Pastor’s Corner: “Tick Tock (not the app)”
Psalm 90:4 (NIV) – 4 A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. 2 Peter 3:8 (NIV) – 8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
A lot has changed since the electric clock was invented in the 1840s. We now keep time on smart watches, smart phones, and laptops. The entire pace of life seems faster. We’re just moving faster and faster and getting back to people as quickly as we can that is driving us to think everything has to happen now. Moses, the writer of one of the oldest of the Bible’s psalms, reflected on time. He reminds us that God controls life’s pace. “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night, (Psalm 90:4).
Psalm 90:12 (NIV) – 12 Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. I think it is typical of us that we take our days for granted. It is important that we remember that all our days come to us out of the sheer mercy of God, unearned, undeserved and, I fear, mostly unappreciated. By sin our lives stand under forfeit; God owes us nothing. I recently read that certain medieval scholars would place a human skull on a shelf where it could be regularly seen as they studied, as a vivid reminder of their mortality and the shortness of their lives. It was a regular practice in our own society, until seventy or eighty years ago. Churches used to have a graveyard adjacent to the church building, not just as a matter of convenience but as a statement and so that every Sunday there would be a regular reminder of this truth from God’s Word. “Teach us to number our days.”
Psalm 90:10 (AMP) – 10 The days of our life are seventy years—Or even, if because of strength, eighty years; Yet their pride [in additional years] is only labor and sorrow, for it is soon gone and we fly away. Earthly life is short, far shorter that we expect. It’s too short to waste trying to do all the things we want to do. We must not just number our days; we must ask God to teach us to number our days. Because if we number them on our terms, we will likely grab for life in food or clothes or “bucket list” experiences, or career achievements, or even loved ones, only to find in the end that life wasn’t in any of those things or people. Our numbering won’t produce a heart of wisdom.
A heart of wisdom is a heart that learns that life is not how much we can earn, achieve, or experience in our few days of life on earth. But that real life is wholeheartedly trusting God’s Son Jesus Christ for eternal life, where there is no need to bottle time, where there will be an abundance of time to do the things we want to do, and a God-provided bucket list so long it will take an eternity. The only true wisdom is God’s wisdom and living wisely can happen by only one means and that is being “satisfied” with God’s steadfast love. We were not made to waste this God given life to live for things that will not last. We were made to live in eternity with God starting right now!
Christian writer C.S. Lewis wrote of time: “The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.” Trusting God with your time and effort and giving Him every moment of today assures you tomorrows full of His peace and love.
The secret to time management, isn’t to go faster or slower. It’s to abide in God, spending more time with Him. Then we get in step with each other, but first with Him—the One who formed us and knows our purpose and plans. Our time on earth won’t last forever. Yet we can manage it wisely, not by watching the clock, but by giving each day to God. As Moses said, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (90:12). Then, with God we’ll always be on time, now and forever.
Ask yourself: What’s your pace in life? How could you spend more time with God, getting in step with Him?
In His Grace,
Pastor Hamilton