How to listen to a…New Years Psalm of Wisdom, Part 1

While it is true that New Year’s Day is just another day of year, I’m glad for a marker.  Yes, today, New Year’s Day 2024, is just another Monday.  A day off for people who work at companies that give off for New Year’s Day.  An extra day of family, food, football.  But I am personally glad that our culture has an emphasis on a new year.  A new you.  A new normal.  A new start. 

We sometimes need a new start.  We can talk about New Year’s resolutions, but I think that might be jumping the gun a bit.  Instead, let’s talk about how to evaluate the past year, or past years.  Maybe we evaluate the past year or years, and we realize that we don’t need to change anything, or very much at all.  Maybe we evaluate our lives, and we discover there’s a lot we should change.  But to determine that, we first need to evaluate our lives.

How do we evaluate our lives?  Just as with measurement, we have options.  When you’re taking your temperature, for example, the magic number is 98.6.  But 98.6…what?  My wife was recently working with one of the families who came to SEEDS ESL classes at Faith Church.  Their child was sick, and taking a temperature is very different if you measure in Celsius and Fahrenheit.

The same could be said for the driving as well.  If you’re in a country that uses the Metric system, kilometers per hour, when you get pulled over, what will happen if you say to the police officer, “I was looking at my speedometer’s miles per hour lines.” The officer probably won’t let you off the hook.

Likewise, when we evaluate our lives, we can use evaluation tools that will give us very different results. What measurement tool should we use?

During Advent we studied a variety of genres of psalms, helping us prepare ourselves to celebrate the birth of King Jesus, and helping us ready ourselves for his return.  This week we finish the blog series with a psalm to help us evaluate our lives and thus be ready for Jesus’ return, which could be at any time. Very appropriate, I hope, for New Year’s Day, when we often look back over the past year and plan toward the new year.  So what kind of psalm will help?

Psalm 49, a psalm of wisdom, is just the psalm that can help us evaluate our lives. Here are verses 1-4:

“Hear this, all you peoples; listen, all who live in this world, both low and high, rich and poor alike: My mouth will speak words of wisdom; the meditation of my heart will give you understanding. I will turn my ear to a proverb; with the harp I will expound my riddle.”

The psalmist begins by saying, “Listen up, everyone.”  What he has to say is for low and high, for rich and poor.  Notice the diversity of the various people groups.  Low and high refer to social status.  Rich and poor, of course, refer to economic status.  Whatever it is he’s about to say, he first wants to make sure that everyone is listening.  These words are for all.

We can often filter things out based on our sense of our standing in the world.  We can say, “Oh, that doesn’t apply to me,” and we can turn off our listening function and ignore it.  The psalmist is concerned that his readers will tune him out because they might think they know better.  Or they might think, these words are for others, not for themselves. 

So let’s not give in to that temptation. You and I need to hear this.  And what is it that we need to hear?  First, the psalmist tells us the category of what he is about to say.  It is wisdom. These words of wisdom, are a meditation from the heart of the psalmist, and they will give us understanding. 

That’s exactly what we are looking for if we want to evaluate our lives.  Wisdom and understanding.  Many people, when they hear those two words, “wisdom and understanding,” have a pretty good idea of what they are referring to.  As we evaluate our lives, however, let’s start from a place of humility and teachability and not assume that we already know what wisdom and understanding are. 

Likewise, let’s not assume that we are living our lives in a wise and understanding way.  The whole point of evaluating our lives is to check up on ourselves.  Are we wise and understanding?  Are we living rightly?  Probably a mix of yes and no.  The psalmist, in what he says through the rest of the psalm, will give us some further information that we can use to evaluate with.

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash