's something about embracing these realities that leads us to gaining a heart of wisdom. So he asks God, like, if this is what life is like, teach me. Show me how to live.

[24:46] Show me how to live wisely. He recognizes he's in a situation where he can't control time. He can't control God's wrath. He's got nothing to bring to the party, Moses. So he comes to God and says, teach me how to live.

[24:59] Would you teach me to number my days, to see life as a gift, so I'd live wisely, so I'd invest my time well, so I wouldn't waste myself on fruitless, pointless endeavors and all the different anxieties we can get caught up on.

[25:12] Some of them are good things, but when we let them become the driving force in our life, we can miss that this is brief and there's a reality of brokenness out there. So teach me how to walk and live in that world, which is the world we all live in.

[25:27] So Moses is not affirming some sort of like nihilism, where he's like, life is pointless, so who cares? He's also not affirming some sort of hedonism, where he's like, well, life is brief, so just do what you want.

[25:38] Who cares either? He asks for the path of wisdom. It looks at the reality of the fleetingness of life, the weight of God's anger at sin, and comes to God and asks him to guide, which makes wisdom radically relational.

[25:52] It's done with God and it's done through the fear, like Proverbs talks about, beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. And as you move closer to God in reverence and fear, you see more wisdom of how to live life and the opposite is also true.

[26:06] And how is that possible? I think verse 13 gives us not just a clue, but the answer. Relent, Lord, how long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.

[26:17] And the word relent there is the word return. And there's a beautiful interplay with verse 3 where Moses is talking about humanity being returned to the dust. By verse 13, he's talking about God returning to humanity.

[26:30] And there's this flip that you see in the psalm. Return back to humanity with compassion, with mercy. And like we know as Christians, way more of the solution to that than Moses ever did because of the person of Christ.

[26:45] If you look at Jesus, the Bible, which consistently affirms Jesus was perfect, he regularly gets angry, doesn't he? He gets angry at the temple. He gets angry at the death of Lazarus.

[26:55] He gets angry at religious leaders. And with the words that the Bible uses when Jesus gets angry, he's not like mildly miffed. He's like deep. He's like raging at some of the things he sees in life.

[27:08] And why? Because he's a man of love. He's a man of perfect love. And he gets angry but does not sin. But he is angry at the sin that he sees in our hearts and that all people, sin impacts everybody.

[27:21] Sin is not just I'm bad sometimes. It's the idea of this kind of like cancer almost that exists within us that messes our hearts, messes our relationship with God, with ourselves, with one another, with the world we live in.

[27:33] And Jesus doesn't just be passive at that. He's angry at it. But his anger is not flying off the handle of anger or he's like, well I shouldn't get angry because I'm the son of God. His anger, his slow anger, leads him to the cross to do something about it.

[27:49] Because anger always relationally separates, doesn't it? If you get angry with someone and you try to pretend it doesn't exist, it festers away. If you get angry at someone and it blows up, it causes more hurt. Anger has to be absorbed in order for it to continually build relationship.

[28:04] That's what Jesus does in the cross. He absorbs the anger of God, the wrath of God which was designed to bring justice and love and peace back into all of creation.

[28:17] And it is there that Jesus moved by slow anger and love together secures forgiveness so that me and you are no longer under this wrath of God. It still exists, it's still present, but we are brought into something new, a new life, a redemption that is ours now, today.

[28:37] So when Moses says, teach us to numbers our days, because of the understanding of the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, we're actually motivated to move to God and ask him to return, but he actually returns to us.

[28:51] Again, you've got this interplay that Moses is saying return to us God and God does return to his people in the person of Christ. He comes back in all of the fullness of his splendor and glory in the resurrection.

[29:06] And so that leads us, finally, to a new way of seeing life. So notice what happens. So the psalm, kind of, from verse 14 onwards, start from all this imagery of life being transient and fast moving with dreams and floods and this kind of instability, the psalm is deliberately shaken up.

[29:24] Suddenly, from verse 14 onwards, the tone is very different. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us.

[29:37] Let your work be shown to your servants. And your glorious power establish the work of our hands. So the psalm is moved back into a place of stability. When he engages with God, he asks God to teach us to number our days.

[29:51] He asks God to return in compassion. He suddenly starts to talk about establishing the work of his hands and you're back in quite a solid place again. He has life of substance, of purpose.

[30:04] The things I do with my hand, God, establish it. It's an amazing prayer when you think about it that you reflect on life like this and one of the conclusions is you can ask God, so the time I've got and the things I do, would you establish my work, please?

[30:17] It's a humble realism in this psalm because I do know, I think, I lured into the idea of I'm tempted to live and think that I will live forever like death. I'll deal with this stuff when I get older.

[30:29] Yeah, there's something where God, this psalm is inviting us to reflect in a realistic way but not just from our own perspective but in light of who God is and who he says we are as a result.

[30:42] I read over the summer Beautiful World, Where Are You? the Sally Rooney book which is like her wrote Normal People and Conversation with Friends. The BBC make everything she does and it's a group of people in their 30s who are suddenly like, how did we get here?

[31:00] They're really struggling with the idea that they're realizing they're more selfish and they tried really hard not to be and they're lacking purpose. I had a kind of mini crisis when I read this book because it's put a bit too closely to me.

[31:12] I've got to stop leaning on this thing. And the two women who are the center of it reflect that they're in this like existential wilderness. They don't know what to do and they're inevitably drawn towards religion and they hate the idea they're drawn towards religion.

[31:26] And after a one night stand one of them accidentally ends up in mass and she thinks she's been let in as some sort of practical joke. She sees what she thinks is sincere faith. And she writes to her friend and her friend confesses who's been really depressed that actually she's been reading the Bible and not to tell anyone.

[31:44] And she says in the letter back could it be that easy? We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything. Maybe it's not easy at all. Maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn to do.

[32:00] And the conclusion is quite murky. They don't really know what to do because ultimately they think that's too much hard work for us. And the book actually kind of just kind of carries on in this kind of like messy well maybe if we cobble enough things together and hope for the best then it'll be alright.

[32:15] Psalm 90 reminds us that while we're fleeting and mortal God is everlasting and constant and a refuge and present. And it's a great blessing in our lives then to have the work of our hands established by him to know his goodness and to see that passed on to the next generation and to be satisfied day by day by his steadfast love a present love in your life that satisfies and brings meaning.

[32:43] You and I have the opportunity to ask God to establish the work of our hands. Now what that means you can work that out in terms of the implications of your day to day life and I think we're supposed to do that in community and in conversation. But it's something that we're asked that Moses asks to do and it causes you to look at life differently I think.

[33:00] You're looking to live lives in a way where it establishes and has meaning in light of who God is and that we can have compassion. So for you and me to be people who live purposeful intentional significant and meaningful lives we walk in wisdom.

[33:17] Wisdom is the way you do that and you cannot have wisdom the scriptures would say unless you understand the fear of the Lord and understanding the fear of the Lord is realizing actually in comparison we're pretty small and fragile don't really have much impact on this world and it's broken and God has something to say about the reasons of why it's broken and if you end the story there it's pretty hopeless but if you come back to this God who comes back to us it changes how we see life and one another in the understanding of who God is and what he's done.

[33:44] it gives us a new purpose that satisfies you in the morning with steadfast love day in and day out throughout this brief time however long it may be where our hope is found in God who is for every single one of us always an eternal shelter.

[34:02] I'm going to pray and then the band will come up. Jesus I thank you when we look at your life and when you pray in the garden of Gethsemane would you take this cup away from me it's the cup of the wrath of the Lord and that you do still choose to take that on yourself so that we are no longer under wrath but we thank you that we have a God whose love extends to doing something about the sin in this world in our hearts and in the world round about us.

[34:38] So would you help us to be people who reflect on the brevity of time the transience of life yet not also let that be the thing that defines us we let who you are define define who we are in this world and how we live.

[34:52] Would you help us to know what it means to ask you to establish the work of our hands. I ask that in Jesus name. Amen.