[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Erickson Covenant Podcast. We are so glad that you've joined us today.
We confess that we don't have all the answers, but as a community, we seek to find and follow Jesus and to discover daily the life he has always wanted for us.
We hope this message will be encouraging and will inspire you to take the next steps on your spiritual journey.
If we can help you in any way, please connect with us. The easiest way is through our
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[00:00:38] Speaker B: Well, welcome to our summer teaching series, Ancient Prayers for Today, where we're mining deep into the Old Testament in order to unearth some wonderful prayer treasures that are still relevant for us today.
And if you haven't been with us so far, I encourage you both of the previous messages are online on all the platforms, and you can catch up there and come along with us on this journey.
Let me ask you a question.
When did you first learn to count?
Do you remember?
Some of you do.
Did an older sibling teach you?
Or was it the immensely helpful Count Dracula, as he so was always sounding off with such numeric enthusiasm? You know him? No, no, just me.
Or maybe you remember numbering off the little piggies as they headed off to market, but one of them went wee, wee, wee all the way home, right? Yeah. Yes.
When did you learn to count? Now, it's funny, I have a memory of counting. When I was a little boy and I was bored in church, we had these long wooden pews, and I would lie under the pew under my parents, and my mom would give me a piece of paper and a pen and I would count. I would write the numbers. 1, 2. I'd go up to 100.
And because I was raised in a Pentecostal church, I would go to 100 several times in the course.
There's no screens put into my hand back then, I tell you. No children's ministry to go off to. It was under the pew with a piece of paper and a pen.
But I don't actually remember learning to count.
Many of us started counting long before we can even remember, and we've kept on counting ever since. We're accounting people, aren't we? Part of a counting culture?
Even people who can barely read usually can count, to some extent, at least.
And not everyone's obsessed with numbers. But you know who are.
Show me a person with a passion and I'll show you a person who's counting.
Right?
Birders.
They count up their birds, don't they?
Runners and cyclists. It's all about the Metrics, man. What's the pace? What's the heart rate? The VO2 Max. I don't even know what that is. And I've been running for years. Or, you know, how long I got, the kilometers per whatever. You know, they're always counting something. And then. Sports fans don't even let me start with those nut balls.
Think of all the statistics in the world of baseball or hockey. It boggles the mind.
And then there's people out there who are counting, believe it or not, people who are counting. Calories, carbs, protein, fat. Oh, my goodness, I've even fallen for that one. You get it, though. We measure things. We love to count things, don't we? We. We calculate our gas mileage, we add up the Amazon ratings before we'll even consider purchasing the thing. We look at the Google review before we walk in the restaurant's door, do we not?
We're tallying up our crop yields and our kilowatt hours and our school GPAs. We count and we count and we count and we count. And the count would be so happy, right?
All together now, yeah.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: But there's one thing that people fail to count.
The one thing we all have in common, the one thing we all know, is a shrinking commodity. You've got less of it now than the moment you walked in the door.
And that is the time left until we die.
We'll obsess over carbs and count up birds and calculate stocks and clock up miles and then ignore how many sunrises we have left to enjoy.
That we don't count, that we fail to consider, that we disregard.
It's kind of like we live our daily lives with these big hats on and we pull the brims down close so we can see just a little bit in front of us, you know?
But our vision of the future, we don't get too concerned with that. If we do look forward, it's just to the next stage coming, usually. And that's usually because we want to get out of the stage we're in now.
And then a few brave souls will look, yes, that further afield to retirement.
But very few people look beyond that. How many people actually live each day with their end in mind?
How many live in the now with the tick, tick, ticking sensation, the countdown to their inevitable death.
Earlier in the week, my wife asked me, why did you order a skull from Amazon?
I want to let you know the delivery system failed me this week. It arrives tomorrow.
So I guess the skull I ordered from Amazon, which was meant to be an illustration for our series this morning is just for me to hold and consider.
Not many of us do, though, and not myopia. It hurts us.
We can't live wisely now if we don't look all the way to the end.
We can't live fully in Christ now if we don't acknowledge the brevity of our lives. You know, we're told by the Apostle Paul to look carefully at how we walk.
Look carefully, then, how you walk. Not as unwise, but as wise.
Making the best use of the time. Or as the old King James put it, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
How are we to redeem the time? Exactly.
How are we, knowing that the days are evil, make the best use of the time that we have?
Well, it turns out, by numbering our days properly, by learning how to count them well and in light of who God is and what he has done. But do we know how to do that?
How to actually number them up? Most of us do not.
I mean, you can pull out your phone. You might want to right now. You can pull out your phone. I gotta find mine. Sorry, this is a sign. I shouldn't do this. You can pull out your phone. Pull up the little calculator.
Oh, oh, there we go.
And you can start punching in numbers and figure out how many days you have left. Have you tried this? Have you ever done this? Let's try it for me. I turned 52 next Saturday, thank you very much.
So if I live to be 85. Let's try 85 -52 equals 33 years. That's how long Jesus lived on Earth. 33 years old. The Hobbit is okay, mature. Sorry. 33 years is all I've got. Let's get a little more specific, though. If I multiply those 33 years by 52 weeks in a year, that means I have 1000. If I live to be 85.
Is that too generous?
Okay, if I live to be 85, that's 1,716 weeks left.
You know how fast weeks go?
Let's get a little more specific, though. Let's multiply that by. What's the number I need to multiply by? My math ain't math. And. Okay, seven.
It's just a touch a couple weeks over. 12,000 days left.
12,000 days.
12,000 days. My friends, if you're around middle age like me, we've got less than 2,000 weeks left.
If you live to be 85, my dad died at 79. I have no guarantee of that.
If you're older than me, a few of you are, you might only have a few hundred left.
You know what they say about life. Life's like a toilet paper roll. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes around.
Those weeks go fast, man.
Well, knowing those numbers can be helpful, it's true.
But simply counting them up isn't enough to make the best use of time to redeem the time, because the days are evil. We need to learn to count our days using God's math, adding them up according to God's revelation, numbering our days with his eternal perspective, and that informing and influencing our daily vision.
And that's where today's ancient prayer comes in.
This ancient prayer corrects our myopic vision. Here it is, from Psalm 90, verse 12.
Teach us to number days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
And what a potent prayer this is.
I like how the various translations put it. King James says, so teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
The contemporary English version says, teach us to use wisely all the time we have.
The new English translation says, teach us to consider our mortality.
That's what the skull was for.
Teach us to consider our mortality that we might live wisely.
And the easy English Bible, I really like this translation. Teach us to count carefully the days of our short lives. Then we will be wise in how we live in short. This is an ancient prayer, not just that we would number our days, but that God would teach us to number our days, which is actually a more powerful prayer by far.
The force of the Hebrew here is that God would goad us as though you would kind of like you're training an ox with a sharp stick so that by poking it you can get it to go in the right direction. Which I think is a super applicable image for some of us, isn't it?
God goed me poke me. God, I need some help getting me in the right direction?
No.
Well, just think of that when we pray the prayer. God teach us. Through this ancient prayer. We're asking God to train us, to instruct us, to poke us with a sharp stick so that we properly count off our limited days in a way that, that he wants us to, so that we live wisely those numbered days.
Because we aren't just counting up numbers here, we're numbering up days with each day unique from morning through evening, filled with challenges and opportunities that we're commanded to make the most of for the glory of God. And for the good of others.
Numbering up our days under God's tutelage means that we're learning to assess our time using his math, applying his calculation to our days, living with his purposes in mind. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. That's today's prayer. And we could stop right there.
We could. If you would just take this verse and pray it consistently, it would be all you need. God would teach you through this prayer.
So hands up if you want to do that. We could just cash out and have coffee right now. Is the coffee ready?
If you just all agreed to pray this for the next month, every day, I would encourage you to order a skull off Amazon while you do it.
No surprising. No takers.
They do want me to preach long, Lord. Okay, now if you combine this prayer, though, with the two prayers we already explored in this series, Speak for your servant is listening.
Give me a listening heart so I can fulfill my calling. Take those two prayers and add to it this prayer. Teach me to number my days.
Well, then you would see exponentially more wisdom and more growth in your life. So we could just leave it there. But of course, we're not going to. There's so much more to explore in this psalm. You see, our ancient prayer today is verse 12 of 17 verses, and it forms the pivot and the point of the psalm.
When we understand what comes before and after verse 12, we'll more deeply appreciate the power and the point of this ancient prayer. So walk with me through Psalm 90, a prayer of Moses, the man of God, verse one. 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.
You turn people back to dust, saying, return to dust. You mortals, a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass of the morning, in the morning that springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.
The opening six verses of Psalm 90 set up this stark contrast between the eternal God and ephemeral humans, between the one who was before the mountains were formed to the ones who wither like grass in a single day.
From everlasting to everlasting. You are God.
Return to dust, you mortals.
And yet, Moses starts off the whole prayer, the whole psalm, with this moving confession of trust.
This eternal God has been our dwelling place, the dwelling place of these ephemeral humans, these ephemeral earthlings throughout all generations. In other words, though there is this massive gulf between the eternal God and the ephemeral humans, it does not mean this eternal God doesn't care for the ephemeral humans.
It doesn't mean that this eternal God can't be trusted or isn't able to relate. In fact, it's because of who God is eternally that we can trust him to be our dwelling place, the dwelling place of our mortal, dusty lives. And we'll hear a little bit more on that as we go.
Etched across the top of this ancient prayer that God would teach us to number our days is this contrast between God's immortal nature and our mortal ones.
He ever lives, we always die. He endures, we pass.
He always was and he always will be. And we pop up in the morning and we're gone by evening.
Why does Moses start his psalm this way, though?
Because in order to learn to number our days properly, the very first thing we need to know is that we are not eternal. Our days are severely limited. We are not the source of our life, but we are dependent upon God for the life that we do have. We are dust, and to dust we will return. One of the effects of having the myopic vision we often have where we pull our brims down low, is we actually can be deceived into thinking somehow that even though we know everyone else is dying out there, we aren't going to.
Or at least we're kind of ignoring the fact.
This reminds us that we have to confront the reality that there is an eternal God and we are not Him.
But there's another inscription scrawled across the top of this prayer. And you may find the next bit of this psalm jarring from the eternal ephemeral.
We now go to another fundamental distinction between holy and unholy.
Verse 7.
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.
All our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan.
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.
If only we knew the power of your anger. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.
Now what is all this talk about anger and wrath and indignation?
In order to number our days properly, not only must we accept that God is eternal and we are mortal, we must also confess the truth that God is holy and we are sinful.
The first section of The Psalm, verses 1 through 6 make the point that our lives are incredibly short.
Then verses 7 through 11 explain why our lives are short because of sin.
Our short lives, yes, sometimes are 70 years short lives, or are 80 years short, or even our 90 years short, or the odd person even 100 years short, but still short.
These lives are short, these lives in which we often suffer. But we all die, yes, some too young and some a bit older, but all without exception. All of our lives end precisely because of sin.
We bear in our bodies the result of our rebellion against God.
All nature groans, we're told in Romans 8, because of our sinful nature.
We die because of who we became when we rebelled against our good creator.
That's the story of the world front to back. That's also the narrative arc of scripture captured in the story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, from the creation to the fall, to the long story of redemption and through to consummation when God brings it all home.
According to this psalm, we live short lives under God's judgment on sin.
Our lives pass away, he says, under God's wrath, which means we all experience death because of God's wrath.
And what is wrath exactly?
Now, it's very important that we step back and explain wrath a bit, because in English and in our larger culture, the word wrath has become something truly awful, as though God is freaking out, or God has lost control. Sort of like God has road rage, experiencing an irrational meltdown or a temper tantrum because things aren't going his way. And so he decides to smash some things up. That's the vision or the image of wrath. But that's not God's wrath at all.
The wrath of God is his settled holy opposition to anything that defames his holy character, defaces his human images and destroys his good creation. I'm going to say that again because it's important that you get this. The wrath of God is his settled holy opposition to anything that defames his holy character, defaces his human images and destroys his good creation. You may not have realized it, but you want a God of wrath.
You do.
You want a God of wrath who actually opposes evil and sin with everything that he is. You want that.
You want a God of wrath who is against that which destroys the good.
What would we have without that?
What would we have without a God of wrath? Without a God of wrath, there would be no justice, there would be no freedom, there would Be no hope and there would be no love.
You know what? A God who isn't wrath. You know what that God is like? He looks at evil and goes, what's the big deal?
You don't want a God who isn't wrathful.
God's wrath, in fact, is an expression of his eternal love.
For it is out of God's love that he opposes evil.
It is out of God's love that his wrath opposes and judges sin.
But of course, that poses a real problem for us, doesn't it?
Anyone pick up on the problem?
Yeah. The problem is we are sinners.
And the problem is we are the ones under God's judgment for sin.
We defamed God's holy character. We are the ones who said, I'm better than you, God.
I'll be the judge of what's right and what's wrong.
I'll decide who I want to be and what I want to do. And you can't tell me anything. Thank you very much.
We are the ones who defaced God's human images by rejecting his design for our lives, by going after worshiping other gods, by putting ourselves first, by oppressing other people, by refusing to be who we were created to be. We are the ones who destroyed his good creation by rebelling against his purposes for us in the world, rejecting our responsibility to exercise proper dominion over creation as his human image images. It's because humans sinned that humans die.
That's the point of the whole Genesis 3 story, the false story.
And though the language of Psalm 90 may be a bit strange to our modern ears, we need to let it clang around a bit, let it grate on the nerves slightly.
God is against the deformed creatures we became when we rebelled against him and rejected his ways. He's against that.
God is dismayed at the fallen, shattered state of humanity precisely because he created humans as his holy images. He created humans to live in a love relationship with him together and over his world, and to do so forever. And we are so far gone from that original plan.
God did not create us to die.
He created us to live. We were formed in the image of eternal, everlasting, triune God for an eternal, everlasting relationship with the Father through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. If you read Genesis 1 and 2 and then go on from there, you'll see it to be true. God created us for life, for a life with Him.
Death came through human rebellion.
Death came as a result of sin. Death is not natural. Death is an imposition of evil. Death is not good. Death is the enemy. And that's why everything within us fights death. And yet we all die. We're helpless to do anything about it.
We know it's wrong.
We can't change it.
Well, Psalm 90 in just a few short verses explains why this is so. The eternal God is a holy, good God too. And because he is holy and good, he is rightly opposed to sin, and he rightly judges us.
The God who made us good is against what we've become. Arrogant, destructive, rebellious, hurtful, resentful, bitter and bent.
And so in the story of Genesis 3, humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden, specifically so that they won't then take from the tree of life and live forever in their state of damnation.
We need to have our sin problem dealt with before we can have eternal life restored. And that's the rest of the story of Scripture. God immediately steps into action and begins to work out his to deal with the sin problem, deal with the death problem, deal with the unholiness problem, so that we can be restored to what his original plan was all along.
All humans die because all humans sin. As you read in Romans 6:23, the wages of sin is death. There's my skull. I had to.
We all sinned. We all fall short of the glory of God. That Romans. That's Romans 3:23. And we get paid sins, wages with suffering, with death, just as God said we would.
Having cut ourselves off from the source of life, we wither and we die.
But.
And Romans 6:23 features one of the greatest buts of the Bible. But for the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus Christ Lord.
Moses pictures our lives passing away under God's wrath, which is a sobering diagnosis.
But then Moses does something by the Spirit that is beautiful, because then he goes on to prophetically point toward God's solution. The Christ cure for our sin and death. How does he do that? Well, first he gives us this prayer to pray.
Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. The eternal holy God is the only one who can teach his ephemeral, sinful creatures how we are to live wisely with the time that we have.
The central verse of Psalm 90 teach us to use wisely all the time we have.
Confessing what we know. If you catch up everything so far. Confessing what we know to be true. God is eternal. We are mortal, God is holy. We are sinful. And we live short lives under God's judgment. His righteous judgment on sin. We also then confess that we don't know how to live.
We need instruction.
We need to be taught.
We need to be goaded in order.
And this humility is a good place to start, because it's our pride that got us into trouble in the first place. We humbly admit that our way of counting time, our way of numbering our days, doesn't take into account the full truth of who God is and who we are. And so we need God to teach us, to goad us into proper alignment with God's eternal, holy perspective on time, on days, on us, on what he has done to overcome our mortality and our sin. We need to be taught God's math so that we can number our days God's way.
So first, Moses gives us this prayer, which is meant to anchor our lives and center the psalm. But then he goes on to prophetically point toward Christ.
So let's read on. And I want you to notice how the tone of the psalm shifts immediately.
Now, Moses is full of appeals, even demands, you could say, and through each one, we are pointed towards Christ. As we who have received the whole story know that Christ is the cure to our sin and death. And ultimately the answer to Moses prayer here, beginning in verse 13. Relent, Lord, turn, relent. How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. For first, Moses calls God to relent, that is, to turn back from his plan to destroy and instead have compassion on these pathetic creatures.
Here Moses is acting as a Christ figure, interceding for sinful humans itself. His action here points to the intercessory work of Jesus Christ, our great high priest. And you're going to hear more on that intercessory work when Peter Hanbury preaches in the ancient prayer series here in a few weeks.
But Moses starts there, asking God to turn around, to relent. And flowing from that compassion comes everything else that we read. In Psalm 90, Moses prays that the eternal God would do for us what we can't do for ourselves. We're sinful, we're mortal. But God, you're not.
You're eternal, you're holy. So act with compassion on our behalf. And of course, we know from the story we. We know that Moses is not praying here against God's will.
Moses is praying here. He didn't even probably realize it. He's praying in perfect alignment with the Father's heart. This is what God has been doing all along. And you will find Moses will discover, of course, that God is more than happy to go along with this plan.
In all that follows. Moses the prophet is praying a prayer that God is already answering and is going to ultimately answer in Jesus Christ.
Through Jesus the Father would answer our primary problem of sin shortened lives.
See, the Eternal Father saw that we were dead as the natural consequence of our sin and God's wrath.
His settled opposition was upon who we had become.
Deformed, shattered images, alienated in death. But rather than leaving us there to rot, hear this. Rather than leaving us to rot, our loving Father sent His one and only Son to become one of us. A human being who had not rebelled, a human being who was not dead, so that his sacrificial death on our behalf would overcome our death sentence.
And his resurrection from the dead would secure our resurrection to eternal life.
What's more, the Holy Father saw that we had fallen into sin, sin that he in his holy character could not abide, that we were helpless to make ourselves holy again.
And in his holy wrath, the Father stood utterly against who we had become as sinful, rebellious creatures. But rather than a wrath that wipes us out completely, his holy opposition to our sin meant that he sent his one and only Son to wipe us completely clean.
This is the astonishing gospel that God, in His holiness, who cannot abide sin, sent his only Son to become sin for us. I want you to hear that.
Instead of a wrath that wipes us out completely, this is a holy opposition that wipes us completely clean.
This perfectly sinless, perfectly holy Jesus, who's both fully God and fully man, did all this to make us holy again.
Why? So that we can be restored to to the relationship that God had always desired, always planned that he had created us for with Him.
Well, with all of that in mind, listen to how it rolls out as we finish Psalm 90. Listen to how it points to Jesus, verse 14. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. That's quite a tone shift, by the way. Isn't that quite a tone shift from our days are passing away under your wrath to this. Yeah, big tone shift. When we wake in the morning, we wake satisfied. We're asking the Lord to satisfy us with the unfailing love of God that has been revealed through Jesus Christ. That means that each day we wake to the only day you have, which is today, we realize that we wake loved in Christ.
And as a result, we wake as worshipers.
We wake and engage the day with praise on our lips. Satisfy us in the morning with your unleashed love that we may sing for joy and Be glad all our days.
Verse 15 make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.
That's an interesting paradox. Make us glad afflicted, glad trouble Learning what God has done for us in Christ to overcome our sin and our death means that our suffering now, whatever it might be our suffering now, is part of how we participate in the sufferings of Christ.
And what's more, our suffering, our afflictions, our troubles, which are often the consequence of direct sin, but more broadly are always the consequence of sin.
It is through our suffering that we are refined and made holy.
Our groaning is no longer a sigh of despair, but a sign of hope.
For we know, as we read in Romans 8:18, our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
God can make us glad, knowing that he is hard at work for our good, even, and maybe especially when times are hard.
Verse 16 May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. My friends, if Moses is praying this prayer, this is exactly what God did. This is exactly what he did to his servants, to the children, to the generation upon generation. And through the wonderful story of Scripture, the eternal God revealed himself to us all, showing us all his wonderful deeds, his majestic splendor, that this is the God, a God of wrath who would be so kind to us, a God who is utterly opposed to what we've become. And because of his opposition to what we've become, he redeemed us back to himself, taking our place in sin so that we could take our place in his holiness.
And we want to pray that we would all see the deeds and splendor of God, but also that this splendor would be rippling down the through the generations.
Verse 17 May the favor or the beauty of the Lord our God rest upon us. What a beautiful way to pray with each day that you were given, Whether you have 12,000 left or only a few hundred, each day that you wake, that you would pray that you would have the favorite, the beauty of our Lord Jesus Christ resting upon you by the Holy Spirit you've been given.
And then finishing that verse, establish the work of our hands for us.
Yes, establish the work of our hands. This is perhaps the surprising end of the psalm, actually, that here in a psalm about the short lives of sinful people, that as we learn to number our days and apply our hearts into wisdom, that we actually pray that our work, our daily activity, the things that take our time and our energy the things that God has called us to, however short they may be, that this work would be established and made firm and rooted and enduring, secured by the eternal, enduring God himself.
In order for this to be the case, of course, the work needs to align with God's purposes, must itself be honoring to God, be done unto the Lord, and I think aligned with his eternal holy perspective. But we discover through the Scriptures that this really actually covers a lot of territory.
From the way that we love and serve our neighbors, to the way that we love and raise our kids, to the way that we use our gifts to build up the church and serve one another, the way that we reach the lost and help the hurting, the ways that we grow honest businesses and care for employees, the ways that we are involved in our community or we conserve or develop creation, ultimately seeking to glorify God in all that we do.
Paul, when he concludes his chapter on resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he says that we can know with confidence that because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because death and sin have been defeated, our labor, whatever labor that might be done to the glory of God, our labor is not in vain.
God does not forget, is secured.
And so we pray eternal holy God, establish the work of our hands. Well, that's the whole of Psalm 90 and it's the context for this powerful prayer. Teach us to number our days so that we might live wisely. Through the coaching of Psalm 90 and the teaching of God's word, we learn first, having numbered our short lives by God's eternal life, we can wisely live our days. And in view of his resurrection promise, every day we have is infused with an awareness that we will die. When you consider it, when you actually are willing to number up the days, think about it.
But because of the resurrection promise, it's infused even more with the powerful hope filled reality that we're not just going to die, friends, we're going to rise.
We're going to rise.
That makes all the difference. Every week that we count counts us down to an end, yes, but because of the gift of Jesus, the gift of God, which is Jesus Christ. Knowing that the end is coming, heightens the importance of today, this day without leaving us.
We know we only have a limited amount of time left before what resurrection.
But we realize that today is the day where we are able to experience what God has for us. Grow in the Lord, serve our neighbor, do with today exactly what God has called us to do, attend to him and love others.
And he has assured us that we can live in the present fully, because he's got us in the end.
Second, having numbered our sinful lives by Jesus sacrificial death, we can live wisely our days in partnership with the Holy Spirit, who's making us holy. You know, each and every day, even in our suffering, or maybe especially in our suffering, whatever your suffering might be, the Holy Spirit is hard at work making us more like the God in whose image we are made.
The Holy Spirit is working to apply the work of Jesus to our lives, making us holy unto the Lord. Why?
All for the goal of us being in a fully restored relationship with the God who created us. And the Lord is working through everything for our good. And this lifelong process that we have, be it short or long in human time, is all being done so that you and I would end up like God Himself, without sin, without spot, without wrinkle, fully enjoying life in him as we were created to enjoy.
And this means that every day we have the opportunity to yield to the work of the Holy Spirit in us, to partner with him in what he is doing.
Rather than wishing today was just going to be over, or wishing this stage in life could just be done, or wishing I could get on to the next stage, or wishing I could get on to retirement, or wishing I could go back to an earlier stage, today is the day you've been given to open yourself up to the Holy Spirit and say, what do you want to do today?
Because he's got things he'd like to do in your life. Do you know that?
He's got plans he'd like to work out with you.
He's asking you to yield to his work of holiness in you right where you are. We so often cry out to God to change our circumstance. When God is saying, yeah, not yet.
The circumstance is the actual tool that I'm using to make you into who I want you to be.
The place you're serving and the suffering you're undergoing and the experiences you're having are the very way in which I want to move you toward my ultimate goal. God's ultimate goal for your life is not to eliminate a few years of suffering from your life. It's not.
That is too short term. He has a big goal in mind. Guess why? Because God knows something you and I can barely conceptualize. He's got to spend the rest of eternity with you, Man. A little bit of suffering in that boy's life is well worth that.
God has a bigger goal in mind for us, a bigger heart for us, a vision for our lives.
And he is committed to following that through. But he wants us to partner with Him. And so every day we've been given this opportunity to live our lives in partnership with the Holy Spirit.
For some of us, the best way to get through the suffering is just yield. For crying out loud, yield.
Let the Holy Spirit do the work. Maybe, maybe you'll get to move on.
But someday you will anyway.
Someday suffering will be over and we'll all be here. But you won't. You'll be in a box right there in front of the and we'll be celebrating what God has done in your life and saying, thank you, Jesus. Now you're done.
I really wish I had that skull right now.
The amazing truth is this.
God came into our sin shortened lives and he took up residence in us by the Holy Spirit. That is an astonishing truth.
He didn't have to do that, you know, but he did.
God short circuited death and gave us eternal life. Now if you have received the Lord Jesus as your Savior, you have eternal life. It's already operative in your life now.
You're still going to die. Your body's still going to die, but eternal life is already operative.
It starts now and it goes on forever. This is the beautiful thing.
God short circuited death and gave us eternal life. Now through Jesus, he overcame sin and gave us holiness. Now by the Holy Spirit, and he is going to teach us. He will teach us as people who have received eternal life, as people who are dwelling places of the Holy Spirit. He will teach us what it means to live our days limited as they are, to live them for his glory, to live them for others good. And because God is so gracious and compassionate and wrathful and angry, God is doing things for our good too.
Because our God loves us way too much to leave us dead.
Way too much to let us reject his plan, way too much to not bring us through to his intended goal that we be with him, that we be like him, flourishing for eternity in freedom, in grace and in love.
So let's pray, Lord, teach us.
Teach us.
Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Teach us, Lord Jesus, how you have accomplished for us life, holiness, our salvation, so that even in these short days when we look forward, we don't see despair when we think of our death, we don't see futility when we think of our lives.
But we anchor our daily lives, our today, in the full hope, the guarantee of your resurrection.
And we yield ourselves to you today because you have come to us to live among us. And live in us by your Holy Spirit, we yield to your work to make us holy now.
Father, thank you for your vision for humanity, your vision for us.
Thank you for not giving up on your plan to make men and women in your image who would live eternally with you.
Thank you for not giving up when you could have but for working out on our behalf all that we could not and giving us life through Jesus.
And so today, as we conclude, Lord, we want to say, teach us in whatever way. Teach us so that we can gain hearts of wisdom, so that we can best use the time you've given to us so that we can redeem the time in these evil days.
Teach us, Lord.
And we pray this in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[00:48:59] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. In today, we hope you feel encouraged and challenged.
If you know someone who would benefit from what you have heard today, please share this podcast.
For more information or if you have questions, you can connect with us through our website, Erickson Covenant ca.
You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Erickson Covenant Church.
