Let's look to the Lord in prayer before we look into his word. Father, we are thankful for your faithfulness and your mercies that are new every morning. Lord, we're thankful for this opportunity that you've given to us to hear your word read, and taught to sing praises to God. We pray that you would help me, that I would make it clear, at least not stand in the way of your word, and Lord, that you, through your spirit, would work in the heart of everyone who is listening to believe and trust you for who you are.

Father, we pray for Eric as he's away. We pray that you would bless the opportunity he has to preach in Mexico and for his time there. Lord, we thank you for our other sister churches, and we pray for all of our brothers, some of whom have already started to preach and minister the word, and some who have yet to do it, Lord, we pray that you would help them to preach Christ and that you would be glorified and magnified in your word.

Pray for everyone who is suffering with one thing or another, Lord, we pray that you would give a sense of your love and your mercy and you would help us to see our utter need for you. Be with us this morning, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, if you can work your way to Psalm 90, I'm actually gonna read from the ESV, the English Standard Version, not that it's my favorite version, but I really, enjoy the way that it lays out this passage and you know I know some read along while somebody else is reading and certainly if you if you think you need to do that go ahead and do that but I would encourage you to just listen to this psalm. We'll have opportunity to go back through it again but listen attentively to what God has to say to us through his word.

Psalm 90, 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, and 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 70, or even by reason of strength, 80, 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 the 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. A couple of months ago I, in my reading, came across this psalm and I just couldn't, I don't know if you've ever had this happen with a passage of scripture or an idea, just couldn't get it out of my head.

Little did I know, well, two things as I worked through this. One, the more I looked at it, at least in the beginning, the less confident I was that I would ever want to teach on such a passage. I would say if I had to categorize this, it's a brutally honest passage, perhaps more honest than we ourselves care to be.

I think sometimes when it comes to the matter of prayer before God, we are so worried, especially if we're in public, how others might see us, that we wouldn't dare pray in the way that Moses did. And then what is even more remarkable when you think about this, typically when we think of the psalms, we think about David. And certainly many of the psalms are psalms of David, but a psalm of Moses, that is not something we think about.

But if we reflect on it, of course, there are the songs of Moses in the first five books of the Bible, and Revelation talks about the song of Moses and the lamb. And we should not think it is unseemly that Moses himself would be, one, called a man of God, and two, that he would have a reason to pray before God in the way that he did.

Earlier, James read from Numbers chapter 20 And while we can't say specifically that is the historical setting behind what Moses puts down here, certainly it seems to fit. The children of Israel for years had troubled him and troubled God, more importantly, and Moses came, as it were, to the end of himself with those people and his horrific sin there where instead of listening to God and speaking to the rock, instead he strikes the rock.

And his sister and then later on in the chapter, his brother both die after years and years and years of God killing off a generation before they would go into the wilderness. It was for that sin that Moses was not allowed to enter into the promised land.

And I don't know about you, again, when I think of the law of Moses, of course we see it as something we can never attain to. But I think we should think more about the person of Moses, and when he comes to mind, hopefully after hearing this message and considering this psalm on your own, you'll think a little bit differently of Moses.

Moses, of course, is a great sinner, as we all are. And little did I know I was continuing a series that Eric didn't know he was doing on flawed men of God, but certainly it's here. And little did I know that I would be teaching on prayer. Probably I feel that I am least qualified to teach on such a subject.

And yet, in what Moses sets forward here, I think there's just such a pure honesty that we understand how great our God is that we can go to him like this. As we reflect on this psalm, we don't see Moses making excuses for his sins, but we do see him lamenting his sins. He sees God for who he is, and he sees himself as we should in this psalm, as we truly are, and at first, there's a lament, a strain,

And yet the hope is, is when we see God for who he is, and ourselves for who we truly are, we plead before God, we set our pleas before him. So in the first 11 verses, I would say we have the lament of Moses.

Now when I was a newer Christian, They had different acronyms and ways to remember the right way to pray. And to a certain extent, Moses follows that. You have to praise God before you come to him in petition. But if you didn't, If you weren't familiar with some of the background, you might look at some of the wording here and say, Moses, don't you think you're going a little too far in the way you're wording things here?

He asked for example, to be glad for as many days as God had afflicted him. I don't think we have that level of honesty in our prayer, or at least I don't. Maybe you're more honest than that. So often we come before God and we seek to justify ourselves, and again, as I said earlier, I don't see any of that here. Don't read this as Moses being snarky or trying to get a dig in against God. He knows what he deserves in the flesh.

So at the end of his life, probably with the promised land not very far off, after burying a multitude of people and seeing his sister die and seeing his brother die, as I said later in Numbers 20, I think it's a fitting place for him to meditate on what's next. And I read the first two verses as somewhat of a chorus or a refrain, because keep in mind, Words were meant for the worship of the people of God, not just now, or not just then, I should say, but for all time.

And Moses, as he's reflecting on his situation, he's thinking about the nature and Spurgeon does a masterful job of this. I won't get anywhere near it, but just think about it. For years and years, they had trudged through the desert in tents, and they would go from one place to another in heat and in cold, and they would no sooner settle in a place, and it'd be like, oh, you're gonna keep going. I forget which writer said this, but he said, Moses lived in tents and talked about the temporariness of our lives, but he said, when you see how some people live, you wonder if they understand the temporary nature of their life.

But this contrast is what makes Moses lament. because he is going to be kept out of the promised land. He has spent years wandering in the desert, but the first thing that comes to his mind is how God has been his dwelling place. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. What a magnificent thing to grab a hold of. There's a lot we can worry about in life, and I'm not saying we should live in a way where we're careless, but when our outward life is such that it gives us distress, And if our outward life gives us distress because of what we ourselves have done, the first place we should turn is what Moses turned to here.

The first place we should turn is to God. God, Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born, before creation itself, or you brought forth the earth and the world from everlasting into everlasting, you are God. I know in theology classes that I've taken, they make a big deal about the difference between everlasting and eternal. Well, Moses has us covered here. Go all the way back as far as you can in the past, Everlasting that direction, and everlasting into the future you can, and God is God.

The first hymn that we sang was inspired by this psalm. And when you think about it, it is a great comfort to think of God being eternal. There's nowhere in time where we're not covered And there's nowhere in time he's not our shelter, he's not our dwelling place, our place of rest. But then Moses moves on and he wants to talk about the contrast here. And again, remember that Moses penned the words of Genesis. when you read this, you turn men back to dust. Well, God created us from the dust. Moses was given that creation account and that understanding. And in comparison to the everlasting nature of God, from everlasting to everlasting, men are dust. And God says, return to dust, O sons of men.

And then for 1,000 years in your sight, well, I'm quite a bit older than when I first came to understand the grace of the doctrines as Joe would tell me, not the doctrines of grace, but the grace of the doctrines that we believe. But 1,000 years, that's, a long time, but to God it's like a day that has just gone by. And I'm sure that at the end of the day, especially if you've been busy and you're trying to accomplish things, I've heard this lament, speaking of laments, at home is like my list had 10 things and the day is gone and I only got a couple of them done.

But like a day that is gone, or like a watch in the night, so an hour or two, depending on how exactly it was divided up. The ancients would talk about watching for robbers and wild animals and whatnot. There would be somebody awake at night and a watch in the night. A thousand years, no different to God.

And then we read about the temporariness of man. You sweep them away in the sleep of death. And I do like how the NIV renders that. It puts the ideas together. They're like the new grass of the morning, though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered. And that figure comes out over and over again in scripture, and it must have been something that impressed them of the temporary nature of life, because in a desert environment, you would have dew in the morning, everything would look like it was green, but it didn't last through the day. By evening, it's dried and withered. That's the temporary nature of our life.

So we have God's eternity or his everlastingness in the past and in the future. We have man's brevity. And then in the next few verses, we have sin's toll. Verse seven, it says, we're consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sin in the light of your presence. All of our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan. The length of our days is 70 years or 80, if we have the strength. Yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and we fly away.

Some very good and learned men of God see these passages and they say, well, this only applies to Moses. And I'll grant you this, I'll say it applied to Moses in a very specific way because God had covenanted with Moses and the people of God and no sooner had he covenanted with them in the, what we call the Mosaic Covenant, that they sinned against him.

And God, if you remember Psalm 95 repeated in Numbers 11, or actually originates in Numbers 11, Psalm 95, and then in the book of Hebrews, God said that he loathed that generation. And some very good commentators say, well, we shouldn't think of God in this way. But I think we need to consider that in Adam, we all are being consumed by the anger of God.

We who are the people of God, just like Moses, who's here by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said to be the man of God, our deeds and the deeds of our father Adam don't go without impact in this life. And think about it, Moses knows that land that he can see off in the distance, he is not going to go. But he's contemplating God, he's considering God for who he is.

And I know Joe said this often, if not in this pulpit definitely to me in talking about these things and I'm in complete agreement is we should never come to the place where we think about the grace of God as if God is just winking at sin. We should never look at God in a way where we look at him and think somehow his holiness is just no longer to be considered.

No, Moses does the opposite here. When he contemplates the anger, the righteous anger that God had, he's terrified by it. When he thinks about his sin, and I think when he thinks of secret sin, he means sins that he doesn't even know he's committing, he knows that it's in God's presence.

all of our days, in a sense, pass away under the wrath of God. Adam's fall and the impact on this world, the whole creation, groans and travails now. Yes, God will save us from this place and he gives us rest, and that's what Moses will ask for here in a minute, but he doesn't deny the righteousness of God for his anger against them and against him. He talks about this, we finish our years with a moan, the English Standard Version ESV said with a sigh. And I know It's something when you hear somebody sigh, you know they're at the kind of the end of their patience, their end of their breath, as it were, they're done. And he talks here about the length of our days. And Moses had already lived longer than this. He isn't trying to set infallibly how long someone can live. What he's saying is, is that on average, 70 or 80 years is all there is. And that span is but trouble, and sorrow that quickly passes and we fly away. Yes, God is eternal. We are of time, of a brief time, and sin has its toll.

But probably one of the hardest hitting verses in this psalm is, Who knows the power of your anger? None of us do. We think we do. We think we understand the idea of God punishing sin. And if we have sense, we're thankful that we're not the objects of his wrath, not eternally. But that doesn't diminish that aspect of his character because Moses says here, your wrath is as great as the fear, or let me put it to you this way, as the worship that is due you. Don't ever diminish one of the attributes of God for others. I know that that was another danger of a biblical seminary training is like, what's the primary attribute of God? It's like, looking at it now, I would say asking the question shows you don't understand God. All of his attributes are who he is, and we do not know the power of any of his attributes, not as fully as we think. Who knows the power of his anger? I think there's only one man who really knows that, and that's the Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered in the place of his people and paid the penalty of our sins and was completely under the wrath of God.

Well, after this contemplation, this lament about God, And as Moses reflected on God, and just before I go on in this second section, think about it. Moses stood before God. He went up on the mountain and even though God shielded him as it were from his full glory, the reflection of the glory of God was so strong that the people of Israel couldn't bear to be near him. He was a man who understood more than Most of us do in this life what it meant to be with God and his sin troubled him. Well, with this lament he turns not to a petition, not to a grocery list of things he wants God to do, not to a needlepoint or whatever you call it, a saying that you hang on the wall, but a very real plea, and it starts off with a request to be taught. To truly be taught of God is a grace and a mercy that we should never take for granted. Asking God to teach us is the most important thing I believe we can do as believers in this life. And Moses asked to be taught to number our days right. He's not asking for an arithmetic, you know, 365 days a year, you know, 24 hours in a day, times however many years, 70 or 80 years. He's not asking for that. He's asking that God would show him to value the time that he's been given.

I think it was Augustine, but it was one of the older writers who said, scarcely are we alive before we realize the wisdom of heavenly arithmetic. And that's a paraphrase, but the idea is we're barely alive and we're up in our later years and we realize how important it is to take in accounting of the days that we have left. And he doesn't do that to try to figure out how long I have, how long is my 401k gonna last, or how long is this thing or that thing gonna last, as important as those things can be to calculate. But he says that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

So not only does Moses want to be taught, he wants God's wisdom in how he acts and what he thinks. And perhaps he's thinking about that and meditating on that as it's being written down. And then he moves on to his next petition. And the NIV here has relent. The ESV had return. It's actually the same word as in verse three when he says you turn men back to dust. And I guess in a sense we want God to turn to us, return, oh Lord, how long will it be? But there's also a sense when we know our sinfulness and the holiness of God, there's a sense of relent. Turn away from me, God, I can't, it's too much.

But certainly in this prayer of Moses, in light of all the people he's seen die, all the misery he's seen, brought about by their sin, his sin. He just asked for, please for pity, have compassion or pity on your servants. So wonderful that God does that. He doesn't say, God, you know that I'm your child, I deserve this. No, he says, have compassion on me and on the people of God, and he's including and identifying himself with the people who have been dying with him in the wilderness. He's asking for compassion for them as well as for him. He doesn't set himself up as something superior to them.

And then, not only does he want to be taught, not only does he want God to turn in a way that shows pity and compassion He wants his satisfaction to be in God. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. And then he goes on, make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us for as many years. as we have seen trouble.

Moses doesn't ask for an easy life. I remember having this conversation, another conversation I had with Joe was, you know, there are people, and he, I believe he related, perhaps even from the pulpit, I don't recall exactly, a story of somebody who either sang or prayed a certain way and essentially their life came unglued after that and he and I talked about this idea that people are like, you know, I think we should pray for more persecution. We should pray for more affliction. No. I want God to decide exactly how much of that I need and not a speck of dust more than that. But we need to be satisfied in God in all these things. And notice, he doesn't say, make me able to be satisfied. No, he says, to God, you satisfy me.

All of Moses' prayer here is of the sort where he's in complete and utter dependence upon God to do it. And Gil gives this idea that Moses here isn't just thinking about tomorrow morning, although certainly there's this, just nature how things will be is like, maybe I'll be better in the morning. Perhaps you've woken up in the middle of the night and had a bad night and you think, well, maybe it'll be better in the morning. Well, Gil says here, while that might be in view, again, paraphrasing Gil here, he says the resurrection is in mind here, that it is that eternal, that everlasting morning that we have with God that Moses is saying we should plea that God would show us, satisfy us in the morning of the resurrection with your unfailing love that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days.

Then Moses has a future orientation and When I was younger, I definitely was not trying to make this a Joe reminiscent moment, but I know Joe had made the comment when he moved here, he was, when he was young and excited about being here, he's like, well, I'll go to Northwest Iowa and show those people what's what, right, and fix everything that was there. And he said, as I, Gotten older, I realized how fruitless that idea was. God would do what he would do, and I would just be there for him. But Joe put his time in and was faithful to teach here because he understood the long game of what God would have him to do.

And I think Moses is thinking the same way. Moses is not going into the land. Moses can draw up all the blueprints and battle plans and everything that he wants, but Moses is gonna die and he knows he's gonna die before they go into the land. But what Moses pleads for here is that God's deeds would be shown to his servants, and his splendor to their children. He's thinking in the future, when I'm gone, Lord, I pray there is still a work amongst the people of God, and he's praying for it. I may be at the end of my life, and sin and affliction may have cut it shorter than it might have been otherwise, of course, apart from the sovereignty of God, but certainly he can look at it that way, but that doesn't stop him from praying for future grace.

And then he says, may the favor, and I actually like the way I think it's the King James and maybe the New King James has this as well. May the beauty of the Lord our God rest upon us and establish the work of our hands for us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. If any man apart from the Lord Jesus Christ knew the beauty of the Lord God, it was Moses. And his prayer was not a prayer of spite. It was not a prayer of selfishness to get what he wanted. But it was a prayer that God would establish the work. Yes, they would do the work. Everywhere there's a work of God, there's a preacher and a church, there are people who work with their hands, but they should never think that it's their work that establishes them, but rather the work of God, the deeds of God would be shown to them. and the beauty of God would be displayed to them.

As I thought about this passage and how to bring this to a close, didn't really have a good ending for this message. And then I came across something that Martin Luther wrote about this passage. And essentially what he said Moses did here was Moses laid hold on God and believed that he is merciful and gracious. He laid hold of God and believed that he is merciful and gracious.

When you think about your life, I think about mine. Hopefully God will bring us to a place where we don't want to make excuses for how we live. We don't complain. Maybe we lament some of the things that have done. But I pray and Moses prayed that we would learn from God, that God would teach us to be dependent upon him.

James. We'll close by standing and singing number 580, When Peace Like a River. Number 580.