We Pass Our Days Like a Sigh

Candace: Hi, I'm Candace. I'm originally from South Africa, currently living in Sydney, Australia, and I'm a Revive Our Hearts Monthly Partner. One reason I support this ministry is because it has changed who I am and who I want to be. Enjoy today's episode of Revive Our Hearts, brought to you in part by the Monthly Partner team.

Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth invites you to think about your long-term future.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We think seventy or eighty years is a nice long life . . . ninety years or more seems very, very long. In light of eternity, those years are nothing.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules, for March 14, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

This month on Revive Our Hearts we are exploring the topic of living and dying. Specifically, living in light of eternity. Later in the program we’ll hear from a woman who was faithful to the Lord until age eighty-nine. You’ll hear how an awareness of eternity can affect your day-to-day life.

But first, let’s hear from Nancy, continuing in the series “Living in Light of Eternity.”

Nancy: We're going to be talking about a subject that we don't hear about very often today, and it's not an easy subject to talk about. We've been looking this week at Psalm 90, a prayer of Moses, the man of God. Moses has first of all established the fact that God is eternal. He is from everlasting to everlasting.

And then in the segment we looked at yesterday, we saw that man—compared to God—is frail. His time here on earth is short. His life is like a vapor; it's like sand on the seashore that's washed away with the tide. Now, in verse 7 of chapter 90, Moses talks about why man's time is short on earth.

Let me read, beginning in verse 7. He says, "For we have been consumed by Your anger." Now, look at that word "anger," and notice how many times this thought reoccurs through these verses.

We have been consumed by Your anger, and by Your wrath we are terrified. You have set our iniquities before You; our secret sins in the light of Your countenance. For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh. The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason by strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knows the power of Your anger? For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath. (vv. 7–11)

Now, if I were to summarize that paragraph, I would do it with just a few short sentences: Life is short and sad. Isn't that the sense you get from that passage? Life is short, and it is sad. It's trouble! That raises this question . . ."why?" Well, he gives us the answer here. It's the wrath and the anger of God that cuts man's life short.

And that raises one more question: "Why is God angry?" We see that question answered in this passage also: it's the sinfulness of man. God's wrath and anger is a righteous response to the sinfulness of man, and it's that wrath—caused by our sinfulness—that results in our days being cut short.

Moses says in verse 7, "We are consumed by Your anger and by Your wrath we are terrified." There is a principle in God's Word that has always been true and always will be true: The soul that sins, it will die. Death is the result, ultimately, of sin, and sin has this terrible destructive effect—not only on our soul but even on our bodies.

Moses said we are consumed by God's anger. He saw the way that sin physically consumed the bodies, the lives of God's people. Now, Moses knew something about death. We said that this passage was probably written when he was in the wilderness with two million Jews that God was going to kill off over a forty-year period because of their sin and unbelief.

If you do the math, you'll see that that's an average of seventy funerals a day for forty years that the children of Israel experienced. They knew something about sin consuming man and about being terrified by the wrath of God. Don't you think that those Israelites were just wondering, Who's going to be next? Is it going to be me?

There were some that were old, but there were a lot of young men in their forties and fifties who were dying off, one after the other, being consumed by the wrath of God. Moses says that God is angry. "We're under His judgment because of our sin."

The words used in this passage for "anger" and "wrath" are strong words. They speak of an outburst of anger, of passion, of rage. It's an overflowing fury of God. They speak of a fierceness that's overwhelming and complete. The picture is that nothing can stand in the wake of God's righteous, burning anger.

Modern man loves to talk about the love of God and the mercy of God and the grace and the tenderness and the kindness of God. All these things are true of God, but no less true is the fact that God is a God who hates sin, and that sin evokes the righteous anger and wrath and judgment of God.

Moses says, "By your wrath we are terrified." Listen, the thought of God's wrath should terrify us. Unfortunately, we don't think enough about God's wrath enough today to be terrified, but many passages of Scripture speak of this effect of being terrified by the wrath of God.

I'm reading now in Isaiah chapter 2, beginning in verse 10, where the prophet says, "Enter into the rock and hide in the dust from the terror of the Lord and the glory of his majesty."

"The lofty looks of man," Isaiah says, "shall be humbled. . . . The haughtiness of men shall be bowed down and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. . . . For the day of the Lord of hosts shall come upon everything proud and lofty, upon everything lifted up—and it shall be brought low" (2:11, 17, 12).

The "day of the Lord" in Scripture always speaks of a terrifying day of the wrath and judgment and terror of almighty God against unrepentant sinners. We see the fulfillment of the wrath of God as we read through the middle chapters of the book of Revelation. We see how, one after the other, God dispenses His judgments, which Scripture says are "true and righteous." God's judgments are good! They are right; they are pure.

We read in Revelation 6,

The kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of his wrath has come, and who is able to stand?" (vv. 15–17)

What is it that precipitates such fierce overwhelming, destructive wrath of God? Moses tells us in verse 8 of his prayer:

You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins [the ones we think are secret] in the light of Your countenance.

You see, ultimately, all death and affliction is the byproduct, the inevitable fruit, of the sinful fallen condition of man.

Moses says that God's countenance, His face, is like the brilliant sunlight that comes streaming into a dark place, and it immediately exposes everything that, perhaps, was hidden by the darkness. It probes into the depth of our being. Our secret sins are exposed "in the light of your countenance."

As I've been meditating on this passage in recent days, this verse has struck some appropriate degree of fear and terror into my own heart. I think about my secret sins, the ones that I know about but I would never want you or anyone else to know about. But in the light of God's countenance, His face, they're all exposed! There's nowhere to hide.

Not only the sins that I know about, that I'd like to keep secret, but the sins that are so secret that I have not even seen them in my own life. The face of God, the holiness of God, the purity of God, the glory of God exposes that sinfulness—those hidden secret things in my life. "You have set our iniquities before you . . ."

I just picture all of my sins being set up, lifted up before God, for Him to see and for Him to expose to everyone else. That's not a pleasant thought to me. It makes me want to run to Jesus for cover, for forgiveness, for grace and mercy, and that's the only place that we can find covering.

Moses says in verse 9,

All of our days have been passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh.

That word pictures a moan—it's just the dying breath of someone who is in their last moments here on earth. He says in verse 10,

The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength [maybe] they're eighty years, yet their only boast is labor and sorrow; for it's soon cut off and we fly away.

We think seventy or eighty years is a nice long life; ninety years or more, that seems very, very long. But in the light of God's eternity, those years are nothing. Sin is what caused the average lifespan of man to be shortened. That's why only have generally, at most, seventy or eighty or a few more years.

Moses says, "Not only is life short, but this short span of life is filled with and characterized by meaningless labor and sorrow." That word "labor" speaks of "heavy labor, toil, misery, distress, oppression, travail." It's a word that carries with it the meaning of "drudgery," that unsatisfied feeling of being on a treadmill, and you just eke out one more tenth of a mile and keep going and keep going. You're not really getting anywhere, and you're sweating, and it's hard, and it's drudgery, "same old, same old."

The song I was thinking of this morning as I was reading through this passage was, "I've been working on the railroad, all my live-long days!" Just day after day, the same routine and monotony. Listen, life apart from God is meaningless labor and sorrow; it's repetitive, it's laborious, it's nothingness. And this pictures for us the hard way of life for those who live their lives apart from God.

So Moses says,

Who knows the power of your anger? For as the fear of you, so is your wrath (v. 11).

One commentator summarized this passage with one sentence, that I think says it so well. He said, "The common denominator of people, worldwide, is a sad tale of lives blighted by sin, inescapably answerable to the sin-hating God." Not a very pretty picture, is it?

God hates sin. He hates my sin; He hates your sin, and that sin evokes His righteous wrath. Now, if we don't know Christ, that's bad news, because either you and I will bear God's wrath for our own sins—when we one day stand before Him and are cast eternally out of His presence, consumed by His wrath, perishing in an eternal hell—or the good news!

The gospel is that we can trust in Christ, who bore the full brunt and fury of God's wrath against all of our sin when He went to Calvary. So, in the midst of this laborious, sorrowful, fallen, blighted condition in which we find ourselves, there is hope, because there is grace through Christ who said, "I will take on myself all the wrath that you deserve for your sin. I will be consumed. I will bear that wrath." 

Oh, thank You, Father, for providing in the midst of such bad new, for providing a way out, a way of escape. Cause us to ponder the terror of Your wrath and Your judgment and to make sure that we are in Christ, that we have trusted Him and His death on the cross to provide our eternal salvation from Your wrath. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Dannah: Jesus has given us hope for all eternity! Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been helping us get that truth deep in our hearts. And that truth will affect the way we live day by day. That teaching is part of a series called “Living in Light of Eternity.”

We need practical help knowing how to live each day purposefully with an eternal perspective in mind. To help, I’d like to play you a clip from an interview between Nancy and Evelyn Christenson. At the time, Evelyn was eighty. She knew she was in the final season of life. She wanted each day to count. Evelyn eventually went home to be with the Lord at age eighty-nine. But the example she left behind can help all of us learn how to make each day count.

Evelyn told Nancy about losing her seven-month old child, Judy. Eveylyn wanted to be bitter and angry. But she surrendered her child to the Lord and learned to trust His plan. She used her pain to serve others as a pastor’s wife. Years later, she heard from one of the members of the church who watched her go through that pain.

Evelyn Christenson: I was doing a radio broadcast, a call-in broadcast from California just a couple of years ago, and somebody called in from the East Coast. She said, “Evelyn may not remember me, but I was a little girl when she was a pastor’s wife”—then in our second church. She said, “My mom and dad went through a real sorrowful thing because my little baby sister died. Pastor Chris and Evelyn were on vacation, and they gave up their vacation to come back to be with my mother and dad.”

She said, “I was this little girl”—little toddler about four, probably—and she said, “I watched my pastor’s wife, Evelyn, come back and stand.” You see, the secret here is the little casket. This isn’t a miscarriage here. This is a casket. She said, “I watched my pastor’s wife walk up to my mom by the casket, and all she did was take my mom in her arms. I don’t remember that she said anything, but she held my mom, and she cried and cried with my mom.”

Nancy: This was some years after you lost your little girl.

Evelyn: This was many years. But I knew . . . God said, “If you’re going to be a pastor’s wife, you need to know. Your heart needs to understand.” I held that member of my church—she was a member of my Sunday school class. I held her in my arms, and we just wept together.

That woman calling into the radio program said, “I said to myself when I watched that happen, ‘When I get big enough, I want to be like that, if that’s what a Christian is.’”

But God comforts us so that we can comfort those who are in like circumstances.

God chose to train and prepare me. Not every pastor's wife goes through this, but that was part of my training.

I have found through all my round the world tours, women are alike, all over the world. They all lose babies. 

For awhile I got tired of starting back there, of where I really learned to pray and my with my relationship with the Lord and Romans 8:28 and everything. People would say, "Evelyn, don't start teaching where you are now. Please start teaching where we are now, where you were then." I had to learn that, to go back to where they are. That's extremely important. It's not so much what you say, but they know, they can feel if you feel their hurt. That's extremely important.

You don't have to be a pastor's wife. You can be anybody . . . We all have those we mentor. We all have those who look up to us for security, who come running to us when things hurt. Every woman has that. This is something God has called us to do as Christians, to be that support. But you don't understand unless you've had some hard things first.

Nancy: Of course, you could see all that fifty, sixty years ago. How God was making, how God was refining.

One of the things I love and admire about you is your tenderness of heart. In fact, I remember hearing you say in a conference where you were speaking and I was in the audience. I wrote it down, and I came across those notes again recently. Hardly a night goes by that the Lord doesn't wake you in the middle of the night, that you weep and pray for the lost. I heard you say that, and I couldn't even begin to relate. This is all part of writing that book in your life.

Evelyn: God had to allow those hard things. I believe that He even send some of them. You go through the Old Testament, God sent hail; God sent the drought. God does these things, but He does it for a reason.

The wonderful part about this now that I'm eighty is I can look back and I can see Romans 8:28, that God is working out everything for my good because I'm called according to His purpose.

When I was twenty-three and God gave me that verse after my second miscarriage, I had to take it on absolute faith. There was no track record. I didn't know. I just had to say, "Lord, I believe You, and I will take this on faith."

I have lived that verse. My children and my husband will tell you that I live that verse. But the wonderful part is, as we get older, the joy—that unshakable faith . . . You look back and you say, "He did it. He did it. He did it." I have one of the most precious gifts from God and it is an unshakable faith. My mother had it. I watched her through a very difficult life. My father was unfaithful. He was everything he shouldn't have been until he finally found Jesus. She had unshakable faith in God. She never wavered. I have a gift from my mother. This is a heritage that is very precious to me.

Nancy: You didn't start with unshakable faith. It developed.

Evelyn: I started with just that faith. Because faith is not knowing what is going to come. You trust God. You have faith in God when you can't see. But when you get my age and you look back, there are some things you know. This is something I know.

I know how He keeps His promises because of who He is. Getting old is one of the greatest gifts God could give to anybody. I am of all women most blessed. I've said many times: I don't deserve it. All He has wanted is my empty self saying, "Lord, I want Your will." It hurts almost more than I can handle sometimes to lose my life for Christ's sake. But that's what it has been through all these years—losing my life for Christ's sake. But that great thing is: it sounds like it all loss, but it's not.

One Easter I was trying to lose my life for Christ's sake. Chris found me downstairs and I was weeping. He came down and said, "What's wrong?"

I said, "I'm writing this book and I'm trying to lose my life for Christ's sake."

He said, "Well, if you ask me, I think you have already done 99 percent of it."

I said, "If I have, this 1 percent for which I'm wrestling is one huge 1 percent."

I was weeping. It was Easter morning. I never made it that morning. Finally, I was going up to Ottawa, Canada for a weekend for meetings. And the night before in the hotel I said, "Lord, I obviously can't handle this whole thing all at once." I was in this process of emptying myself of what was wrong and surrendering. But you know the exciting part about God is He doesn't leave you in the emptying process. He lets us get that done. But the most amazing thing happened. There was a sweetness and a . . . I don't know what it was. It was good. I was just the Lord.

Nancy: It's the resurrection side of the cross.

Evelyn: The other is the giving, the hard side. But the joy on the other side. I was so filled with some kind of joy and excitement.

Nancy: That makes me think of Jesus. "For joy that was set before him, he endured the cross." We are trying to get off the cross.

Evelyn: See, that isn't it at all.

Nancy: Jesus went through the cross, and then, the resurrection.

Evelyn: That's it.

Nancy: I wonder if so many times we don't experience that fullness of joy because we are not willing to go through the cross.

Evelyn: I think almost always. That's what it takes so often in my life. It takes going through the hard things. But the joy that comes in the morning is absolutely awesome.

Nancy: But it is a morning after a night of weeping.

Evelyn: Oh, yes. The joy, the sweetness, the warm, the security with Him; it was the most awesome experience. And it wasn't my last one. There are other times when I have given up, and He always comes back with more of Him when there is less of me. 

“Keep me faithful, Lord.” That’s what I’m saying at this age. The hardest one is when we have to start peeling off, not doing what you want to do because there isn’t enough strength and all that. But to stay faithful in these years, this is what I’m learning now. So I’m never done. I’ll never be done with, “Lord, change me.” Never.

Dannah: We’ve been hearing a conversation between Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Eveylyn Christensen, who went home to be with the Lord at age eighty-nine.

To hear more of that conversation, listen to the series “Facing Life’s Final Season: Remembering Evelyn Christensen.” You can hear it by visiting Revive Our Hearts.com. There’s a link in the transcript of today’s program.

Evelyn Christensen lived her life in light of eternity. She sensed the nearness of heaven and it shaped her day to day life.

We’d like to help you keep your mind on heaven and live in light of eternity, so we’d like to send you a book called Heaven: How I Got Here: The Story of the Thief on the Cross. Colin Smith imagined what it was like to be the thief crucified next to Jesus. He tells the story from the point of view of the thief, now in heaven.

We’d like to send you a copy when you support Revive Our Heart with a gift of any size. We want to continue pointing women to the hope of eternity. We can only do that through the support of listeners like you. To make your donation, visit ReviveOurHearts.com. When you donate online, you’ll be able to let us know you’d like a copy of Heaven: How I Got Here, or ask for the book when you donate by phone. The number is 1-800-569-5959. 

Tomorrow Nancy will continue her study of Psalm 90. She’ll help us to number our days and spend them in light of eternity. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the NKJV.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.