Day by day, day by day,

Oh dear Lord three things I pray:

To see Thee more clearly,

Love Thee more dearly,

Follow Thee more nearly, day by day.

Are you conscious of the days passing by? Do you know what the date is today without looking? Are you watching this or are you just aware of time flying by? Time does move fast. No sooner did I put our Christmas decorations away when Valentine hearts started appearing everywhere.

I’m keeping an eye on the days more than I usually do right now, only because my annual spring training trip to Arizona is a little over a month away, but that’s not really the best reason to do this. There is actually a much better reason we should be aware of the days all the time, and that is because the Bible tells us to: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Number your days. Don’t float along. Numbering your days makes you aware that your days are limited. We only have a certain number of them.

If you somehow knew you only had ten days to live, I’m sure you would be numbering your days. And I bet you would have some sort of plan for those days — what you wanted to do or needed to do (tell someone about Jesus … ask someone for forgiveness). But what’s the difference between ten days and a couple thousand? None really, especially when you consider that for any one of us we could only have ten more days until we collide with a bus, we just don’t know it.

So that’s why we number our days; however young or old we are, we don’t know how many days we have left. So numbering your days means living with deliberateness. It means living with a purpose. And what is that? To apply our hearts to telling people about Jesus, and to encouraging those who already know Him to follow Him more nearly, day by day, and spread the news about Him everywhere.