My “Commentary” as editor of The Baptist Courier is down to its last two appearances, with my final offering to our readers to be published in our Dec. 20 edition.

The end of the year and my completion of 42 years in communications ministry for South Carolina Baptists is within earshot now, and I find great joy and even satisfaction in reflecting on my time spent in service at Furman and Anderson universities, and at the Courier, which accounts for 38 of those years, the last 16 as editor.

At the November meeting of South Carolina Baptists in Greenville, I spoke to messengers by way of a video in which I said that my strongest emotion as this chapter of my life closes is simply gratitude. I am grateful that God called me to the ministry of Christian communications and sustained me in it. And I am grateful to South Carolina Baptists for providing places of service to me for four decades.

What will retirement hold for me? I have no idea; it is not my call to make. God will use me until I am used up, of that I am sure. I do hope that, with the ensuing years, I will be less conscious of the clock but more keenly aware of time.

It has been wisely written that “at the moment of our birth, God turns the hourglass upside down, and our time starts running out.”

As I think about time and its tendency to run out, I think of Moses. He is not viewed primarily as a psalmist. One psalm is attributed to him, however. It probably is the oldest psalm in the Bible, written as Moses neared the end of his 120-year life.

Psalm 90 is dated either during or at the end of Israel’s 40 years of wanderings in the wilderness. The Hebrews were disobedient to God. They had refused to enter into Canaan to claim the promised land.

God’s judgment? Wasted years.

In the psalm, Moses asks God’s help in using his time more wisely for God’s glory. “Teach us how short our lives really are,” he writes, “so that we may be wise” (90:12).

The verse is commonly translated this way: “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Moses was time-conscious. Typical of people then and now, many are not. Small children are not preoccupied with death. They do not “number their days,” or, as another translation puts it, “number their days aright.” Teenagers often think they are immortal; death is farthest from their minds.

Not so with me. Not when I was a teenager. I thought often of death, of dying. Sometimes, when I should have been listening to my pastor father preach on the quality of life, I was concentrating on the quantity of life. At times during the worship service, I looked around the congregation at older members, calculating in my mind what percentage of their lives was behind them. Then I compared their numbers to mine, taking comfort and finding joy in how comparatively little of my life was already lived.

I am now where those older church members were then. Knowing of my love for football, someone observed of me, “You’re in the fourth quarter.” True, but I’ve heard no two-minute warning.

Many adults do not want to think about their impending deaths. And yet, if we are to “number our days aright,” we cannot, and should not, shrink from the reality of our mortality.

To number our days “aright” means to see time for what it is — the stuff life is made of. It is to embrace the brevity of life on this earth, to determine in our hearts and before God that the time given to us will not be wasted.

Seeing time for what it is, though, is only the first part of the prayer of Moses. To know that time may be short for us at best, the all-important aim of our lives ought to be to gain a heart of wisdom.

The Bible is filled with wisdom literature — Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and portions of Esther, Psalms, Song of Songs and Daniel, for example.

When compared with the wisdom writings of other cultures, biblical wisdom literature is unique; it teaches that the fear of God is the foundation of true wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). For believers, fear in this context is better understood as respect, reverence and awe. We must never lose sight of this, however: There are aspects of God’s divine character that compel obedience — his holiness, righteousness, unlimited knowledge and power. We know that God’s wrath has been satisfied in Christ. We are relieved of the fear of condemnation by God. We are not immune, however, to accountability to a holy God.

What is the wisdom that is the fruit of our fear of God? A good working definition, I believe, is this: the ability to put the knowledge we have learned into practice in a way that is pleasing to God.

It means that we become, as one writer said it, “God-conscious,” which includes the knowledge that he is God and we are not.

This kind of fear of God will give you and me a reverence for God that is deep-seated, that causes us to want to please God whatever the cost.

It is too late for us to redeem much, if any, of time wasted on trivial pursuits and useless activities, not to mention outright sin against God. Repentance is in order and will be accepted by God from hearts truly sorry for the wrong done. And each new day provides fresh and inviting opportunities to live in such a way that God finds pleasure in our lives.

If, that is, we “number our days aright.” If we recognize the brevity of life. If we seek with all of our hearts and minds to gain wisdom that comes from God. Wisdom to be found in the pages of Scripture and in communion with our Heavenly Father and our daily walk with his Son, Jesus.

But the years are speeding by for you and for me. Time lost cannot be reclaimed.

Determine to do what needs to be done or said. Do it while there is still time. My father, when stuck behind a particularly slow-moving vehicle, would often turn to me, smile and say, “He must have nowhere to go and all day to get there.”

It is not so with you and me. The hourglass still is tilted against us, the sand running through it. We may have more time than we think to do and to say what we should to show our love for God and for others. Or we may not. Either way, there is no time to waste.