Daily Devotional – May 27, 2020

Well, good afternoon on day 22 ,646. Yes, you heard that right.

I know it's only day 67 of the, well, no one's really sheltering in place anymore thing.

And it's not the way it feels like it's been 22 ,000. I'm calculating something a little bit different.

You see, along with 248 ,196 other Americans, today is my birthday.

Though I'm really not sure how that's even possible. I mean, I just had one a couple of months ago.

Oh, those things really come and go pretty quickly, don't they, at this stage of life? Well, anyway, at least it's not one of those milestone, you know, zero birthdays.

You know, I just had one of those just like the other day, it seems like.

And there's, well, you know, maybe 20 years ago, I would have said the next one is a long way off.

And now I have to just admit it'll be here before I know it. So it's not a zero milestone, but I suppose it's a milestone of another, in another sense, because I could hop over to the

Social Security office tomorrow and get that snowball rolling. Of course, we all know that they just pick up speed when they go rolling on downhill.

Well, by the way, I thought, okay, since my birthday, who else has had a birthday on May 27th?

I decided to figure out any celebrities, you know, that I would know that also share my birthday.

And, well, I didn't know any of them. I just picked, I just pulled some up, and the top 10, never heard of them.

First one that came up was, let's see, 1924, a guy by the name of Ernest Ingenito.

Ernest Ingenito, and his claim to fame is he is an American murderer who died in 1995.

And then there's four years after he was born, Tia Musgrave, a

Scottish -American composer and educator. Never heard of her either. And on and on down through the list of the next eight people, never heard of any of them.

The last one mentioned was born in 1989, young guy, Igor Morozov, who's an

Estonian footballer. I'm sure everybody in Estonia knows who he is, but foreign to me.

So I couldn't find anybody that I recognized who had my birthday. So I thought, well, maybe something of significance happened on May 27th.

And sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. In 1940, 99 British soldiers were rounded up by the

Germans. The soldiers had surrendered to the Germans. And the Germans then got them all in a group and opened fire on them, shot every one of them.

And all but two were killed. I thought, man, that is depressing.

Well, he wants to look at something like that on his birthday. There's got to be something better than that. So a year later, I found that the

British got revenge, and they sunk the German battleship Bismarck.

So it was a banner day for the British. Not so much for the 2 ,000 Germans who went to the bottom of the ocean along with the ship.

All right. So maybe by now you've figured out the significance of 22 ,646.

Well, here it is. Several years ago, I was reading Psalm 90.

And I decided I was going to take one of the verses in Psalm 90 very literally. Now, this psalm begins with the extolling of God's eternal existence.

Moses wrote this psalm. Don't know exactly when he wrote it, but Moses wrote this psalm. And he opens it up by saying,

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. You get the contrast there, right?

Generations come and generations go. But the Lord is constant.

He's been the same dwelling place in each successive generation. And then he explains why.

He says of the Lord, From everlasting to everlasting, you are

God. So from eternity past to eternity in the future, you are

God. And the contrast goes on. He continues it. He says, A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Like, boom, you know, it's here and it's gone. But man, he says, Man, 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. So here's

God. His perspective is that a thousand years vanish just like that.

And so man, therefore, in his whole lifetime, he's like a dream. He's like grass that sprouts up in the morning and is renewed and flourishes in the morning.

And in the evening, it fades and withers away. And then a little while later, he offers,

Moses offers this well -known summary. He says, 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.

We fly away. I've often wondered when Moses wrote this. It seems like he would have to have written it before the

Exodus. I mean, because Moses got that call to go to Egypt and lead the people of Israel, the

Hebrews, out of Egypt when he was 80 years of age. So he would have been past 80 when he wrote this.

So I'm thinking, I'm wondering if he wrote this when he was like 76 years old. You remember what Moses was doing before he led

Israel out of Egypt? He was tending sheep, his father -in -law's sheep, and he was doing so out in the wilderness.

And when he got that call, we read that he was on the backside of the wilderness by the Mount Horeb and saw that bush.

So he's probably 75, 76 years old. He's had this long, hard day working out in the sun, tending to the sheep.

And some of them have been a little cranky and tried to wander away. He had to go get them and get them back in.

So at the end of the day, his bones are aching. He's tired and he's weary. And he writes this psalm.

I don't know. I don't know if that's the case or not. But his point is, nevertheless, quite insightful.

We may live to be 80 years of age. We may live to be 70. But however long we live, it's toil and trouble.

And before you know it, we soon fly away. So whatever the case, it's what came next that struck me all those years ago.

Moses then wrote, So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Now, clearly, Moses' point is that reflecting on how swiftly the years fly by and how few of them we have left, especially from God's perspective, where a thousand years are like yesterday when it's passed, that such a reflection should motivate us by God's grace to seek

God's wisdom for living the few years that he gives us. So that got me to wondering, how many days have

I already lived? How many of those days have been spent? How many of them have actually been invested?

And then, of course, the next question is, well, how many days do I have left?

So this pondering was in the old days, you know, before people Googled everything. So I got out my calculator.

Yeah, so it wasn't that much in the old days. But I got out this calculator and I decided

I'm going to figure this out. And I multiplied the number of years I'd already lived times 365. I calculated the number of leap years and added that number in.

And then added the number of days since my last birthday and came up with the total number, whatever that was.

And once I got that number, I worked backwards. I said, OK, if I live to be 80 years old, how many years is it till I hit 80?

And I just calculated backward times 365, add in the leap years, the number of days till my next birthday.

And that's how many days I have left if I live to be 80 years of age. So I have no clue what those numbers were back then.

I could probably go to some old devotional journals and try to dig it up.

But the point is, and the reason I could do that is because I used to write down underneath the date those numbers.

Number of days lived, number of days left. Somewhere along the line, I got out of that routine until I read something earlier this year.

I'm not exactly sure when it was. It may have been around the middle of March, you know, like when this whole virus crisis thing started, perhaps.

But it got me to thinking about that exercise. And I thought, I want to do this again.

And so this time I've entered the 21st century and I googled it. It's very simple. You can just ask

Google this question. How many days since May 27th, 1958? And about as fast as yesterday flew by, you've got your answer.

22 ,646. Well, here's where it gets interesting.

You ask the question, then how many days until May 27th, 2038?

I'm 80. The short answer, not enough. But the interesting answer is that the first thing that popped up when

I asked Google that question was 6 ,574. But then

I looked down at some of the other results and one of the next websites had a different number. It said 6 ,548.

I said, wait a minute. How did that site lose me 26 days in the process?

So I did some further confirmation. Yeah, it's 6 ,574. Tomorrow it's going to be 6 ,573.

Before you know it, it is going to be 6 ,548. Well, anyway, we recognize what another psalmist,

David, wrote when he said, to the Lord, my times are in your hand.

So the reality is I may never live out that full 6 ,574 days to reach age 80.

On the other hand, I may reach 90 and I live to see my 10 ,000th day pass from here, from right now.

Who knows? But God, of course. But the point of this little exercise is not to set the date of one's demise.

It is instead to live wisely while I live. Live wisely today.

And these days are going to end all too soon. So today, live wisely.

Oh, oh that I did so consistently, faithfully. Well, isn't that the prayer of Moses after all?

Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. So on this, my birthday,

I challenge myself to continue that practice of counting the days and considering how they're being spent or invested to live wisely.

Get a heart of wisdom. I would encourage you to do something like that. Not necessarily technically and specifically writing down the days and all that kind of thing.

But just to ponder, how much of life is left? I better live it wisely while I have it.

Let me encourage you to that end. Let's have a word of prayer and we'll get on with the rest of the day. Our Father in heaven, teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

And may this day count for something, something of worthwhile endeavor for your glory.

We pray in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right. Well, you have a good day and God bless you as you go through it.