The Lavishness Of God - Part Iii Series

This past week I celebrated a birthday, my birthday – 29 years old and I had a lot of wonderful people who were really quick to remind me that it was one year away from 30. So thanks so much for that encouragement. 361 more days until 30 years old. Now some of you are thinking- “Big deal. You’re just a young punk. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have many years on you.” Yeah, I guess it isn’t that big of a deal. The other week I was visiting the oldest member of our congregation – Tillie Johnson. She’s a 106 ½ years old…that’s Tillie. 106 ½. So my 29 compared to 106 ½ - that’s not a big deal.

We’re going to be talking about time today. Because I have realized that as I get older time goes by faster and faster and since the birth of my son over a year ago now – I just see the growth that he’s making. It’s kind of frightening how fast time goes. Maybe you have kids who have grown and now have grandkids who are growing. Maybe grandkids who have had kids. You know what I’m talking about. The passage of time seems to speed up. For you in VBS – all of you guys – time is going pretty slow. Enjoy it. Summer time seems kind of long doesn’t it? …No, okay. I like that. A man after my own heart. But when you look forward to something in a couple of weeks it seems like forever until it comes. You’ve got to wait and wait and wait. Well, soon there’s going to come a day – and it’s starting to snowball for me where time goes by faster and faster.

We’re going to look at Psalm 103 today. I invite you to turn there if you have your Bibles. We’re continuing on through this Psalm looking at the lavishness of God….His extravagance. Who God is and why David, the Psalmist, praises Him in such a way that he does. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, let all that is within me bless His holy name”…and he goes on verse after verse praising God for who He is.

Today we come to verse 15. First we have the bad news. Okay, you want to hear the bad news? It starts in verse 15.

“As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower of the field for the wind passes over it and it is gone and its place knows it no more.”

The bad news is that everyone is going to die someday. And when we do die it’s going to come quicker than we would like because life is short. Life is short. Whether you live 29 years or you live 106 ½ years, life is short. In the grand scheme of things and in eternity a 106 years is nothing compared to 2,000 years of history or 6,000 years or the age of God…timeless.

Men and women, boys and girls, our days are short in the grand scheme of things. We’re all going to come to the day of our death. We’re all going to die. That’s reality. Now maybe some of you are saying, “Why does the Pastor have to talk about death? We’re having such a fun day here and we’re celebrating life.” I’m all about life too. I’m all about living because I believe Jesus saves people. God saves people to live for Him and to make a difference here on earth today for the kingdom of God. But I also have to be honest and I also want to share the whole story with you. I don’t want to leave out some of this. David writes “for man, his days are like grass – they’re like a flower of the field.”

This spring a flower came up in front of the house – some tulips. It was really nice. We had that nice warm spring weather, but then the weather turned cold kind of like today and those flowers were gone. They were there and gone.

David is praising God and in the midst of it he comes to the reality of who we are before God and we’re dust as he said in verse 14. I want to share with you all of God’s Word and I want you to know that you are going to face death unless Jesus comes back again. So I want you to be ready. If I was driving down the road with a bunch of my friends and they knew the road. They’d been down there before and they knew that there was a speed bump…a huge speed bump that if you hit going 50 or 60 miles per hour the car is going to fall apart and the engine will fall out of the frame…and they don’t tell me about it…when we hit that and the car breaks down and we can’t go any further, I’m going to say to them, “why didn’t you tell me about this speed bump. You knew it was here. Now it’s taking us off the race.” Or they could say, “Well, we were having such a good conversation about other things and the scenery was so nice and the sun was shining and a lot of things to look at, so we didn’t want be bothersome and seem pessimistic to tell you about the speed bump coming up.”