Numbering Our Days

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The Revive Our Hearts radio program was just a few years old. We were recording at that time in Little Rock, Arkansas, and our producer, Hugh Duncan, set his planner on the roof of his car. Now, this was one of those paper-based, task-planning systems in a binder. Get the picture; remember those?

Well, when Hugh got in the car, he forgot to retrieve his planner! And as he drove off, the planner flew off the top of the car and fell down a drain in the road! When I first heard that story, I’ve got to tell you, it made me a little nervous!

Our staff was a lot smaller back then, and Hugh was responsible for a ton of details for the daily Revive Our Hearts program. If he couldn’t keep track of his tasks, that could mean serious trouble for all of us!

Dannah Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story for June 7, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

So, what happened, Nancy? Was Hugh’s planner lost? Did Revive Our Hearts suffer because of unfinished tasks?

Nancy: No, it didn’t. Hugh told us that he pulled off the side of the road and used a tire iron to open a manhole cover where the planner had fallen. He climbed down and retrieved his planner out of the gutter. So, mercifully, catastrophe was averted for Hugh and for Revive Our Hearts.

That story reminds me how our to-do list can sometimes make us a little anxious. Don’t we all know what it is to be nervous that we may be forgetting a task that we’ve committed ourselves to? That’s why we work so hard to keep track of tasks and stay organized.

And we should do that. God is glorified when we show discipline and self-control. We do need some way to organize our work to help us serve God and others. Using a good system can keep us from unnecessary stress . . . when the system is working!

But sometimes, our plans just don’t work the way we expect. Even our best systems can let us down. And sometimes we even see all that work go down the drain. That incident with Hugh’s planner happened close to twenty years ago.

Since then, as we’re about to hear, Hugh has experimented with several types of task management systems. But far more importantly, he’s been searching the Scripture for insight into how we spend our time and how we approach the tasks the Lord has given us.

Hugh spoke about this topic to the Revive Our Hearts team not long ago. When I heard this message, I knew our listeners would relate to the constant pressure to check things off our list. I thought this message would encourage you, so I wanted to share it.

Hugh has been serving with Revive Our Hearts since its very earliest days, and today he serves as the Director of our Audio and Video Outreaches. Here’s Hugh Duncan.

Hugh Duncan: One of the Cutting Edge Commitments of this ministry is Priorities. I sure see the value of that. That is why this morning when I got up, I used this . . . which has a task planner on it. It’s a way to keep track of tasks.

I have tried various things over the years to plan my tasks. I brought a few books that happened to be on my shelf here. Starting in my early twenties, when I got my first full-time job, it was like, “I’ve got to have a way to keep track of things!”

So, here I’ve got Getting Things Done. (My wife thinks it’s funny that I’ve read a book called Getting Things Done instead of actually using that time to get things done!) It says it’s “the art of stress-free productivity.”

Some of these books have said things like if you can manage your time, you can manage your life. I remember one book that said if you can manage your time, you can experience inner peace. Those sound like great promises. So I’ve tried, over the years, to do that and to implement various things to help me manage my time.

I love thinking about these kinds of things. Some of you know me, and you know I’m not extremely task oriented, but I love exploring task systems. So I like reading about them and exploring them sometimes more than actually doing the tasks. But I also love the idea of keeping track of our days.

I was born April 24, 1972; that makes today number 18,196. For a while I was numbering every single day and journaling about it, because I wanted each one to be special. I wanted to keep track of what day I was on. There’s also another significant number for me, which is sixty-seven.That’s the number of days until I turn fifty.

So I love this topic. I’m thinking about it a whole lot with a big transition in life coming. There have been goals that I’ve set: “What do I want to do before I turn fifty?” So some of what I read on this laptop this morning were just my goals and my attempts to accomplish things before I turn fifty.

I also love stories. I love thinking about how stories unfold in acts and in scenes. I like to think about life like a story. If my life was a three-act story; if this week was a story, what would it look like?

I am also fascinated by seasons and by days and the way God creates rhythm in our year. Unfortunately, I can’t get into all that this morning. But all that leads me to love Psalm 90:12, which says: “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Now, it’s easy for me to say I love that verse because I love all these topics. But another one of the Cutting Edge Commitments of this ministry is The Authority of Scripture. It’s easy for me to say this verse justifies all the time I think about spending time and doing all these things.

But it’s important to not let all of this stuff and all these human opinions affect the way I read this verse. What matters is taking God’s Word and setting it on top of this [computer with task manager] and letting the Bible determine how we spend our time. 

In the ESV (I’ll be mostly in CSB today, but in the ESV) Psalm 90:12 says, “So teach us to number our days.” That “so” makes me think, “Well, I’d better pay attention to everything that came before verse 12.” So for the next few minutes, I want to explore Psalm 90 and what it says about the way we use our time and the way we try to manage our time.

Even if you don’t do this kind of thing—if you don’t use your iPad, if you don’t have a planner—you’re still managing your time in some way. Even if you say, “I just drift from thing to thing,” that’s a way to manage your time. So we all need to think about what God says about time, what the Bible says about time.

As I’ve looked into this whole chapter, I’ve found it to be pretty sobering! So I would like to explore three points. I’d like to talk about: 

1) Our Days Are Marked by God’s Anger
2) Our Days Are Marked by Futility 
3) Our Days Are Marked by Brevity

Number one: our days are marked by God’s anger. I sent these slides to Tom by my deadline—noon yesterday. I looked at them this morning and I thought, Should I really have said that, that our days are marked by God’s anger?

Maybe I should have said, “Our days are marked by our sin,” which is true. I do want to talk about that, but Moses, the man of God who wrote this chapter, says in Psalm 90:7: “For we are consumed by your anger; we are terrified by your wrath.” So he doesn’t sugarcoat things; that is, as he explores this issue of time and how we number our days, God’s anger is a big factor.

Moses knew something about God’s anger. There was a time when he was leading the people of Israel and someone named Korah rebelled against Moses and against God. Korah had 250 people following him. God came out like a fire against those 250 people and consumed them. So when Moses writes, “We are consumed by Your anger,” he saw that with his own eyes.

The other thing that happened to Korah and his family was that the earth split open and Korah and his people fell into the earth. They were immediately sucked into the earth. That is just a dramatic picture of what happens to all of us, really. 

Moses writes about that in Psalm 90:3, “You return mankind to the dust, saying, ‘Return, descendants of Adam.’” He’s referring there to Genesis 2:7, which says: “[After the Lord had made the earth and heavens] the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.” But then Adam and Eve sinned and rebelled against God, just like Korah did.

God said in Genesis 3:19, “You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” And Moses is bringing that concept back in Psalm 90:3: “You return mankind to the dust, saying, ‘Return, descendants of Adam.’”

I am a descendant of Adam, too. So just like Korah rebelled very dramatically and got sucked into the ground, Adam rebelled against God and returned to the dust, and I have rebelled against God. Probably the ground is not going to open up, and I am not going to fall into the ground, but I am going to return to the dust.

So as I think about numbering my days, as we think about numbering our days, as I come and do this kind of a thing, what I have to realize is that my sin greatly affects the way I number my days. I can read these books which promise inner peace, promise that I can control my life, I can use these tools . . .

The problem is, I’m bringing my own sin to these tools. I could have great tools, but I can come to them with a sinful heart. I can read all these books, I can do all the plans I want, but I can still be lazy, and I can still fear failure.

I can both crave people’s recognition and be lazy at the same time, which is kind of crazy, but I can sin in both those ways. I can refuse to rest, and I can be lazy at the same time. I can have opposite sins that are still present within me. So, as we number our days, the reality of our sin and God’s rightful anger over our sin is a reality.

Secondly, Psalm 90 tells us that our days are marked by futility. Verses 9–10 say, “For all our days ebb away under your wrath; we end our years [with] a sigh. Our lives last seventy years or, if we are strong, eighty years. Even the best of them are struggle and sorrow.” (The ESV says “toil and trouble,” which seems like something I can relate to.) 

I was studying this verse one day last week; I focused on that one verse. That very day I was on hold with customer service for two different companies for probably an hour. And there were things we needed at the grocery store that I hadn’t planned for. My time just didn’t go the way I expected. All day long it was like, “This is the toil and trouble that Moses talks about.”

Our days ebb away. That’s a picture of the tide going out. The waves crash day after day. It’s another day, and before we know it, that tide has moved out. Solomon talks about our days going one after the other. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. (see Eccl. 1:5) 

It hurries around to where it comes again, and every day can feel monotonous, and we feel the result of the curse, the result of sin. Because of that, we face sorrow and struggle. When I read that, “We end our years with a sigh,” (v. 9) it reminds me of a poem by T. S. Eliot, where he ends the poem saying, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”

I feel like, “I want to go out with a bang!” And it’s fun to even think (I like to create scenarios), “My funeral’s going to be great! We’re going to have songs and pictures and all these people!” But the reality is, there’s a very good chance that my days are just going to ebb away. 

I could be in an assisted living facility for a long time, and the people who come to my funeral will be any family that happens to live nearby and a few people who are able to get out of the assisted living facility. There’s no guarantee that I’m going to end with a bang. It’s more likely that I’ll end with a whimper or with a sigh.

And so, as we come to try to manage our time, we realize that our time is marked by toil and trouble and struggle and futility. And so, for one thing, you can just never get to the end of the list because there’s always toil and trouble, things interrupting your plans.

You can make all the plans you want, but life has a way of keeping you from checking everything off your list. But even if you check everything off your list, the problem is tomorrow comes, and there’s a whole new list!

It’s easy to think, I need to justify myself. I need to justify my existence. I need to get things done in order to deserve my spot here on earth. And the problem is, the list never stops! You can do the laundry, and the laundry basket fills back up. You could mow the lawn, and the grass grows again. It is a life of toil and struggle and futility.

Our lives are also marked, according to Psalm 90, by brevity. Psalm 90:5–6 says (referring to God), “You end their lives; they sleep [talking about all of us]. They are like grass that grows in the morning—in the morning it sprouts and grows; by evening it withers and dries up.”

So, I don’t know what kind of grass Moses encountered in the desert; he seemed to be around grass that could grow for one day. Our grass, in our lawns, we think of, “Oh, I just have a lawn.” But I did a little looking into it, and each blade of grass lives about forty days.

So when you see your lawn, you’re actually seeing a whole bunch of little plants, and each one only lasts about forty days. So every forty days your lawn is dying and new grass is growing to replace it. Our lives are a little bit like that. Humanity is kind of like the lawn, and we're just one little blade lasting in Michigan about forty days, in Indiana about forty days.

Moses tells us about grass that sprouts up in the morning and by the evening it dries up. So as we go to try to manage our time, and as we try to number our days, our lives are marked by brevity. We can’t hardly ever get to the end of our list, because there’s just not enough time. As we think about our lives, there’s just not enough time to do everything we want to.

So, as I looked at my verse that I love so much—I Iove to think about numbering our days—well, when you look at the whole chapter, it’s pretty sobering, because our days are marked by brevity and futility and by our own sin.

But there was one person who actually did do everything He was supposed to do, and that’s Jesus. In John 17:4, Jesus is praying and He said, “I have glorified you [God] on the earth by completing the work you gave me to do.” Jesus probably lived about thirty-three years, but He did everything God wanted Him to do.

And then on the cross, John 19:30, He said, “It is finished!” So He completed the work, He perfectly did every single task that God gave Him to do, without sin. That transforms everything about the way we number our days.

So how does the gospel affect the ways we number our days? I’d like to explore how the gospel means that our days are marked not only by God’s anger, but by God’s mercy. Our days are marked not only by futility, but by purpose. Our days are marked not just by brevity, but by eternity. I think Psalm 90 gives us a few hints about this as well.

Psalm 90 begins, “LORD, you have been our refuge in every generation.” So if you’re just reading this not in light of the gospel, how can God be our refuge but He’s also the consuming fire who we’re terrified of? In Psalm 90:13, Moses is dealing with all these issues of how we spend our time. He says, “LORD—how long? Turn and have compassion on your servants.”

He seemed to know, “Something’s got to happen, because there are all these problems. This is very sobering when I look at how brief our days are, and how much toil and trouble we face.” So he said, “How long?”

And there’s another place in Psalm 90 that says to God, “A thousand years are . . . like a few hours of the night” (v. 4). Moses was living in the night, but to God the time was really fast. And the answer to this question, “How long?” was, “The time I’m going to send Jesus.”

God knew that brief night would come to an end, morning would come and God would bring light to the world. First Corinthians 15:47 tells us more about Jesus, the One who transforms our use of time. It says, “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.”

Jesus’ days were not marked by sin. He was not like Adam—being from the dust—but He was from heaven, and He was perfectly human. He was made from dust like we are, but He was also perfectly God.

He never rebelled against God’s will like Korah did, or like Adam did, or like I do. Yet, He was consumed by God’s anger. And so because of Jesus, not only are our days that are usually marked by God’s anger, they are now marked by God’s mercy, because of Jesus taking that punishment for us. Not only are our days marked by mercy but our days are marked by purpose. 

I think Moses hints at this, saying, “Let your work be seen by your servants, and your splendor by their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us; establish for us the work of our hands—establish the work of our hands!” (Ps. 90:16–17). So God does have things for us to do.

I’m tempted when I look at the brevity of life and the futility of life and the sinfulness of life just to give up, like, “Okay, I’ll just drift through life. I won’t use this, because I can never do it right anyway!” But we actually have a very good reason to take on the work that God has called us to do.

And then He can establish the work of our hands and use tools like this to bring about His purpose.

I grew up hearing the phrase “born again” all the time. It kind of sounded like a cliché. It was on T-shirts, and I got kind of tired of that. But when you look at it in light of these issues about how we spend our time, it’s amazing we can be born again, have a new day come, a new life to live!

I want to go back to 1 Corinthians 15:47–49; I read the first part of this already, but I want to keep going: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.Like the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; like the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.And just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

So, I now bear the image—not of Adam, who is of dust—but of the Second Adam, who is from heaven. This means that I don’t have to order my days. When I come and do this job, I don’t have to be marked by fear of failure and procrastination. I don’t have to be marked by laziness. 

I have a new image, and I have been born again as someone who can work with all my heart. I can serve people, and I can hit deadlines. I am, by God’s grace, trying to grow at doing that.

I can live out another one of our ministry’s Cutting Edge Commitments, which is Faithfulness. And so, I don’t want to give up on this tool, even though my approach to it—in human terms—is marked by failure.

Also, when I think about, “Teach us to number our days,” I have to realize that, in one sense, the number of my days is zero, because all my days have been given to the Lord. When I die to myself, what I’m really doing is dying to all my time.

And so, as I number my days in light of the gospel, I have zero days. He has all of them, and they all belong to Him. Finally, our days are marked not by brevity, but by eternity. 

Moses says in Psalm 90:14–15, “Satisfy us in the morning with your faithful love so that we may shout with joy and be glad all our days. Make us rejoice for as many days as you have humbled us, for as many years as we have seen adversity.”

So Moses is making a bold request, you know like: “Our days are marked by sin, and we’re going to have seventy or eighty years of them; would you give us the same number in joy that we’ve had in adversity?”

And God said, “I’m not going to answer that prayer exactly like you prayed. I’m going to do way more than you could have imagined!” So we don’t have seventy or eighty years of joy for the seventy or eighty years of struggle, instead we have eternity.

So in one sense, I have to realize in light of the gospel that I have zero days. They all belong to Him. But in another sense, I have an infinite number of days. My wife’s great at living this out, because she has a lot of interests, a lot of things she wants to learn to do, but she’s really devoted her life to homeschooling and to setting aside her agenda. She doesn’t get uptight about it. She says, “I have all eternity! There are all these things I want to d;, I have all eternity to do them!

So what are some practical ways to live out the gospel as we all go about doing this, whatever version of this you’re doing? What are some ways that the gospel speaks to that? I have a few ideas.

Number one, I’m not going to give up. I have a tendency to drift, and I don’t want to do that. I do want to set goals, and I do want to use tools. I do want to do what I say. I do want to be faithful because time is short and the mission that we’re on really matters. It matters for eternity.

I can also use these tools because I’m a new creation in Christ. I can bear the image of the Second Adam, and I can have God’s power—even though on my own I am going to always fail when I try to number my days, but I have the Holy Spirit allowing me to do that.

And if you’re not like me, if you tend to be more of a task-oriented person, what the gospel says is that you don’t have to do anything to be right with God. In fact, you can’t do anything to be right with God. So yes, it’s great to check things off our list because it means we’re serving people, and we’re doing God’s work, but that’s not how you justify your existence. 

Jesus did everything God called Him to do, and He’s given you His righteousness. When I think of the way I like to spend time, I like to have periods of downtime. I like to have time by myself, because I like to think. I like being up here on the platform, but I like a lot of time to think by myself before I get here.

All of my life is kind of like that. I kind of need to be by myself to know what I think, so I can go talk to people and tell them what I think. But the gospel says that if I don’t have that time, it’s going to be okay.

If I was looking forward to, “Hey, I finally get some downtime tonight!” if someone needs me, I can serve that person through the power of the gospel. But you might be the opposite: “I love to be with people I love to be with people all the time. That’s how I know what I think, is when I can talk to people.” If they need time alone, then you can give them time alone and it’s okay, because all of our time belongs to the Lord.

To wrap up, I would like to pray, and I am going to pray by reading all of Psalm 90. You can read along with me, or you can close your eyes, or you can participate however you want. This is a prayer of Moses, the man of God: 

Lord, you have been our refuge in every generation.
Before the mountains were born,
before you gave birth to the earth and the world,
from eternity to eternity, you are God.

You return mankind to the dust,
saying, ‘Return, descendants of Adam.’
For in your sight a thousand years
are like yesterday that passes by,
like a few hours of the night.
You end their lives; they sleep.
They are like grass that grows in the morning—
in the morning it sprouts and grows;
by evening it withers and dries up.

For we are consumed by your anger;
we are terrified by your wrath.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days ebb away under your wrath;
we end our years like a sigh.
Our lives last seventy years
or, if we are strong, eighty years.
Even the best of them are struggle and sorrow;
indeed, they pass quickly and we fly away.
Who understands the power of your anger?
Your wrath matches the fear that is due you.
Teach us to number our days carefully
so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.

Lord—how long?
Turn and have compassion on your servants.
Satisfy us in the morning with your faithful love
so that we may shout with joy and be glad all our days.
Make us rejoice for as many days as you have humbled us,
for as many years as we have seen adversity.
Let your work be seen by your servants,
and your splendor by their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us;
establish for us the work of our hands—
establish the work of our hands!

Nancy: That’s Hugh Duncan, our Audio-Video Director at Revive Our Hearts. He’s been praying one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 90. You know, ultimately, only the Lord can establish the work of our hands. I need that reminder again and again!

When I’m in the middle of multiple deadlines (as I actually am right now!) it’s so easy to feel like everything depends on my own effort and the work of my own hands. I can slip into feeling like it’s up to me to perform.

But we’ve just been reminded that Jesus accomplished everything perfectly! When we come to faith in Him, we don’t have to perform, but we can joyfully serve with all our hearts by His power! I know so many of our listeners can relate to the feeling of a never-ending task list, so when I heard Hugh give this message to our staff, I wanted to share it with you.

I appreciated the honest look he gave us at some of the fears we face, and I’m so grateful for the hope that all those fears can be addressed in the gospel. I’ve written about that in a booklet called Facing Our Fears.

If you find yourself struggling with fear, especially of what it might cost to fully surrender to God’s will in your life, this booklet will help you look to Jesus. When you place your eyes on Him and surrender to His plan, you’ll find yourself thinking more about Him and less about yourself and the things you’re afraid of.

I think this booklet will help you do that, and we’d love to send you a copy. It’s our way of saying “thanks” when you support Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com to make your donation. You’ll find a place to request the booklet Facing Our Fears, or you can call to make your gift and ask for the booklet. That number is 1-800-569-5959. 

Thank you so much for your prayers and your support. They mean more to me and to this ministry than you could possibly know!

Dannah: Thanks, Nancy. Tomorrow Nancy is going to pick up the theme she just mentioned. I know it can feel like there are many reasons to worry, but tomorrow Nancy will show us how to face the future with joy! Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to greater freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ! 

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

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