I’m part of a uh a little pastor’s WhatsApp group here in Strath Kona and it was active uh last evening, yesterday evening, because uh they were scrambling to get their messages together for the Sunday after Christmas and bemoning the fact that they were tired and worn out and uh and they had to do it. And one fella said, “I’m just trying to put together a mediocre sermon for tomorrow.” And I said, “Just preach and run. You know, the crowd will be small, but they’ll be forgiving.” So, if that’s you, that’s good. Yeah. I don’t know if you I don’t know if you um subscribe to Spotify music streaming service, but if you do, uh couple weeks ago, they gave every user their wrapped summary for 2025, and it just broke down all our listening habits for the year, number of minutes we spent listening to music, and most played songs and albums, and our favorite genre, uh total number of genres we listened to. The big reveal was um Spotify’s estimated listening age, how old we are depending on the music we listen to this past year. Very flattering for me because there was a young guy in the church, mid20s, he had a listening age of 74 and and mine was comparatively youthful, 26. So I’ I’ve been bragging about that for the last number of weeks. And I wonder what it’d be like if God were to give us a wrapped summary for the year, measuring some of our spiritual activities and our spiritual passion and tabulating the number of minutes we spent reading our Bibles or or praying or serving others or going to church or being involved in activities. If we were to get our wrapped spiritual summary for 2025, it might be a little embarrassing, might be a little convicting. We might want to keep the result to ourselves and not be too eager to share our spiritual habits with those of anyone else. In about 85 hours time, we’re going to kick into a new year. And this morning, I want to spend a few moments looking at probably what I think is the greatest prayer in scripture that we could pray going into a new year. Prepares us with perspective and hope. And it’s found in Psalm 90. We actually, it was part of that that little um reading, responsive reading we did a few minutes ago. It’s attributed Psalm 90 is very interesting psalm because it’s attributed to Moses which would make it maybe the oldest worship song in scripture. The heading the superscription says uh says it’s a prayer and it’s a prayer of Moses himself. If so, this is the most ancient of these song prayers that uh we would find in scripture because most of the psalms around the time of King David uh over 400 years later. The content of Psalm 90 is unique. Uh commentator Derek Kidner says that in the entire Bible only Isaiah chapter 40 can compare with this psalm for its presentation of God’s grandeur, God’s eternity against set against the frailty of man. So this psalm presents God’s grander, his eternity set against the brevity and the frailty of mankind. And if Moses indeed wrote it, he really had to wrestle with that subject of God’s grandeur and his frailty throughout the course of his life. You wonder which stage of life did Moses write this, you know, because he had three stages to his life. They all lasted approximately well 40 years. first 40 years of Moses’ life uh life of privilege growing up as a kind of stepgrandson to Pharaoh the ruler of Egypt and so he was a prince he had the life of a prince wealth and food and education and pampered care probably didn’t have a lot of concerns or things to worry about and in that environment growing up in Pharaoh’s court Steven in the New Testament in Acts 7 comments on how Moses was confident and secure he was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians He was powerful in speech and action. And why wouldn’t he be a confident, secure young man, used to getting what he wants? When he spoke, people listened, people acted. Why wouldn’t he be confident and powerful in speech and action? But that’s not where God wanted to use Moses. God was going to use him in a mighty way, but first there had to be uh a climbing down from that pedestal. He had to have a sense of spiritual reality and identity and responsibility. And he did develop that. Hebrews 11 describes it like this, saying, “By faith, Moses, when he’d grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward.” So God fueled a spiritual fire in this young man’s life. But the fire early burned out of control and wild. A few seconds of poor judgment, Moses killed an Egyptian guard. An act of great betrayal against his Egyptian upbringing. So he found himself fleeing as a fugitive on the run 300 kilometers into the desert land of Midian. And there he ended up getting married to the daughter of a Midionite priest. And for the next 40 years he uh looked after the flocks of his father-in-law. And it seems like he was just beaten down by ordinary life. Years went by, one season after another, birthing the lambs and docking their tails and grazing them through the summer and selling and slaughtering year after year. And as every month went by in that kind of small, narrow world of Moses, it seems that his once bulletproof self-confidence evaporated. In the desert, education and privilege of Egyptian royalty must have seemed like it was far in the past. And Moses, I think, slowly diminished from Steven’s description as powerful in speech and action to a man who spoke haltingly, low confidence, insecure, man who repeatedly said no to God’s call on him to be his leader and his spokesman. If you read uh in Exodus, after making many excuses, including not being eloquent, not being a able to string his words together, slow of speech and tongue, Moses just said to God, “Just go find someone else. I’m not up for the job.” Those second 40 years of Moses’ life seemed to humble him to a point where in Numbers 12, the Bible refers to Moses as a man more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. He just went down, down and down and down for those second 40 years. And then came just an amazing year in Moses’ life. One wild great year. He eventually responded to God’s call, commissioning of the burning bush. He went back to Egypt, a place that was really dangerous to return to. There were plagues and miracles and he led the people out of slavery and they had that miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. He received the law of God, the ten command commandments on a smoking mount si and he came down and his face was glowing and built the tabernacle and established the Jewish priesthood and he marched the people up to the very threshold of the promised land and all of that took place really in the short span of about 14 months. But then the people were afraid to enter the land. God judged that generation unfaithful, unworthy of entering their reluctance uh to take the land that the Lord was giving them. It all fell apart. And the final third, the last 40 years of Moses’ life, he had to lead the people on a long extended death march through another four decades in the desert, waiting for everyone 20 years and older to die. Now, for those 40 years, there would have had to been about 85 deaths every day to flush away that generation at seven funeral services per waking hour, endless egg, salad, sandwiches, naimo bars, all the stuff you have to make for receptions. And Moses himself then died on the very threshold of the promised land. So a full twothirds of Moses’ life was spent in the desert where things were pretty much the same day after day. He doesn’t seem then to be the most likely guy to give us a time or life management seminar. But he does something very like that in Psalm 90, which I think is actually a tremendous New Year’s prayer for us as we consider a new year. The psalm has two parts to it. uh the plight of man and then the last seven verses uh a new year’s prayer. So plight and prayer are what we’re looking at this morning. We’ll focus more a little more on the prayer time toward the end. If there’s anything we can’t miss from the first 11 verses of the psalm, it’s just that life is very short and very fragile. Begins with this. Lord, you’ve been our dwelling place throughout all generations. before the mountains were born or you were brought forth the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting. You are God. After the first 40 years of his life and certainly uh for the last 40 years of his life, Moses had no regular dwelling place. Whether he was hurting sheep or hurting people, neither Moses nor the people of Israel had a a land or a dwelling place to call their own. So Moses was a man largely without a country. He was a fugitive from Egypt. He died without entering the promised land. But he knew that ultimately man’s dwelling is not a place but a person. It’s God who is our dwelling place. In him we find our security and our peace and our safety. After that brief hym of praise to God, you catch the flow and the impact of Moses thoughts. In verses 3- 11, he says, “God, you turn men back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, oh sons of men. For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that’s just gone by or like a watch in the night. You sweep men away in the sleep of death. They’re like the new grass of the morning, though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it’s dry and withered.” How short it all is. This is a very prominent theme throughout the Bible. Job cries out in in chapter 9 verse 25, “My days are swifter than a runner. They skim past like boats of papyrus, like eagles swooping down on their prey.” James 4:14, “What is your life? You’re a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” When we lived in the interior of BC in a valley with very little wind, in the fall, usually uh in September, would wake up to a fairly thick morning fog, and that would burn off by about 10:00 a.m. and uh reveal a gorgeous warm, sunny fall day ahead. Moses tells us that our lives are very foglike. And then he tells us why people like us who are created by God to live forever, why all of us must certainly die. Verse 7, he says, “We’re consumed by your anger. We’re terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. We all have to die because of our sin. When our sin is matched up against the holiness and the wrath of God, it’s like a cold front meeting a warm front and something something some storm has to result. God’s not impassive about our gossip and our anger and our lies and our jealousies and our lusts. As a holy God, he must judge our sin. And that judgment is death. The wages of sin is death. Our death won’t be the result of a mishap or an accident or some circumstance. We might call it an accident, but Moses says that there are no accidents with God. Death will sweep us away at his discretion. And that’s the ultimate consequence for our sin. He sweeps men away in the sleep of death. Verse seven says we’re consumed by his anger. Verse eight says there’s nothing about our lives that God doesn’t see. Our secret sins are plain to him. They’re set in his presence and he turns us back to dust. Though now those verses would have had special meaning for Moses. He saw a lot of death. Imagine his last 40 years and all the people marching in the desert and every morning someone doesn’t wake up and the generation that came out of Egypt should have entered the promised land dying by slow degrees just a few kilometers south of it. As Christians, as people who have put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation, we understand that because Jesus took our sins on himself, our physical death is in no way the final word on our lives. We’re we’re all so bad that God had to Jesus had to die for us, but we’re so loved that he was glad to die for us. And as a result, although we face death, we don’t fear God’s wrath or his condemnation. As we put our faith and trust in Christ, we’re made spiritually alive. And and though we eventually have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we know that resurrection and life eternal awaits us. So our death is indeed a sign of God’s judgment on all humanity for our sin and our rebellion, but it’s really no more than an very unpleasant transition for Christians. We may understand that and trust that death is still a a hard and bitter thing for us to face. Moses writes, “All our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan. We don’t want to die. We don’t look forward to death. All of us want to hang on for as long as we can. We give up our lives with a moan. Kate Bowler is a historian of American religion at Duke Divinity School. And in 2015, when she was 35 and married and the mother of a young son, she was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer. Among many other things that that cancer stole from her, it stole from her any sense that she was in control. She wrote, “I have a terrible premonition that at the end of this, once every stone is upturned and every drug tried, my family will have nothing left. I feel like I feel like an anvil dropped, crushing everything on its way down. I know it like I know the weight of my son’s sleeping body in my arms. I will be the reason for the tall paper stacks of bills on the desk in the study, the second mortgage on my parents’ aging home, the slope of their backs as they walk a little more heavily. They will carry my death in their checkbooks, vacations deferred, sleepless nights, the silence of Sunday morning prayers where there’s no daughter left to pray for. I am the death of their daughter. I am the death of his wife. I am the end of his mother. I am the life interrupted. Amen. Now Moses writes very realistically, “The length of our days is 70 years or 80 if we have the strength. Yet their span is but trouble and sorrow. For they quickly pass and fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.” Now 75 years doesn’t sound like much. You’ll spend a full 25 of those years sleeping. Maybe another year or two if you sleep in church. You’ll uh that’ll catch up to you as well. spend about six months of that time just brushing your teeth. Moses is showing us the grim reality of life. Life is marked out by limitations and toil and suffering. This is the dark yet real side of man’s plight as described by Moses. God is eternal. He is man’s dwelling place. But our lives are limited and short and marked with sorrow, suffering, and labor. And if Moses stopped there, that would be a very dim picture going into another year. But Moses doesn’t leave us leave this psalm after verse 11 feeling bitter that life is unfair that it’s too short that God is cheating us. Moses doesn’t want us to land in pessimistic despair. Instead he just wants to bring us to a place of prayer. The kind of New Testament prayer that recognizes yeah life is short. Doesn’t try to anesthetize uh what life is with just a bunch of pleasures and distractions and entertainment. He wants us to get hit by the brevity of life like a cold slap on the face. And then he wants us to begin to pray together. And in verses 12-1 17, we see four basic things that uh we can pray about as we go into a new year and maybe pray uh regularly over the course of this next year. The first of one of them is a sense of accountability. First prayer request in verse 12. Teach us to number our days are right that we may gain a heart of wisdom. What are we asking God to do when we’re asking him to teach us to number our days are right? Asking God just to give us a sense of accountability when it comes to time and our use of time. We’re asking God to give us the wisdom to be able to take stock of what we’re doing, how we’re using the hours in our days. When when we’re young, we tend to focus on the future. 12y old always wants to be 16 and 16y old wants to be 18 and get a driver’s license and and an 80-year-old longs to be 25 again. The poet Christian Wyman says, “We’re driven ceaselessly onward in this life and are certain of our desires only until we realize them, at which point they seem to dissolve and shimmer further off like a heat mirage on a road down which we can’t stop racing.” You know, it seems that we’re reluctant to just focus our thoughts on today, on the next 8 or 12 hours that we have in this day. Moses says we should pray that since life has limits, since it’s so short, since we don’t have any real assurance that we’re going to be around tomorrow, we should dare not waste today. He’s just asking for a sense of accountability. Take stock on our lives before God. It’s a prayer for us. We don’t presume on the future. We don’t procrastinate things that need to get done now. During the during the five years I spent after university working for a bank um we followed a detailed elaborate set of checks and balances and reports and procedures. We had to do that. We were managing other people’s money and we were safeguarding those obscene bank profits. And so we were careful that those procedures were in place. And it was a good idea to stay current because at least once every two years without any warning, a SWAT team of bank inspectors would suddenly descend on the branch and and hang out there for the next four or five days. And their mission was to tear apart the books and ensure that all the eyes were dotted and tees were crossed. make sure every procedure was being followed throughout and then they’d rate the branch from a high grade of excellent to a low grade of poor and careers would hang in the balance. Now to us the staff a visit by the inspectors it was shock and awe and that threat of inspection was meant to c keep us on our toes. A sense of accountability maintained a sense of purpose and commitment and devotion to detail. That’s the kind of thing Moses says we should ask God for. a sense of accountability. Life’s short. I want to live a wisely before you, God. God, you have to give me that. I need to pray for that because on my own, I tend to be lazy. I tend to procrastinate. I tend to give myself to very trivial things. I just want to be entertained. I don’t really want to be challenged. So God, help me understand and regularly reflect on how short my life is. Then be my coach and train me to give every day a number and pay attention to how I use it. Give me a sense of accountability with my time. I don’t want to just waste it. I’d rather learn to invest it. And God, you need to teach us that so we can be accountable people this year. Second petition or request in this psalm, verses 13- 15 sounds a little bit counterintuitive because after asking God for a stronger sense of accountability, Moses next prays for a light heart and for optimism and for delight and for joy and for gladness. He says, “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.” What do we want to happen in our lives if we gain that strong sense of accountability for our time? What if God answers our prayer and gives us that overwhelming accountability? Will life then feel infinitely serious? Will we always feel burdened and carry that eternal responsibility like a weight? Uh we’ve all known people like that. Just people who are so perfectionistic and burdened by responsibility they never seem able to relax. If we pray for accountability for God to teach us to number our days, are we just going to be stoic and grimfaced all the time? Would a person who’s seriously aware of their short lives and time constraints ever be able to laugh and relax and just have fun? God’s answer is yes. or we wouldn’t be asked to pray these things for ourselves. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy. Be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us. In God, there’s never a contradiction between responsibility and joy, between accountability and delight. God wants us to enjoy him and he would tell us that we enjoy him most when we’re working with him and co-laboring with him for the sake of his word and his kingdom and for the sake of the lost. God is saying there can be a lot more fun in serving and working with him than in doing other things. And that can give us a very light and optimistic attitude. Author Bobby Jameson writes, “One of happiness’s many paradoxs is that you don’t get happy by aiming at happiness, but by leading a life worth living.” Psalm 90 reads to me very much like my favorite book in scripture, the book of Ecclesiastes, which also speaks to the brevity of life and the call for us to enjoy it. Anyway, at the end of Ecclesiast Ecclesiastes chapter 5, we read, “Then I realized that it’s good and proper for a man to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him. For this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work, oh, this is a gift of God.” He seldom reflects on the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart. God as our heavenly father, he wants us to enjoy working with him and being with him and praying and reading his word and serving people and visiting the sick and uh praying over people and teaching people and sharing the gospel with people. If those activities seem dull and burdensome to us, we do them only because we have this weight of responsibility, not because we enjoy them. We desperately need to pray this prayer of Moses. God wants kingdom accountability to be combined with kingdom gladness. We’re asking God to make himself as desirable in our lives as the other things that we love so much and we do so easily and naturally. Knowing that we’re doing the right things with our lives. It’s intended to bring us our greatest joy. Never wrong to pursue joy and gladness if we’re pursuing God and his kingdom at the same time. God would rather, I think, have a church that both works and laughs than one that’s grim and serious. And third, our New Year’s prayer invites us to ask God to reveal his works to us, to show us what he’s doing around us. God’s always busy. He’s always active. Verse 16, may your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. His prayer request is that God will manifest his presence and his works to his people. he’d show us some of the things that he’s about. Can be hard work just to persevere in things like praying for people and serving people and uh and hospitality and giving. It’s hard unless sometimes when we’re not even really expecting it. Suddenly, we hear God speaking really clearly to our hearts. We see him working. We pray and we see an amazing answer to prayer. uh people’s hearts and lives are being changed and wor our worship time suddenly gets elevated to a new level that we weren’t expecting. God shows his deeds to his servants, his splendor to their children. When that happens, it doesn’t happen all the time, but we should never stop asking for it. When those things happen, it puts a new spin on our day and our week and our year. It boosts our perseverance and our hope. It fuels our worship and our prayer, strengthens our faith. We can do church for a while without seeing much of God’s deeds or experiencing much of his splendor, but it’s not nearly as much fun. You know, kind of an odd term maybe to use, but it’s a term when God shows up, church goes from being mere responsibility to something really passionate. And again, it doesn’t have to happen every week. There’s great value and just raw plotting faithfulness. But Moses doesn’t want to live all of his life apart from the splendor of seeing God’s works. And think of things he was able to see. We we won’t see the things of Moses. He saw bushes burning and rivers turned to blood and seas opening up and mountains smoking and the glory of God passing right by him and mana coming down from heaven every morning. And says he would meet God face to face in the tabernacle. He saw a pillar of cloud in the day, a pillar of fire at night, and he could keep walking in that tedious desert. In fact, his prayer to God was, “God, I can’t lead these people unless you come with me. Unless you’re there, unless I can see you.” We have we have nothing to fear and everything to gain by just asking God to show us his deeds and reveal his splendor to us. So, the New Year’s prayer of Moses invites us, one, pray for a sense of accountability uh with our time. Two, ask God for joy and gladness. Three, ask God that we would see his works and his splendor displayed around us. And the fourth and final request in verse 17 is that the work we do put our hands to would have a lasting effect. There’d be lasting results from our efforts. That God would take our feeble, measly efforts for his kingdom and he’d turn them into something solid, something concrete, something that endures. May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us. Establish the works of our hands for us. God, establish the works of our hands. Something’s established. It’s firm and stable. There’s a degree of permanence. We talk about a lawn established. When it puts its roots down and then kids can play on it and and uh when a business is established, it’s not a a tenuous startup or a temporary popup. It has some firmness and some future associated with it. So when we pray, may the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us. Establish the work of our hands for us. Establish the work of our hands. What are we asking God to do? We’re saying we can work, but God has to make it has to make it solid and secure. Paul reflected uh on his planting of the church in the Greek city of Corenth in 1 Corinthians 3. He says, “Well, God used me to plant the seed and then he brought a guy named Apollos in to help water that seed.” But Paul says, “God, it’s only you that ever makes things grow.” Because we don’t want to spend our time this year just doing religious activities that go nowhere, that wear us out, that don’t seem to accomplish anything. So our prayer, Moses’ prayer, is that God will make things grow. He’ll establish the works of our hands. He’ll make it secure. He’ll make it have some lasting effect. He’ll let it change this city. He’d put it in stone. He’d give it eternal value. We’ll cultivate. We’ll faithfully uh cultivate the soil. We’ll plant. We’ll we’ll weed. But the real reward comes when God makes our efforts lasting, makes them permanent. Our father wants to lead us to greater effective effectiveness, success. He coaches us toward having fruitful lives. If we just keep showing up to practice with a desire to please our coach, more and more, he’ll establish the works of our hands. So, as a as a church this year, I’m certain God will call us to many things. We’ll have worship services, baptisms, celebrate the Lord’s supper. There’ll be opportunities to grow through small groups and opportunities to serve one another, to serve our community. Maybe we’ll look around and and see God doing things we haven’t even considered yet, and we’ll be able to join him in what he’s doing. But we should keep this New Year’s prayer before us, I think, throughout the year. It tells us that in light of the severe brevity of our lives, we need God to make us wise and accountable with our time. We want God to make us joyful and glad in our emotions. We want God to make us spiritually sensitive and to be aware of his presence and his activity. And finally, that we would be effective and eternal in what we lay our hands to. And I don’t know what we’ll face as a church this year. Births, deaths, victories, defeats. But I know that if we’re accountable and if we’re joyful, and if God reveals himself, his deeds, and his splendor, if God causes what we do to be eternally established, 2026 could be a really good year for us here at Knox Church. So, I just want us to take a few moments that you that you would pray these four petitions for yourself this year. just go through the list of Moses prayer requests. Pray them for yourself. Pray them for your family. Pray them for our church. And I’ll close us off in a few moments after.