“TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS”

F. C. Mutton

Psalm 90: 1, 2, 10, 12, 16, 17

We were reminded on Lord’s day of the divine ‘dip into time’, and of what God has wrought, and is still working out, in time in view of eternity, according to His eternal purpose. This psalm speaks of God being “from eternity to eternity”; it also speaks of various periods of time— “a thousand years”, then “threescore years and ten” and “four-score years”; then it refers to our days. As we think of the brevity of life compared with eternity it should impress upon us the value of each day.

This is a psalm of Moses, the man of God, the product of his rich experience with God. What an experience that was—forty years in the court of Pharaoh and then forty years looking after someone else’s sheep. How would any of us like forty years

keeping sheep in a wilderness? But all through that history Moses was learning God and being formed in view of the great responsibility he was to have during his forty years with Israel in the wilderness. Through it he became a man of God.

All this bears upon us, especially as we are feeling the death of our beloved sister in Edinburgh. We think of the brevity of the life of Jesus here and of all that was concentrated in it. All that shall be displayed millennially and pass into eternity is the fruit of that life, and of His death. Then there is what God is working out in our lives. How tiny they are compared with eternity; yet how much God would secure in them in view of eternity.

This morning I walked by Bo’ness Academy and I thought, ‘This is one more essential day in the education of those hundreds of young people, another day in their few years of education to fit them for life’. We are in the school of God for the brief period of our lives, to form us for the day of display, and for eternity. So Moses says, “Teach us to number our days”. Let us value each day. Let us be with God as we start each one, and as we go through each one, so that there is something for Him out of it. Let our circumstances day by day yield something as we go through them with Him. Most of our lives are fairly ordinary, as the poet said,

‘The common round, the daily task.

Will furnish all we ought to ask’.

So as we meet the little tests, problems, maybe disappointments and sorrows of each day, let us go through them with God, so that as we learn our lessons in His school the flesh may be worn down and what is according to Christ built up.

So Moses says, “Let the beauty of Jehovah our

God be upon us”—that would be like Paul’s word in 2 Corinthians 6: 11, “that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh”. Thus each day in the lives of the saints, amid the ordinary circumstances in which we move, the great divine work is to proceed, the result of which shall be displayed is its magnificent aggregate of glory in the world to come, and subsist for divine pleasure eternally.

Let us then learn to number our days, and be with God in each of them, so that none of them may be wasted, but each yield something in formation after Christ.

Substance of word in meeting for ministry, Grangemouth
22 January 1980