- 00:00
- Well, good afternoon on day 22 ,646. Yes, you heard that right.
- 00:07
- I know it's only day 67 of the, well, no one's really sheltering in place anymore thing.
- 00:15
- And it's not the way it feels like it's been 22 ,000. I'm calculating something a little bit different.
- 00:20
- You see, along with 248 ,196 other Americans, today is my birthday.
- 00:27
- Though I'm really not sure how that's even possible. I mean, I just had one a couple of months ago.
- 00:34
- 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.
- 00:45
- You know, I just had one of those just like the other day, it seems like.
- 00:50
- And there's, well, you know, maybe 20 years ago, I would have said the next one is a long way off.
- 00:57
- 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
- 01:10
- 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.
- 01:21
- Well, by the way, I thought, okay, since my birthday, who else has had a birthday on May 27th?
- 01:27
- I decided to figure out any celebrities, you know, that I would know that also share my birthday.
- 01:34
- 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.
- 01:42
- First one that came up was, let's see, 1924, a guy by the name of Ernest Ingenito.
- 01:49
- Ernest Ingenito, and his claim to fame is he is an American murderer who died in 1995.
- 01:55
- And then there's four years after he was born, Tia Musgrave, a
- 02:00
- 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.
- 02:09
- The last one mentioned was born in 1989, young guy, Igor Morozov, who's an
- 02:17
- Estonian footballer. I'm sure everybody in Estonia knows who he is, but foreign to me.
- 02:25
- 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.
- 02:34
- And sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. In 1940, 99 British soldiers were rounded up by the
- 02:41
- 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.
- 02:51
- And all but two were killed. I thought, man, that is depressing.
- 02:59
- 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
- 03:04
- British got revenge, and they sunk the German battleship Bismarck.
- 03:10
- 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.
- 03:20
- All right. So maybe by now you've figured out the significance of 22 ,646.
- 03:26
- Well, here it is. Several years ago, I was reading Psalm 90.
- 03:32
- 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.
- 03:43
- Moses wrote this psalm. Don't know exactly when he wrote it, but Moses wrote this psalm. And he opens it up by saying,
- 03:49
- Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. You get the contrast there, right?
- 03:57
- Generations come and generations go. But the Lord is constant.
- 04:04
- He's been the same dwelling place in each successive generation. And then he explains why.
- 04:10
- He says of the Lord, From everlasting to everlasting, you are
- 04:16
- God. So from eternity past to eternity in the future, you are
- 04:21
- 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.
- 04:33
- 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.
- 04:42
- In the morning, it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening, it fades and withers. So here's
- 04:47
- God. His perspective is that a thousand years vanish just like that.
- 04:53
- 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.
- 05:04
- And in the evening, it fades and withers away. And then a little while later, he offers,
- 05:10
- Moses offers this well -known summary. He says, The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength, eighty.
- 05:18
- Yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone, and we fly away.
- 05:25
- We fly away. I've often wondered when Moses wrote this. It seems like he would have to have written it before the
- 05:34
- Exodus. I mean, because Moses got that call to go to Egypt and lead the people of Israel, the
- 05:42
- Hebrews, out of Egypt when he was 80 years of age. So he would have been past 80 when he wrote this.
- 05:49
- 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
- 05:55
- Israel out of Egypt? He was tending sheep, his father -in -law's sheep, and he was doing so out in the wilderness.
- 06:03
- 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.
- 06:10
- So he's probably 75, 76 years old. He's had this long, hard day working out in the sun, tending to the sheep.
- 06:18
- 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.
- 06:24
- So at the end of the day, his bones are aching. He's tired and he's weary. And he writes this psalm.
- 06:31
- I don't know. I don't know if that's the case or not. But his point is, nevertheless, quite insightful.
- 06:40
- 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.
- 06:46
- 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.
- 06:54
- Moses then wrote, So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
- 07:03
- 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
- 07:21
- God's wisdom for living the few years that he gives us. So that got me to wondering, how many days have
- 07:29
- I already lived? How many of those days have been spent? How many of them have actually been invested?
- 07:38
- And then, of course, the next question is, well, how many days do I have left?
- 07:44
- So this pondering was in the old days, you know, before people Googled everything. So I got out my calculator.
- 07:51
- Yeah, so it wasn't that much in the old days. But I got out this calculator and I decided
- 07:57
- 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.
- 08:06
- And then added the number of days since my last birthday and came up with the total number, whatever that was.
- 08:13
- 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?
- 08:20
- And I just calculated backward times 365, add in the leap years, the number of days till my next birthday.
- 08:26
- 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.
- 08:37
- I could probably go to some old devotional journals and try to dig it up.
- 08:43
- But the point is, and the reason I could do that is because I used to write down underneath the date those numbers.
- 08:51
- 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.
- 09:00
- 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.
- 09:09
- But it got me to thinking about that exercise. And I thought, I want to do this again.
- 09:17
- And so this time I've entered the 21st century and I googled it. It's very simple. You can just ask
- 09:22
- Google this question. How many days since May 27th, 1958? And about as fast as yesterday flew by, you've got your answer.
- 09:32
- 22 ,646. Well, here's where it gets interesting.
- 09:38
- You ask the question, then how many days until May 27th, 2038?
- 09:47
- I'm 80. The short answer, not enough. But the interesting answer is that the first thing that popped up when
- 09:56
- I asked Google that question was 6 ,574. But then
- 10:02
- I looked down at some of the other results and one of the next websites had a different number. It said 6 ,548.
- 10:10
- I said, wait a minute. How did that site lose me 26 days in the process?
- 10:17
- So I did some further confirmation. Yeah, it's 6 ,574. Tomorrow it's going to be 6 ,573.
- 10:25
- Before you know it, it is going to be 6 ,548. Well, anyway, we recognize what another psalmist,
- 10:32
- David, wrote when he said, to the Lord, my times are in your hand.
- 10:38
- So the reality is I may never live out that full 6 ,574 days to reach age 80.
- 10:46
- On the other hand, I may reach 90 and I live to see my 10 ,000th day pass from here, from right now.
- 10:54
- Who knows? But God, of course. But the point of this little exercise is not to set the date of one's demise.
- 11:03
- It is instead to live wisely while I live. Live wisely today.
- 11:11
- And these days are going to end all too soon. So today, live wisely.
- 11:18
- Oh, oh that I did so consistently, faithfully. Well, isn't that the prayer of Moses after all?
- 11:26
- Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. So on this, my birthday,
- 11:32
- I challenge myself to continue that practice of counting the days and considering how they're being spent or invested to live wisely.
- 11:44
- 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.
- 11:53
- But just to ponder, how much of life is left? I better live it wisely while I have it.
- 12:00
- 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.
- 12:12
- And may this day count for something, something of worthwhile endeavor for your glory.
- 12:20
- 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.
