As always, much could be said about this Psalm. Here are a few things that stood out to me this morning:

1) A conscious awareness of the brevity of life helps us to live our lives to the full–provided we are thinking rightly.

I suppose it is possible for a man to contemplate the brevity of life and therefore declare, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!’ But that man is not thinking rightly. For he is failing to consider what will take place after his brief life here is done. And he is failing to recognize that what he does here on this earth carried consequences in the land of forever.

If we are thinking about life in this fashion, then it is good to think about how short our lives are. Which is to also imply that it is good to think of the fact that we will soon die. For such things, when combined with a solid understanding of the life that awaits us, serve to give us a certain urgency to live well here and now. If we realize that what we do now matters forever, we are much more apt to do all we can to get our acts together now.

That being said, I suppose it should at least be mentioned that a proper understanding of what awaits us is necessary. That is, we must understand not only the fact that there is a Heaven and Hell, but what kind of places Heaven and Hell will be. For if we understand Heaven to be floating in the clouds, we will live a certain kind of way now. Maybe we will care only for saving souls. But if we embrace the biblical picture of Heaven as a New Earth, with the strong possibility that many of our cultural works will be carried over onto that New Earth, our perspective will change and we will no doubt live differently.

2) We need to pray consistently for this conscious awareness of the brevity of life.

It’s not enough to read it as it was said by someone else in the Psalm. We must pray it ourselves, for it is only with the Lord’s help that we will really become consciously aware of the brevity of our lives. It is only through prayer that this plain reality will sink in deep enough so as to have a dramatic impact on the way in which we live our day to day lives.