May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish for us the work of our hands—yes, establish the work of our hands!Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us. Establish the work of our hands for us. Yes, establish the work of our hands.And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.And let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; And establish thou the work of our hands upon us; Yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
3 sermons cite this verse
… Listen now for God's word to you as it echoes to us from this brief verse from Psalm 90. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands. O prosper the work of our hands. This is the word of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to God. In 1976, in his book, The Selfish Gene, biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins coined a word, a term that may prove to be Dawkins' most important and lasting contribution to the cultural conversation. The word Dawkins coined was meme. A meme derived from the Greek word mimesis, from which we also get words like mimic, mime, and imitate, is an idea, behavior, style, or image or image that gets passed from one cultural node to another, mind to mind, person to person, group to group, through imitation. A meme is a copied theme. It's a mimicked scene played as a joke. It's a shared image, recognizable but endlessly modified, riffed on, and remixed. …
But what does it mean to number our days? Well, part of it may simply mean admitting that our days are indeed numbered. A good friend of mine has recently been reading the best-selling book, Being Mortal. As you may know, the book is by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School. And it's a very frank description of what it's like for us as human beings to come to the end of life. It's a book about what it means to grow old, for our bodies to wear down and to fail, and especially what it means to encounter the inevitable truth that we will all die. Well, when my friend got about halfway through the book, he confessed to me, you know, this book scares the heck out of me. Well, I understand that what frightens my friend, what frightens all of us, I suppose, is right there in the book's title, Being Mortal. We are all mortal. We know that, of course, but we tend to know it in the abstract. …
"Establish the work of our hands for us; yes, establish the work of our hands." Psalm 90:17. SOME of us have been to the grave this afternoon and the most forcible impression upon our minds at this time is that of our mortality. We cannot, in burying others, say, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," without thinking of the time when we, too, shall be laid in the silent grave. The thought that we are, yet are not, that we are but as shadows that flit across the path of life—coming, going, scarcely come before we are gone—the thought of our mortality has led us to ask concerning our work—Is that mortal, too? Will that die like ourselves? Some of us have darling objectives, high designs, great enterprises on our hearts—are all those shadows? We are as the grass of the field—are they also grass? Will the scythe that cuts us down cut them down, too? Truly, if we thought it would be so, it would give double bitterness to the remembrance of our own mortality to think that our work was mortal as well as ourselves! …