Psalms 90

Psalms 90:8

What Are They? Our secret sins.—Psalms 90:8.Did you ever go into a dark room which had shutters on the window? Everything was black as night, but you knew where to find the bolt of the shutters, and you groped your way to it and drew it and threw the shutters wide, so that the sunshine streamed into the room. Suppose, instead of opening the shutters all the way, you had opened them only a tiny chink, what would have happened? Only a ray of sunlight would have entered the room. Yes, and in that ray what would you have seen? Why, hundreds and hundreds of little motes of dust bobbing and dancing in the bar of light. So busy did they look that you could almost imagine they were tiny live creatures which had danced into the room when the shutters were opened.

But of course, being a wise boy or girl, you knew better, you knew that they were just minute particles of dust which had been there all the time though you hadn’t seen them. It was the bright ray of light in contrast with the surrounding darkness that had revealed them.Today we are going to speak, not of the motes in the air, but of the motes in our heart—motes that we· never know are there till a ray of Christ’s purity streams into our heart and shows them to us. Our text does not call them motes, it calls them secret sins. Now the very mention of “secret sins” makes you stiffen up in the pew and say to yourself, “Oh, if we are going to have the same old story about the little faults and meanness and lies and naughty things that I know I have been guilty of, but that nobody else knows; and if we are going to be told again that no sin is secret, and I’ve to be sure my sin will find me out—why, I think—I really do think—I’m not going to listen, for I’ve heard it all before.”Boys and girls, you can set your mind at rest on that score. I could have told you that same old story over again, and you might have been none the worse of hearing it either! But the secret sins I am going to speak of today are of another kind.

They are sins so secret that we don’t even know them ourselves. For there is a kind of secret sin known to God and yourself, and there is another kind known to God alone.

I hear some smart boy or girl saying, “If we don’t know we do them, how can they be sins?” Well, let me see if I can explain.1. In the first place we don’t know about these sins because we are so accustomed to them. We have grown up with them. We have lived with them all our lives; we have taken them to bed with us at night, and risen with them in the morning; we have carried them to school with us, and invited them to share in our games. They are so mixed up with us that we look upon them as part of ourselves. We have grown so used to living with them that I believe we should hardly know ourselves if we lost them one day.

We should actually miss them, but it would be a delightful miss for ourselves and for our friends. Nobody would have to say of us then, “Oh, you’ve got to be awfully careful with Jean, she’s so easily offended,” or, “You’d better not interfere with Jim; he likes his own way best.” You would think from the way people spoke that these faults were so much a bit of us that they couldn’t be separated from us, but they can.

Only we must first see them ourselves. And if only we ask Him, Christ will discover them to us.2. The second reason why we don’t know our secret sins is that we are judging them by a wrong standard. We must remember that what some people consider very horrible sins indeed, others consider no sins at all. For instance, a native of India thinks it is clever to cheat, or steal, or tell a lie. That is the way he has been taught to look at such things. Yes, and I’m afraid a good many people in our own country think the same. A Sunday school teacher in a mission Sunday school was telling the children what a black thing a lie was, and one little urchin looked up at her in amazement and said, “Eh, Miss, what’s the hairm in a lee?

There’s nae hairm in a lee.” The sin, in his mind, lay not in telling the “lee” but in being found out. You see, people judge things differently. What one person thinks white another calls fawn, and a third very dark fawn indeed. It all depends on the background.Did you ever see a flock of sheep feeding on the slope of a hill? How white and fleecy they looked— just like little patches of snow! Did you ever see the same flock of sheep on the same hillside, but with a background of snow instead of one of green grass? Why, the sheep were nearer fawn than white then, weren’t they? You wondered how you could ever have compared them to patches of snow.

It was the background that made the difference—compared with the grass they were white, compared with the snow they were fawn.It is the same with our sins. We don’t know that they are sins because we don’t compare them with the background of Christ; we compare them with the background of other people. If we took the white light of Christ’s purity as a background we should be astonished to find that what we had called “being careful” was really meanness; what we had called “looking after our rights” was really selfishness, and what we had named “a good appetite” was really greed. Sins, you see, are splendid at dressing up and disguising themselves. But Christ can pierce any disguise, and with His help so can we.3. The third reason why we don’t know our secret sins is that they are not the sins we actually do, they are the sins that we might do.

They are like sleeping volcanoes that may burst into flames one day. Nobody knows what he may do if he has the chance.

We have a proverb, “Opportunity makes the thief,” and Shakespeare says—How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Makes deeds ill done! (King John, IV. 2: 219.) People cheer us up when we’ve got some difficult task by saying, “You never know what you can do till you try.” That is very true of good things. It is equally true of bad things. You never know what bad deed you may be capable of doing till suddenly one day you find to your horror that you have tried to do it, and have succeeded only too well.Let us ask Christ to extinguish our sleeping volcanoes. You hear at school about active volcanoes, dormant or sleeping volcanoes, and extinct or dead volcanoes. Let us ask Christ to turn all our sleeping volcanoes into dead volcanoes, all our possible faults into impossible faults. That is the only safe way.

Psalms 90:12

Counting Our Days So teach us to number our days, That we may get us an heart of wisdom.—Psalms 90:12.I expect you all like having birthdays. It is nice to have birthday letters and birthday presents and birthday parties. Well, this is a birthday text and a birthday sermon, but you don’t need to wait till your birthday to begin to use it. Sometimes we get our birthday presents beforehand, and we are not allowed to open them till the proper day. That is very tantalizing. But you needn’t keep this text till your birthday; you can begin to use it now, and the sooner you begin the better.

1. When your birthday comes round one of the things you always do is to number your years. You say, “Yesterday I was eight and today I am nine,” or, “Yesterday I was ten and today I am eleven,” and you are proud to think you are a year older, a year nearer being grown-up. Well, this verse is a prayer to God that He will teach us to number—not our years, but our days.But what does that mean? Does it mean that we are to count up all the days we have lived, count 365 days for every year, and multiply by the number of years we have lived. That might be rather a useful exercise in math, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do us much good otherwise. No, “numbering our days” means more than merely counting them. It means taking account of them, valuing them, so as to lay them out to the best advantage.

We count our money when we count how much it will buy. We count our days when we count how much they will buy, how much we can get out of them and get into them.It is an unusual fact, but a true one, that the more we have of a thing the less we generally value it. If we have a great many toys we grow tired of playing with them. If we have a great many pleasures we weary of them. If we have a great deal of health we often throw it away. And it is just the same with days as it is with other things—if we are rich in them, we don’t value them so much.Now, you are very rich in days.

You haven’t spent much of your life yet, and the likelihood is that you will live much longer than a man of forty, or fifty, or sixty will. You are looking forward to a long life, and perhaps you think that a day wasted doesn’t matter much.Well, I am going to tell you something.

Losing a day always matters, but it matters much more in childhood than it does when you grow up. For childhood is the storing time. It is the time of all times for storing knowledge, and character, and goodness, so that we may be able later to draw on our store. What would you think of a bee which refused to go out and gather honey on a sunny morning because the summer had just begun and there were lots of sunny days to follow? You would say it was rather foolish, would you not? and that it deserved to run short of food in the winter. But the children who waste their storing days are just as foolish as that bee, and they are sure to suffer for it.The psalmist asks God to teach him to count—not the years, but the days; so he evidently thinks a day is a very important thing.

There was a great painter of old who rose to great fame and was commissioned to paint the portrait of Alexander the Great. And the secret of his success lay in his motto.

What do you think it was? “No day without a stroke.” He never let a day pass without adding a stroke to the picture he was painting.Will you remember that motto and make it yours? Never let a day go past without giving it something to take away. Learn your lessons, and play your games, and do your tasks, but don’t dawdle. Don’t waste time, don’t fritter it away, for you will never get it back again.A little day ran past Without a word from me; I thought it ran too fast, But that could hardly be, Because a little boy next door, they say, Found time to speak a happy word that day. A little day was spent Almost before I knew; I wondered where it went, And so indeed would you, If, of a sudden, at the set of sun, You found how very little you had done. (F. W. H., in A Garland of Verse, 131.)2. But if you look at the text you will see that we are to count our days, to lay them out, for a special purpose. What is that purpose? “That we may get us an heart of wisdom.”And what is a heart of wisdom? Well, it isn’t the same thing as a mind of wisdom.

We may be very wise in our hearts although we are not at all clever with our heads, and we may have very wise heads and very foolish hearts. But though we can’t all have clever heads, we may all have wise hearts.What, then, is a heart of wisdom?Well, I think it is, first, a heart that is learning to know itself, to know its own weakness, its own temptations, and is learning, too, to guard against them.But even more than that I think it is a heart that is learning to know other people—a heart that is big enough to make room for other people’s failings—a heart that is ready to pity, and sympathize, and help.But most of all I think that it is a heart that is learning to know God—a heart that has found room for Jesus; for our hearts will never be really wise unless Jesus is ruling in them.You are a year older than you were this day last year. Are you getting a heart of wisdom? Are you a year wiser, a year kinder, a year more loving and sympathetic? How are you counting your days?Lord, help me love Thee every day, And, as I grow, Help me to keep Thy holy way Of life, and so Be Thy true loving child, I pray! (A. R. Thompson.)