Psalm 90 carries the superscription A Prayer of Moses, the man of God — the only psalm in the Psalter attributed to him. Whether composed by Moses himself or in the Mosaic tradition, it reads like the meditation of a man who watched a generation die in the wilderness because of unbelief. The audience is Israel at worship, but the framing is brutally honest: God is everlasting, we are grass, and the years are short. The psalm asks God to do for the worshipper what the wilderness did for Moses — teach him that his time is finite and therefore precious.

From the writers we read together

Francis Schaeffer

pastor, apologist, founder of L'Abri (1912-1984)

Schaeffer wrote No Little People against the modern temptation to measure a life by scale. He had watched evangelicals chase platforms and influence as if a small life were a wasted one. His answer was that the question of significance is not how many days or how large a stage, but whether the days — few or many, public or hidden — are spent under the lordship of Christ. Psalm 90:12 is the prayer behind that answer. To number your days is to stop measuring them by ambition and start measuring them by faithfulness.

Schaeffer also insisted that wisdom is downstream of honesty. We do not get a heart of wisdom by inspirational thinking; we get it by facing the hard arithmetic of mortality and asking God what to do with what is left. That is the move Moses makes in this psalm. He looks at the corpses in the wilderness, looks at the eternity of God, and asks for a teachable heart. Today is one of the days you are being asked to number. It will not come back.