A Heart of Wisdom - Psalm 90

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Turn with me please to the 90th Psalm. Psalm 90.
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I have the suspicion that if we were to look back at last year, or maybe the year before that, or the year before that, that is one of the disadvantages of the sermon audio site that we now have is that people can go back.
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Jamie went back and informed me after I spoke on something recently, yeah actually you last addressed that on such and such day.
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You didn't give the exact time and that's not a good thing. But probably if you go back somewhere around this time of year when
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I've had the opportunity of speaking, I've probably gone to Psalm 90. I can't think of too many other places in the scriptures where we can have such words of wisdom as at this time of year we have reason to consider eternity, to consider time, the new year and of course different cultures and history have had new years at different times.
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That's one of the real challenges in figuring out when certain kings reigned in the Old Testament is that some nations their new years in the spring, some in the fall, some in the winter, and things like that.
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But ours happens to be coming up here in just a few days and people make resolutions and people think about, stop and actually think about what's happened over the past year and that rarely happens at other points in time during the year.
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It's a good thing. It's a very good thing. And it seems that here in a prayer of Moses, the man of God, we have some tremendous wisdom that we might take advantage of as we take advantage of this time in thinking about eternity and our lives and the coming year.
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So Psalm 90. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
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Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are
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God. You turn man back into dust and say, return,
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O children of men. For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by or as a watch in the night.
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You have swept them away like a flood. They fall asleep in the morning. They're like grass which sprouts anew.
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In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew. Toward evening it fades and withers away. For we have been consumed by your anger and by your wrath.
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We have been dismayed. You have placed our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
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For all our days have declined in your fury. We have finished our years like a sigh as for the days of our life, they contain 70 years or if due to strength, 80 years.
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Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow for soon it is gone and we fly away. Who understands the power of your anger and your fury according to the fear that is due you?
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So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom.
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Do return, O Lord, how long will it be? And be sorry for your servants. So satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
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Make us glad according to the days you have afflicted us and the years we have seen evil. Let your work appear to your servants and your majesty to their children.
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Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and confirm us and confirm for us the work of our hands.
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Yes, confirm the work of our hands. So many thoughts presented to us by this text.
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As we are reading through it, I'm sure your mind latched on to a number of the statements that were made here, but just a few thoughts as we consider the coming year, a year that none of us can see very far into.
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Oh, we may have certain plans and we may have a good idea of some of the things we're going to be doing, but we all know that things can enter into our life that will completely change what we think the future will be like.
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Obviously, changes in health, a car accident, a disease, all those things can completely change things.
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The change in employment for good or for bad change all those plans we've made.
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And of course, we look beyond ourselves and we think of, for example, the fact that, well, I'm already sick of political advertisements and discussions, and it's only going to get much worse during the course of this year.
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But we would all agree a very, very important political season coming up in our land as well.
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And we don't know what the future is going to hold. We we see things in the world and we wonder,
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Lord, are you still in control? And as we think about these words, as we think about this psalm, we cannot help but pray that whatever the
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Lord brings into our experience over this next year, that we would be people who respond to it as Christians are to respond to these things.
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Notice some of the themes. Psalm 90 verse 2 is a text that I have shared with many, a
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Mormon, because they do not believe that God has been God for all of eternity.
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Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are
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God. And so it does seem that in light of what Calvin said at the beginning of the
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Institutes, if you've not read them, I would highly recommend them to your reading. But it's sometimes difficult to know where we need to start.
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The knowledge of ourselves, the knowledge of God. I think he ends up deciding that we need to start with the knowledge of God.
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Because we start with ourselves, we always end up with a twisted and contorted view of God and a twisted and contorted view of ourselves if we do not see ourselves as God's creatures.
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And so here the psalmist begins. Moses begins with the everlasting nature of God.
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And you notice that he contrasts that with the very transitory nature of man. And I know that for some of the young folks, it may be a little bit difficult to enter into some of the things the psalmist says, because when we're young, the future looks like it's almost inexhaustible.
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And we look at folks, and I remember about the time I got married.
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Of course, I was a teenager when I got married, as were some of you. But we had a teacher in our
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Bible study department, and I think he was about 40 years old. Man, I wondered why they had this old man teaching us, you know?
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I mean, it just seemed 40 years, long ways down the road. So we're twice as old as me.
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That doesn't seem that long ago. But as you get older, all of a sudden you start realizing something.
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And that is that every year seems to go by faster than the year before that. And it can cause some panic on the part of some folks.
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You start thinking about it's going faster and faster. Boy, I'm going to get to the end pretty quick, at least as I'm experiencing it.
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But even that, our 70, or if by reason of strength, 80 years, is but a watch in the night.
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It's like yesterday when it passes by. A thousand years is like yesterday when it passes by.
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And so in comparison to God's eternal nature, we are very transitory beings.
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And we need to keep that in mind. I don't know that any of us ever really fully appreciate that reality.
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If we did, we would never be impatient with God. If we really, really took it in, and we really had some sense.
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I don't know that we'd ever be impatient with God. I think everybody in this room has been impatient with God. But if we really thought about it,
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I saw a quote. I'm not sure if the pastor's going to appreciate this because of where I saw it, but it was a good quote.
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It was actually a quote from, I see a lot of quotes from Spurgeon and well -known writers, but the fact that I read it on Twitter might be enough to cause
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Pastor Fry hives. But I see a lot of good quotes there. And the quotation
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I saw went somewhere along the lines of the idea of rushing
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Christ in his work in our lives is foolish because he is too good and too full and too satisfied a savior to ever be rushed.
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I thought that was an excellent thought. We tend to push, we tend to be impatient, but that's because we don't really, really look at things the way
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God does. And we have so many examples, the example of Joseph, the example of David, where these men had to be patient for long periods of time, a lot longer than, to be honest with you, we normally have to be patient.
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And yet, if we start with God, we recognize his eternal nature. And then we think of ourselves and we're like grass.
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I used to have these bushes out front. Thanks be, I don't have them anymore. It took a lot to get rid of them, but paving helped a lot.
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That sort of took care of the bushes, but used to have these bushes out front and they had very pretty purple flowers on them.
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And they would bloom in the morning and they'd be beautiful. But by the time we got back in the evening, and then the next morning, and I never found,
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I never even was overly concerned with the name of the kind of bush or anything like that. But it was, it was interesting to watch the change that would take place in that particular plant, especially in light of the fact that we're sort of likened to that by the scriptures.
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We're like the, well, we don't have this a lot around here, but the dew. Yesterday morning,
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I did a, in comparison to my wife, a short ride. And at one point in time,
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I have a thermometer on my computer, and it was reading 28 .4
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degrees. When I got back, I calculated the wind chill at the speed I was going.
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It was 17 degrees. That just hurt. That's all there is to it. That's the only way you can describe it.
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But at one point, as I was coming back, the sun was coming up, and I came over this little rise, and it was along the canal where all the playing fields were.
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It was beautiful. There was frost on all the dead grass.
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And it was just, it was gorgeous. I mean, it really, really was beautiful to see. But you know what?
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It didn't take long for that stuff to just be gone. Just melts away, disappears, gone.
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That's the illustration that is used of us. And we don't like to think of ourselves in that way, but that is the biblical understanding.
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And what makes it important to see that is what the psalmist then recognizes, and that is that there is wrath on God's part against sin.
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In that same venue of Twitter this morning, someone happened to mention me and the president of the
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American Atheists in the same tweet, which gave the Atheists my nick.
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And so pretty quickly, an Atheist wrote to me and said, Hey, aren't you ashamed that your
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God allows children to starve to death in Africa? That was his message to me.
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And I wrote back to him and I said, My God is the source and sustainer of all life, including yours, and you owe him your thanks and your worship.
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Didn't hear back from him after that. He didn't want to have a conversation or anything. Either that or Twitter has profanity filters and he couldn't get through to me.
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I'm not sure which one it was. But isn't it amazing the way that people will think?
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They want to blame God, but the idea of his wrath against sin, oh no, we won't even go there.
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We won't even talk about that anymore. But the psalmist, he talks about you have been consumed by your anger, by your wrath.
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We have been dismayed. You have placed our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
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This issue of God's holiness and our sinfulness.
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If we are wise, if we have simple, creaturely common sense, and I would submit to you that sin drives creaturely common sense right out of our existence.
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But if we have even simple, creaturely common sense, we will think about and consider our relationship to God and the fact that our consciences tell us that we have broken his law and that his wrath and his fury, they're just.
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They're just. And if that's the case, then as we see the evidences of our of our aging, as we see, as we start gaining enough years to start thinking back, you know, the past and I were just talking about, well, you know, are we going to have a video
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Friday night? You know, we really haven't mentioned it. And I said, well, you know, I've got some videos and started thinking about it.
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Last time we saw some of the videos that I've got 14 years ago, 14 years ago, anybody here remember them very well for 14 years ago?
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Mr. Calhoun does. Thank you very much for ruining my sermon illustration, Mr. Calhoun. I appreciate that very much. Well, you make it, you know what you're going to have to stay and watch it.
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That's what I'm going to make you do. I'm going to make you stay and watch it. You're going to watch the Ian Huss video.
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That's just all there is to it. Anyway, once you start adding up a few of those years, you start thinking about all the, you know,
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I love telling, you know, we had a wedding this summer and we all got together and told our favorite
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David stories, you know, from that to that, you know, and it doesn't seem like it was that long ago, you know, and you start you start collecting enough years to be able to start talking about things like that.
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And that should make you wise enough to realize, you know what, I'm a mortal being.
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I'm going to go the way of the world. What does that mean? Should I not be concerned about my relationship to this
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God that I know is there, that has testified of his existence in my life?
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You know, that leads us to a verse that to me, every time
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I read it, I'm absolutely struck by the depth of the wisdom and it really, it becomes for me sort of a test, a standard.
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Almost every year I think of this at this time of year and I ask myself, how have
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I done in light of Psalm 90 verse 12? And I would suggest that for you, not in front of everybody else, but in the quietness of your own heart over the next few days.
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I've got a really, really, really busy time period coming up and it's not really going to be one that's going to allow me to do a whole lot of contemplation of these things, but maybe you might have some more time than I will.
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So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom.
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Teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. There's something about recognizing our mortality, recognizing the passage of time, recognizing that God has been at work in our lives and there are duties that he has given to us.
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I think that's what numbering our days is, recognizing, getting away from that worldly way of thought where we never think about the fact that we are mortal beings.
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We invest a tremendous amount of effort in not thinking about that, putting it as far out of our minds as possible.
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There's something about numbering our days where we recognize that we are the creatures of God and that our days are limited.
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Even if we don't get hit by that semi -truck. Remember, remember about 10 years ago, that guy that stole a dump truck and was flying through Phoenix with it?
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He was going up Central Avenue and I remember I was watching it live on TV. Channel 3 or something had their helicopter up and they were following this thing and he was going up Central Avenue and they zoomed in on Bethany Home and Central Avenue right near North Phoenix Baptist Church there.
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And you can see this car. It's amazing how you may not be able to do trigonometry on a piece of paper, but isn't it amazing how your mind can do it really fast?
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And you just know this car is going through a green light. Can't see anything coming out of it.
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We all go through those green lights every single day, don't we? And it looks like it's going to be a
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T -bone and this is a full -size dump truck and a regular -sized car. You figure this is a fatality about to happen.
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Thankfully, somehow, it worked out to where it hit the back of the car, spun the thing, actually tipped over the dump truck.
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That's what stopped the chase. Anyone remember which one I'm talking about here? I'm the only one who remembers.
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You remember it? Okay. And then some other guy gets out of the car with a baseball bat and chases the guy around and whacks him a few times.
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I think he ended up getting in trouble, too. But anyway, you know, it reminds me of earlier this year as we were coming to church on a
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Sunday morning. We're going toward 19th Avenue on Indian School Road, just driving along. Got a green light about,
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I don't know, 100 yards out. We have a green light and right through the intersection going north goes a pickup truck.
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Didn't even slow down. Totally ran it. Didn't hit anybody. Didn't hit me.
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I couldn't help but sit there and think, three seconds, four seconds, boom.
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We may dodge all of those things. We may be the recipients of God's grace and missing all of that stuff and get to our 70 or 80 or these days 90 or even 100.
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But it's still such a small period of time. And so the question becomes, if we number our days, if we recognize that we are mortal creatures, how is that related to presenting to God a heart of wisdom?
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Or to put it another way, doesn't it follow that a person who doesn't think about the future and doesn't think about their mortality and doesn't think about the number of days that have been given to us, that person's not going to have a heart of wisdom.
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Part and partial of presenting to God a heart of wisdom, which evidently is something that we should desire to do.
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We should desire to do it. Part and partial of that is recognizing who we are as creatures and that God has given us a limited amount of time before we are in his presence, before we experience that eternal state.
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And so ask yourself a question. Has my heart grown in wisdom in 2011?
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Has my heart grown? Has that even been a goal of mine? And if not, what can
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I do in 2012 so that when White forgets again that he's already spoken out of Psalm 91's recently and he takes us back here again at the end of next year,
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I can actually look at this and go, yeah, I think
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I can see, not out of pride, but I think if I'm just honestly evaluating myself, the Bible tells us to evaluate ourselves, test ourselves,
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I can see that there's still much foolishness, but there's been a growth in godliness, there's been a growth in wisdom.
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I want, I really do want to present to God a heart of wisdom. Now the means of doing that, the means of grace, exposure to the word of God, all those things, well, that's why we get together regularly at church.
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But I hope it'll be for all of us a real desire this coming year to cultivate a heart of wisdom so that we may present to God on that day, not as Paul would describe it, wood, hay, stubble, but I think a heart of wisdom would be that gold, that silver, those precious stones, a heart of wisdom.
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It should be something that we desire, it should be something that we want to cultivate, and Lord willing, if he gives us another year, let's hope when we gather together again that we will be able to say, yes,
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Lord, by your grace, I've learned wisdom this year. Let that be.