Dr Paul Allen

“Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90: 12). This verse is often treated as if it were a proverb that means, “Life is short, so live wisely.” But in the context of the whole psalm, it means much more than that, as we will see. It is a key part of a meditation on God and on living as the people of God. DAY NUMBERING In Hebrew, verse 12 begins with the words “to number our days.” This phrase picks up the theme of time that is so pervasive in this psalm. A reflection on time leads us to see how weak we are and how short our lives are:  “You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man!’ . . . You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers... The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (vv. 3, 5–6, 10...

Grief is a wilderness we all travel at multiple times in our lives. Sometimes we grieve the loss of a loved one. Other times, we grieve a broken relationship, a shattered dream, or a ministry failure. Loss takes many shapes, affects us in different ways, and often lingers longer than it seems we can stand it. The Israelites had a liturgy and structure they followed during times of grief. They wept and wailed. They tore at their clothes. They covered themselves in dust and ashes (Job 1:20; 2:12). They cried out to God in sorrow. They sang out in lament. In our culture, we’ve forgotten how to grieve. We rush through painful experiences to put them behind us. When others around us grieve, we are uncomfortable with their tears and do whatever we can to distract them. We might even altogether avoid the grief-stricken around us. But grief is not something to be distracted from, overlooked, or avoided. There’s no timetable and no way to rush through it. Grief is not something that we just ha...

You hear it said often, don’t you? You need to glorify God! But what does it mean exactly? How can someone glorify God? Perhaps one of the best pictures of glorifying God in the Bible is found in Luke 9:9. Herod says, “I beheaded John. Who, then, is this I hear such things about?” The context around this verse is clear. Jesus sends out the twelve on their first evangelistic trip. They go out to preach about the kingdom, but they do so in a way that brings glory to Christ. I say this because as people watch and listen to the twelve, they can’t help but wonder about who Jesus is.  In other words, they think to themselves that these twelve men couldn’t possibly believe these things that they were declaring, that they couldn’t do the things they were doing unless God had enabled them to do so. Bringing glory to God with our lives means that we are doing supernatural things that can only be attributed to Him. And I’m not talking about miraculous sign gifts, those have ceased ; I...

We cannot enjoy God apart from glorifying Him. And the Westminster Shorter Catechism wisely goes on to ask, “What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?” But notice that Scripture contains the “rule” for enjoying God as well as glorifying Him. We know it abounds in instructions for glorifying Him, but how does it instruct us to “enjoy him”? Enjoying God is a command, not an optional extra : “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). But how? We cannot “rejoice to order,” can we? True. Yet, Scripture shows that well-instructed believers develop a determination to rejoice. They will rejoice in the Lord. Habakkuk exemplified this in difficult days (see Hab. 3:17–18). He exercised what our forefathers called “acting faith”—a vigorous determination to experience whatever the Lord commands, including joy, and to use the God-given means to do so. Here are four of these means—in which, it should be noted, we also glorify God. Joy in Sa...

Baptism of Christ. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) What does it mean to glorify God with your life? How do you do that? Really, take at least 60 seconds to think about your answer… Ok, what did you come up with? Maybe your response was something like: “I glorify God by praising Him with my words, both in conversation and sincerely singing at church (especially last Sunday).” Or, “I glorify God because I believe in, speak, and defend sound doctrine.” Or even, “I glorify God by the actions of my life, so by serving others and serving in my church.” All of these are good things and things that anyone who is glorifying God must be doing, but there’s a problem: all of these things–as essential as they are–can be done by an unregenerate professing believer (Lk. 18:11, 18-27; Ps. 106:12-13), a true believer with a wrong heart (1 Cor. 3:13-15; 4:6), or a true believer with a right heart . Notice a theme? Its a matter of the heart. Yes, God is con...