Ps. 90:12. "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." This beautiful passage urges us to give due consideration to the use of our days and sets before us a noble purpose. "Teach us to number our days." So swiftly pass the days of our lives that the number of the years increase alarmingly fast. Speaking of the tenure of life, Job says, "My days are "swifter than the weaver’s shuttle." Perchance you may have stood by the loom and watched the shuttle pass back and forth. How swiftly it flew! Job says that life is like that. David likens our days to grass, and to a shadow that passeth away. James compares life to a vapor. These all tell us how swiftly the days of our pilgrimage pass. How needful, then, that we make the best use of them while they are passing. Yesterday is dead and beyond recall. Tomorrow exists only in anticipation and may never come. Today is here, let us use it for we have promise of no other. How often we are prodigals of time. Wasters of precious, ever fleeting time. Lord, teach us to so use our time that we may be numbered among the wise.

The experiences of life lead us to see the need of a teacher. The need of a constant influence to strengthen us against the lower forms social and moral life everywhere present. The need of a guide that will lead us out of the way of folly into the way of wisdom. It is so easy to become a fool. Who, of us, have not cried out like Saul, (1 Sam. 26:21.) "I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly." Have we not too often disregarded righteous instruction and plunged into darkness? How foolish! Solomon tells us that, "The fool walketh in darkness." Darkness is depressing. It doesn’t lift. It fills us with fear. Darkness destroys hope. Man void of hope is a derelict on life’s outspreading sea. He is but a vagabond, a moral and spiritual hobo, with no aim to attain and no place to go. "Clouds without water" driven by a ghostly past and an empty blighted future. If we could only learn that any step in the dark is a dangerous step. How useless objects in the dark become. Even a sign-post that stands in the dark gives no guidance.

Darkness is a symbol of evil. Prov. 14:16. "A wise man feareth, and departeth from evil; but the fool rageth, and is confident." That person is wise, who, from the bitterness of his own tasting and the examples of evil persons, has learned to fear the consequences of evil and has departed therefrom. Evil is a canker that insidiously corrodes the moral fabric of the heart until it sends its poisonous spores into the soul, condemning it to a realm where white pain lives and tears drip forever. Let us beware of that which will master us for evil. Let us shun that, which will lead to a prostitution of high moral and edifying spiritual standards.

Various passages of Scripture are sign-posts on the highway of life, showing us where to go and how to get there, but they do not take us there. We, ourselves, must do the going. First of all we must subdue passion and curb lust. There must be a changing sky of our thoughts. We must set our affection on things above and not on things on the earth. There must be a death to evil. There must be a transformation of heart and soul. Jesus put it in these simple words, "Ye must be born again." It is a great thing to live right. Every man, whose soul is ambitious, can be great things and can do great things. He must first rise to be noble before he can do noble things in a noble way. Christianity gives aspirations for the best life. Its molding influence will produce character unimpeachable. Honor will be more precious than profit as he grows strong in fortitude. Death will be the emancipator of his soul while his beloved and friends gaze upon a body that the chisel of death has carved into marble majesty.