Man’s Brief Journey

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Transcript:

I am tired. I am sore. And to be perfectly honest with you, I did not want to roll out of bed this morning.

But I had to. Not that I didn’t want to be here. And I thought, well, if I called Greg, it’s awfully late.

But I was excited about yesterday being one of the first really good weather Saturdays that we were having. And so, and y’all know, I like to work in my yard. And so I made a list of about seven days worth of stuff to do yesterday.

And I only got about three and a half days worth of stuff done. I needed to until my garden again for about the third or fourth time just to make sure all the grass is up and dead. Kids helped me build signs to show what we planted where.

I mixed concrete because I was going to do a new flower bed and wanted to build some stepping stones to go around it and hauled hundreds of pounds of concrete mix just to get it done, and I’m not used to doing that. I do most of my heavy lifting up here. Yeah, right.

And I thought afterwards, I got about 5 o’clock, and I told Charlie, I said, I’m going to run to Sonic. I need a drink. See, if I say I need a drink, that’s where I go.

Sonic, not the bar, so don’t worry. I said, I need a drink, and then I’ll come back and do some more of this. And I got back, I said, I don’t want to do any more of this.

I was hurting so bad. You see, I used to be able to do all of that stuff. Yeah, I know.

It seems like just yesterday, I was 21, and I could haul bags of concrete wherever I needed them. And then I blinked and here we are 10 years later and I’m dying. I told Charlie, once we get the kids to bed, I’m planting myself in that chair in the living room and I’m not moving until bedtime.

And sure enough, that’s just about what I did. I didn’t like that feeling of not being in my 20s anymore. And I know some of you are sitting there thinking, hold on, it only gets worse.

What is he complaining about? I’m complaining because this is the beginning of the end. All right.

It’s all downhill from there. I will never feel better than I do today. And I just happened to read last night where a family had posted online a letter.

It’s nobody I know. It was a news story from somewhere else in the country. Where a family had posted online the farewell letter that their mother or grandmother had written when she was dying of pancreatic cancer.

And one of the things she said in there was, you know, my story is this. I was born, I blinked, and it was over. And it really does feel that way sometimes.

Now, Lord willing, I’m not close to it being over. I don’t know that though. But Lord willing, I’ve got a few more years.

We don’t know that, but it does seem like time moves faster than we anticipated. When I was a kid, when we were kids, didn’t it feel like it just took forever? Everything took forever.

It took forever until summer got here. It took forever until the next big thing that we got to do. It took forever to be old enough to drive.

It took forever to be grown up. And then you get there and time speeds up and it starts zipping by. And we start to realize what the people in the generations ahead of us were talking about all that time.

About how quickly it goes. And David, King David, in the Bible was no stranger to this feeling of, I feel like I just got started and here I am toward the end of my life. Or in my case, hopefully not toward the end of my life, but further along than I thought I would.

Like I said, it felt like it was just yesterday I was 21. And I think where did the last 10 years go? King David was no stranger to this feeling that we all experience from time to time of where does the time go?

And we’re going to be looking this morning in Psalm chapter 39. And for starters, we’ll also look at a passage in Luke chapter 12 as well. But Psalm chapter 39, he writes about this in part.

As somebody who’s at the end of his, coming toward the end of his life, we think this is one of the Psalms where we don’t know for sure when he wrote it. I mean, it’s hard to line it up with the historical events in his life, but it sounds like something he would have written toward the end as he’s looking back. And as he’s looking forward, also thinking, okay, how much do I have left, and what can I do with it?

And the reason I bring this up to you this morning is as we’re going through some basic Christian teachings, and we’ve spent the last few weeks talking about the various members of the Trinity, and before that we talked about the inspiration of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, we turn our focus this morning to look at us. What does the Bible teach about us? And what the Bible teaches is that we are not the center of the universe.

Hate to break that to you. We are not at the center of the universe. We feel like it sometimes.

I feel like it sometimes. But we have to stop and remind ourselves there are other people. And there are other things going on.

And there are bigger plans that involve us. But we are not at the center of them. And when we get right down to it, we are a species.

We are a creature that likes to think we’re at the center of everything. but really we’re just here for a little while. And this is what David wrote about.

When we start in verse 4 of Psalm chapter 39, he says, Lord, make me to know mine end and the measure of my days. What it is that I may know how frail I am. He’s asking God to remind him.

Now this is somebody who, he’s a very powerful man. But even he’s coming to the realization that no matter how powerful I am, no matter how rich I am, no matter how strong, no matter how good looking, no matter how any of it, that I’m still just one of God’s creatures. And there is an expiration date on me.

He says, help me to, make me to know my end. Now I don’t know that he’s necessarily praying, God, show me how I’m going to die. Have you seen those Facebook quizzes?

You type in a few things that says, I’ll tell you how you’re going to die. See people post that. Why would you, first of all, they’re all made up, But why are you even, that doesn’t seem like anything I want to know.

I want to be just as surprised as everybody else. But I don’t think he’s asking God here, show me how I’m going to die. What I understand this to mean is he’s asking God to help him to live every day in light of the fact that this will come to an end.

And when we live life like it’s going to come to an end, we live differently. Our list of priorities changes, doesn’t it? Sort of like yesterday in my garden when I realized there’s only so much strength I have in me for today.

I got to about 1 o’clock and it started getting hot outside. And I realized I only had so much strength left in me for that day. My list of priorities, that 7 days worth of work I had planned, the list started getting a little shorter.

And then it started getting a lot shorter. Okay, what is it that I have to do today? And then I focused on that.

So he says, help me to know, make me to know mine end. and the measure of my days, what it is. He says, help me to measure how much time I have left here.

And again, this is not, I don’t believe this is David saying, tell me exactly how much longer I have. And for you and I to measure our days, we’re not going to sit there and say, oh, I have 12,364 days left. Or, oh, I have 638 days left.

Or I have 12 days left. Because we don’t know. We don’t know.

I mean, statistically, we can make guesses based on our age and health, but we still don’t know. I’m 31 years old and reasonably healthy, but I could go in a car wreck tomorrow. I don’t know.

You can be told by the doctor that you have a terminal disease and have six months to live, and you can still be kicking 12 years later. We can make guesses, but we don’t know. So it’s not asking here.

God never promises us tomorrow. So David’s not asking here, tell me exactly how many days I have left. He’s saying, teach me to number my days.

Teach me to realize that there’s a finite amount of time left here. Help me to count my days. Treat them like they’re precious.

Yesterday, some of the things that I worked with were, I worked with some gravel and some mulch and some strawberry plants. And we’re putting all of these together in pots and use the mulch and the gravel underneath the dirt to give extra drainage in these big pots. Well, I’ve got a whole bag of gravel.

I’m not concerned about it. I didn’t reach in there and count every little piece of gravel. I just stuck the jar down in there and scooped them out and threw them in the pot.

Same thing with the mulch. I just reached in the bag and threw it in the pot. Those strawberry plants, though, I knew I only had 10 of them.

I had them numbered. And I paid good money for them at Walmart. So they were precious to me.

I had them counted. And I was going to make sure. I didn’t just throw those strawberry plants out wherever.

I carefully separated the roots, separated the plants and unwound the roots from the crown and then stuck the roots down in there and covered it up to where the dirt is just right at the crown level. I was careful with them. Do you see what I’m talking about here?

I had those strawberry plants numbered unlike the gravel. When we think life just goes on forever, we treat every day like it’s nothing. But when we start to number our days, when we look at things from God’s perspective and realize that we are just here for a little while and each of those days becomes something precious that we are determined to do something with.

The measure of my days, what it is that I may know how frail I am. And we realize this more and more the longer we go on. The longer we go on in life.

You know, you’re in your 20s and you think nobody can touch you. You’re 10 feet tall and bulletproof and then you grow up and realize that’s not true. We realize how frail we are.

We like to think of ourselves as the creature that built the Great Wall of China, as the creature that built the Panama Canal, as the creature that built rockets that went to the moon. There’s a lot of strength and a lot of wisdom in humanity collectively, but think about this. We can be brought down by organisms we can’t even see.

Tiny little things. A tiny little bug, smaller than the head of a pen, can kill us. we’re really a lot more frail than we realize or than we like to admit so that I can see how frail I am he says verse 5 behold thou hast made my days as a hand breath and mine age is as nothing before thee verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity he said my days are like a hand breath some translations say a span a span was a relatively it was about this wide from thumb to pinky finger I think and it was a relatively short unit measurement when you’re talking about building something.

I mean, you’ve got cubits and fathoms, but he says, what I have here in your perspective is just this much. That’s not a very wide measurement. How much house can you build on a plot of land this wide?

Not much. You can’t do much with this. And he’s saying from God’s perspective, we’re just little blips on the radar.

Am I making you feel insignificant yet? That’s not the point. That’s not the point of this.

So if you leave here and you think, well, I feel like I’m totally unimportant, then we need to come back and redo this because I missed something. That’s not the point. He’s saying from God’s perspective, this is all we are.

And that our age, you know, we look at somebody who lives many years. My grandfather lived to 92 years old. There’s a guy I read about in a letter just recently.

The chief of my tribe sent out a letter talking about somebody he’d met who was 105 years old. And we look at that, we think of somebody in their 90s, we think of somebody 105, and we think, wow, they’ve lived a long time. But look at it from God’s perspective.

God has seen 6,000 plus years of human history. And not only that, God was there before there was time. There’s never been a time or a non-time when God did not exist. And you think about that hundred years.

How big is it really on the scale of human history? I mean, that guy’s been around long enough to see some things. He would have been born around 1912, somewhere in there.

That’s when the Titanic sank. That’s two years before World War I broke out. That’s five years before we got into World War I.

He’s seen some things, but he wasn’t here when George Washington was here. He wasn’t here to see the Vikings. He wasn’t here when Jesus walked the earth.

You start looking at the whole of human history, and a hundred years is nothing. And then you take another step back and you look at things from God’s perspective where he exists outside of time. And all of human history is just like that.

And so we’re just tiny little blips on the radar from God’s perspective. He says in verse 6, Surely every man walketh in a vain show. And I like how one translation I looked at this week talked about that at our best every man is like a shadow.

Can you grab hold of a shadow? No. Have you ever tried to chase a shadow?

No. You are smarter than that. Have you ever watched a dog try to chase its shadow?

Yeah. They never can catch it, can they? That shadow is fleeting.

It’s here and it’s gone. And so he’s saying at our best, our life is like a shadow. And it doesn’t matter the strongest among us, the most powerful, the most impressive person, it’s just like a shadow.

It’s just here today and gone tomorrow. Just fleeting. He heapeth up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them.

Now, as I said, well, first of all, he’s talking here about the foolishness of somebody who would spend their whole life focused on the things that are within that shadow and spent this fleeting life concerned with things that are also fleeting. But as I said a few minutes ago, the purpose of this is not to make you feel unimportant. Well, I’m just nobody.

I can be taken down by a bacteria, and I’m just a blip on God’s radar. That’s not the point. The point of this is that life on earth is short.

Life on earth is not all there is. And David learned the sobering reality of human existence, of this earthly existence, that first of all, life is finite. There is an end to it.

There is an end to life on earth. There’s a part of us that lives forever. There’s part of us that God created to live forever.

But folks, this life on earth will come to an end for each of us. Now whether God comes for you individually or whether you go when he takes all of us, someday God is going to call you home. Or God is going to call you to your future reward wherever it may be.

There is a point at which life comes to an end. And it doesn’t matter how strong we are, how important, how powerful, how good looking, any of these things. They won’t change the fact that there is an expiration date on this life.

That’s why I said, help me to know my end and the measure of my days, what it is. Life is finite. And David, even as king of Israel, had to confront this reality.

Second of all, we’ve already talked about it. Life is fragile. Life is fragile.

Life is very resilient in a collective sense. You know, we as humanity have been able to overcome a lot. But individually, our lives are fragile.

It just takes one illness. It just takes one bullet. It just takes one distracted driver.

It takes just, all it takes really is one thing to go wrong. And life is over. Life on earth is over.

It’s fragile. And life is fleeting. Things can be finite without going quickly.

I have said in meetings before that I knew would go on for a finite amount of time. Eventually they would come to an end. But they sure were not fleeting.

You ever been in those situations? goes on forever. Life is fleeting.

Life is over quickly. That’s why David said his existence was as nothing before God. Every man in his best state was altogether vanity.

It goes fast. And like I’ve said, I know a hundred years sounds like a lot, but not when it’s your hundred years and it’s coming to an end. You look back and say, wow, it went so quickly. David confronted this reality.

It’s a reality that we all have to confront. But as quick as it goes, as short as it is, life on earth still has meaning. It’s not insignificant.

It’s not unimportant. Life on earth has meaning because of the life that comes afterward. As I said, there is a part of us that lives forever, and what we do here on earth is sort of the dress rehearsal for what comes next, or practice.

I’ve been told by my wife about using theater terms. Like when I said my son was getting on his soccer costume and going to rehearsal. It’s a uniform and it’s practice. Okay, so I don’t care what metaphor you want to use. You want to go with sports and say that this life is practice for the big game.

If you want to use the theater metaphor and say that this life is the dress rehearsal for the big show, the point is the same. The point is the same. What we do here on earth has meaning because it’s preparation for the life that comes afterwards.

And that’s why David didn’t sit and just wallow in this harsh reality of life being fleeting. He goes on and talks about and remarks on those who would waste their lives by focusing the time we have here and now on things that only matter here and now. But instead he points out those who in verse 6 heap up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them.

And we see that all the time. Not just with rich people but people all around us and maybe we’re some of them. We’re focused on what can I get?

What can I gather? What can I prepare? What can I stockpile?

I’ve got to make sure I have enough. I’ve got to make sure I have more and it doesn’t matter if it’s money food, whatever. Make sure I have enough, make sure I have more, more, more, more, more, and we’re focused on things that we can gather for this life, and then we die, and we no longer care what happens to them.

We spend our whole lives on that, and yet we no longer care what happens to that. It’s just divided up among other people. One of my jobs I had as I was preparing to go into ministry, but before I’d been called by a church, was I worked at the Oklahoma County Court Clerk’s office.

And I worked, I was primarily dealing with adoptions and guardianships, but I also worked probate some. And there were people that the lawyers would come in and file the wills. There were some well-known people that have my signature on their will, aren’t they lucky?

Because I was there when it was filed in, and sometimes there wouldn’t be anything to do. And I’d read through some of these papers that were filed in, And I’d think, oh my goodness, you had all that. You spent all your life amassing all of this, and it’s just going to be divided up by a bunch of other people that maybe you liked and maybe you didn’t.

And this is your legacy, a bunch of stuff that’s just going to be fought over by other people. And I’m not against having money. I’m not saying it’s evil to have stuff.

But I’m saying it’s a waste of life to spend your whole life in pursuit of things that only matter here. And that’s what David was pointing out. And later on, Jesus told a very similar story in Luke chapter 12.

If you want to turn there with me real quick. Luke chapter 12, starting in verse 15, He said to them, Take heed and beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth. Jesus says there’s more to this life than the material things that we gather up, that we can see and touch and smell and hear and taste.

There’s more than stuff to this life. And so in verse 16, he spake a parable unto them, saying, the ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

This guy’s farm, this guy’s land, produced a lot of crops, produced a lot of stuff. And he had a really good problem to have. He said, I don’t have enough places to store my stuff.

Sounds like us in America. I don’t have enough room to store the junk I will never use again. And so there’s a whole multi-million dollar industry where we can get storage.

And he said, I have no room to put all this stuff. What a wonderful problem to have. And he said, verse 18, this will I do.

I will pull down my barns and build greater. This always struck me as stupid. I’m going to tear down the barns I’ve got and build bigger ones.

Why not just keep what you’ve already got? The cheapest barn is the one you already own and build another one to go alongside it instead of ruining what you already have. But anyway, he’s not interested in my opinion.

He said, this will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there will I bestow all of my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.

Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. That’s where that phrase comes from, by the way. So if you hear people say, eat, drink, and be merry, that’s where the phrase comes from, and it didn’t work out real well for the guy who said it.

He says here, I’m going to tear down what I’ve got. I’m going to be wasteful with this. I’m going to put up more places to store more things that’s more than I could ever possibly need.

I’m going to have so much that I don’t have to do anything, and I’m just going to spend my days laying around eating and drinking and having a wonderful time. So he’s basically laid out this plan where he’s going to waste what time he has left after he’s done wasting some of the stuff that God has blessed him with. Verse 20 says, But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee.

Now this doesn’t mean that God was, I don’t take this to mean that God was punishing the guy for being lazy, or that God was punishing the guy for having too much. But there is a time that God has appointed to us when our days have run out. And so this man is making his plans for the future and plans of ease and gathering more and more stuff.

And God’s saying, no, that’s not going to happen. That’s not what’s on the calendar for you today. You have a previous appointment.

He said, your soul will be required of thee. Then who shall these things be which thou hast provided? In other words, your life is coming to an end tonight.

You may make all these plans, but your life is over tonight. And when you look back, you’ve spent your entire life pursuing stuff. And this is not a message about don’t work harder and don’t provide the rich or evil.

That’s not what this is about. It’s about the focus of our lives. And he’d spend his entire life focused on, I just want more and more stuff, and then I want to spend my time the way I want to spend it.

And he had wasted all of the time that God had given him. When things are good, we feel like things are going to go on that way forever. I remember growing up in the 90s, and I actually watched the news as a kid.

Growing up in the 90s and the stock market bubble and the housing bubble were starting to get bigger. And there was prosperity and there was money everywhere. The economy was doing great and people thought the stock market is going to go up and up and up forever.

And people thought housing prices are going to go up and up and up forever. We’re going to have this prosperity forever and ever and ever. And then 2001 hit.

And then things gradually improved and people thought, well, the stock market’s going to keep going up. And then 2008 hit. When things are good, we think things are going to be great forever.

And it just takes one moment for everything to change. So we can spend our lives gathering stuff and focused on things of this world. And think it’s gone so well, so far, everything’s just always going to be wonderful.

And we don’t realize there’s an expiration date on it. And Jesus said after telling this story in verse 21, and so is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. In other words, he says, it’s foolish to waste this short life that we have on stuff that only matters in this short life when there’s a whole other life after this one that this is just the practice for.

This is just the staging area to get ready. And so with that truth in mind that God has created us and that God has created us to live in this world a short time but he’s created a part of us to live on forever. We’re faced with a choice.

You are faced with a choice this morning, whether you want to make it or not. And to not make a choice is to make a choice. You’re faced with a choice to waste this life or to make it count.

We only get one shot at it. I hate, I hate, I hate. I don’t know if people still say it, but a few years ago, everybody was saying, YOLO, I hate it.

You only live once. Well, they were saying it in the city. I don’t know about here.

The kids were saying YOLO all the time. you only live once. That’s not true.

You only live twice. You live twice, but you only get one shot at this life to make this count. We only have one shot to make this count.

We can waste this life or we can make it count. Now, what makes it count? Jesus says that the problem with this guy in Luke 12, 21 was that he was not rich toward God.

He was not rich toward God. He was rich in stuff, But he wasn’t rich toward God. So realizing this truth that life is fleeting, that it’s going to be gone in the blink of an eye, we have to face the reality of our eternal destination.

We have to face the reality that eventually there is going to come a day where we stand before God in judgment and that we are going to be sent to one place or another depending on what we’ve done in this life. Meaning whether or not we have accepted His grace and mercy. See, sometimes people think, and a lot of times people think actually, that if I just do enough good stuff that God will let me into heaven.

That is a lie. Let me say this as emphatically as I know how. That is a lie from Satan.

You will not find that in the Bible. The Bible does not teach that if you do good things, and if you do more good than bad, and if you just try hard enough that God will let you into heaven, that is a lie. What the Bible teaches is that we have all sinned against God, we all have this mark on our record this mark of sin and God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection we can’t get anywhere near it no matter how much good we do we can’t get anywhere near this standard of perfection and don’t tell me that sounds harsh to say because we all know it about ourselves are you perfect?

I’m not perfect and that’s even by human standards now think about God’s and so by God’s standards we’ve sinned, we’ve broken the law rebelled against him. We’ve disobeyed him. We’ve just pushed him at arm’s length as far as we could.

And so we’re destined for eternity in hell. And one day there will be a day when this life is over and we stand before God in judgment to receive what we deserve. And yet God was loving enough, even though we didn’t deserve it, God was loving enough to look at us and say, there’s another way.

There’s another way. He sent Jesus, God the Son, to put on human flesh and become one of us and to live a perfect life and to go to the cross, take responsibility for my sins and yours, be nailed to that cross and shed his blood and die to pay for my sins and pay for yours. And now God offers us salvation.

God offers us forgiveness of those sins. God offers us a relationship with him and God offers us eternal life with him in heaven as a free gift because of Jesus did. People say, I don’t want to think about that.

I don’t want to think about heaven or hell. I’ll think about that when I’m on my deathbed. You don’t know when you’re going to get there.

That could be today. I don’t say that to scare anybody. That’s just reality.

It could be today. It could be 60 years from now. It could be today.

And so knowing how quickly life goes, we’ve got to realize that God makes this offer of salvation, and the Bible says that today is the day of salvation. How will we escape if we neglect such great salvation? The book of Hebrews says.

we won’t there’s a choice to be made here today to realize our frailty you know our how quickly this life is over and that today is the day to look at our eternal destination and say have I put my trust and my faith in the fact that jesus christ died for me have I asked god for forgiveness of sins because of what jesus did for me have I thrown myself on his mercy am I just going to keep going on doing what I want to do and hoping that that day never comes. So we know that day does come. And so this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, you need to take this opportunity to consider your eternal destination.

You need to take today and this thought that life ends at some point as an opportunity to ask yourself, where will I spend eternity? We can spend eternity in the presence of God and in His heaven than only because Jesus Christ paid for our sins. And only if we’ll believe in Him and believe in what He did on the cross and ask God’s forgiveness.

Now, if you’re a believer, if you’re somebody who’s trusted Christ for your salvation already, you’re not left out of the equation here. We still have the reality to face that life is failure. We still have the reality to face that life will come to an end and it could come to an end today.

And so for us, it’s a matter of numbering our days and asking God like David did to help us to know the number of our days, to make them count. We’re faced with a choice to either waste the time that God has given us or to change our priorities to accomplish what we need to accomplish in what little time we have left. I say little time.

Again, it could be 60 years from now. It could be today. We don’t know.

But either way, it’s going to go so fast. It’s a little amount of time. And this morning, if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, You’re somebody who has trusted Him for your salvation because of what He did on the cross. And you’ve already asked God’s forgiveness.

Then the choice for you today is whether or not you take a look at your priorities. Whether or not we say, am I doing things my way? Am I concerned with my barns and stuff to put in them?

Or am I going to ask God what His plan is? Am I going to be rich toward stuff or am I going to be rich toward God? Am I going to be rich in the things of this world or rich in the things to come?

What am I going to focus on? It’s a matter of priorities. and a mat