In this excellent article by Jon Bloom from DesiringGod we are once again reminded of how brief our lives are and how we should not waste our life on sin and evil.
Life Is Too Brief to Waste: Learning to Number Our Days
"As I write, I’m sitting outside my home, basking in a verdant, cloudless midsummer day in Minnesota. The sun-drenched landscape around me is lush and green, except for the colorful interruptions of flowers in full bloom that draw the eye as well as the bees and hummingbirds. And from the trees, a virtuoso wren leads a choir of birds, providing a perfect seasonal soundtrack in surround sound.
And as I sit enveloped by this world flush with life, I’m thinking about how brief life is. I recently turned 59. One more quick trip around the sun, and I’ll be 60 — if the Lord wills and I live, that is. Given how fast the decades are speeding by, before I know it I’ll find myself at “seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty,” which both Moses and modern demographers say is the average span of a human life (Psalm 90:10) — if the Lord wills and I live, that is. The end of my earthly life now feels less like someday and more like someday soon.
Which is why, in recent years, I have increasingly returned to what has become one of my favorite psalms: Moses’s prayer in Psalm 90. I share Moses’s deep desire for God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). I want to know what it means to grow wise as we grow older.
And learning to number our days begins by coming to terms with how few days we are given.
Like It Was Yesterday
When I was a young man, the phrase “I remember that like it was yesterday” usually referred to events that occurred just a few years prior. Now, I find myself saying that about things that happened three, four, even five decades ago.
A fun grade-school overnight with my closest childhood friends, Brent and Dave.
Riding in a car with high-school friends, belting out “American Fast Food” to a Randy Stonehill cassette.
That moment in the Wayzata Perkins parking lot at age 18, when I knew deep in my soul that Pam was the one I would marry — and we weren’t even officially dating yet! Now we’ve been married for 36 wonderful years.
That first time I heard John Piper preach, and I knew deep in my soul that somehow my future would be intertwined with his — and we weren’t even part of Bethlehem Baptist Church yet! Now we’ve been serving in ministry together for more than 30 years.
That overwhelming moment in the hospital room 28 years ago when I held our first child for the first time. Now that child is nearly the age I was then.
I remember these events like they were yesterday. And they leave me wondering where all the time went. How did it go by so fast?
Like Yesterday When It Is Past
Moses felt this kind of bewilderment too, and even more when he compared our brief lives to God’s life:
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:2)..." from the article:
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