Time Flies

Good evening, my name is Mark, one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes. I also want to welcome you. So glad that you're part of this worship service. And if you're also joining us through Facebook Live, welcome to you as well. We are glad that you are with us. Welcome.

We are in a series right now called Songs of Summer. It's based in the Old Testament book of the Psalms, which is essentially a collection of Israel's ancient worship songs. Tonight we're going to be in Psalm 90 and see what it has to say about how time flies. Have you found this to be true in life? Time flies. Case in point, in 1964, The Rolling Stones released a song entitled "Time is on My Side." You know this song, "Time is on My Side." When this song came out, they had some credibility here. They were all very young, with their lives ahead of them. Sadly, the guy in the middle there with the blonde hair, he would only live five years longer. That's Brian Jones. But the core of the band has had an incredibly long run, so much so that now if you were to hear them perform that song today, it's not quite the same. I mean, I'm not picking on anyone, but time is not on their side. I get news for you: it's not on your side either. Time flies.

This was impressed upon me in kind of a weird way this week. Tuesday morning, I go to meet with the rest of our worship team. Every Tuesday we get together, we plan out the services, and every so often we'll meet for breakfast. So we're over in Santa Cruz having breakfast, talking about the songs, the announcements, and Psalm 90 in this theme about the brevity of the time we have on earth. Then I'm driving back on Soquel Avenue and I passed by this skateboard shop called Bill's Wheels. Perhaps you've seen it; it's hard to miss because it's just adorned with all of these amazing murals. But the thing that catches my eye are these four words right here: "Time is too short." Now bear in mind, I've just come back from this worship planning session talking about Psalm 90. I drive down Soquel Avenue about four or five times a year, so I'm thinking, well, this is kind of an odd coincidence. I'll pull over and take a picture of this. I might just end up using it in my message.

I go directly from there to Aptos High School where I pick up my son Luke's class schedule. When I'm pulling out of the school, right where the entrance to Aptos High intersects with Freedom Boulevard, I'm sitting there at the light and I look across the road. There's a cement structure that says, yes, same four words. So now I'm starting to think, is somebody trying to tell me something? We always try to take our messages very personally. I mean, it's not really a sermon until it comes from our heart. But I'm thinking, Lord, you want me to take this personally and in a really special way because I felt it all a little bit disconcerting. But I think the answer is yes; God wants me and you to take this subject very personally because it's that important.

Five years ago, I preached on Psalm 90, and just as I did back then, I want to give credit to a pastor named Andy Stanley for some of my thoughts and for the outline, and so I want to acknowledge that. But Psalm 90 is a unique Psalm because it was written by a guy named Moses. You've probably heard of Moses. He lived an amazing life. And here's why you and I should listen to Moses: Moses lived 3,500 years ago. We know his name, we know much of his life story. If 3,500 years from now people are talking about you and the things you said and did, we should be listening to you too. But we know that to be true about Moses. The Bible says not only that, but he lived 20 years. You're going to pick up some things over the course of 120 years. Not only that, but Moses had three careers, each lasting 40 years. You may have had one career lasting close to 40 years or more, but he had three.

The first 40 years, he grows up in Pharaoh's household in Egypt. He's surrounded by all the money, all the resources, all the education that Pharaoh could provide. Moses grows up, now he's learned how to basically run one of the world's superpowers of the day. But then at age 40, he kills a man. He has to flee for his life out into the wilderness, and for the next 40 years he has a career as a shepherd. Maybe thinking that's the way he's just going to live out the rest of his life. But 40 years into that, God appears to him in a burning bush and says, "Time for you to go back to Egypt." He does the whole "let my people go" thing. There's the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, and for the next 40 years, Moses is the leader of a nation. So Moses has more experience, more wisdom, more perspective than any of us, that's for sure.

Which brings us again to Psalm 90. Notice how it's attributed there at the beginning. It says, "A prayer of Moses, the man of God." This is a prayer. He's taking this personally. This is an issue of prayer for him, even though he's called the man of God. It's a pretty cool title. But he begins Psalm 90 like this. He says, starting at verse 1, you can follow along in your notes or on screen or in your Bible. He says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations." Right out of the gate, Moses wants to just expand. He wants to stretch our perspective as wide as it can be. "Lord, from the very beginning of human history, you have been our dwelling place for all generations." But he's not done. He's going to stretch the lens even further in verse 2 when he says, "Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God." Super wide-angle lens there: before creation and eternity past, during the entire history of this earth, and after that, Lord, you span it all.

In comparison to that, our little nanosecond of existence looks just about as tiny as you can get. Verse 3: "You turn people back to dust, saying, 'Return to dust, you mortals.'" That's like something Gandalf would say, right? "Return to dust, you shall not pass," or something like that. But he's not talking about blasting us. He's saying just from this perspective, you know, all the generations that preceded him and all the generations that followed him, all the way down to you and to me and countless generations beyond us, who knows? But he's saying, you know, it's all just a little blip in comparison to the eternity that God occupies. He just keeps this theme going. Verse 4: "A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by or like a watch in the night." You know, when you're really young, a year seems like a long time. Like if it's the day after your fifth birthday, your sixth birthday just seems like an eternity away, right? You think about that when you're a kid. "Oh man, it's going to take forever," or the year before you get your driver's license. Yeah, that's a long year.

But then by the time you get into your 40s, 50s, 60s, time starts to go by at warp speed, right? You know what I'm talking about. Well, it's like Moses is saying, "God, you are so old. A thousand years, it's like a day to you, or not even a day, like a watch in the night." That was three, sometimes four hours. And again, this perspective in terms of time. Continuing, verses 5 and 6: "Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death. They are like new grass, the new grass of the morning. In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered." He's saying, you know, when you're born, you're just like this little tender baby shoot of grass. You know, "Mama, here I am." And then by the end of that day, you're all withered and old and creaky. And they're like, well, that's really encouraging, Mark. Aren't you glad you came to church tonight? There we go, let's close in prayer.

But listen, because Moses is wiser than us and has more experience and perspective than us, he is forcing this perspective on time upon us. He wants us to take this very personally. Verse 10: "Our days may come to 70 years or 80 if our strength endures, yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow." He's saying, you know, maybe you're around for 70, 80 years, but I have 40 more on top of that, and the last 40, they were the hardest of all. You know, I'm doing laps out in the wilderness with a bunch of whiners and complainers, and it wasn't a lot of fun. And by now we're like, okay, Moses, you win. You know, you got the biggest bummer award or something like that. But his main point is that, you know, however many years the Lord gives you, whether they're kind or they're difficult, it all goes by so fast.

Verse 10 ends, "For they quickly pass, and we fly away." If you grew up in church, you might remember a song you sing sometimes that says, "I'll fly away, oh glory." You can sing with me, "I'll fly away. When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I'll fly away." Beautiful job. Yes, that was good. That's Moses, 3,500 years ago, inspiring that song. Now the next verse probably didn't inspire any songs. You're not going to see this on a cross stitch at grandma's house or anything like that. It's kind of sobering. It's difficult to translate in the Hebrew. Verse 11: "If only we knew the power of your anger. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due." It's like it's missing a few words or something like that. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due. What in the world is he talking about? Nobody knows.

My guess is this: Moses is kind of saying, you know what? I got a glimpse of God's power and God's wrath over the course of my life, like back in Egypt. Wow! Or out in the wilderness, I saw some amazing things. And of course, in the perspective of the entire Bible and especially in Christ, we know that even greater than God's wrath is God's love. But Moses says, man, there were some times I saw some stuff that would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It'd make the hair stand up on the top of your head. I mean, it was awesome. In other words, if you saw some of the things I saw, being in awe of God would not be a problem for you. That would not be an issue.

And on an infinitely lesser scale, the only thing I can kind of illustrate this with is one night Laura and I had the opportunity to see the northern lights. Anyone seen the northern lights? This is some high-definition video on screen. But I don't care if you have like 4K or 8K or 100K; it doesn't matter because there is nothing like seeing this with your own eyes. It will just take your breath away and it will make you feel very small in comparison. And Moses is saying that that's nothing to the lights I saw. In other words, I think he's saying this: if we could see God as he is, we would give him the reverence he is due. If you're a note-taker, you might want to write that down: if we could see God as he is, we would give him the reverence he's due.

In Psalm 46:10, it says, "Be still and know that I am God." That word "be still" in the original has to do with cease striving, you know, let go, take a time out, and remember that, as René said last week, he's God and we're not. That we have this awesome God who loves us and wants to infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. Because of that, if we could see God as he is, we would also be more careful with the time that we've been given. We would be more careful with it. And this is where Moses is heading here. He brings us all to a head because all this perspective, all this kind of review of his life and the travails and all that, it's coming down to a perspective here in verse 12 where he says this: "So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom." That's what he wants to have produced out of this kind of perspective.

If you learn to do this, if you learn to actually number your days, listen to me, it will change your life. It will absolutely change your life, and you will gain along the way a heart of wisdom. Because here's the thing: as your time goes, so goes your life. So your time goes, so goes your life. And so let's start to apply this. Let me just first begin with kind of the big idea here. This is what I think Moses is getting at: remembering our time is limited gives us wisdom to know how to spend our limited time. We remember our time is limited; it gives us wisdom to know how to spend our limited time. And the good news is you already know how to do this. I'll prove it to you.

If you're married or you've ever been married, the day that you became engaged, a clock started to tick in your life. Right? Unless you had some kind of open-ended engagement, I don't get all that. But most people, there's a proposal and then you set the date. Right? And between that time, you've got boxes to check and you're doing all sorts of stuff running down details so that you're ready to walk down the aisle when that day comes. You made those days count. Or if you're a student or you remember being a student, the beginning of the term, the professor or teacher talked about, you know, there's going to be a term paper that's due on such and such a date or we're going to have these exams. And even if you procrastinated through school like I did much of the time, when you're doing that, the voice of wisdom starts to cry out louder and louder: you better knuckle down because that final is coming whether you're ready or not.

And so you learned how to number your days. And this is so clarifying. You number your days and it will give you wisdom about what matters, what's truly important and what isn't. So I really want to drive this home because listen, if all we do is kind of nod and go, "Yeah, that's true. That's something that I agree with," it's not going to do you a lick of good. You will have essentially wasted 30 minutes of your precious time if we do not apply this into our lives. And so let's make this very practical in terms of the application. And that's this: remember every single day, if your life, as you can pray to remember that my time is limited, so I need to limit how I spend my time. It's that simple. My time is limited, so I need to learn how to limit how I spend my time.

Some of you are thinking, well, you know, thank you very much, Captain Obvious. Okay, we get it. But here's the thing: this is not our natural drift in life. Not many of us are overachievers in this regard, and I think there's two main reasons for that. First of all, we tend to just adopt this mindset. It's human nature. Like I've got all the time in the world, like I'm practically going to live forever. It's like we even have a saying: you ask someone, "Hey, can you help me?" "Listen, I've got all the time in the world." No, you don't have all the time in the world. You don't even believe that. But if we go through our lives just kind of punting into tomorrow the things that truly matter today, that's essentially what we're assuming. We've adopted that philosophy: I've got endless tomorrows. I'll just keep kicking the can, and someday I'll get to those things. I'll have that conversation, or I'll embark on that project, or I'll follow that path or that goal. Someday I will.

And yet we all know we don't have an endless string of tomorrows. We don't even have a guarantee that we have one tomorrow, let alone thousands of them at our disposal. That's the first reason. The second one is this, and I think this is really so much typical of our culture and even where we live, which is this: we tend to assume, without even consciously assuming this, but we tend to just operate under this assumption that my most precious commodity is money. And so I just chase after money because if I have more money, well, I have some stuff that I like having. But more than that, I'll have more time because I'll be like the captain of my own ship. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll just spend all of your time taking care of all of your stuff. One thing is for sure: you can spend money and you can make more. You can even lose money and you can make more. But you cannot spend or lose one second and ever get it back. That's why this is so huge. We're talking about what our lives will ultimately amount to.

And here's the thing: here's the challenge in this area of having a life infused with meaning and purpose. The odds are stacked against us. Our natural drift is not in this direction; it is away from this. And eventually, eventually the math starts to catch up with us. The math starts to catch up. And so why not start doing the math now? Math that we will not be able to avoid someday. What really counts? Along these lines, a woman named Bronnie Ware wrote a fascinating book. It's called "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying." Now, it doesn't sound like a real uplifting book, but it's actually really clarifying. What qualified Bronnie Ware to write this book? She was a hospice nurse for many, many years, and typically she would care for her patients anytime from three to twelve weeks, their last three to twelve weeks. And so she had this unique perspective on what people were thinking, what mattered to them at the very end of their lives.

And so she started interviewing these patients, hundreds of them. She puts her findings into this book and talks about their top five regrets. I'm only going to cover the top two. The second highest regret is this: "I wish I didn't work so hard." May or may not come as a surprise for you, but I wish I did not work so hard. And then she says this: "This came from every male patient that I nursed. They miss their children's youth and their partner's companionship." Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients