Psalm 90; A Psalm for the Mortal

Adam Shields July 5, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

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Transcript

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Today we are going to continue uh with our Summer in the Psalms series, and we will be looking at Psalm 90. Uh, Martin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. Um, many of the psalms that we have looked at this uh this summer have not been for the faint of heart, and that will theme will continue today with Psalm 90, uh, a psalm that has been used uh for many, many

Summer In The Psalms Begins

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funerals, some of which you have maybe been in attendance of. Um and the the good news uh with one service at 9:30 today, I'm not in a rush to get you to KC. And so I'm gonna take a long time up here. Uh whenever I get to the 19th point, you'll know that you're about 28 minutes from lunch. So I should I should get you there by 12:30. So just hang in there with me. There was a moment in the life of an engineer named Alfred where God, in his providence, gave him an unexpected glimpse of the end of his story. And of course, it happened while he was still alive. In 1888, Alfred's brother died. But a newspaper mistakenly believed that it was Alfred, and they printed Alfred's

The Man Who Read His Obituary

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obituary instead. And the headline read, The merchant of death is dead. And so you could imagine waking up and reading the headline of your obituary over your morning cup of coffee that read that way. You see, the paper remembered Alfred not as a brilliant inventor, but as a man who had grown rich by creating more efficient ways for people to die. You see, Alfred is the man who created dynamite. And so he intended it primarily to be used for infrastructure-related purposes, but of course, governments quickly adopted it for warfare. And so this experience of reading his obituary had a profound impact on Alfred's life. He began asking different questions. What am I living for? What will remain when I'm gone? And what kind of person am I becoming? Those questions changed him. You see, eventually, Alfred Nobel dedicated much of his fortune to establishing the Nobel Prize, which historically, at its founding, recognized people whose work greatly benefited humanity. And most of us won't have the opportunity to read our own obituary before someone else writes it. We don't know how many years we have left, and we don't know what people will say about us when we're gone. But here's the uncomfortable truth for us this morning. We usually live as though we have all the time in the world. We assume that there will always be another year to reconcile a relationship, another season to pursue holiness, another opportunity to share someone, to share with someone about Christ, another decade to become more generous, another tomorrow to finally give ourselves to the things that matter most. We live as though life is endless. And so let's look at our text this morning. This is a prayer of Moses, the man of God, getting in the verse one. You return man to dust and say, Return, O children of man, for a thousand

Psalm 90 Read And Prayer

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years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. And you sweep them away as with a flood, they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning, in the morning it flourishes and is renewed, and the evening it fades and withers. For we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins, in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath, we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength, eighty. Yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? Have pity on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands. Yes, establish the work of our hands. Let's pray this morning. Lord, you are the everlasting God, and we are but dust. And we confess that we are so quick to forget how brief our lives are, and how often we live as though this world is our home. By your Holy Spirit, humble us by your word this morning, as we consider our mortality. Help us to fix our eyes on you and to lead us to live faithfully for your glory. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. And see, Moses knew what it was like to bury his friends and to bury his family, to watch funerals become routine, to feel the weight of human frailty. And from that place, he teaches us a prayer that we might not think to pray on our own. Teach us to number our days that we may have a heart of wisdom. And that's likely a surprising prayer to us because Moses doesn't ask God to give us more days. He doesn't ask God to tell us how many days we have left. He asks God to teach us to number our days. Why? Because until we're honest about our mortality, we will never become wise. We'll waste our days chasing things that cannot last. We'll ignore our dependence on God. We will postpone repentance. We'll assume that there is always more time. Psalm 90 is not friend is not meant to make us afraid of death. It's meant to teach us how to live. And before Moses tells us how to live wisely, he first invites us to be honest, to be honest with God and to be honest with ourselves about three realities that we would rather avoid. So three points this morning that I want us to look at. The reality of our frailty, the reality of our sin, and the reality of our need, our desperate need for God's mercy. The reality of our frailty, our sin, and our need. Let's look at our first point this morning, the reality of our frailty. Moses begins not with humanity in these first couple of verses, but

Three Realities We Avoid

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he begins with God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before he says anything about our mortality, he reminds us where our security is actually found. You see, Israel had wandered

Frailty Next To God’s Eternity

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through the wilderness for 40 years without a permanent home, but yet Moses says they already had a home, the Lord himself. You see, the refuge was not a place, but a person. And then Moses lifts our eyes even higher. Before the mountains were brought forth, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You see, as the Israelites wandered, the mountains were the oldest, most enduring things that they could possibly imagine. Yet before the mountains existed, God was already God. He has no beginning and he has no end. He is not measured by time, he created time. And only after establishing God's eternity does Moses then turn to our frailty. You return man to dust. And so here we see the echoes of Genesis 3.

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Right?

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We are creatures formed from the dust, and because we are finite, we return to the dust. Moses actually wants us to feel the contrast between the everlasting God and the temporal state in which we all live. And then he piles image upon image to emphasize how brief our lives really are. If we look at verses four through six, a thousand years are like yesterday to God. Our lives are swept away like a flood. We're like a dream. Our dreams vanish when the morning comes. We're like grass that sprouts in the morning but withers in the evening. You see, each picture reinforces the same truth that our lives are remarkably short and surprisingly fragile. You see, this is about more than death. It's about our finiteness. We cannot stop time. We cannot guarantee tomorrow. We cannot control our health or our circumstances or even the length of our lives. Because we are not self-sufficient. We are dependent, finite creatures living before an eternal creator. The psalm begins by reminding us of something our culture constantly is encouraging us to forget everywhere we look. And that is God is God, and we are not. Many of you will likely spend some time on the beach this summer if you haven't already. Imagine you spent the entire day building the perfect sandcastle. So you here you are, you've carefully shaped the towers, you've carved out the walls, you dig the moat, and now you begin to smooth every detail out. And the people that are walking up and down the beach, they're stopping to admire this sandcastle that you have built. And if we're honest, you've already snapped a couple of pictures for Instagram because you're just proud of what you've built. And then the tide comes in. And you see, the tide doesn't hate your castle, it doesn't even acknowledge that it's there. You see, the tide is simply doing what tides have always done. They come in and they go out. By the next morning, there isn't a trace that your masterpiece ever existed. And if we look inward this morning, this is actually unsettling for us because in many ways we spend our lives building sandcastles. We build careers, bigger homes, investment portfolios, reputations, and carefully planned futures for ourselves. And none of these things are wrong, right? These are good gifts from God. And there's wisdom and planning, but our plans cannot and will not save us. So the danger comes when we begin treating the temporary things as if they are permanent ones. Psalm 90 reminds us that every earthly accomplishment is ultimately like a sand castle before the tide of time. Only God remains. And that's why Moses says, Lord, you have been our dwelling place, because our hope is not found in what we have built, but in the one who never changes and the things that he has built. You see, the reality of our frailty should change the way we live. What does this look like for us? Well, maybe it looks like holding our plans with humility. Right? Scripture never condemns planning. It often encourages it, but it does consistently condemn the illusion of control that we have in our lives. We make our plans while remembering, as James would later say, if the Lord wills. It means that we stop looking for the ultimate security and temporary things. Because many of us believe quietly that if we can save enough money, if we can buy the right house, maintain our health, prepare well enough, then we'll finally be secure. I tend to believe those things. But Psalm 90 lovingly exposes that illusion. You see, our security is never in our possessions. It can't rest there. Our security rests in God, the one who is our dwelling place. And it means that we receive each day as if it is a gift. We remember that our lives are brief and ordinary moments become these really precious and special moments in our lives. Time with your spouse, conversations with your children, worship with God's people, opportunities to serve. These are not interruptions to life, these are life. And finally, we let our limitations drive us to dependence rather than to anxiety. Every day reminds us that we cannot control tomorrow. And that realization can either produce fear for us or it can produce faith. Moses chose faith. Moses chose dependence. And he invites us to rest not in our own strength, but in the everlasting God who has been the dwelling place of his people in every generation. You see, the purpose of remembering our frailty is to not make us despair over how little control we have, but to deepen our confidence in the God who has all authority, all power, and all of time in his hands. Let's also look at the reality of our sin this morning. Up to this point in Psalm 90, Moses has emphasized the brevity of life. We are dust, we flourish like grass in the morning and we fade in the evening. But beginning in verse 7, he answers the question that naturally arises why? Why is life so short? Why is death universal?

Secret Sin In God’s Light

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Why do we return to dust? And his answer is not simply because we're human, his answer is because we're sinners. In verse 7, he says that we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath, we are dismayed. There's that little word for that we've discussed before. It connects the verses to everything that came before it. Moses is explaining why mortality exists. You see, death is not merely a biological reality, it's a theological one. We die because sin entered the world. As Paul would later write, the wages of sin is death. And this isn't because God is cruel, it's because God is holy. And because God is perfectly holy, he responds to sin with perfect justice. And then Moses says something that's even more searching in verse 8. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. Notice that he just doesn't talk about or mention our obvious sins, the ones that are so easily seen by us and everyone around us. No, he also mentions our secret sins, the sins that no one knows about, the motives that we hide, the pride behind our generosity, the bitterness behind our smiles, the lust, the envy, the selfish ambition, the self-righteousness that may have never been seen by another person. You see, we are all remarkably good at managing our image before others. But there are no hidden rooms in the presence of God. Everything is exposed before Him. Verses 9 and 10 remind us that life under sin feels painfully short, right? Whether 70 years or 80, even a long life as we know it becomes a sigh. And finally, verse 11 asks us a sobering question: Who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? In other words, who really takes God's holiness seriously? You see, we tend to minimize sin because we've forgotten who God is. And the smaller our view of God's holiness becomes, then the smaller our view of our sin becomes. And Moses wants to restore both. You see, the message of these verses is simple, but it's uncomfortable. Our greatest problem isn't merely that life is short. Our greatest problem is that we are sinful people who must stand before a holy God. Imagine you're getting ready to begin an addition to your home. Everything already looks great from the outside. You've picked great paint in the past, you have beautiful floors, well-maintained landscaping. You just need a little more space. But when the contractor opens up one of the walls, he finds extensive termite damage. What you could see looked great, but the beams that have been supporting the house have been quietly eaten away for years. No one walking through the house would have suspected anything at all. The damage was hidden. You see, sin often works exactly that way. And most of us spend enormous energy maintaining the exterior, right? We want people to see a successful career. We want them to see our happy marriage, our obedient children, a respectable reputation. Faithful church attendance for those of you who showed up on July the 5th after a big celebration yesterday. But God doesn't stop at the paint. Right? He sees behind the walls, he sees what no one else can see. Psalm 90 reminds us that God's greatest concern isn't simply our public behavior. He sees the hidden places of our hearts, the places where pride and resentment and greed and unbelief quietly weaken us from within. The good news is that God exposes those hidden places, not because he delights in condemning us, but because he delights in healing what we would have otherwise left hidden and in the dark. And so how do we how do we respond? There's a couple things we could do. We could stop measuring ourselves against other people. Most of us have probably heard the phrase, right, that comparison is the thief of joy. And most of us compare ourselves horizontally. I'm better than most. I'm not as bad as they are. Psalm 90 changes the measuring stick. The comparison is no longer between us and our neighbors, but the comparison is between us and a perfectly holy God. And that should humble every one of us this morning. And we could bring our whole hearts before the Lord. Verse 8 tells us that God already knows our secret sins. Right? We confessed our sins this morning, but confession isn't informing God about something that he has already missed in our lives. It's agreeing with him about the things that he already sees. We can stop hiding, we can stop pretending and come honestly before him. You see, we cannot understand the beauty of God's grace until we understand the seriousness of our sin. The same God whose holiness exposes every hidden sin is the God who in Christ bore his righteous wrath so that sinners could be forgiven. Psalm 90 leaves us longing for someone who can deal with our frailty and who can deal with our guilt. We need someone, and that someone is Jesus. This brings us to our third point: the reality of our need. You see, these remaining verses are not simply just the conclusion that Moses has presented. This is a prayer. Moses has shown us the problem, and now he teaches us how to respond. And it's a beautiful movement. We are finite, we are sinful, and therefore we desperately need God. Our greatest need is not more time, it's not better health or greater

Teach Us To Number Our Days

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success. What we need is a savior. After contemplating death and judgment, Moses realizes that there is nothing humanity can do to rescue itself. Everything, all of our help, must come from the Lord. And so he says, Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. You see, Moses isn't asking God for a crystal ball. He's asking God to teach him to live every day in light of the fact that life is short. To number our days means to live with our mortality in view. If we assume we have endless tomorrows, we will waste today. But people who know their days are numbered begin to ask different questions. And some of you in this room this morning know what I'm talking about. If you've received a jarring Health diagnosis, or maybe you're seasoned in years, you begin asking different questions. What really matters? What will last? What does God want me to do with the days that I have left? You see, mortality becomes a classroom for wisdom. This is not something that I learned in a commentary. This is something that I learned from my dad. My father was diagnosed with cancer and fought it for four years before he died in 2005. And several months before he passed, he told our family that I'm going to write each one of you a letter. And that was exactly the kind of thing my dad would do. You see, he was a words person. And one of my primary love languages is words of affirmation. And so I treasured the thought of receiving this letter from my dad. But then the day came and he died, and no one handed me a letter. And I remember searching everywhere for those letters. Bedside tables, his Bible, coat pockets hanging in his closet, briefcases that were tucked away in the back. I asked my mom. I asked our pastors, trusted family friends. I talked to my dad's siblings. I was so desperate I even asked our banker. I was conceived that those letters, I was convinced that those letters had to exist somewhere. But they never turned up. You know, eventually we realized what had happened. My dad fully intended to write those letters. But he had less time than he thought. I don't tell you this this morning because I think that my dad failed, or because I think that he sinned against me in my final moments. I tell you that because my dad was human. And so are we. And we all assume that there will be another conversation, another opportunity to forgive, another chance to encourage someone, another season to spend with our children. But Moses reminds us that later is never promised. And that's why he prays, Teach us to number our days. He's asking God to rescue us from the illusion that we always have more time. You see, wisdom is living as though every day is a gift. Looking at verses 13 through 15, having prayed for wisdom, Moses immediately prays for mercy. Return, O Lord, how long? Have pity on your servants. Moses knows that the greatest need of frail and dying people isn't simply more years. It's the mercy of God. And then he prays, Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love. Moses is asking to be satisfied by God's covenant love, his faithful love that never fails. We spend our lives looking for satisfaction, and the world promises it everywhere we look. It promises success, comfort, security, pleasure, achievement. And yet none of those things can satisfy people who are marching toward the grave. Only the love of God can fully satisfy us. And then Moses says, make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us. This is wild for me. Because Moses isn't asking God to erase his suffering as we often might. Yet most of us spend our days wondering if what we're doing will matter at all. See, we all know that Moses was not afraid of hard work. He knew what it was like to labor for decades. But he also understood something that we often forget: that unless God establishes our work, everything we build is in vain and it will eventually fade. And that's why his final prayer is so humble. It's not, Lord, make me successful, Lord, make me famous, but Lord, establish the work of my hands. Make it pleasing

Satisfaction That Comfort Cannot Give

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to you, make it useful for your kingdom, make it last because you have given it lasting significance. And that's a prayer that we can all pray this morning. What do we do with all of this? Well, we can pray more than we plan. You see, most of us spend a ton of energy organizing our calendars or maintaining spreadsheets while spending very little time asking for God's wisdom. Moses teaches us a better road, a better way rather than asking, what can I accomplish? Maybe we ask, Lord, teach me. Lord, satisfy me, Lord, establish what really matters. Prayer acknowledges that our greatest need isn't a bread or strategy, it's God's grace. We can also seek satisfaction in God's steadfast love. Especially in a church like ours, surrounded by comfort and opportunity, we're constantly tempted to believe that satisfaction is just one more achievement away. Right? One more promotion, one more renovation, one more vacation, one more accomplishment. But Psalm 90 says that only God's steadfast love can satisfy hearts that were meant for eternity. Everything else fades away. Christ alone is enough. What if we measure our lives by faithfulness? Most of us want significance, but Moses simply asked for faithfulness. What if we said, Lord, establish our work and help us to be faithful? When and what would that look like? When we're changing diapers, caring for aging parents, when we're showing up for work, that we would do so with integrity, when we're teaching our children, when we're serving quietly in the church, we're forgiving those who have wronged us. Those things are never, ever gonna make headlines. But whatever God establishes is never wasted. What if we allow our mortality to create urgency and not anxiety? You see, if we are children of God, numbering our days shouldn't produce panic, it should produce purpose. We don't have to fear missing out, we don't have to cling desperately to this life because we have eternal life in Christ. And that frees us up to spend the few years that we

Purpose Over Panic Through Jesus

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have left on what actually lasts. A year after my father's death, on the anniversary of his passing, my mother gave each of us a letter. And she said, This is gonna be the last letter that I write to you. I don't ever want you wondering what I wanted to say. And friends, that's actually the good news of the gospel this morning. Because we have a heavenly father that has not left us wondering what he wants us to say. He loves us, he likes us, and we know it because he's spoken clearly and finally in his son. He's shown us his heart through Jesus, he provided forgiveness for our sins, he has shown us that our mortality is not swallowed up in death, but in life, and that our labor in the Lord is never in vain. You see, the reality of our frailty reminds us that we are not God. And the reality of our sin reminds us that we cannot save ourselves. The reality of our need reminds us where our hope is found. See, Jesus lived the life that we have failed to live. He died our death. On the third day, he rose again, so that everyone who trusts in him would not simply have more years, but that we would have eternal life. And that's our hope. You see, one day every prayer of Psalm 90 will be answered, and we will dwell forever with the Lord who has always been our dwelling place. We will be satisfied completely in his steadfast love. His favor will rest upon us forever, and the work that he has done will never fade. And so today, if Psalm 90 has made you feel your weakness, don't run from it. Bring it to Jesus. And if it has made you aware of your sin in ways that are super uncomfortable, don't hide from it. Bring it to Jesus. And if it has reminded you that your nay that your days are numbered, then let that reality lead you not to despair, but to Jesus. The one who has conquered death itself. Because the wisest thing that any of us could do with the days that God has given us is to spend them trusting the Savior who gives us life that will never end. That's right. Teach us to number our days, that we might gain hearts of wisdom. We confess that we are frail, sinful, and unable to save ourselves. Thank you for sending us your Son who entered our mortality and bore our sin and conquered death, so that all who trust in him might

Establish The Work Of Our Hands

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have eternal life. Lord, satisfy us with your steadfast love. Establish the work of our hands. We ask this in the name of our Savior. Amen.