Sabbath Meditation

Confirming the Work of Our Hands

Psalm 90 contains a wonderful “sabbath” prayer. We read at the end of the Psalm: “And let the favour of the Lord be upon us; and do confirm for us the work of our hands. Yes, confirm the work of our hands.”

This Psalm is a prayer of Moses and it is a lament over the frailty of life, its shortness, and tenuousness. It is also a lament over having lived under the disciplining judgments of God. He says, “For we have been consumed by Thine anger, and by Thy wrath we have been dismayed. Thou hast placed our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy presence. For all our days have declined in Thy fury; we have finished our years like a sigh.” (Psalm 90: 7—9)

We recall that Moses spent the last third of his life with a generation of Israel which had been condemned by God to die in the wilderness, having been refused the privilege of entering into the Land of Promise. His duty was to lead the people during this phase of redemptive history. He was leading a people whose iniquities had been placed before God. They were doomed not to enter the land of rest. It was a time where the heart would have quailed; there would have been a deep sense of the worthlessness, uselessness, and vanity of life.

Nevertheless, towards the end of the Psalm, Moses asks the Lord to feel sorrow for His servants, and return again to them with the morning of His lovingkindness. He concludes by asking the Lord to confirm for them the work of their hands.

There are times and generations within the history of God's people when they lie under the anger and wrath of God. God seems far away. There is evil and unbelief on every side. Faith is weak. Compromise is the order of the day. We live in such times in the second world, as the Christian faith weakens and flickers in the West.

It is critical in such days that we not lose heart. Our eye must ever be toward the Lord, and our hands ever stretched out to Him. For His lovingkindness will return. He cannot deny Himself or His Son, and He has taken solemn oaths concerning us. The prayer of faith in such days is that the Lord might confirm for us the work of our hands.

When we pray this prayer we are asking that, however weak or limited, frail or compromised our labours have been, the Lord might make them stand and confirmed. If Moses could pray that the labours of that generation would be confirmed by the Lord, how much more we? We are thereby admonished to ask in faith that our labours would be acknowledged by God and in due time they would bear their fruit in His kingdom. Our generation may not see their fruit, but the Lord will make subsequent generations to see and be blessed by them.

As we enter the Lord's presence on the Sabbath in holy worship, we come bearing the works of our hands of the preceding week; we also are conscious that we will labour in the forthcoming week. We bring this labour as a sacrifice before Him and ask Him to confirm the labour of our hands. May very straight blows be struck by the Lord with our crooked sticks—this is what we must pray.

There is no better place nor time to pray such a prayer than on the Sabbath day, as He greets us with joy and welcomes us to His Throne of Grace.