What's the Number of Your Days?

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom”

Ps.90:12

How many days do we have left here in our mortal bodies?

If I live to a ripe age of 120 I would have 35,430 days left. Now that seems like a lot but compared to the 8,521 days I’ve already spent on the earth, it’s not that much really.

Anyways, what is the essence of this verse? Is it to motivate us all to get our calculators out and do the math or is meant to teach us something much greater? I believe God wants to reveal to us how temporary and short our time is here. I sometimes think about old men on their deathbeds and when they look back at all they done they remember what was really important.

Mark Twain said, “Buy land, they're not making it anymore.” You know what else they’re not making anymore of either? – Time. Because if someone were making it they would be the richest person on the planet. Time is more precious then oil and more valuable then gold, that is if you place a high enough value on it. Now if your personality is like mine you may automatically be thinking of ways you can improve time management. There is nothing wrong with that but if you would, refrain from going down that path for now. I want to bring our focus to wisdom not efficiency.

The reason God wants us to number our days is that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. So what is wisdom? Answering that question may take us the rest of our lives but Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is where wisdom starts. And Jesus is the wisdom of God (1Cor 1:24). So we are introduced to wisdom through the fear of the Lord and wisdom also then dwells in our hearts when we ask Jesus to come and live in us. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and is crying out to every one of us. The question is, do we have an ear to hear what the Spirit is saying?

So I said that to say this, if we are willing to take an inventory of our temporal existence here I believe we will begin to see our desperate need for wisdom. Our American culture offers us an endless supply of choices and paths to take in life. We can seek after so many things in life only to discover they had been distractions from the call of God on our lives. One last verse I would like to leave with you:

“See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,

Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”

Eph 5:15,16