The most precious resource

What is your most precious resource? You have only a limited amount of it; it is not renewable; once spent it can not be recovered. You know precisely what you have spent, but you never know how much of it you have remaining. A decision to spend it in one direction is at the same time a decision not to use it in other directions. It can be invested wisely or poorly, it can reap dividends or regrets. What is this resource?

The answer? Time.

Moses wrote what I call the 'time psalm': Psalm 90. He begins by contrasting the eternality of God with mankind's brief and transitory life. Moses uses a metaphor found throughout Scripture: man's life is like the grass which flourishes today, and is gone tomorrow. God's fury expressed at our sin causes our days to decline.

So Moses constructs an eminently sensible prayer: "teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom." Moses prays that God would teach us to value our most precious resource, time. He prays that God's wrath would turn from us, and that we would experience His covenant faithfulness, and that the days of our joy would outweigh the days of our affliction. And lastly he prays that the God Who is from everlasting to everlasting would place His favor on us, and establish, confirm, or make of lasting value the work of our hands.

Time. Neither you, nor I, have any clue as to how much we have left. We know what we have spent so far, but we don't know when our time runs out. In light of our coming appointment at the judgment seat of the everlasting God, Paul the apostle tells us, "We also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent [meaning, dead], to be pleasing to Him" (2 Corinthians 5:9).

That ambition will produce no regrets on the final day.