Fulfill Me to the Finish: Praying with Knowledge as We Age

This summer time, I started reviewing all my journals. As I write, I’m nonetheless plodding by the handwritten journals I stored in my twenties, transcribing them into digital paperwork as I am going (for simpler future reference).

I’ve discovered this to be a superb train for my soul. It’s allowed me to revisit seasons of religious desperation and breakthrough, confusion and readability, unbelief and faithfulness, sorrow and pleasure. And it’s fueled my gratitude for the way a lot previous grace I’ve obtained, the extraordinary loving-kindness of God within the lifetime of an all-too-ordinary, usually stumbling, earnest younger man. My journal entries will not be the stuff of nice religious classics; I’m no David Brainerd or Henry Martyn or Robert Murray M’Cheyne. However being humbled can be good for my soul.

Because it pertains to some current reflections on Psalm 90, although, this train has additionally confirmed the truths I’ve lined up to now: life on earth may be very transient (how might greater than three a long time have handed since I made these entries?), and life is filled with toil and bother. I’ve lived the reality of Ecclesiastes 11:8: “the times of darkness will likely be many” — greater than I anticipated once I started journaling.

However laced by these written information of my swiftly passing, usually troubled days, I’ve additionally heard echoes of the ultimate third of Moses’s nice prayer. Two dominant wishes present up repeatedly: fulfill me with you, O Lord (Psalm 90:14), and present me your work, O Lord (Psalm 90:16). These wishes definitely aren’t distinctive to me; they’ve all the time been core wishes of each soul who hopes in God.

Needs of Our Souls

Within the first two-thirds of this poetic prayer, Moses frames our transient lives from God’s perspective after which helps us lament our dismaying expertise of dwelling underneath God’s curse, with all of the futility and sin-wrought loss of life that entails. However within the ultimate third, Moses helps us give voice to the deepest wishes of our souls — wishes God guarantees to grant us in full when he units all of creation “free from its bondage to corruption [to enjoy] the liberty of the glory of the kids of God” (Romans 8:21).

‘Fulfill Us with You’

Hear to those stunning expressions of religious longing:

Return, O Lord! How lengthy?
     Have pity in your servants!
Fulfill us within the morning along with your steadfast love,
     that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you’ve troubled us,
     and for as a few years as now we have seen evil. (Psalm 90:13–15)

Don’t you end up saying, “Sure, Lord!” to those prayers, regardless of how a lot of God’s nearness you’ve loved? These prayers come from a person who skilled extra of God’s manifest presence and direct divine communication than practically anybody else in historical past. God spoke to Moses “as a person speaks to his pal” (Exodus 33:11). And but, Moses needs extra of God’s nearness; he needs extra of God’s mercy. And he needs them not merely for himself, however for all the saints. The cry of his coronary heart is “present me your glory” (Exodus 33:18).

Then we hear Moses specific these longings when it comes to pleasure: satisfaction and gladness. However not the satisfaction and gladness we discover within the stuff of earth (Psalm 4:7). He needs the actual wealth, the actual treasure. He needs the Nice Reward, his coronary heart’s deepest want, the One Factor that made him prepared to bear such painful earthly reproach (Hebrews 11:26): God himself. For he is aware of that gaining God himself will greater than make up for all of the affliction he and his folks have suffered and all of the evil they’ve seen. We discover on this nice saint an old-covenant model of what we name a Christian Hedonist.

‘Present Us Your Work’

Within the ultimate stanzas of his prayer, Moses expresses his deep religious longing this manner:

Let your work be proven to your servants,
     and your wonderful energy to their kids.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
     and set up the work of our palms upon us;
     sure, set up the work of our palms! (Psalm 90:16–17)

Moses yearns to expertise extra of God’s glory in his coronary heart, however he additionally yearns to see extra of God’s glory in his exterior expertise of actuality. Moses acquired to see loads — excess of most of us. However he wished extra. He wished to see God’s wonderful energy pervade extra of this world.

“Moses acquired to see loads — excess of most of us. However he wished extra.”

And doesn’t this additionally make you need to shout, “Sure, Lord!”? As a result of it doesn’t actually matter how a lot we get to see. My journals file some fantastic occasions of experiencing God’s energy. But again and again, I’ve prayed some model of verse 16: “Let your work be proven to your servants.” For some of God’s glory isn’t sufficient. None of us will likely be totally glad till “the earth [is] stuffed with the data of the glory of the Lord because the waters cowl the ocean” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Coronary heart of Knowledge

I made a decision to evaluation my journals as a result of, if I find yourself surviving into my seventies or eighties (Psalm 90:10), I’ve already lived at the very least three-fourths of my life. And I, like Moses, want “a coronary heart of knowledge” (Psalm 90:12) — to develop wiser as I get older, to stroll the final leg of the journey “in a way worthy of the Lord” (Colossians 1:10). To that finish, it helps to evaluation the sojourn of my life and religion and replicate rigorously on how the Lord has led me to this point.

But it surely doesn’t require a journal to “educate us to quantity our days” (Psalm 90:12). It requires us every, within the methods the Lord directs us, to come back to phrases with the brevity of our days and to have our perspective on them formed by God’s perspective, whose life is “from eternal to eternal” (Psalm 90:2). It additionally requires us to soberly take into account the facility of his wrath in order that we would dwell in acceptable concern of him (Psalm 90:11) — which is the start of knowledge (Psalm 111:10) — and take refuge within the deliverance he has supplied in Jesus. And it requires that we by no means cease praying for him to be the best satisfaction of our hearts and for his wonderful energy to pervade increasingly more of actuality till the day it’s the solely actuality that pervades all.

I consider Moses is true: that is the center of knowledge that begets a lifetime of knowledge. I consider this greater than ever as I see my life expertise bearing it out. I’m not silly sufficient to say to own a coronary heart stuffed with this knowledge. However to echo Paul, “I press on to make it my very own, as a result of Christ Jesus has made me his personal” (Philippians 3:12).

And so, I more and more return to Psalm 90 because the years cross. And I commend it to you. As a result of the extra our hearts are stuffed with godly knowledge, the extra “the God of hope [will] fill [us] with all pleasure and peace in believing, in order that by the facility of the Holy Spirit [we] might abound in hope” (Romans 15:13) — all by the trouble-filled days of our transient sojourn on earth.