Soldier On! w/Leroy Garrett   — Occasional Essays

So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:12 NKJ).

I choose this as a New Year's prayer, but it is an appropriate petition for all year long. The So with which it begins is a Therefore, and there is that fitting interpretive rule, "When you come to a therefore, stop and ask what it is there for." This time the conclusion is given -- the So or Therefore – in reference to the brevity of life the writer has been describing.

"All our days have passed away in your wrath," he says, recognizing that all our "iniquities" and "secret sins" are laid out before the Lord. He goes on to lament, "We finish our years like a sigh," which means something like "Our lives pass like a sigh" But life is not only brief, it is also frail. And all this is in contrast to the power and goodness of eternal God. This is the wisdom for which the writer prays -- to realize our frailty and finitude before Almighty God.

Of all the psalms this Psalm 90 is the only one ascribed to Moses, and it is one of the more scriptural psalms, with allusions to Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Job. It also inspired what some believe to be the greatest hymn ever composed in English -- Isaac Watts' O God, Our Help In Ages Past, composed in 1719, and sung by Christians of all persuasions all these years. It can be viewed as a unity hymn. If we can sing this hymn together, we should be able to work and worship together.

The first stanza can be seen as an extension of our New Year's prayer.

O God our help in ages past,
  Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
  And our eternal home.

The second verse has a line I find especially comforting: Sufficient is thine arm alone, and our defense is sure. But it is the fifth verse that captures the theme of Psalm 90, the brevity of life, and that should give us pause to seek wisdom for our short sojourn on planet earth.

Time, like an everlasting rolling stream,
  Bears all its sons away,
They fly forgotten, as a dream
  Dies at the opening day.

  Life is not only brief, but once we "fly away" as the psalmist puts it, we are soon forgotten -- like a dream that one cannot recall. We may have "threescore years and ten," the writer allows," and if by reason of strength, fourscore," but what are a few decades? The writer is more of a realist than a pessimist. He is telling it like it is. Life is short! So . . .we need wisdom for life's brief sojourn.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life was even shorter since he died as a martyr at the hands of the Nazis. On New Year's day, 1945, the year he was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Hitler, he composed a prayer from his prison cell. It not only reflects the faith of a man soon to be executed, but it serves to define the spiritual wisdom for which the psalmist prayed.

With every power of Good to stay and guide me,
  comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I'll live these days with you in thought beside me,
  and pass with you into the coming year.

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us,
  boldly we'll face the future, be it what it may.
  and, oh, most surely on each new year's day!

  Teach us to number our days is to pray that we will realize that all earthly glory -- all its fame and fortune -- is like the mist that appears momentarily and then is gone. We make ambitious plans for retirement, but for how long? We build houses that will be lived in mostly by others, for our years are so few. The writer of Ecclesiastes lamented that even if we live "a thousand years twice" we are left unsatisfied.

  That we may gain a heart of wisdom. This is the one thing the Bible tells us to pray for, wisdom, as in James 1:5. And the Scriptures tell us that wisdom begins with reverence for God (Pro. 1:7). To "gain a heart of wisdom" we must realize our ignorance --- that we stand before God empty-handed, with no way either to buy or merit his grace. The wise person is on a journey in search of truth and integrity, a journey that never ends. It is a journey of self-examination and self-improvement. Socrates taught wisdom when he insisted that "The unexamined life is not worth living."

  A heart of wisdom is a humble heart. It is the servant's heart. Shakespeare had a character say, "What meat does Caesar feed on that he has become so great." So long as people feed on the meat of self-indulgence and self-importance they will be fools rather than wise. The Lord could have been defining wisdom when he said, "This is the person to whom I will look, he who has a humble and contrite heart, and that reverences my word" (Isaiah 66:2).

  William Barclay, the late Scottish theologian. wrote a prayer on wisdom that would also serve as an expansion of our New Year's prayer. I have no better way of wishing you a fruitful 2006 than to pass along this prayer for wisdom.

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