MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT: THE WISDOM OF GODLY ARITHMETIC
Psalm 90: 12
1. I received the most incredible news this past week – and I expect that each of you either has or will be receiving yours as well – that an account had been opened in my name at Life Bank with a daily deposit of $86,400. Isn’t that awesome!
• The letter did state that the terms of the deposit are that I cannot carry over any balance from day to day. What I fail to use each day will be deleted from my account and cannot be retrieved. I can also not borrow from the next day’s deposit.
• The letter also stated that one of the conditions of receiving this daily deposit was that at any time, and without prior announcement, the bank would do an audit on my account to assess how I was using the funds applied to my account and depending on the outcome of that audit I would either be rewarded or penalized.
• I can tell you that news has certainly helped me do a total re-assessment of my financial status and start learning to put every penny to good use. I don’t want to waste even one red cent!
2. How many of you have already received the same letter? I am sure many or most of you wish there was such a bank. Well there truly is! But the deposit made daily into each of our accounts is not in dollars and cents but in hours, minutes, and seconds.
• While there is certainly no equality among us regarding our financial status, in terms of TIME God has given every human being exactly 86,400 seconds every day of their life – no more and no less – and we cannot borrow against tomorrow, nor can we go back and retrieve wasted moments from yesterday. What we do not use carefully and wisely today is lost for ever.
• And since there is an unannounced day coming for each one of us when our lives will be audited, and the outcome be favorable or unfavorable to us, it makes absolute sense to consider how we might wisely use every second of every day.
3. The text for my message today comes from verse 12 of Psalm 90 which is headed in Scripture as “A Prayer of Moses, the man of God”.
• The setting for Moses’ writing of this prayer is clearly during the latter part of Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the wilderness because of their disobedience to the Lord and their failure to believe His promise. Instead of heading straight into the lush land flowing with milk and honey, they settled instead for the hot, dry and barren desert.
• And so an entire generation of those who came out of slavery in Egypt died in the wilderness and Moses is one of them.
• This prayer was written near the end of Moses’ life and since he died at age 120 or around 43,800 days – though longer than most – it highlights the great contrast between the eternity of God and the extreme transitoriness of human life – he says, we are “like a dream”, “like grass that may be fresh in the morning but has withered by the afternoon”, “like a watch in the night” – a mere 3 hours, “like a sigh”.
• As Moses daily watches one funeral after another, and recognizes the increasing brevity of his own life, he asks God to teach them “so to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom”.
• What he is asking for is not just an ability to count the number of our years, months, and days – nor even the number of days and hours we have clocked doing this activity or working on that project - that would just be regular human mathematics.
• Instead he is asking to be given the wisdom, the insight to use however many days, hours, and seconds we are given in such a way and only in those things that bring honor and glory to God. That is the wisdom of Godly Arithmetic!
4. Perhaps the best way for us to grasp and understand what is meant by doing this “Godly Arithmetic” that will produce a heart of wisdom – or learning to make our lives count from God’s perspective rather than our own or the world’s – is to look at a few examples from Scripture and hopefully make application for ourselves.
MOSES
1. Let’s start with Moses himself – one mightily used by God to confront Pharaoh and deliver His people from 400 years of slavery in Egypt.
• The one who, on the banks of the Red Sea while being pursued by the Egyptians, told the people to “stand still and see the salvation of the Lord” and God honored his faith by allowing the people to cross through the sea on dry ground and then swallowed the entire army in the returning waters.
• The one who was permitted to have direct audience with God and receive from Him the sacred commandments – whose face afterward had to be covered with a veil because the glory of God reflecting from him was too dazzling for the people to look at.
• The one who believed and trusted God for the provision of manna from heaven and water from the rock.
2. But this same Moses – when God told him to speak to the rock that water might come forth, acted instead out of his own wisdom and his own frustration smiting the rock instead with his staff.
• And because of his disobedience and unbelief as the leader in front of the people, the same penalty that had been passed on others who never made it into the Promised Land, became his as well.
• The lesson being that when we act on our own initiative and out of our own wisdom and what seems good in our own eyes instead of following the clear word of the Lord, we miss the joy He had planned for us.
3. The good news is that even when we mess up, God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness is made available to us. Though Moses had to die on the other side of Canaan, with his resurrected body he eventually made it into the Promised Land.
• In the Gospels we read of Jesus taking Peter, James and John with Him up the Mount of Transfiguration and there Moses appeared with the prophet Elijah as Jesus’ heavenly glory was revealed.
THE RICH FOOL
1. In Luke 12 Jesus told the story of the rich fool who tore down his barns and storage facilities to build bigger ones to accommodate all that he had acquired for himself – content that he had done everything necessary to take good care of his future.
• The problem was that this man had used only earthly and human arithmetic – adding up all his multiple dollars and cents and the years of health and vitality he presumed he still had left to enjoy them. From the earthly perspective his future looked exceptionally bright. He had followed sound human economics and would have been a big name on the Jerusalem equivalent of Wall Street.
• But little did he know that that very night would be his last and that according to God’s Arithmetic his work sheet would have little if anything to show.
• Which balance sheet right now is receiving your primary focus?
• Amidst all of the demands and expectations we and others place on our lives and that clamor for our attention, may God teach us so to number our days that we might gain a heart of wisdom.
MARY AND MARTHA
1. The story of Mary and Martha sadly often gets used in church circles by the super spiritual “Bible Study and Prayer Group” folks who are so caught up in their devotion and worship that they don’t want to be bothered much and are seldom available to assist with the mundane and earthly responsibilities involved in running and maintaining a congregation.
• The “Martha’s” on the other hand, often tend to pride themselves on being the ones who can be relied on to get things done. “Bible study and prayer is all well and good, but if we don’t plan and prepare the meals and attend to all the other arrangements, bake the cookies, do the fund raising, help with the cleanup, who is going to do it?”
• And so in a sense we find both sides often using human arithmetic to add up the hours and days they give to their respective activities and use those statistics to justify their positions and convince themselves and others they are doing “the Lord’s work”.
2. When Jesus told Martha who complained that Mary would not come and help her in the kitchen that she was distracted by many things and that Mary had chosen the better part, He was certainly not elevating “spirituality” above “hard work” but rather was stressing that His and the Father’s agenda and timetable needed to have the place of priority in our lives above our own. There would be time to go into the kitchen and attend to the preparation of the meal, but right now what He wanted was their full and undivided attention.
• So again, the issue is of the priority of God’s Arithmetic over our own. That is the way to develop a heart of wisdom.
THE THIEF ON THE CROSS
1. One last Bible story is that of the crucifixion scene where Jesus hangs on the cross between two thieves. One mocks and arrogantly rails at him saying, “Aren’t you supposed to be the Messiah? Then save yourself and us!” The other pleads humbly, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
• Both thieves have lived their lives figuring out ways to cheat the system – to get what they want at other people’s expense – to add to their own purses while depleting the purses of others.
• Some people live their lives that way and try to justify their own wrong doing by arguing that the entire system is crooked anyway – that those in power only got where they are because they stole from the poor and defenseless and all they are doing is trying to even the score.
• Now they got caught and the one thief is still trying to use human wisdom, ingenuity, and arithmetic to even the score – “Come on man, if you are who you say you are, then get yourself and us out of this mess.”
• The other realizes that the game is finally up. He gains a heart of wisdom by recognizing that all his life he’s fooled others and tried to fool himself and now acknowledging that he cannot fool God and all that is left is God’s mercy. He doesn’t even dare ask Jesus to rescue him – just to remember him.
• And that cry results in the application of God’s Arithmetic that has Jesus saying to him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
CONCLUSION:
1. As we commenced this service today, each of us had already used up 36,000 of the seconds for today that God has allotted to us. Have you used any of those moments with heaven in mind or have you been too caught up in the arithmetic of this world?
2. It is possible that each of us may still have another 46,800 seconds left in this day. We cannot be certain. All that we can take for granted is the time we have already had and this present moment.
3. May whatever additional time today God graciously grants us be lived with Him in mind that when the final count is done, we might receive His word of approval and enter into His joy.
