The Measure of My Days – Devotions for 4-2-25
Psalm 39:4 “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am.”
I had a friend whose wife died suddenly in a car accident. It came out of the blue on an icy road in the winter. One moment she was there and then she was gone. He was devastated.
After a few months I met with him, and he brought up her death and this verse and a similar one in Psalm 90:12 “So teach us to number our days that we may have a heart of wisdom.” Then he gave me the sum total of all the days his wife lived on this earth. He calculated them to the day. He had the exact number of her days summed up. In some ways it was a cold number, but a sobering one.
We don’t like to think about death. We like to think that we will live forever, that our days will continue to go on and on. But the truth is that we all have a set number of days to live on this earth. A long life of 100 would be 36,500 days. Most people live fewer days than that.
Sobering to think about isn’t it. What is the number of our days?
I don’t want this devotional to be morbid and I don’t think the Psalm writers did either. Psalm 90 was written by Moses and is the oldest Psalm in the bible, Psalm 39 was written by King David to be a song of the church.
What both Psalms show, in different ways, is that we need the Lord. Verse 7 in Psalm 39 says, “My hope is in you.” And Psalm 90:17 says, “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us.” Both of these show us that it is not our death that God wants us to look at, but rather our life. How will we live? What shall we do with the days we have? Do we live for ourselves and do all that we can to make ourselves happy, or do we try to serve the Lord? Do we serve self or God? Who do we live for in this life with each and every day that God gives us on this earth?
Obviously, the Lord wants us to consider that He has put us here to live this day, and every day He give us, for a purpose. God wants us to live for Him and for others, not just to serve ourselves.
So, as we consider the measure of our days, we need to consider that there are different ways to measure them. We can measure them based on how much fun we had, how many different things we were able to do in this life, how many trophies we accumulate or pictures we have of us in various places. We can measure our life based on personal accomplishments or we can measure our life by what we have been able to do for the Lord.
How do you measure your life?
As we consider how many days God has given us and how many more days we have in this life, let us consider how we have lived them and how we can live them. Let us consider using the days we have left on this earth for Him. That will look differently for each one of us because God created us each uniquely. But, using our days for God’s glory and good will help us look back on them with much greater satisfaction than looking at a wall full of trophies or a scrapbook full of our faces in all sorts of places.
That is true wisdom, to know our place in God’s world, why He made us and why He has and is giving us each day of life in this world. When we live our life doing what the Lord created us to do, we are going to be filled with great joy.
Pastor Gary.
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