Psalm 90

Mark Smith preaching from Psalms 90

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

A prayer of Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You return man to dust and say, Return, O children of man, for a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. 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, in 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 upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. And so reads God's Word.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Welcome to you. If you join us while we're singing, my name is Mark, I'm one of the pastors here at the church. Welcome back to our screen two, exile for the summer. We'll be back in screen one at the start of uh of September. And can I invite you to turn up that passage that Arena read for us? We uh we started Psalm 1 uh, I guess nearly a decade ago now, and we do between eight and ten psalms every year. And so we are in Psalm 90, and we're continuing through the book of Psalms as we do in the in the summertime. Still not sure what we're going to do when we get to Psalm 119, but that's a problem for another year. Uh this week, uh, for those of you who uh don't realize, um, uh I turned 40, just to make it all about me. Just for a moment. Uh I turned 40 on Wednesday. Uh, I have had so much cake, I think I'm basically diabetic. Um and I want to thank you all for staying behind last week and for the uh the those of you who brought cake and sent messages and signed the the humongous card uh that is sitting on our uh on our mantelpiece at the moment. I felt very, very loved and I really appreciate it. Obviously, 40 is a milestone, it's the closing of a decade, and uh hitting the reset button uh on another one. I was 28 uh when we planted City Church, and how is that not last year? Um time uh passes and we mark it by our psalm series. Like I said, we're in Psalm 90, that in itself implies that we have been going for some time, and time sneaks up on us all in different ways. Uh people say to new parents, oh, the the days are long, but the years are short, and you just want to punch them straight in the throat because new parents are exhausted. Kids can't wait for Christmas, adults can't believe that it's Christmas again. We mark anniversaries of different sorts and kinds, we mark our wedding anniversaries, but we also mark those anniversaries of the passing of a loved one, and we shake our heads and we say to ourselves, How has it been that long? Uh, just before my my birthday is the anniversary of my grandfather, and uh he is dead 19 years, and so we're sitting at lunch on my birthday, he yay going, How is he gone? 19 years, but we mark it, don't we remember it? Those dates become imprinted in our mind, and we can scarcely believe the quick passage of time. How will it be 20 years next year? Decades seem to evaporate, and relationships and friendships with them. You have those friendships that you look back upon and they were so intense and so close for a season. And now, as those names and those faces and those people come to your mind, you think, gosh, yeah, I haven't spoken to him in forever. I wonder where she is now. I can certainly think of some friendships and relationships like that. Our hairs turn grey or they fall out, and time takes its toll. We begin to wonder, well, what is what lasts? Does anything last? What's truly of value when it feels like everything is slipping through our fingers? And if you feel something of the rapid passaging passing of time, that is exactly the kind of head space that Psalm 90 occupies. That's exactly the questions that the psalmist, Moses, who wrote Psalm 90, is asking in order to help us think through what is it that we can grapple onto when it just feels like things slip through our fingers. Psalm 90 is the start of a little mini book in the book of Psalms. There are five of them, and so this is the start of book four. And the reason why that matters is because they tend to be kind of roughly thematically grouped. And so Psalm 89 is a big Psalm uh basically lamenting the end of the kingdom. It's a Psalm where the psalmist is saying, look, everything that we hoped for, everything that we thought that God had promised us has been destroyed. David's uh line seems to be broken, the kingdom has been destroyed, the people have been carried off into exile, and everything is in turmoil. Psalm 89 is that season in your life where it feels like all of the chips have been thrown up in the air. Your relationship, your career, your family, what you're gonna do, all of those things. Everything's been tossed up in the air, and it ends basically with a question of, well, now like now what? Where do we go from here? And Psalm 90 brings us, I was gonna say, brings us back down to earth. In a sense, it does, but it lifts our eyes to heaven. You when everything that they had built, everything that they had hoped for, time and circumstances had taken it all away. And in the midst of all of that uncertainty comes Psalm 90, verse 1. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. I believe that the compilers, those who brought all the Psalms together, have done something deliberate in putting this Psalm right beside Psalm 90. Or beside Psalm 89, rather. Because Psalm 89 is focusing on David and the kingdom and where's that going and all of this uncertainty. And this Psalm, Psalm 90, that's not written by David. It's not written by anybody who ever saw the kingdom. It's not even written by somebody who ever entered into the promised land. It's written rather by Moses of Red Sea fame, ten plagues guy, before the kingdom, before Jerusalem, before Canaan, before Joshua, before any of it all, we go all the way back to Moses. Back to a time when Israel had no land, it had no king, but it had its God. It had its God. The Psalm is often read at gravesides about the fleeting nature of life. But the Psalm is not ultimately about death, it's a Psalm about where to anchor your life in a world where it feels like everything else disappears. Every life, every life in this room is looking for something that is permanent, that time cannot take away. Lord, you have been our dwelling place. And so our first point this morning, our first of four, is that Moses points us to the home that cannot be taken away, the home the time cannot take. Let's read verses one and two. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting. You are God. Every one of us has this longing for a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary, a place where it's safe to be seen. You can think of those particular relationships that you have where where you feel like you can kind of take the mask off, take the armor off, and it's a safe place. That's what we aim for. And sometimes they slip through our fingers as well. And Moses here doesn't say, well, that safe place, that refuge is our promised land or a nation, or even the tabernacle in ancient Israel. He says, No, it's you, Lord. The Hebrew word for dwelling place is uh carries that sense of refuge, of safety, of security, of permanence. A place where it is safe to be seen. And it is not therefore a question of geography, but a question of relationship. Moses himself. Yeah, he's not perfect, but he is the perfect person to understand the true nature of this refuge in the context of feeling like you're wandering. He's adopted into a foreign family, raised in Egypt. He spent 40 years in the wilderness of Midian as a as a shepherd before God called him to deliver the people of Israel, and then another 40 years in the wilderness wandering, leading the people. And he never entered the land of promise. He was taken up on a mountain, he got to see it, and that's where he died. He never got that place of rest. He spent his whole life wandering. You ever feel like that? You like you're spending your whole life wandering far from home. Well, he is exactly the one to listen to because he's got it right. He says, Lord, you have been my, our dwelling place, our safe, secure refuge. The place where it is safe for me to be seen is in relationship with you. He goes on to say that that's been true in all generations, that whatever happens, whatever the passing circumstances, empires rise and kingdoms fall, people are born and people die, wars come and wars go, exiles and famine come and go in every generation. People all across this world have discovered the same thing that God was already there. Our generation isn't unique. Perhaps our fears are somewhat different. Certainly the technology is different, maybe the economy is different, but the refuge hasn't changed. The place where your soul will find rest hasn't changed. The one who is always there has not changed. The place where he invites you to run to is relationship with him, and that has not changed. The one who we belong to is, as Moses says, from everlasting, from everlasting. He was there in the beginning and he will be there in the end, and he is there at every point in between. Before the mountains, before the earth, before creation itself, God was. Imagine Moses standing, maybe early in the morning. The camp hasn't woken up yet, and he's out, and he's on this plateau, and he's surveying the ring of mountains around him. He's got to lead the people over, and it seems unassailable. It's going to be hot today, and people are going to be grumbling again because they don't have any water and they don't have any food, and the Israelites were never happier than when they were complaining in the wilderness. And in that moment, as the sun rises over the mountains, he looks and says, There's something more permanent than those mountains. There's something more real, more of a refuge, more secure than those seemingly immovable mountains around me. Everything that we build has a beginning. Everything that we build will have an end. Our God is from everlasting to everlasting. That is why He is our dwelling place. Think again about what Israel had just lost. They'd lost their city, they'd lost their king, they'd lost their nation, they'd lost any hope for the future. Everything that looked permanent had shown itself, but it wasn't. Those seasons are so disorientating, aren't they? When those things that you assumed were permanent reveal themselves to suddenly be not. The one thing that they had thought least about is the one thing that had never moved. God had not changed, he had not aged, he had not weakened, nor had he forgotten his commitment to his people. The circumstances that they find themselves in had shifted. But their dwelling place had not. They have to navigate by things that don't move. And so it guides every ship through every storm. And Psalm 90 is a little bit like that. Psalm 90 says that in every generation there's different waves, there's different storms that everybody faces, different kingdoms, different crises, different fears, different pressures. But there's a sure lighthouse guiding us safely to shore. The Lord has never changed his position, and every generation finds him exactly where he was. In the relationship that you find yourself in, your health, your reputation, your wealth, your marriage. None of those things are wrong. All of those things are good gifts to be enjoyed. But all of them are temporary. They're not from everlasting to everlasting, right? Every one of them will succumb to the power of time. And none of those things were meant to carry the weight of refuge that we need. A home that would survive every season. Only a relationship with the God who is everlasting can do that, can emotionally and intellectually and psychologically satisfy us in that sort of way. The question then that we must ultimately ask is if there's a refuge that can hold us through all circumstances in this life and ultimately through death, secondly, Moses might have begun with a home that time cannot take away, but he contrasts it immediately with a life that we cannot hold. That's our second point. A life that we that we cannot hold on to. Verses 1 and 2, they lift our eyes to the heavens. Verses 3 to 11, they bring us crashing back down to earth. Moses has just shown us the God who is eternal, who is everlasting to everlasting. And by contrast, he looks at ourselves honestly, and there he says there couldn't be any greater distinction. Notice as you cast your eye down through verses 3 to 11, the different kind of time-bound and fleeting pictures that he paints. He says that we are we're dust. He says that a thousand years are like yesterday for God. Or a watch in the night that's three hours. That we are a flash flood that rises up quickly and disperses just as quickly. That we are like a dream. It's kind of there, but you just can't quite kind of grasp onto it. Moses says that's that's kind of what our life is like. We can barely remember. That we are like the morning. We rise full of hope and promise, and 12 hours later we wither into night. I've just hit midday. Moses piles up these images to do one thing. To shake us awake, to bring us to our senses and to remind us of one unassailable truth, that your life will slip through your fingers. Verse 3, you return man to the dust. And immediately, when we see when we hear that language of dust, where does our mind go? Our mind goes back. Mind goes back rightly to Eden. The very opening chapters of the Bible, where God speaks to our first parents, to Adam and Eve, and says, You were dust, you came from the dust, and you will return to the dust. Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. It's Genesis language. And it's spoken in response to Adam's sin, to the cosmic treason that Adam commits in grasping at power for himself. So when God says, you are dust, and to dust you shall return. One of the things that God is saying, and we we lose sight of this, is that death is not just biology, death is theology. Death is not simply about what happens to living things, death is what happens as a result of sin entering into God's good creation. And that's why every funeral feels wrong. That's why nobody stands at a graveside and thinks, this is exactly how it should be. We don't do it. We instinctively know that death that there's something incredibly wrong about it. There wasn't in here, forgive me. Sorry, Nicole. It was my birthday this week, so can I have like a short, just a little one? Anytime I mention the Lord of the Rings, I can feel Nicole's eyes rolling in her head. In the uh, this is a movie one rather than the book one. If you watch the if you watch. The movies, anytime somebody dies, have a look at uh Orlando Bloom's face because one of the things that uh choices that he made as an actor, as Legolas the Elf, was that anytime he was confronted with death, he would look confused because it doesn't make sense to him. As an eternal creature, death is confusing. Death doesn't make sense, and in doing that, with his kind of slightly hammy acting, right, he's actually communicating something that is true of us. There is a confusing, why has this happened? This doesn't feel rightness to death. And certainly there are some deaths that feel terribly out of order, and they hit us like a freight train. People often say that life is short, but Moses is taking us deeper and asking the harder question: why is life short? And so in 7 to 11, he has these repeated words, the repeated words of anger, wrath, iniquity. That's another word for sin. Secret sin. Verse 8 is devastating. You've set our iniquities before you are secret sins in the light of your presence, that everything that we hide from everyone else are completely visible to God, the sins that nobody knows about, the thoughts that we would never speak out loud, the motives that we've never even managed to make sense of ourselves, that nothing escapes his gaze. And that's why verse 7 says, We are consumed by your anger. This isn't Moses just having a bad day. He's giving us a biblical theological explanation for death. That death exists because humanity is living by nature under God's wrath. By nature, under his righteous judgment. This is, of course, not popular to hear. Welcome to City Church if you're visiting, but it's the reason why life slips away so fast. It's the reason Moses gives us of why it feels like everything just slips through our fingers. It's because something has happened to our world that never should have. It was never meant to be this way. And again, you imagine Moses. What's Moses doing? He's leading people through the wilderness on his way to the promised land, but they're not there yet. And the generation that he's leading is not going to get there. It's going to be their kids. And so he's watching a whole generation die. Every day, another funeral. Every day, another person consumed by the sands. Every day, another grave in the wilderness. 40 years of saying goodbye. 40 years of burying friends. 40 years of watching life disappear into the desert. And then comes perhaps the most quoted verse in the whole Psalm. 70 years, if we have strength, even then our span is toil and trouble. This isn't Moses at his most cynical. This is Moses at his most realistic. That even the very best life ends. That even the strongest person time takes its toll and death seems to win. This question is Moses saying, does anybody really understand what death is telling us? Death is screaming at us truths about who we are and the problem in our world and who God is. Every funeral preaches a sermon. Every gray hair tells us something. Every birthday, every obituary, they're all saying the same thing that life cannot be held on to. Our culture tells us that death is natural, just another part of life. The Bible says that death is an intruder. He's a thief that has broken into the house of this world. Our culture tells us to distract ourselves from our own mortality, to rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas said. The Bible tells us rather to face it honestly. Not to make us despair, but to make us wise for what we have been given. If we never face the brevity of life, we will spend our lives investing in things that will only ever slip through our fingers. Brothers and sisters, we must avoid two equal dangers here. On the one hand, pretending like life is permanent, and on the other, despairing that death is the final word. Psalm 90 allows us to grieve honestly. It won't minimize suffering. It won't try and explain away death. And we acknowledge that this world is not as it should be, but neither do we stop there. Neither does Moses stop there. There is hope to be had here. Because the remarkable thing about this, Psalm, is that Moses refuses to end with death. He's shown us the life that we cannot hold in order that he might show us the wisdom that we must learn. That is our third point, the wisdom that we must learn. Just to say as we make a transition. That second point was heavy, right? If it's aroused things' thoughts in you, maybe questions, come and talk to us. The elders will be down the front. There's also our prayer team, which usually in Scream 1 is at the wings. I'm assuming that they're going to be kind of at the wings again. If you'd like prayer, come down. We'll have somebody pray for you. And uh we'd love to bless you in that way. Thirdly, the wisdom that we must learn. The realities of verses three to eleven, uh, the talk of of death and of judgment are not meant to leave us paralyzed. They're meant to drive us back to the God who is from everlasting to everlasting, that we might learn how to live a life of significance, meaning, and joy. So verse 12, teach us to number our days, that we might get a heart of wisdom. Verse 14. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. That's the goal that uh Moses has in mind, not just the graves in the wilderness. Teach us to number our days that we might gain a heart of wisdom. This verse is perhaps often misunderstood. It's not saying, help me to calculate how many years I've got left, nor is Moses simply saying, remember everybody, you're gonna die. No, the language of numbering is the language of learn to learn to understand the value of the thing that you've been given. And that's a that's a growth and wisdom thing, isn't it? Because kids instinctively, because of their immaturity, don't understand the value of the thing that they have been given. If you were to ever uh have a conversation uh with my mother, you know, moms and dads have a have a cycle of maybe a dozen stories that they kind of go around and like to and like to tell. One of the ones that my mom will tell you if you spend any length of time with her is uh is how she spent one Christmas going around lots of different stores trying to find the gift for that year, and this ages me, uh, which was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right? In the kind of van bus thing that they had, and all four figures. It was the gift to have. And her heart was broke, as Irish people would say, trying to find it. All these stops were out, and she finally got the last one. It was like that, it's like that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger that I didn't write down, but you remember the one, right? So she's searching, saying, give me the toy. Um and she gives it to me on uh on Christmas Day, and I'm like, oh, thanks very much. Let's love it. And I went off and played with someone else. Let's talk about something else. I didn't know how much how precious this thing was and how much effort that she had gone into. I didn't appreciate the value of it. Do you appreciate the value of the things that you have? Part of growing in maturity is being able to understand the value of the things that you possess. And Moses says, that's true of your days. To grow in wisdom is to know the value of the gifts that you have been given, to recognize that every day is precious, that every sunrise is undeserved grace, every day matters because it's limited. Wisdom, therefore, is living today in light of eternity. This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Your knowledge knows that life is short, but it's wisdom that knows how to prioritize what is truly valuable in light of that. You imagine someone told you that you had exactly 24 hours left to live. Every minute would suddenly be of infinite value. Every hour would matter more than the last. Conversations would change, wouldn't they? Priorities would change, relationships would change, not because time had become more valuable, but because you'd finally recognize the value of the time that you have been given. Moses is asking God to teach us in order that we might live like that now. Moses doesn't stop at wisdom. He doesn't pray and teach us to manage our time better, though that's a prayer I often pray. Instead, he says, Return, O Lord, how long? Have compassion on your servants. This little prayer is quite remarkable because earlier in the Psalm, he's told us that humanity returns to the dust, and now he prays, Lord, return to us. The greatest need of God's people is not more time, it's that God would come into our lives and imbue our days with meaning and with joy. That's why he says in verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad in you. Is it beautiful? The thing that causes all of our days to fizzle and crack and pop with meaning and joy and life is knowing the God who is from everlasting to everlasting, knowing his steadfast love. His steadfast love is his promise-keeping, unwavering commitment to you. It is his loyal love, it is his never failing, never giving up, always and forever love. Moses is asking, and he's encouraging us to ask, to be satisfied with and by and in God. It is the language of someone who has discovered where his home truly is, where his deepest longings are met. And those words will be echoed centuries later by Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine. And we sing it in one of our songs. Because Augustine famously said, our hearts are restless until they find rest in you, O Lord. You're feeling that restlessness. You've tried to answer it in a whole bunch of different ways. You've moved, you're moving, you've changed job, you've gone into another relationship, but there's just this constant itchy feet rest. Something isn't quite right. That's a human condition. We're made wandering in the wilderness, wandering east of Eden, away from our home. We're meant made for rest. We're made for refuge. We're made for to be seen and known and loved. And God is saying, I am the home that your soul needs. The world offers placebos and the morphine injection to numb our senses of career and success and comfort and family and achievement. None of them are big enough. All of them ebb away. Wisdom is learning that only God can be our lasting home. And that home is a place of gladness, and it's gladness even in the face of grief. He says, verse 15, make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen evil. I love that prayer. Imagine you're in a season now of grief, trial, suffering. I've been in this a while now. For however many days that you have lain me in the dust of the earth, O Lord, make me glad. Right? Satisfy me. For as many days as you have afflicted me. Overwhelm, in other words, overwhelm the pain that I have felt with gladness. Prove that your mercy is greater than my sorrow. But one question still hangs in the air. If our days are numbered, if all of our work eventually comes to an end, if all of our strength eventually fades, then does anything that we do truly last? Or will time eventually erase every trace of our lives? Well, Moses ends the Psalm with one final prayer that our lives would be established by the favor, by the grace of God. And so our final point is this it is the meaning that God gives. Moses ends the Psalm in perhaps a surprising place. After everything he said about the transient nature of our life, the finality of death after all of the things that he has said about our frailty, you might expect him to pray, Lord, give us more time. But he doesn't. He says, rather, verse 17, let the favor of the Lord be upon us and establish the work of our hands. Yes, establish the work of our hands. Amidst the dust and fleeting flowers, there is something that can last. Like great cathedrals and old castles. Our lives can participate in something of eternal value, of eternal significance. The word establish means to make firm, immovable, to cause to endure. We spend our lives building. We build our careers, we build our families, we build our homes, we build churches, we build businesses, we build reputations, we build families. And time will come and test them. Tear them down unless God establishes them. That it is possible to have a life that echoes beyond your fleeting 70 or 80 years only if God establishes the work of your hands. That little phrase changes everything because it means that significance is never something that we can achieve on our own. It is only something that God gives. It's a gift of his favor, of his delight, of his grace, his kindness to us. This must be the prayer of our lives, it must be the posture of our hearts, it must be the heartbeat of our church as we look to make an impact on our city and in our time, in our generation. That I see the Lord has to be the one who establishes the work of City Church and any other churches that it goes on to plant, or else it will it'll all be tested and found wanting, it'll all come to naught. We must cry out to him, to his kindness, to his favor, that he would establish our work as a church. Because that's the only way that it will outlast us. And it's true of your life. What legacy are you building? What are you hoping to leave behind? If it's not done with the hard posture of Lord, I need you to establish the work of my hands. I might be might be working my tail off, but it's all going to come to naught unless you are the one who imbues it, galvanizes it with meaning that won't just be taken away by time and circumstances and death. This is how dusty, fleeting people find lives that echo into eternity. And it is all done through the one who entered our dusty world. Because Jesus, the one who was from everlasting to everlasting, came into a world bound and constrained by time. He has enabled our lives to have an impact far beyond themselves. The one who was from everlasting to everlasting took flesh. He experienced everything that Psalm 90 describes: weariness, tears, sorrow, the passing of days, and ultimately death itself. He experienced the full weight of verses 7 to 11. The anger, the wrath, the judgment of God for us. He was returned to the dust so that we might be raised to the heights. He was returned to the dust so that those of us who trust in him might never bear that judgment, that anger, that wrath ourselves. And then in three days later, the Father answered Jesus' prayer of verse 17 and established the work of his hands, established the work of his nail-pierced hands, as he secured salvation for us. That great work that echoes down through every generation and century and echoes yet still and is freely available to every one of you here this morning. The resurrection is God's great declaration that Christ's work will never be erased by the passage of time. Death couldn't undo it, the grave couldn't bury it, time couldn't diminish it. It only ever grows and increases. And because he lives, our labors in him live too. That's why Paul the Apostle in 1 Corinthians, we're going to start a lot a long series in 1 Corinthians in September, about six months, right? In the book of 1 Corinthians, we're going to go through the whole book. As I've been reading it, come to the end of the book, chapter 15, where Paul says, Therefore, my beloved brothers, be satisfied, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Why? Because your work in the Lord is not in vain. Hear the echoes of Psalm 90. Establish the work of our hands, O Lord. Paul says the labor in the Lord is not in vain. The resurrection is the answer to Moses' prayer. So let me leave you with those four questions. Where is home? Not in anything time can take, but in God who is our refuge. Why do we die? Because sin has driven us from our home and from the life that we were made for. How should we live? Not in trying harder, but in drawing nearer. Learning to treasure every day as a gift and every moment as an opportunity to know the God who made us more deeply, more richly. And what will last. Not the things that we build for ourselves, only what God and His grace has established through Christ. And perhaps that's the greatest comfort of Psalm 90. That you don't have to make your life eternal. You never could. You simply entrust yourself, your dusty frame, your freeding life to the eternal God. Because when your life is hidden in Christ, time is no longer your enemy. It becomes the means by which God prepares you for home with Him. A home that no years can erode, no death can invade, no sickness can poison, and no eternity will ever exhaust. Forty years has reminded me of something this week. I can't stop time. The grey hairs will continue to come in my beard and probably on my head as well. And neither can you. I can't keep my kids young. I can't keep City Church exactly what it was in those perfect nostalgic moments that I look back upon, and this will be one of them in some years hence. I can't hold on to my health forever. I can't even hold on to my own life. And neither could Moses. And neither can you. But Moses discovered something better. He discovered the one thing that time cannot touch: a refuge that doesn't age, a home that doesn't decay, a kingdom that cannot collapse, and a savior who has defeated death. And one God who can take our brief and ordinary and fragile lives and establish them forever. And that's why, after 40 years in the wilderness, Moses could still call him our dwelling place. And that's why, whatever this next decade holds, he can be yours as well. Let's pray. Father, you are a refuge, you are a strong tower, you are our home, you are our dwelling place, you are the place of safety. And because of our sin, that is a remarkable thing to pray. That's a remarkable thing to realize that the safest place that our life can ever be is in your hands, and that's only true because of Jesus. Thank you that He has made a way, that He has forgiven our sin, that we might come home to you and know you better. You might hold us through all the seasons of this life. Please help us to number our days that we might learn a heart of wisdom. We ask it for Christ's sake. Amen.