I want to start with a somber thought this morning because that is the subject of our 2 Psalms today.  In these psalms we see that we are weak, and fragile, and dying.  This awareness of our mortality breaks down our self-sufficiency, our self-confidence, our self-importance.  It spoils our delusions that we will live forever.  It drives us to God where we find lasting life and love, joy and hope.  

I want to start by giving you a brief background for Psalm 39.

In Psalm 39 David is upset!  He says he is under God’s discipline.  We don’t know what that is for.  But as he sees it, God is taking away something dear to him. Very likely it is his own life and strength that he sees slipping away. He is deeply frustrated because he sees how short life is, and how painful things fill up so many of the few days we do have.

He said, I better not say anything or it will be something I shouldn’t say!  “I will watch my ways, and keep my tongue from sin.  I will guard my mouth with a muzzle.” But this self imposed silence doesn’t seem to help!  He said, “...my anguish increased; my heart grew hot within me”.  

But in his bitter frustration, he begins to pray.  And, surprisingly, in his prayer he sees EVEN more fully how brief his life is, and he sees his NEED to know that, and that leads him to greater revelation of how God IS his ONLY hope.  It is a simple but powerful revelation we all need!  It is one thing to say, “my hope is in God”, it is another thing to truly feel that all your OTHER hopes are gone, and to have the truth that God IS your only hope is pressed upon you forcefully! 

CS Lewis said, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” If pain is God’s megaphone, Death is God’s thunder!  God is shouting to us, “Your life is temporary, you will take nothing with you from this world and before you know it life will be past.  Put your hope in me and in my love! There is no security, no hope, no lasting joy anywhere else!”

Psalm 39:4-7  “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.  You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you.  Each man’s life is but a breath.  Even those who seem secure.  Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro; he bustles about, but only in vain. He heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it.  But now, O Lord, what do I look for?  My hope is in you.”

Psalm 90:10-12 ESV  “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

Both David and Moses not only accept their mortality, but they seek to be made MORE aware of it!  It is GOOD to be made more aware of the frailty of your life!  NOT because frailty and mortality are good but because they press us into God like nothing else!

A devotional I read on Psalm 90 said, “We are armed and eminently more dangerous when we spend time and energy contemplating the shortness of our lives.”  Facing the frailty of our lives is necessary to wisdom.  We live foolish, wasted lives, by ignoring the shortness of life. For some it leads to eternal death, because they never seriously prepare to meet God.  

Many Christians lose much eternal reward by living mostly for what they think will make them happy today. Jesus said there are those who store up treasure here on earth but are not rich toward God.”… Contemplating our own mortality should highly motivate us to focus on things that make us  rich toward God.

Bob Diffenbaugh said, “Ignoring death, and denying the reality of our transitory existence is not good for us.  “A false sense of optimism turns men’s minds from God.” 

Remembering how short are lives are here, focuses us on things that matter.  It motivates us to seek first his kingdom.

Until you realize your projects and possessions, your beauty and strength, are all fading away, you will not turn to God as the treasure of your life.  Until you realize life is fleeting, you will not passionately seek after God and all he has for you.  

We must be shaken out of our pursuit of happiness in the same things as everyone else! It is recognizing the fleeting and fragile nature of life that ALONE can shock us into looking beyond this world for satisfaction and joy in God.  That is why we should pray: Teach me to be aware that my life is coming to an end!

The Bible reminds us over and over in the most vivid images  that our lives on this earth are brief, and fragile. No matter how good we eat, or how much we do to protect ourselves from accident or aging or sickness, we are all gonna die! 

Psalm 144:4 ESV Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow. 

Psalm 39: 5 NLT  “You have made my life no longer than the width of my hand.”  Verse 6 “Man is a mere phantom as he bustles about”.   We are busy, doing stuff, but our lives will disappear from the earth.  Sometimes I think,” Where are my mom and dad, where are Cindy’s mom and dad, where are all my aunts and uncles?”  Most of them are gone!  We feel so solid, so indestructible, but we’re not.

Psalm 90:5,6 ESV The children of men “are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.”  A dream seems so real when you are dreaming but so hard to hold onto when you wake up.  Grass springs up and withers, almost like it never existed.  A man said he was struck with how quickly life is fading, when his son asked him what his grandfather’s name was and he couldn’t even remember his name. 

Psalm 90:10 ESV The years of our life are “soon gone and we fly away”.  Our life is like a bird that lands on a branch for a moment and then just as quickly flies away.  

Psalm 49:11,12 NASB says “Their inner thought is that their houses are forever...They have named their lands after their own names.  But man in his splendor will not endure; He is like the animals that perish”.

We are so different than animals, being made in the image of God, yet our physical bodies perish just like a dog or cat or bird.  Ouch!   

Psalm 89:48 “who can live and not see death?  Who can escape the power of the grave?

What is the point? To wake us up to the reality that we are fragile and dying and will lose everything!  And to drive us to God. After realizing his life was but a shadow or a phantom David said, verse 7 “And so O Lord, where do I put my hope?  My only hope is in you.”  Hope is confident expectation of good and ulitmate happiness. Placing hope in God means you are looking to God for your future good and happiness. Awareness of how frail and fleeting our lives are, should powerfully direct our hope and attention toward God!

*There IS a wrong response to the fleeting nature of life, that we need to be warned about.  The world understands in some way the brevity of life and their response is:  let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.  Let’s live for ourselves, our pleasures, let’s live even more for us!  A milder but dangerous version of this, that is accepted by Christians is the idea that life will be over someday so let’s make sure we do everything on our bucket list before we die.  

Wanting to enjoy or accomplish certain things before we die is not wrong. But awareness that our life is coming to an end it not primarily to be a motive to more aggressively pursue our own pleasures, but to turn our hearts to God – where we will find, “In his presence there is fullness of joy and pleasures forever!!! Psalm 16:11

If, in the name of a bucket list, we spend our lives seeking things other than God, we are settling for less pleasure and joy, not more! If you do have a bucket list, how about adding to your bucket list things like this: that you want to be more filled with the Spirit each year you live. Or add this, “I will praise the Lord all my life.  I will sing praise to Good as long as I live”.  Or add this: I want to be a greater blessing to God’s people.  Psalm 71:18 “Even when I am old and gray, God do not abandon me, until I declare your strength to this generation, your power to all who are to come.”  That was what was on David’s bucket list!   

It is also important to this whole discussion to realize that the shortness and weakness of human life is the result of sin and judgment in the world.  Our days are numbered because of sin.  Psalm 90 “For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed; You have set our iniquities before you, our sins in the light of your presence”. Romans 5:12 Sin came into the world through one man and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”   

Yet, through God’s amazing grace, and the gift of Jesus, our weak, fragile, dying condition can have a glorious outcome.  

Applications:

First:  Let awareness of your own mortality, drives you to God for hope and happiness and security.  Let it fuel your passion for God.  

The beginning of Psalm 90 says God is eternal, we are temporary – we fly away!  If we are only here for a moment we need to unite ourselves to the eternal God. We need an eternal home. We only find that in God.  John Trapp “He that dwelleth in God cannot be unhoused”.  Matthew McCullough said we live “in a rented world”, it’s not permanent.  We will get evicted someday.  We need a home that can’t be taken from us.   

The men and women of faith in Hebrews 11“acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”.  They were “longing for a better country--a heavenly one”.  We want more than what we find here! We don’t find life here to be enough for us.  

That’s why Moses cried out at the end of Psalm 90, “O Lord,“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.”  What have here is not enough!  It’s too short!  Too filled with pain!  Too fragile!  Matthew McCullough said, the message of Psalm 90 is “Teach me to live with the reality of my death, so that I can live in the gladness of your love.” 

The Psalms are all about finding happiness and pleasure in God and in his steadfast love.   Houses, clothes, beauty, travel, camping, property, success in business, are not sufficient to satisfy your soul! They have a place, but only God is sufficient for inward, lasting happiness.  

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Second: *Death makes Jesus precious to us.   It is the awareness of death that makes Jesus’ promise of eternal life precious.  “If death is not a problem, Jesus won’t be much of a solution.  It is because we are weak fragile and dying that Jesus and all he promised us is precious to us!  It is because we are weak, fragile and dying that we look forward to the place Jesus is preparing for us, where he will wipe every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death. 

Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, the one who believes in me will LIVE even if he dies.”  Abundant life, begins here and now.  We become new people, new creations now!  BUT the big promise he makes is that if we trust him, we can live forever with God!  John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will NOT perish but will have everlasting life!  

Death is the most feared thing in life, it takes away everything and everybody from us!  And no one has ever escaped it!  Pascal described our human condition as condemned men waiting our own turn to die.  As we see others die it reminds us that our own turn is coming. Understanding that makes Jesus and what he did for us such an answer!  Hebrews 2 says Jesus suffered death so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.  And by his death he broke the power of him who holds the power of death, that is the devil.  He freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.  

If we are united to Jesus, we can face death right in the face. And have no fear!! Because we come out on the other side of death in complete victory and resurrection and glory!

Third: *The shortness of life delivers us from fearing other people. 

Psalm 49:16,17 “Do not be afraid when a person becomes rich, 

When the splendor of his house is increased;
For when he dies, he will take nothing with him;

We are not to live in fear of any person.  We are not to be overly impressed with anybody.  We are not live in fear of their seeming power to hurt us. They are just people, weak and dying men.

Isaiah 51:12,13 The Lord says, I am the One who comforts you, who protects you!  “who are you that you are afraid of man who dies, of the son of man who is made like grass, That you have forgotten the LORD your Maker, Who stretched out the heavens And laid the foundations of the earth.”

*Understanding our mortality frees us from the burden of trying to be something we are not.  It frees us from a false sense of importance, or that we have to be important.  One of the biggest burden of life can be the burden of trying to be “somebody”.  Understanding our frailty and mortality frees us from living under the false condemnation for being “ordinary” or human.  We are just people!  We are just ordinary people who serve an extraordinary God.  

Psalm 103 says the Lord has compassion on us; “he is mindful that we are but dust.”  It helps us to realize that too.  When we fall for the delusion that we are more than we are, we either become proud or excessively burdened with trying to live up to a false image of what we think we are supposed to be.  Either that or we put on a front to pretend to be more than we are. 

When this truth sinks into us that all the power and glory and strength belong to God and that we are weak and fragile and dying, it relieves us to be ourselves with one another. It allows us to live with one another without pretense. You can come to me, I can come to you, we are not trying to impress each other, not trying to be important.  We are just ordinary people, we are just dust, we are weak, we are fragile we are dying.  And there is something very freeing about that! 

We are not God! We are human.  We are like grass.  Our lives are like a shadow.  Our hope is not in ourselves, our plans, our power to overcome, our hope is in God.  As David said, “Considering all this…. “Now O Lord, for what do I hope?  All my hope is in you! ”