Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Hello everyone.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is Pastor Benjamin.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.
Evan Pederson: Gracious Redeemer, as we hear your word, open our eyes to your glorious kingdom and bring us life through your Holy Spirit by the power that raised Christ from the dead.
Evan Pederson: Amen.
Evan Pederson: Today's scripture reading is Psalm 90.
Evan Pederson: Please remain standing if you are able.
Evan Pederson: From everlasting to everlasting you are God.
Evan Pederson: So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Evan Pederson: Return, O Lord, how long?
Evan Pederson: Have pity on your servants.
Evan Pederson: Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Evan Pederson: Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Evan Pederson: Let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children.
Evan Pederson: Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us.
Evan Pederson: Yes, establish the work of our hands.
Evan Pederson: This is God's word.
Evan Pederson: You may be seated.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, as Eric said, we begin a new sermon series today called Summer in the Psalms, and the subtitle is Subversive Spirituality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, this is our ninth annual Summer in the Psalms series, and we spend a time, June, maybe June and July, slowing down, taking up the book of Psalms every single year for almost a decade now.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why the Psalms?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, the Psalms have this ability to offer us what we're calling a subversive spirituality, where they we we end up finding ourselves in the Psalms with an ancient antidote to our modern maladies.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Okay, what do I mean by that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, we have modern maladies like time anxiety or busyness or hurry or distraction or isolation or inner turmoil, all these things that we as moderns carry around with us, maybe even exceptional to all humans in all times and places.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Some of those things are more intensified now than ever before in human history.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And the word subversive, because you've got to define your terms, as Eric knows, the word subversive is a rebellious term.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It means to undermine or overturn an established way of things.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And listen, the good news of Jesus Christ comes into a culture and it transforms everything, including especially culture.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And one of the ways that it does that is it comes to any culture on planet Earth and it both affirms and challenges.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It looks at that culture, and there's things about every culture that needs to be aligned and accorded with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and things that need to be overturned and upended by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so, what I want to talk to you about today, the first of these modern maladies, is our culture's view of time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our culture's view of time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: When I was a history undergrad at the University of Central Florida, go Knights, I took a class, thank you, I took a class called The History of the Future, which studied how different eras in the past anticipated and predicted what the future was going to be like.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And it won't be a surprise to any of you that almost every era has predicted that technology would cure our need for work.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, 1930, John Maynard Keynes estimated that his grandkids would work just 15 hours per week because machines would take care of most of the tasks.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Are we still doing this today?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: AI, optimists, robotics, all the things, right?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This isn't unique to our generation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: 1930 they were predicting this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Yet surveys reliably show that we are more pressed for time now than ever before.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And then doing what academics do, there was another team of Dutch social scientists who came back and said, Yeah, but those surveys are probably understated about the scale of the business epidemic because most people feel too busy to participate in surveys.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We're busy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Time is pressed, it's crunched.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I collected a bunch of social scientists speaking about this phenomenon, and this is the way they described it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our cultural moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They described it like this: it is the collapse of space and time, time-space compression, future shock, hurry sickness, the annihilation of time, the emancipation of time from space, and here's my personal favorite the juggernaut rushing out of control.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is a way that experts are defining and describing our cultural moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And all of this has created what's been called time pressure.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Time pressure is this pressure to fit an ever-increasing quantity of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If anybody else in here feels that, then I've got a sermon for you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I want to turn to the maybe the greatest meditation on time ever written, Psalm 90, and I'm going to look at how Psalm 90 can give us an ancient antidote to this modern malady.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so if you have a Bible or a device or the worship guide, go ahead and get Psalm 90 out in front of you and let's look at this text together.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I've got one question and three subpoints.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The question is, how do we live on time?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How do we live on time?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And my points are God is eternal, we are mortal, and grace is practical.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's look at how God is eternal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look with me at Psalm 90, verse 1.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says this Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I just got back yesterday from a week in Denver, Colorado for school, and there's something captivating about the mountains, especially when the highest point in Florida is 345 feet.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's called Britain Hill, sorry, Mount Dora.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And you go to the mountains and something happens to you when you're there.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: William Defoe in a documentary on mountains says it like this Mountains live deep in a deep time, in a way that we do not.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Behind and beyond the mountains stretch aeons too vast for us to comprehend.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They were here long before we ever dreamed, we were even dreamed of.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And they watched us arrive and they will watch us leave.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Mountains weather our spirits, challenge our arrogance, and restore our wonder.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you've been to the mountains, you know what he's talking about.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Yet Moses tells us that there is one who gave birth to these mountains.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, the metaphors in the Psalms are part of their subversive spirituality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Psalms want to baptize your imagination, not like a Presbyterian baptism, but like a Baptist baptism, all the way in, all the way out, submerging your imagination in metaphors so that when you see a mountain, you never see it the same way twice.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now you see a mountain, and rather than a great protrusion from the earth up into the heavens, you see something that tells you about the sturdiness and stability and permanence of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what Moses is after.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why in verse 2 he says this from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Not you were God, but you are God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Augustine of Hippo, commenting on this, says it like this: There is no was or will be in God, but only is.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is why God said, I am who I am.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: C.S.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Lewis has this great illustration where if you were just to take a piece of paper and write a small line on that piece of paper, and then imagine that paper extended into infinity in all directions.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That small, maybe half-inch long line is the entirety of time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And the extending of the paper into infinity is the God who is from everlasting to everlasting.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He says, we come to parts of the line, we do, one by one, and we have to leave A behind before we can get to B and cannot stretch reach until C until we've left B behind.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: God from above or outside or all around contains the whole line and sees it all.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is why Moses says in verse 4, For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, God is eternal, but we are mortal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We are mortal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look with me at verse three.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, Moses is a master poet, and what he's about to do is he's about to layer images of transience, one on top of another.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's like he's saying, How else can I make you feel your human frailty, your mortality, your finitude?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he gives us six images, one after another.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Here we go, look at verse three.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The first image is dust.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says, You return man to dust.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Whenever I think about this verse, I think about my grandfather died in 2023.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And my dad had sent me some Google photos.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I was flipping through these Google photos, and I saved one of my grandmother and my grandfather on their wedding day.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And it just so happened that the very next photo in my phone was a screenshot of me FaceTiming my grandfather the day that he died.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I was flipping through my pictures, and I see this picture of them as young and lively, vibrant, a whole lifetime ahead of them, and I, with a swipe, pass over a lifetime to the day of my grandfather's death.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I broke.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In that moment I wept.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, because my grandfather, and many of us know this, if you look on a headstone, a gravestone, you'll see their birthday, dash, death day.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The entirety of a human life summarized in a dash.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the that's the finitude of humanity.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And Moses gives us this image of dust.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, after the funeral, we went to the graveside.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I got to uh conduct the funeral and the graveside homily and whatnot, and then we did this thing that you've seen before or done before.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We took up uh a handful of dirt from the ground and we stood around the six-foot deep hole and we tossed dust on the casket, and we all said, Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In that moment, we're quoting Moses from Genesis chapter three.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That this is humanity's plight.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We are dust with the breath of God in our lungs, made to be living creatures, but we will expire and return to our dust again.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Moses wants you to know your life is short, you are mortal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He goes on from dust.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The second one he gives us is yesterday.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 4, it says, For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Scientists talk about this idea of lived time, which is basically our subjective experience of time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And what happens is with lived time is that it feels like an accordion.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You know this, right?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Time can expand and elongate, like if you're waiting in line at the DMV.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And it can shrink and compress, like if you're spending quality time with beloved friends you haven't seen in a while.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Think about the time compression that God experiences when 1,000 years can be collapsed as if it was just yesterday.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: God's eternity, our mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He goes on in verse 3, uh, I'm sorry, verse 4, he gives us another one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He says, or as a watch in the night.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You ever wake up in the middle of the night and you look at the watch and it's like midnight, and then you fall back asleep, and it feels like only a 30 seconds have passed, you wake up again and it's like time for your alarm to go off.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You know that experience.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what Moses is talking about.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That sense of a watch in the night.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Human history, the entirety of it, is just like a few nighttime hours.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Goes on, and the fourth image he gives is like a flood.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verse 5, it says, You sweep them away as with a flood.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One of the things my family does at the beach is we make sandcastles.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I'm sure you do too.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You will this summer.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And you make a sandcastle and you spend all this time building it, maybe intricate designs and tunnels and all of these things until the tide comes in and sweeps it away.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Your life is tidal, it will be swept away.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The way we experience our life is that it's gradual and then all of a sudden you're dead.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's how a tide comes in, that's how a flood sweeps life away.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He goes on, he gives us another one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Number five is a dream in verse five.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They are like a dream.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is about the how human existence feels so insubstantial.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The prophet Joel in Joel 2 says that there will be a day when old men dream dreams again.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I think what he's getting at is that if you show me a uh someone who's older, you'll show me somebody who will probably tell you, life goes by fast.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Take in the moments.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Right?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why is that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because they know that the human life is short, that our days are long, but our years are short, and they pass by so quickly.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The sixth and final image he shows us right here is grass, verses five and six, like grass that is renewed in the morning.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In the morning it flourishes and is renewed.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In the evening it fades and withers.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a beauty to flowers.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They grow up, they flourish in the morning, but then they wither.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Proverbs 31 says that beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our cultural obsession with youthful beauty is not merely some cosmetic management, it's a total disoriented, disordered approach to mortality management.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You are dying, your beauty is fading.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So, why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why is this the collective human experience?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 7.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: For we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath we are dismayed.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Okay, so notice this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We see it now.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Mortality is not merely biological, it is theological.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is significant.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He goes on in verse 8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It was Adam and Eve's rebellion in Genesis 3 that brought death into the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: By nature and by choice, all of us have turned away from God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And if you turn away from the source of life, the consequence is death.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verse 9 For all our days pass away under your wrath.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We bring our years to an end like a sigh.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What is this existential sigh?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What's going on here?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, humans were made to be immortal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Ecclesiastes 3 says, God has put eternity into man's heart.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We have a sigh, an ache to transcend our finitude, to live beyond death.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's inherent to who we are.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But we have all turned away from God, and therefore we are mortal creatures whose days are numbered.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why in verse 10 it says the years of our life are 70, or even by reason of strength, 80.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, according to a report from the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in the United States is 79 years old.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Most people in wealthy nations are hovering around the 80-year mark.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I just wish that the Bible knew something about something.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or wait, actually, all of our advancements in extending lifespan have not surpassed what Moses penned almost 3,500 years ago.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Like this year we're celebrating.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Next month, the USA turns 250 years old.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's cute.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Multiply that by 14, that's when Big Moe has taken up the pen to write Psalm 90.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I love the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It is cute compared to 3,500 years.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And these words are still living, they're still speaking.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's an ancient antidote to our modern malady here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why do I tell you all this?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, because the scriptures also say that grass withers and flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Moses says, even by reason of strength you might live to be 80 years old.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In the face of our human resolve, Moses reminds us that humans dissolve.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is the human condition.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 10.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says, Yet their span is but toil and trouble.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They are soon gone and we fly away.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, even if we do extend our life, we have this longer life, we fill it with toil and trouble.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We think that we can just get it all done if we get the right life hacks so that we can unlock more productivity, right?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Oliver Berkman wrote a great book called 4,000 Weeks.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The subtitle is Time Management for Mortals.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, Oliver Berkman's not a theist as far as I know, but he's profoundly insightful because he misses that God is eternal, but he gets that we are mortal, probably better than many of us in this room.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he says it like this: productivity is a trap.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Anyone know that experience?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved, quote, work-life balance.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Whatever that might be, and you certainly won't get there by copying the six things successful people do before 7 a.m.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control, when the flood of emails has been contained, when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer, when you're meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life, when nobody's angry with you for a missed deadline or dropping the ball, and when the fully optimized person you've become can turn at long last to the things life is really supposed to be about.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's start by admitting defeat.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: None of that is ever going to happen.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Welcome to church.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Happy to see you this Sunday.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, there's something oddly refreshing about this because Moses and Berkman, they call us to consider our mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I get that word from verse 11.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Everyone must consider their mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Besides Christianity, this is my opinion, aside from Christianity, I think the greatest solution to mortality outside of the Bible is probably found in Buddhism.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Buddhism gets this, it gets the mortal piece here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The cornerstone of Buddhist teachings is that the idea that everything is impermanent.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This idea of impermanence or mitakpa is central to the experience of the spirituality of Buddhism.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And it basically means that nothing lasts, therefore nothing should be held on to.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because the more we try to hold on to things, the things that are fleeting, that are just fading through our fingers, the more we try to hold on to them, the more suffering ensues.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, Moses agrees with most of this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But there is one that is permanent, unchanging, and beautiful.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There is one in whom we can take up residence to endure our impermanence.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Some of the Buddha's final words were, all things pass away, strive without ceasing.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus' last words were, it is finished.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What makes the difference?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, the third and final point I have for you is that grace is practical.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I get this word grace from verse 17, where it says, Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That could be favor, grace, beauty, delight, any of those ways you could translate that word.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And unlike Buddhism, where life is impermanent and in an impersonal universe, Moses ends this psalm by addressing a very personal God who is eternal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verses 1 through 11, there were no requests, just squarely facing the reality of our mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And in light of all that, verses 12 through 17 is this like rapid-fire cascade of requests from Moses to God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's almost as if the contemplation of God's eternality and our mortality brings us to a place of dependence.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's see what he asks for.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 12.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who is executed at the age of 39 years old in a Nazi concentration camp.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One of the reasons why is because he wrote a book on the Psalms.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you didn't know, Nazis didn't like Jewish books like the Psalms.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so they killed him for it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he wrote on this Psalm and he said this applying our hearts to wisdom means knowing the limit of our life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But even more, knowing that beyond that limit is the God who is from everlasting to everlasting, into whose hands we will fall, whether we choose to or not.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, there's a heart of wisdom here, and it's not just information management, it is it's wisdom, it's it's skill of living life before God, as if God really does exist, as if you really will die someday.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's where this heart of wisdom comes from.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Modernity prizes information, but the Bible teaches us to get wisdom.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How do we get wisdom?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He just says right here, by numbering our days.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because as we number our days, we find an antidote to the serpent's ancient conspiracy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You will not surely die.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Instead, we squarely look death in its ugly face.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It is an enemy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The last enemy, though, the one that's already been defeated, and we say we look at death and we say, God, give us a heart of wisdom as we stare at our own mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Oliver Berkman again says, in practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won't have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, I said that grace is practical.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me be super practical.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You will see one of these all of life guides in the foyer after worship.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You're welcome to go grab one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The point of this is to take time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Some of you are like, I don't do it, I don't have time for it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Exactly.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Here you go, it's a gift.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To take the time to slow down and get perspective on where your life is, to number your days, to notice that this very precious thing that you have called time is so limited, and I want to give the best of it to the best things.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what the all of life God is meant to help you do for all of life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so the invitation is to take up the practicality of grace by slowing down, taking 30, 60, 90 minutes, slowing down to get perspective before you plan what the next season looks like.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Moses goes on in verse 13.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Here's another one of his requests.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Return, O Lord, how long?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Have pity on your servants.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you remember, God says in verse 3, return, O children of man, to dust.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And now in verse 13, return, O Lord, and have pity.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, we are returned to dust until God returns to us in mercy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We know that God is outside of time, and so we look at God and we say, Hey, don't forget, we're not outside of time.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How long, O Lord?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's too much, too long.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Give us a sense that you're coming, that you care about us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You haven't forgotten us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And in the meantime, verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Do you remember Moses had six metaphors earlier on about our mortality, about these images of fleeting, the fleeting nature of life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He talked about dust and yesterday and night and flood and sleep and grass.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, if you're a know the scriptures, you know that if you got six, you should look for a seventh.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And here's the seventh.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The seventh image reverses the previous six morning.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Morning.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Newness, freshness, light from dark, day from night.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Morning is the time for flourishing and renewal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The answer to fleeting, the fleeting mortality of life is not transhumanism's immortality projects or Brian Johnson's Never Die biohacking protocol or the cottage industry of life optimization hacks.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's none of those things.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The answer to fleeting life is the joy that comes from steadfast love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The joy that comes from a love that is surpassing death in its power.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at 15, it says, make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Grace is practical in simple trust that God has purposeful oversight in all that happens.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's really important.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I mean, only if God is sovereign over our afflictions can God be sovereign over our gladness.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you want a God who can, quote, make us glad, we need a God who can afflict us too.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If God can prevent or permit our afflictions, then God, if he cannot do that, then how can he possibly give us gladness?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How can he be bring redemption?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But the hope that we have here is that God is sovereign, he is in control, he is purposeful in his providence, which is why he can establish us beyond death.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 16.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let the favor or grace or pleasantness or beauty or delight, let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Yes, establish the work of our hands.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why end here, Moses?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because the only legacy that endures past your death, the only two things, your children and your work.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see them both in the text here?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or as Genesis 1, 2, and 3 would say, your work and your in the womb.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion, work and keep.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: These twin realities that God intends to transcend our mortality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what he points us to here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So Dallas Willard tells us that your work is the total amount of lasting good that you will produce in your lifetime.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's not just what you are compensated for, it's your contribution.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's the good, the total amount of good that you bring into the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's your work.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And the reality here is that life without work is meaningless.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But work must never become the meaning of one's life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And this is a chastening reality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why there's a connection between God's work and our work.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 16.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let your work be shown.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verse 17, let our work be established.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, God's work establishes our work.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That word established shows up twice here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It means to make firm, secure, lasting, enduring.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Everything we do eventually crumbles.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Everything.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We cannot accomplish all that we would want to accomplish in a lifetime.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our years run out.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But because modernity lives in the ways that we do with a closed universe and no sense of time beyond death, we feel this inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and we feel a corresponding overwhelm because we can't possibly do it all.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a German sociologist named Hermet Rosa, and she says this pre-modern people didn't have that problem.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why not?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They weren't troubled by such thoughts because they believed in an afterlife.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, there was no particular pressure to, quote, get the most out of their limited time, because as far as they were concerned, it wasn't limited.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In any case, earthly life was but a relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Do you feel that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's because you succumbed to the secular culture's modern malady.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The opposite of that is verse 17.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let the favor, the grace, the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, Psalm 90 begins with who God is and ends with what God gives.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: God is permanent and eternal, and God and God alone can give life that is permanent and eternal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How do we receive that eternal life?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, let's go back up to verse one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's end where we began.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Charles Spurgeon says this foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the saints dwell in their God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a beauty to that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I want you to imagine for a moment that you're climbing a mountain.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You're on the rock face, and as you're there, there's a storm that just gets whipping and it's threatening to blow you off the ledge.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And you're hugging the side of the rock face, just shimmying to try to figure out how you're gonna stabilize yourself.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And then in that moment, as you are about to give up because your fingers can't cling to the rock anymore, you find a little cleft in the rock.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Just a little crack, and it opens up into a small cave, and you you crawl in, and inside you turn, you put your back against the rock wall, and you look out at the fierce storm, and in that moment you realize that you're safe and secure, and that there's a quiet.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what it means to take refuge in God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Mortality is whipping by, it threatens to kill you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Death is real, it's coming for every one of us, and yet there's an eternal dwelling place for us in God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a hymn that says, Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the invitation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, the Buddha again, he said, This, I was only able to point the way for you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Buddha said, Be a refuge to yourself, take yourself to no external refuge.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus said, In me you may have peace, in the world you will have tribulation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But take heart, I have overcome the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, brothers or sisters, if you belong to Jesus, you are a dual citizen.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What that means is that you have a home here in Orlando and a home in Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Both are true, both are tangibly real.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The one here is impermanent, passing away and mortal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The one there in Jesus is permanent, growing brighter and brighter towards an eternal dawn.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, in this transience of our world, we find residence in our God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus Christ Himself is the place of human security.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, in 2 Timothy 1, it says, our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death, abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you remember our words of assurance, 1 Corinthians 15 is the greatest chapter in the Bible on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it ends in an interesting way.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says, in light of Jesus risen from the dead, therefore, brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because in the Lord, residence in him, in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What else can establish the work of your hands?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What else can give your life meaning in the face of mortality?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The fact that you can take up residence in the eternal dwelling place that is Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the invitation of this text.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If this is true, then we can work and rest, we can pray and wait because Jesus is alive forevermore.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a pastor named Percy Ainsworth.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He pastored in the 1800s.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So think about how much more relevant this is for us today.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He said, This busy world will surge about you with the with the tread of restless feet and the throb of restless hearts.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And little that you will do will seem to make a pause in the rush of things.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But you may in Jesus Christ find rest for your soul.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There is a hasteless life for those who believe in Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's pray.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus, we want to take up refuge in you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Would you, Holy Spirit, awaken us to the reality of our own mortality?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We don't want to live on the narcotic of you will not surely die.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We want to live in the truth that we are dust, and dust we will we shall return.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And we want to live in the greater truth that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and has put, has abolished death and brought immortality to life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Thank you, Jesus.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We pray this in your name.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Amen.