How Remembering Eternity Transforms Today (Psalm 90)

Rebecca Ellerman: Hi, my name is Rebecca Ellerman, and I'm from Texas. I distinctly remember listening to a Revive Our Hearts program in June of 2007—nineteen years ago—where an invitation was given to join or become a monthly partner with Revive Our Hearts. I remember thinking, What a gift and opportunity I have been given from the Lord! I said "yes," and I still say "yes!"

But in addition, I can tell you that day when I made that decision something profound really happened. I felt a deeper connection to this ministry. I felt engaged. I felt blessed. I felt prayed for. And it has not changed. I am still a Revive Partner today, and now on staff, I get the opportunity to be able to share the blessing of being a Revive Partner.

And so I would like to be able to lay this before you. Would you prayerfully consider becoming part of our team as a Revive Partner? We would be so honored and to the praise of His glory. Now, here's Dannah.

Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has a probing question for you.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Whether you’re still in the first half of your anticipated lifespan or you’ve gone into overtime, how do you want to live the days you have left on this earth? What practical difference would it make for you to live your life today in the light of eternity?

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Facing Our Fears, for June 22, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Welcome back for another week in the Psalms! I’m loving this summer series of ours, because I love the Psalms. Today, we’re lifting our eyes. It’s so easy to get tunnel vision, to become wrapped up in this present life. But Psalm 90 calls us to change our perspective. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has already recorded teaching on this chapter for our Wonder of the Word series that's releasing in January. Today, you’re getting a preview of what will be a two-year journey through the Bible with Nancy. She’s been recording pretty far in advance so that our global teams can translate each episode into languages, like: Spanish, Farsi, French, German, and so many others. You can learn more about our global outreaches at ReviveOurHearts.com/global. I’d encourage you to be thinking about women in your circle who maybe have a different first language than English. It’s very possible we’ll have a translation for her, to help her soak up truth in the language she knows and loves the most. You can visit ReviveOurHearts.com/wow to see which translations will be available.

Now, here’s Nancy in Psalm 90.

Nancy: You may have heard the name Isaac Watts. He was a theologian, a hymn writer, a minister. He got kind of weary of the hymns of the church being boring to sing and not having interesting words. So his pastor dad said to him at one point, why don't you write some that have words that are biblical but easier to sing, and he began to do that. 

He wrote many hymns that you would be familiar with: “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Joy to the World the Lord Has Come,” and then this one in the early 1700s, “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past” . . . “our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home.” “God Our Help, Our Hope, and Our Home,” this is a hymn that is taken from the psalm we want to look at today, Psalm 90. I think that hymn will take on even more meaning to you once we have taken this journey through Psalm 90. 

Now we read at the top that this psalm is “A prayer of Moses, the man of God.” Approximately half of the psalms were written by David. Moses lived hundreds of years before David. It's perhaps the earliest psalm in the whole Psalter collection. “A prayer of Moses, the man of God,” by the way, wouldn't you love to have it be said of you that you're a man or a woman of God? I want to be a woman of God. That's how Moses is designated here, a man of God. And part of being a man or woman of God is that you pray. And this is a prayer that Moses prayed. 

There are other prayers of Moses we find in Deuteronomy. As he was getting ready to die, there are some prayers that have been captured for us there in the inspired Word. There is also in Revelation a prayer or a song of Moses, the man of God. We will come to that when we come to the book of Revelation. 

But this prayer, Psalm 90, was likely written during the forty-year period when Moses led the children of Israel through the wilderness as they wandered through those years. So we begin in verse 1 of Psalm 90. The first word, I'm just going to say it and then stop there, because we need to look at it. It's the word “Lord.” 

Now, usually in the Old Testament, more often than not, when you see the word Lord, it's in all capital letters, capital LORD. That is a translation or transliteration of the word Yahweh. This is not that word, because you'll see in your Bible here that it has capital “L” then lowercase o, r, d. It's the word adonai, which means “master” or “sovereign Lord.” So He is the sovereign Lord. We don't find that as often in the Old Testament, but we see in the psalm that God is our master, and we are His servants. You'll see references in verses 13 and 16 to us being the servants of the Lord. So he says: 

Lord [sovereign Master], you have been our refuge [or your translation may say our dwelling place] in every generation.

Isaac Watts said, “our eternal home.” He is our home, our stability, our safe place, our resting place. And all generations, Moses is saying, have found You to be a dwelling place. There is no other secure or lasting refuge for the people of God, no home here on earth, no home in the ultimate sense. In the midst of instability and chaos and change and loss, He is our heart's home. He is our dwelling place. You have been our refuge, our dwelling place, in every generation. Deuteronomy 33, verse 1 says: 

This is the blessing that Moses, the man of God, gave the Israelites before his death.

He had now led them for forty years. He knew he was dying, and these were very close to his final words to the children of Israel. Deuteronomy 33:27 he said to them: 

The God of old is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

You can imagine that the people were afraid. They felt insecure. Moses was leaving. He was going to die. They were going to go on into the Promised Land without him. Things were changing. Their world was shaking, but what Moses said to reassure them is what we need to be passing on to the generations coming behind us: the God of old, the God of all time, the God of eternity is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. 

Moses was saying, in effect, “My arms aren't big enough to carry you for all of eternity. I've helped to carry you this far, but it's the everlasting arms God has that are your safe place. The wilderness has been your home for these years. The Promised Land will be a home, lowercase “h,” but your heart's Home, capital “H” is in God. “You are our refuge, our dwelling place in every generation.” Verse 2, Psalm 90: 

Before the mountains were born, 
before you gave birth to the earth and the world.
from eternity to eternity, you are God.

He stresses here God's eternal existence across all ages. In eternity past, before there was time, He was God. In eternity future, after time has ended, God always was, He always will be. He has no beginning, no end. From eternity to eternity, You are God. 

How long is eternity? I can remember my dad talking about that with us when we were children. He used to tell a story written by a Dutch author named Hendrik Van Loon. 

This author spoke of a mythical mountain high in the north of Sweden. And this mountain, he said, was one hundred miles long and one hundred miles high. And once every one thousand years, a little bird would come, and it would sharpen its beak on that rock. Van Loon said that when that mountain has been worn away down to nothing but dust, then he said one day would have passed in eternity. Now that's not actually precisely true, because there is no time in eternity, but you get the point . . . eternity is long.

God has been and is and always will be God from eternity to eternity. You are God in the past. You were God in the present. You are God in the future. You will remain God. He is in control. He's on His throne. He's in charge. He's all powerful. He's greater than any other reality you or I may ever face in this world. 

So we have in verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 90, the eternality of God. Then we come to verse 3, and we see that in contrast to the eternity of God, mankind is frail and his days are few, just the opposite of God. Verse 3, again in the form of a prayer 

“You return mankind to the dust [or to destruction] . . .” It's the word that means “to be pulverized like dust,” like that rock van Loon talked about when it's worn down to just nothing. 

You return mankind to the dust, 
saying, “Return, descendants of Adam.” 

I think this perhaps is a reference that certainly makes a connection to Genesis chapter 3, verse 19, where part of the consequences of sin in the world was that God said to Adam and Eve: 

You [will] return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return.

This is speaking of the reality of death. Ever since Adam and Eve, our first parents, sinned against God, so God returns mankind to the dust. We see that referenced in Genesis 3. Verse 4 of Psalm 90. 

For in your sight [O Lord] a thousand years are like yesterday that passes by,
like a few hours of the night. 

Your translation may say, “like a watch in the night.” When you're in the middle of that night watch, maybe a four-hour vigil that you're keeping or an eight-hour shift you have in the middle of the night, it seems so long. It may seem so hard, but then it's gone. It's over. It's done. One thousand years in God's sight are like yesterday. It passes by like a few hours of the night. It passes quickly. Now, one thousand years referenced here seems like a long time, but in the context of eternity, it's actually virtually nothing. It's so short, like yesterday. I mean, can you remember what you did yesterday? Well, maybe you can. But will you remember it a year from now or one hundred years from now or one thousand years from now? Yesterday will be like nothing in the distant past? Here's another metaphor in verse 5. 

You end their lives; they sleep. 

The ESV says, “You sweep them away [mankind] as with a flood; they are like a dream.” It's the idea of life being washed away like in a sudden, overwhelming flood. Or you walk on the beach and you leave footprints, or you make a sand castle, and then the tide comes up and it's just washed away. It's nothing. 

They are like grass that grows in the morning—
in the morning it sprouts and grows; 
by evening it withers and dries up. (v. 5–6) 

It's just a pile of grass trimmings. It's worthless. It's useless. It doesn't last. My friend Charles Haddon Spurgeon said this.

Here is the history of the grass—sown, grown, blown, mown, gone; and the history of man is not much more.

God is eternal—eternity to eternity. You are God. But mankind is frail. His days are few. He is weak, like a pile of grass trimmings, like yesterday. The conclusion is that life is short and eternity is long. 

 

So here's my question for you and for me, “Are we living today as if we will be here forever, as if what we're doing is going to go on and on and on?” Really, this earth is just a campground. You don't plan to live on a campground. You go there for a few days, maybe for a little getaway. We're pilgrims. We're passing through this earth, but we're headed to our true home, which we'll be back on this earth as there's a new heaven and a new earth. (But that's another story for another day.) 

Not only is your life and my life short, but we need to also remember that the lives of those around us are also short. On September 1, 1979, I said goodbye to my dad as he and my mom dropped me off at an airport where I was going back to the church where I was serving at the time. I had no way of knowing that between the time I said goodbye to them and the time I landed in the place where I was living, over those few hours, that my dad would have a heart attack and he would be gone at age fifty-three. No warning. No notice. Life is short.

 It's a reminder that we don't know how long we will have family members, friends. Our colleagues, our neighbors are all headed into eternity, and we may never have another opportunity to say, “I love you. I forgive you. Please forgive me. Let me tell you about Jesus.” There's no guarantee that we will have more opportunities. Life is short. Eternity is long. We come to verse 7: 

For we are consumed by your anger, 
we are terrified by your wrath. 

Different words for the anger or the wrath of God are used five times in verses 7–11. It's something to take seriously. Moses, presumably at this point in his life, was in the wilderness where the children of Israel wandered around for forty years because of their disobedience to God. And during that forty-year period, some roughly two million Jews perished in the wilderness. That's an average of seventy funerals a day, as God, in His anger and His wrath, said to this generation that rejected Him and rejected His plan, “I'm going to get rid of all of you over the next forty years.” 

Why did they die? Because God was angry with them. They were under His judgment. Moses knew something about the anger and the judgment of God. Listen, the thought of God's wrath should terrify us. That's what it says here in verse 7. “We are consumed by your anger, we are terrified by your wrath.” This is the destructiveness of sin. 

We were intended by God, created by God, to live forever and to enjoy Him. But now our bodies wear out and are decaying, and they're being consumed. This is the effect of God's judgment on sin in our universe. The Scripture says, “The soul that sins, it will die.” God said to Adam, “In the day you sin, you will die.” Ultimately, all death and all affliction is the result of the sinful, fallen condition of the human race. “We're consumed by your anger, we're terrified by your wrath.” Verse 8: 

You have set our iniquities before you, 
our secret sins in the light of your presence.

The presence of God is like brilliant sunlight. It exposes the darkness. You push away that rock and the sunlight shines in and the creatures, the insects, whatever is underneath there, they scurry away. They're exposed. That's the picture here. You've set our iniquities before You, our sins, the sins that we thought were secret. They're in the light, the spotlight, the searchlight of Your presence. There's nothing hidden. 

He talks here about secret sins. We only think they're secret. They're really not secret, the sins that we know about, but we want to hide, going back to Adam and Eve again, hiding behind the bushes from God, who sees everything, everywhere at all times. They're secret sins that we know about and want to hide. But there are also sins, you could call secret sins, of things we don't know about, that we've deceived ourselves. We've become blind to our sins. Those might be secret or hidden sins, but they're all open to God.

Luke 12 tells us “there is nothing covered,” Jesus said, “that won't be uncovered, nothing hidden that won't be made known” (v. 2). It's all coming out. People wonder, sometimes, Should I tell my mate about this or that situation in our marriage, a way I lied, a way I deceived him? Now, there are more helpful and less helpful ways to handle that, but let me just say it's all coming out in the judgment. Our secret sins will be known as they are now known to God. Verse 9, Psalm 90: 

For all our days ebb away under your wrath; 
we end our years like a sigh. 
Our lives last seventy years 
or if we are strong, eighty years. 
Even the best of them are struggle and sorrow; 
indeed, they pass quickly and we fly away. (vv. 9–10)

In light of God's eternal lifespan, seventy to eighty years of good, long life is nothing. This short span of life is ebbing away. And the Scripture says in these verses that those days, even if we have many of them, they're filled with struggle and sorrow. That word “struggle” means “heavy labor or misery or weariness or drudgery.” It's like being on a treadmill. You're getting nowhere. That's struggle, and they're filled with sorrow. That's vanity, nothingness, life apart from a relationship with God is struggle and sorrow, and that's it. 

 

Now, there may be some sunny days, there may be some common grace, some things that we can enjoy, but there isn't much to really enjoy apart from God. Verse 11: 

Who understands the power of your anger?
Your wrath matches the fear that is due you.

God hates sin, and that leads to the wrath of God, the judgment of God on sin. And here's what we need to understand: we will either bear God's wrath, His judgment for our own sins, every last one of them; or we will put our trust our faith in Christ, who bore the wrath of God for us for our sins in our place. That's the gospel. Jesus Christ died for our sins. If we don't trust Him to bear the penalty and the weight and the guilt of our sins, we will have to bear the weight of God's wrath for all of our sins.

In light of the shortness and the sadness of life, Moses prays in verses 12–17, and I just want to move quickly through those. Verse 12: 

Teach us to number our days carefully
so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts. 

When you think of the eternity of God, the brevity of life—eternity is long, life is short—the sinfulness of man, the judgment and the wrath of God; teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts. Now, I'm not very good at math, but let me give a little try at it here. 

If God gives us a lifespan of, say, seventy years, which is what He said earlier in this psalm was not guaranteed, but it's what we can expect to be something of an average. Seventy years is 25,550 days. Number your days carefully. He said in some cases it may be eighty years. That's 29,200 days. Now, that seems like a lot of days—25,000; 29,000. That's a lot of days till you think about how many have already passed and how few there are left. 

So if, for example, you're thirty years old, that means you've lived almost 11,000 days, and you have 14,600 left if you're going to have a seventy-year lifespan. If you're fifty, you've lived a little more than 18,000 days, and that means you have 7,300 days left, if God's going to give you a lifespan of seventy years. Now as I'm recording this program, I have lived more than 24,000 days. You're going, “Wow, you're old.” Yeah, I'm getting there. So if the Lord gives me seventy years . . . This was a like a wake up call to me this week, as I did these calculations. If the Lord gives me seventy years, that means I have fewer than 1,200 days left to live in this life . . . and God doesn't guarantee seventy years. Some may be fewer, some may be more, but our days, our years, are still numbered, and they are relatively few.

So what's the goal here? It's so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts, to have a wise heart, to see all of life from God's perspective. And how do we gain wisdom? We number our days carefully. We think about our days in light of eternity, how vast it is and how few our days are.

How do you do that? Go to funerals. That's where we learn wisdom. You see a young person taken, a man or woman in the quote, “prime of life,” an older person—they're ninety-three, but it's still they're gone physically. Walk through cemeteries. This is where we can gain godly perspective and wisdom, and we can think about how few our days are here on earth. 

So whether you're in the first half of your anticipated lifespan, no guarantee, or maybe you've gone into overtime, how do you want to live the days you have left here on this earth? What practical difference would it make if you were to live your life today in light of eternity? This is what it means to number our days carefully, and we pray Lord, teach us how to do that. Show us how to do that so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts. 

Then he prays in verse 13: 

LORD—how long? Turn [or return your translation may say] and have compassion on your servants.

God's compassion is the only hope for sinful man who's doomed to die, consumed by God's anger unless God intervenes, as He has in Christ, and gives us mercy. Verse 14: 

Satisfy us in the morning with your faithful love, 
so that we may shout for joy and be glad all our days. 

Satisfy us in the morning. I think that could be mean two things. Your translation may say, “satisfy us early.” That could be seeking the Lord first thing in the day in His Word—which is a habit I highly recommend, seek Him early in the day. But it can also mean seek Him and let Him satisfy you early in your lifetime. 

And let me say this to young people (you decide if you're young), but when you're young, you look at old people like maybe you look at me and you think, Boy, I’ve got a long time till I get there. Or you look at somebody who's really old . . . I got a text this morning from a friend telling me she was praying for me. She's almost at her ninety-fifth birthday. And I think, Boy, that seems so far away, that seems so long. Well, when you're young, you think it seems far away. As you get older, you realize it goes so quickly. 

And so we want to say, “Lord, teach me as a younger woman, a younger person, to seek You, to be satisfied with Your unfailing love.” Don't wait till you're old to be satisfied in God. Don't wait till you're ancient, till you're ninety-five or sixty-five or fifty-five if you're twenty-five or fifteen. Let the Lord satisfy you now in your youth with His steadfast love.

You want to live your days with joy? Start each day getting your soul satisfied with His mercy—fresh and new every morning. I tell you, it will do you a lot more good than picking up and opening your news app. I do that. I get that. I'm very interested in the news and what's going on. But, this is where my soul finds satisfaction and joy. Verse 15:

Make us rejoice for as many days as you have humbled us, 
for as many years as we have seen adversity.

He's saying, “Turn affliction into gladness.” Only God can do that. Second Corinthians chapter 4: 

Our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. (v. 17)

And then verse 16: 

Let your work be seen by your servants, 
and your splendor [Your Majesty, Your power, Your glory] by their children. 

He's saying, “Lord, we long to see Your work, Your mighty deeds—not just what You've done in the past, but we want to see it in our generation, in our time.” We talked in an earlier session about prayer for revival, that God would revive the hearts of His people. And we're saying, “Lord, You've done it before, but now we pray that You would do it, that Your work would be seen by Your servants today, by our generation. We pray that our children, the next generation, would witness the display of Your splendor, Your glory, Your beauty. Lord, we long to see Your work, not just our own labors, our efforts, but what only You can do.” 

Let me say as you pray this, in our ministry over the years, we've prayed this prayer for our ministry children. “Lord, we want to see Your work, but we also want our children to see Your splendor.” I don't have any biological children, but over the years I have invested in the children of my fellow workers, my fellow servants, and saying, “Lord, we want them to see that You are real. We want them to see Your glory reflected through us. We want them to see Jesus in us.” 

And I want to say, if your children, your grandchildren, the children of this generation, the grandchildren who are growing up in the churches, if they see the work and the glory of God, that is going to help protect them from deconstructing, from rejecting the Word of God. Now they can see it all and still reject it, but if they've really seen and witnessed and experienced the reality of God in our generation, that is a great hope for their future to want to walk with God. 

So we've seen in verse 16 what God does. We want to behold His work and His glory. And then in the final verse 17, we see what we do. Verse 17 of Psalm 90: 

Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us 
[the favor, the delight, the splendor, the grace, the beauty of the Lord, let it be upon us and] 
establish for us the work of our hands. 

Establish the work of our hands, that word “establish” means “to make firm or secure or lasting, to cause something to stand and remain.” So immediately after asking God to show His work, Moses prays for God's blessing on the work of His people. He knows that apart from God, the work of His people, their labor is vain, it's repetitive, it's temporary, it's toilsome. So he pleads for divine favor to make the work of God's people enduring and meaningful. He longs for lasting fruit that God would make what little we are able to do count for eternity. This is what Jesus said in John 15, “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (v. 5). 

So Moses is praying, “Let the favor of our God be upon us. Establish the work of our hands.” First Corinthians chapter 15 echoes this in gospel tones, New Testament tones. 

Be steadfast . . . always excelling in the Lord's work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (v. 58) 

You see, our work only matters if it's joined to God's work, otherwise, it's going to be fruitless and meaningless. And so, Moses prays that God's hand would be visible and that our hands would be useful and that His glory would shine through both His work and ours in union with Him. 

I found verse 17 of Psalm 90 a beautiful verse to pray as I begin my day's work or a new project I'm working on. To lift up that day's work, lift up that project to the Lord and say, “Lord, let your favor, Your grace be upon me and establish the work of my hands this day.” Some days that work may seem really lofty, and then I remember I'm just a vapor. Sometimes the work I do may seem trivial, and then I need the reminder that it's all an act of worship. Then the presence and grace of God transforms all the work of my hands, the labors I do, into meaningful work for Him.

And so we have in this psalm, a humble cry from Moses, the man of God, for God's grace. He reminds us that we're dust, that our years pass like a sigh, that our strength is soon gone. But if God's favor rests on us, then our fleeting work today can have lasting and eternal value.

And so we say with Moses, “Lord, our lives are short, our strength is limited. But if You will bless us, if You will shine Your favor on us, then what we do will not be in vain. Please, Lord, make my life count, make my work count. Teach us.” 

When my dad was taken suddenly to heaven, September 1, 1979, after his death, we found a little piece of paper. He loved scribbling verses and quotes and things that were reminders to him. In his nightstand drawer was a paraphrase of Psalm 90, verse 12. Here's what was on that piece of paper. “Teach us to number our days and recognize how few they are. Help us to spend them as we should.” 

And oh Lord, that's our prayer. Teach us to number our days and realize how few they are. And in those days, may Your beauty and Your favor rest upon us. May Your smile shine over all that we do. May You take our fleeting efforts and make them fruitful. May You strengthen what is weak, preserve what is fading, and cause the work of our hands to endure for Your glory. Yes, Lord, help us to spend our days as we should and establish the work of our hands not for the glory of our name, but for Yours. In Jesus' name, we pray amen. 

Dannah: Amen. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been encouraging us to pray, along with Moses, “Teach us to number our days.” You know, my mon is such a faithful example of this. She is constantly considering, "How can I serve the Lord in the few days I have left?" Now, she's only seventy-nine, so I hope she has a lot left. But, it is always on her mind. I love learning from her as she spends her days in light of eternity. 

I wonder, is there an older woman in your life who also lives with eternal perspective? What could you learn from her? How could you imitate her faith? How are you already seeking to live with eternity in mind? Just some food for thought today. 

Want to keep hanging out in the Psalms on your own time? Nancy’s devotional, Dwell: 30 Days with God in the Psalms, is a great tool! Walk through thirty Psalms, enjoy reflections from Nancy, and rest in God’s presence. This devotional is yours when you donate any amount to Revive Our Hearts before the end of June. To request it, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Tomorrow, prepare to praise. We’re back with Nancy in yet another psalm—a psalm of celebration. Curious what exactly we’re celebrating? You’ll have to come find out! Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

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