Psalms 90:9

Psalms 90:9

No part of the ancient Scriptures is less obsolete than this Psalm. It is a picture still true to nature. Human life, viewed generally, has not since brightened up into a scene of joy and triumph. The text seems to express both a necessary fact and a censure. The rapid consumption of our years, their speedy passing away, is inevitable. But they may be spent also in a trifling manner, to little valuable purpose, which would complete the disconsolate reflection on them by the addition of guilt and censure.

I. The instruction supplied by all our years has been to little purpose if we are not become fully aware of one plain fact: that which was expressed in our Lord's sentence, "Without Me ye can do nothing;" in other words, that it is only through the medium of God that we can effectually attempt any of the most important things, because we have a nature that is unadapted to them, repugnant to them, revolts from them. Therefore, if during the past year we failed in the essential point of imploring the Divine Spirit to animate us, well might we fail in the rest.

II. Sentiments of a grateful kind should be among the first to arise in every one's meditation on the past year. If we have no right estimate and feeling for the past mercies of God, how are we to receive present and future ones with a right feeling? For future duty we shall want to have motives. Think, if all the force that should be motive could be drawn, in the form of gratitude, from one year's mercies of God and, as it were, converged to a point, what a potent motive that would be! We have to look back over the year to collect this force.

III. Another consideration is that our last year has added to an irrevocable account. It has passed into the record of heaven, into the memory of God.

IV. Our year has been parallel to that of those persons who have made the noblest use of it. Why were the day, the week, the month, of less value in our hands than in theirs?

V. Another reflection may be on our further experience of mortal life and the world. We have seen it, tried it, judged it, thus much longer. Our interest upon it is contracted to so much narrower a breadth. At first we held to life by each year of the whole allotment; but each year withdrawn cut that tie, like the cutting in succession of each of the spreading roots of a tree. There should in spirit and feeling be a degree of detachment in proportion.

VI. The year departed may admonish us of the strange deceptiveness, the stealthiness, of the flight of time. Each period and portion of time should be entered on with emphatically imploring our God to save us from spending it in vain.

J. Foster, Lectures,1st series, p. 292.

References: Psalms 90:9. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vi., p. 354; A. Raleigh, From Dawn to the Perfect Day,p. 379; R. D. B. Rawnsley, Sermons in Country Churches,1st series, p. 299.