And we'll pick up the reading in verse one. I said, I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle, so long as the wicked are in my presence. I was mute and silent. I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned. Then I spoke with my tongue. Oh Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting I am. Behold, you have made my days a few hand breaths and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath. Surely a man goes about as a shadow. Surely for nothing they are in turmoil. Man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather. And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool. I am mute. I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me. I am spent by the hostility of your hand. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him. Surely all mankind is a mere breath. Hear my prayer, O Lord. and give ear to my cry. Hold not your peace at my tears, for I am a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers. Look away from me that I may smile again before I depart. and am no more." Thus far, the reading of God's Word to us this morning. May He add His blessing to the reading and to the proclamation of it. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, tears, transience, trust, These three things encapsulate Psalm 39, and they are the very three things that you will find at every Christian funeral. In fact, some call Psalm 39 a funeral psalm, because it speaks to the tearful brevity of the human life. that begins and ends with a few hand breaths. And as we have witnessed in this series, Season in the Psalms, David is constantly reflecting upon the providence of God and his response to it as he draws conclusions. In the first six verses, David contemplates the length of his days. And as often been the case, we do not know the exact cause of his angst, the background, the reason for penning this particular psalm. It could be a death of a dear friend. It could be the lingering presence of his enemies, or maybe that prolonged tension between knowing doctrine, the faith, and living out the practice without hypocrisy, without duplicity. Or perhaps it's just the hand of God upon him. Life is short. Life is short. But we are called to consecrate every breath we have given unto him. Verse one, I said, I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle so long as the wicked are in my presence. So you see, David is two-fold aware that eyes are upon him and he will not give any reason for others to sin because he has. And he will take heed lest temptation erupt into sin within himself. And so he positions himself to be resolute, to be on the guard, something we must all do in this life, do ourselves, in wearing the armor of God. Be prepared. Be prepared. I was mute and silent. I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me, as I mused, a fire burned, and then I spoke with my tongue." You see, David's passion, what was growing within, he was getting heated up, and he was getting impatient with the struggle. He could only hold his tongue so long. Again, we do not know what was burning within David, But his silence broke, and it broke into prayer. Now, some commentators make much ado that he was bottling things up for too long, and that suddenly it just came out, and that perhaps he should address some of these things earlier and not let it fester within. But we don't know that for sure. But listen to this petition. beginning in verse four. Oh Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days. Let me know how fleeting I am. How often do we pray that? Lord, let me know how much longer I have to live. Deuteronomy 29 tells us, "...the secret things belong to the Lord, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." It's not for us to know, friends, the length of our days. And David knows this. But David is pondering over death, his eventual outcome. wants to know. He wants to know something in order to live well. He calls himself a guest, and properly so. On this side of the kingdom, we are all guests. And yet we work hard to plant our stakes into the ground, don't we, and accumulate all kinds of stuff. But David wants to know something in order to live well. You see, to die well means to live well, or as Charles Haddon Spurgeon put it, to be prepared to die is to be prepared to live. That's worth repeating. To be prepared to die is to be prepared to live. We want to die well, and in our wanting to die well, we're going to live well. Oh Lord, give me sensibility. This is what the psalmist is saying. Give me sensibility. Give me wisdom. Give me grace to see the frailty of life and to look heavenward. To look heavenward. Friends, we are horizontal gazers. We study each other. We envy the other person. We covet our neighbor's houses and cars, and we gawk at things to possess. We are not so great, though, at vertical gazing, looking above. Paul says in Colossians 1, if then you've been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. I had the privilege of knowing a retired man who had a ton of these collectible die-cast Texaco model planes. He picked up several from different tire shops to which he had sold some rubber on his daily route. Then one day I noticed he had stopped collecting them, and the dust was beginning to settle on these red Texaco plains. I asked him, since he was now retired, if he still had passion for the hobby. He said, nope, he had enough. And while collecting, he had also learned that there was a gold-plated limited edition of the plane, so he thought he had every one in the series. And he didn't. He didn't have the special edition ones. But he no longer cared and was ready to part with them all. He said he was at the rear view mirror portion in his life, and most everything was behind him. But that was okay, because the better was always ahead of him. When we get older, things clear up for us, beloved. We get wiser and realize all those things that we wanted and desired in our youth, well, they're meaningless. The better has always been ahead of us, and we're called to strain forward, right? But the Apostle Paul says, lean, strain forward toward the prize that is in our Lord Jesus Christ. Our life, as the Psalmist observes, is short. Its short end is of no continuance on this side of the kingdom. The earthly tent is folding up. Already, even in our youth, the earthly tent is folding up. And we ought not to mourn that. It is the consequence of sin, but the reward is ahead. And if we can be, move, and have our being in Christ, we will seek the things that are above. As the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, it's all vanity otherwise. For years, when outcome-based education was the national thing, our school board principal and curriculum director had us middle school and elementary teachers tediously write outcome-based objectives for everything. And when I say everything, I mean for everything. We taught and create micro rubrics to evaluate student progress. And as we were working, laboring on this, we knew back then, which was 1994, that this was pure vanity and would soon be replaced by another educational initiative, which was called Goals 2000, and that was replaced by No Child Left Behind, which is being replaced by something else. My wife reminds us with all of her computer programming she's written over the years in her career that all of that has been replaced. And even that which she writes is now being replaced within months as new technology constantly unfolds. Some years ago on a curbside cleanup day in Pella, a widow was struggling to lift several boxes of binders to her curb. And I just so happened to be walking by and offered to assist. I carried about a dozen heavy boxes from her garage. I almost regretted assisting. It was that heavy. And I asked her what was in these boxes. And she told me, decades and decades and decades. of her late husband's sermons. He was an old-school Reformed preacher who hand-wrote all his sermons and put them in these binders, meticulously labeled, had tabs on them, all sorts of things. And they were all going to get trashed, along with years of synodical yearbooks. So why do anything? Why keep your stuff? If all you end up doing is dying and your spouse throws out your life's work, I'm getting on top of things. I'm going to be throwing it out before my wife has to do it, just by the way. Yes, joys, honors, even griefs and fears and cares and toils, they all come and they all go. But then David writes something in verse 7, because the psalm now pivots. It changes in verse 7. And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. My hope is in you. Indeed, our hope is in him. Well, David has surveyed his horizontal existence, and now he goes vertical, replaces his trust. And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool. I am mute. I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me, for I am spent by the hostility of your hand." David's confession and pleading are enjoined to the creator-creature distinction. He knows and trusts his God, even as he experiences the hand the discipline of God. He knows he is the creature who is here today and tomorrow becomes a byword. He knows that the dash on the gravestone between birth date and death date is meaningless outside of Christ. Christi and I make a bit of a ritual that after we have our senior worship in the afternoon at several different residential care facilities, we take a stroll at Oakwood Cemetery, where her parents are buried. And that's always a meaningful stroll because, again, it reminds us of the brevity of life. And unless you know the ones engraved on the markers, and we're recognizing quite a few now because we're getting that much older, all you can read are the names and the dates. But what about their lives, reduced, to a dash. Reduce to a dash. So in the latter half of the psalm, David pleads for God's mercy to relieve him of his afflictions. And he's not navigating here horizontally. He's not negotiating with God, admitting he is nothing, but hoping God will make him something. No. And hear now verse 11, Now that imagery, beloved, is worth our pause, which is why the term Selah is there. It's telling us to pause and reflect. When you discipline a man, with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him. Here comes the punch. Surely all mankind is a mere breath. And we have that again also and back in verse five. Behold, you have made my days a few hand breaths and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath. Pause. You're a mere breath. That's it. And that's worthy of thinking about, pausing. And you are consumed, consumed by a moth, your days. He says, God, you consume like a moth. You eat man away. This past week, we learned of a man, a bit of a celebrity preacher, who was caught in a grievous sin. And that man lost his reputation and really his labor. I was surprised at how many defended the brother, and despite the horrific sin, argued that we should all extend grace. And we should be kind and gracious, of course. but then maybe after a season he can return as a restored man, qualified to preach. No, what is gracious here is God exposing his sin and having him removed from office. That God let him see what he was doing, caught, so he would turn upward and not be consumed by the growing number of His followers, which happens to all of us. We are obsessed by those around us, and we want the accolades. But we need to be more concerned about our Lord and our standing with Him, and to obey His commands, and to please Him, to glorify His name. not our own place in this world. And what would be an outcome of that grace in this man's case is that he would know the severity of his sin and never return to the pulpit, but serve God in another way. You can serve God in another way. He and we all need to pray these closing verses. Hear my prayer, verse 12. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give me ear to my cry. Hold not your peace at my tears, for I am a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers. Look away from me that I may smile again before I depart and am no more. In other words, Lord, I trust you will relieve this from me, that I may continue because I am a sojourner. And friends, that's really the perspective we ought to have. We are sojourners. We are sojourners. Now, we are pursuing a better promised land in Christ, and we have that already. We'll have that in full consummation later. like the saints of old were constantly pilgrims on a pilgrimage. There have been many applications to Psalm 39, including references to Job, and perhaps even to Psalm 37, about fretting over the prosperity of the wicked while the righteous suffer. There's a hint of that in verse 6, where man heaps up wealth, but another receives. We spend so much time working on our 401ks, and trying to build up our investments, and trying to have all these things, and then we die, and who gets them? The ones after us. Do we actually enjoy the wealth that we have while we are alive? The greater wealth, beloved, is not that which the world understands. but that which Christ has procured for us. In the end, we have tears, transience, and brevity of life, and trust. Tears, transience, and trust. David is broken and filled with tears, kept his tongue from sin, though his sullen silence leads to anger, bitterness, and despair. He sees the transience, the brevity of life, but he goes to his Creator. He goes to his Redeemer. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry. Hold not your peace at my tears, for I am a soldier with you. Again, a guest like all my fathers. And thanks be to God, for there is that better promised land. Do you really want to stay on this earth? Had our first parents partaken of that other fruit that would preserve their life, the tree of life? Had they done that, what would they have received? living in perpetuity, in sin, in sin, in misery. And God was gracious, placing the guard, the angelic guard, that they would not dare partake of that fruit as they had of the tree of knowledge, good and evil. And that's grace. That's grace. Because we are moving in this life. Look away from me that I may smile again before I depart and am no more. Friends, funerals are tearful events, and no one leaves a service without some pause. A Christian service, anyway. And without this conclusion. Someday, I will be in that box. I will be in that casket. And that time is sooner than later, unless the Lord no longer tarries. So let's get beyond the tears. Let's get beyond the transience upon the reflection of the brevity of life and get now toward the trust. Trust in Him to guide your life. Trust in Him to remove your tears and your suffering. Trust in Him to lead you to the pastures of everlasting peace. Don't fret. Don't fret. Confess and seek Him, and He will deliver you. Let's pray.