This summer, I began reviewing all my journals. As I write, I’m still plodding through the handwritten journals I kept in my twenties, transcribing them into digital documents as I go (for easier future reference).
I’ve found this to be a good exercise for my soul. It’s allowed me to revisit seasons of spiritual desperation and breakthrough, confusion and clarity, unbelief and faithfulness, sorrow and joy. And it’s fueled my gratitude for how much past grace I’ve received, the extraordinary loving-kindness of God in the life of an all-too-ordinary, often stumbling, earnest young man. My journal entries are not the stuff of great spiritual classics; I’m no David Brainerd or Henry Martyn or Robert Murray M’Cheyne. But being humbled is also good for my soul.
As it relates to some recent reflections on Psalm 90, though, this exercise has also confirmed the truths I’ve covered so far: life on earth is very brief (how could more than three decades have passed since I made these entries?), and life is full of toil and trouble. I’ve lived the truth of Ecclesiastes 11:8: “the days of darkness will be many” — more than I expected when I began journaling.
But laced through these written records of my swiftly passing, often troubled days, I’ve also heard echoes of the final third of Moses’s great prayer. Two dominant desires show up again and again: satisfy me with you, O Lord (Psalm 90:14), and show me your work, O Lord (Psalm 90:16). These desires certainly aren’t unique to me; they have always been core desires of every soul who hopes in God.
Desires of Our Souls
In the first two-thirds of this poetic prayer, Moses frames our brief lives from God’s perspective and then helps us lament our dismaying experience of living under God’s curse, with all the futility and sin-wrought death that entails. But in the final third, Moses helps us give voice to the deepest desires of our souls — desires God promises to grant us in full when he sets all of creation “free from its bondage to corruption [to enjoy] the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).
‘Satisfy Us with You’
Listen to these beautiful expressions of spiritual longing:
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil. (Psalm 90:13–15)
Don’t you find yourself saying, “Yes, Lord!” to these prayers, no matter how much of God’s nearness you’ve enjoyed? These prayers come from a man who experienced more of God’s manifest presence and direct divine communication than nearly anyone else in history. God spoke to Moses “as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). And yet, Moses wants more of God’s nearness; he wants more of God’s mercy. And he wants them not merely for himself, but for all the saints. The cry of his heart is “show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18).
Then we hear Moses express these longings in terms of joy: satisfaction and gladness. But not the satisfaction and gladness we find in the stuff of earth (Psalm 4:7). He wants the real wealth, the real treasure. He wants the Great Reward, his heart’s deepest desire, the One Thing that made him willing to bear such painful earthly reproach (Hebrews 11:26): God himself. For he knows that gaining God himself will more than make up for all the affliction he and his people have suffered and all the evil they have seen. We find in this great saint an old-covenant version of what we call a Christian Hedonist.
‘Show Us Your Work’
In the final stanzas of his prayer, Moses expresses his deep spiritual longing this way:
Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands! (Psalm 90:16–17)
Moses yearns to experience more of God’s glory in his heart, but he also yearns to see more of God’s glory in his external experience of reality. Moses got to see a lot — far more than most of us. But he wanted more. He wanted to see God’s glorious power pervade more of this world.
And doesn’t this also make you want to shout, “Yes, Lord!”? Because it doesn’t really matter how much we get to see. My journals record some wonderful times of experiencing God’s power. Yet over and over, I’ve prayed some version of verse 16: “Let your work be shown to your servants.” For some of God’s glory is never enough. None of us will be fully satisfied until “the earth [is] filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
Heart of Wisdom
I decided to review my journals because, if I end up surviving into my seventies or eighties (Psalm 90:10), I’ve already lived at least three-fourths of my life. And I, like Moses, desire “a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12) — to grow wiser as I grow older, to walk the last leg of the journey “in a manner worthy of the Lord” (Colossians 1:10). To that end, it helps to review the sojourn of my life and faith and reflect carefully on how the Lord has led me thus far.
But it doesn’t require a journal to “teach us to number our days” (Psalm 90:12). It requires us each, in the ways the Lord directs us, to come to terms with the brevity of our days and to have our perspective on them shaped by God’s perspective, whose life is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2). It also requires us to soberly consider the power of his wrath so that we might live in appropriate fear of him (Psalm 90:11) — which is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10) — and take refuge in the deliverance he has provided in Jesus. And it requires that we never stop praying for him to be the greatest satisfaction of our hearts and for his glorious power to pervade more and more of reality until the day it is the only reality that pervades all.
I believe Moses is right: this is the heart of wisdom that begets a life of wisdom. I believe this more than ever as I see my life experience bearing it out. I’m not foolish enough to claim to possess a heart full of this wisdom. But to echo Paul, “I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).
And so, I increasingly return to Psalm 90 as the years pass. And I commend it to you. Because the more our hearts are filled with godly wisdom, the more “the God of hope [will] fill [us] with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit [we] may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13) — all through the trouble-filled days of our brief sojourn on earth.
Desiring God