Y'all helping me celebrate the Gulf Coast? Yeah. Yes. Listen, I want to speak straight to you down there on the Gulf Coast.

Man, thank you. Thank you for helping us start a new work down there. Yeah. We recognize that that culture is different.

Thank you for being a light, and man, a safe place for people to gather on Sundays. Now listen, this series has been so fun because I've gotten to share the stage with our campus pastors. And one of the realities is, man, we're looking for a campus pastor on the coast. And so in this season, we have an interim campus pastor who happens to have been at our church for 28 years, and is the pastor of pastors.

And I want to give you kind of a fun fact here. One of my very first jobs was after my freshman year in college, and I came back to Hattiesburg to what was really First Baptist Church at that time, and I got to be an interim or an intern in the student ministry. And you know who the student minister was, right? Yeah, it was Byron.

Be nice to people. They may be your boss. Right. Yeah.

Here's what I want to do. Man, listen. I want you to know, we want a culture where we honor people. years of being in ministry at the same place. 28 So if you would, stand up with me. Oh, stop it.

Please. We want to give Byron a hand for serving so well and so faithfully Man. ... for a really long time. He has meant so much to our church. And so it is a privilege to get to share this stage with Byron.

And so I want to show you a picture. Byron's going to introduce you to his family. And so tell us a little bit about your family. Yeah.

They told me I didn't have time to go through and name every person, but I want you to know our family has grown through marriage, right? Yes. And so I realize that Donna and I are really rich people. Yeah.

Didn't realize that till I saw that picture. Well, you're blessed. Yeah. We are really.

And one of the ones that many of you here at Lincoln Road, you recognize Raleigh. Raleigh is our children's minister here, and she is also Byron's daughter. Yeah. And so we love Raleigh, and we love your boys.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. But also one of the things we've loved doing in this little season is getting to hear just for a minute, what is life like now on the coast? Mm.

And Byron has played a lot of different roles at our church. And so in this season, he's driving down on Sundays, he's leading our staff, and he's shepherding the Gulf Coast. And so what's that been like for you? Well, first of all, I want to say this, shout out to the Gulf Coast people right now.

God has just, man, enriched my life so much through the friendships I've had going down there. I thought I was going down to serve down there, and what I've recognized is that God's blessed my life so much by being a part of that campus and seeing what God's doing. And man, we're excited. We're taking territory.

Come on. Here's what I want you to do. Open up your Bibles. If you've got your Bibles with you today, we want you to join us.

We've been in the Book of Psalms all month, and we're coming at you today from Psalms 90. And there is a verse in this psalm that you need to memorize, that you want to hold close. Byron's going to teach on it, so I don't want to steal the thunder, but just get ready for a verse that will impact your life, and really from a message from a man that has been such an example to our church. So let me do this.

Let me pray for us, and then Byron will teach us, okay? Let's do this. Let's pray. God, I thank you so much on a day like today to get to hear stories, stories of campuses that are growing, stories of families that you brought here over 20 years ago, that now we're getting to celebrate baptism, stories of a pastor that has been so faithful to a calling and to a community.

And so God, I thank you for Byron. I thank you for his wisdom. I thank you for this stage and this moment for him to pour into us. May we learn from him.

God, I thank you for your Word. Ultimately, that's who we want to hear from today. We want to hear from you. Would you speak to our hearts?

Would you encourage us? God, would you give us some hope, something to shoot for and aim for? God, I thank you that you're a father that never gives up on us, that loves us. It's in your name we pray.

Amen. Amen. Hey, the first thing I want to do is start out by simply acknowledging that, man, on Father's Day, it evokes all kinds of emotions. I'm reminded of the pain chart in the hospitals, and it has the happy face and then the crying face.

And in this room today and in the rooms on all of our campuses today, we can probably place ourselves on that chart somewhere when we start thinking about Father's Day for all kinds of different reasons. For some of us, it's like, man, this is a day where we are nothing but happy face, and for some of us, it's broken-heartedness. So it runs from heartwarming to heartbreaking, and I realize that and recognize that. As a dad of three, I have felt that rollercoaster of parenthood, and I remember when it began for Donna and I.

We were taking Raleigh, our firstborn, home from the hospital, and it was the weirdest feeling, and some of you men in here can understand this. They took this human life, and they handed it to us, and I was waiting for something else to happen. I don't know. I was waiting for the home visit.

I was waiting for the interview, the background check. Do we have a fenced-in yard? Do we have a plan if we leave town? All the things that they would ask you when you take a puppy home.

Yeah. And we got none of that. They simply walked us down, rolled Donna down in the wheelchair, let her get out, and then they said, "We need to check to see if your car seat is properly installed." And then I remember the nurse turning around to me and saying, "Congratulations, Mr. Malone, and good luck." And that was it.

We were now in parenthood, the toughest hood in America, right? And so when we think about that journey, man, it's just full of so many things. It's a time when When it's joy-filled, yet daunting. It's a time when it's exciting and overwhelming.

It's a time that's rewarding and terrifying. But there's nothing like it, this journey we call parenthood. And here's what we can't fully understand until we really get into it, into this journey, and it's that the days seem incredibly long, but the years are a vapor. You blink and they're walking.

You blink again and they're driving a car. You look up one day and that little person that you put in the car seat, they now have a mind of their own, and they're making their own decisions. And then they're getting married, and then they're moving out. And you find yourself wondering, where did all the time go?

Here's a number that stopped me cold when I first heard it. From the day your child is born until they turn 18, you have roughly 940 Saturdays. That's it. 9-4-0. Even more sobering is by the time they start kindergarten, you've already burned 260 of those days.

They're gone. And when I first saw that, it moved me from wondering where the time had gone to deep conviction. Because it's one thing to feel the ache of time passing, it's another to ask the harder question, and I want to challenge us to do that today. It's another thing to ask the harder question of how did I spend my time?

How am I spending it? Not just where did it go, but what am I doing with it? That's exactly the question that Moses was wrestling with in Psalm 90. It's the only psalm that was written by Moses, and you think about what this man has seen.

He had seen a sea parted and two million people walk across on dry ground as he led them out of slavery and captivity in Egypt. He had seen a cloud by day to direct them and a pillar of fire by night. He had seen food drop from heaven to provide. He had seen a generation follow faithfully to the brink of the Promised Land and then balk, and he saw their fear overtake their faith, and then they wandered for 40 years in the wilderness.

As I was researching that, I saw something that just stunned me. It said that Moses witnessed 40 funerals a day for 40 years. And so it's against that backdrop. He's older now.

Moses is an old man. And out of that long life full of both the miraculous and the painful, comes this psalm. And when he sits down to write it, he doesn't write about the miracles and the power that he's seen. He writes about time.

And it's both a warning and an invitation. So let's read it together, Psalm 90. And it says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." Moses is saying, "God, I recognize that you are eternal.

Time doesn't bind you." And then he says, "You turn people back to dust, saying, 'Return to dust, you mortals.' A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death. They are like new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it's dry and withered." Moses is saying, "God, I recognize not only that you're eternal, but you're sovereign. You're all-powerful." "We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.

You have set our iniquities before you, our sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to 70 years, or 80 if our strength endures. Yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

If only we knew the power of your anger, your wrath! It is as great as the fear that is your due." Moses said, "Hey, God, you are eternal. You are all-powerful." And he also says, "I recognize that you are our just judge." And against those characteristics of God comes a prayer of Moses. Listen to this, verse 12.

It's where we'll hang out. "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." That's the prayer of Moses, this man who had seen everything, the miraculous, the power, the disappointment, the funerals. And from his prayer today, I want to give us some simple takeaways, not just for dads in the room, but for every person in this room. The first thing we can take away from this is that we need to live our lives with a sense of urgency.

Psalm 90:10, 12 says, "Our days may come to 70 years, or 80 if our strength endures. Teach us to number our days." Moses opens up the psalm by contrasting two things, God's eternality and our frailty as humans. God is from everlasting to everlasting, but we are simply a mist. As a matter of fact, that's exactly how James describes it in James 4:14.

He says, "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." It's that image of our breath on a cold winter day. Now, I know what you got to be thinking. "I came here today for Father's Day, and this is what I'm getting?" Look, hang on. Stay for the whole thing.

It gets more encouraging. Moses isn't trying to make us depressed. He's trying to wake us up. Dads, moms, each person in here, Moses is saying, "Wake up.

Use your time effectively." But here's the temptation for every dad, every parent, every person in this room, and it's to simply drift through life. Busy providing things, busy fixing things, busy buying things, busy reacting to things. Staying busy, busy, busy, but never stopping to ask, "Am I spending my time or am I investing my time?" And I want to challenge us today to ask that question, to be bold enough and brave enough to evaluate our lives and ask that question. There's three places, three simple ways, I think, that we can begin to invest our lives and live with urgency and intention.

Number one, I want to challenge you to invest your time being physically present. Now, some of us are gifted in different ways, but all of us, if we're here today, we've been gifted with our body. Some of you are thinking, "It's not so much a gift." Well, you got one. And he's saying to us, "Hey, your presence is powerful." There's power in presence.

And so dads, I want to say to you that fatherhood is less about presence that we buy, S-E-N-T-S, and more about the presence that we and we alone can provide in the lives of our families. I know that we're bound sometimes by work, but there are often times where we have a choice today to communicate what matters to our children and to our families by our presence. In the early 2000s, I read an article about the top 10. I was a young parent, and I read an article about the top 10 pastors in America at that time.

I don't know how you make that list. But one of the things they asked them was this question: "What is your greatest regret?" And nine out of 10 of them responded that, "I did not spend more time with my kids." There's power in our presence. Number two, invest your time through conversations. Not just by the amount of words that you speak, but the kind of words you speak.

As fathers, we need to use our words to speak life into our children. Men, listen to me. If we're unable to speak words of life, I mean words like, "I am proud of you." Words like, "I love you." Well, they know I love them, I provide for them. Don't leave blanks.

Don't leave silent places in the lives of our children and our families. Use our words to speak life into them, because here's the danger. If we don't speak those words into our children, it leaves blanks that the world is all too happy to rush in with distorted noise and redefine who they are. Use your words.

Proverbs 18:21 says that there's the power of life and death in the tongue. I had a really good friend years ago, and parenthood was a whole new thing, and as his kids grew up, one of the things that I noticed that he would do is he would always introduce his children this way. He had a little boy and a little girl, and he would introduce his little girl as, "Hey, this is my little girl. Her name is...

And she's an angel." And then he would introduce his little boy and he would say, "Hey, this is my little boy. You better watch out for him because he's bad." And they grew up to fulfill the future that that dad had pictured for them. Man, I want to say this. Maybe you've been guilty of that.

Mom, maybe you've been guilty of that. Stop. Think through the power of your words and begin to picture a future for them that God can use. There's power in our words.

Number three, another way we can live urgently is to invest our time emotionally. I'm going to tell you, that's really hard to define. It's one that we often avoid, especially as dads, because it's complicated. It's messy.

The word I use is it's just kind of squishy, and it's hard to navigate. I found that in my home, especially with one of my kids, Rayleigh, that the time that she would most want to connect with me emotionally and share her heart, it was always late at night. Usually around midnight. And the next day was an early morning for me.

And I got to tell you, in that moment, I was like, "Honey, can we please," in my mind, "Can we please put this off?" But dads, we don't get time off. Moms, we don't get time off. We may take it, but it's not the wise thing to do. And so in that moment, I realized she was not seeking answers.

She just wanted to share her heart. And one of the things that I began to thank the Lord for was that. I read a passage of scripture, it's Malachi 4:6, and it says this: "God's desire is for the hearts of fathers to be turned to the hearts of their children." And can I say this? It's not just your daughters.

It's your sons. Men, our sons need to be able to see us process our emotions in a healthy way. Invest time emotionally in our children. Someone once asked me a question I've never been able to shake, and it said this: "Who will cry at your funeral?" If everyone grieves at our funeral but our kids, what a tragedy.

Not who will attend, but who will weep because our lives have been woven into theirs. Now, I want to tell you, Donna and I have a new mission. I know you came and you didn't expect to be talking about funerals and death on Father's Day, right? But Donna and I have got a new mission for our funerals.

We not only want our sons and our daughter to cry. Here's our goal. I want my son-in-law and my daughters-in-law to cry. It's a new mission, and I want to challenge you in that when you reach this stage of your life.

Because I want to weave into their lives loving kindness. I want to weave encouragement into my son-in-law and my daughters-in-law. I want to weave spiritual foundations into them because you see, our lives will echo in the lives of our children and our grandchildren. We don't need more years to make an impact.

We need the right purpose in the years that we've been given. The days are short, but they're enough if they're focused. Have a sense of urgency and let the tension, urgency just brings tension to my heart. Does it give you tension, like when you hear urgent?

But let that turn tension into intention for you. Point number two. First, live with urgency. Second, lead with wisdom.

"Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom." I find it interesting that Moses doesn't ask for more time, not more strength, he asks for wisdom. Here's what I've learned the hard way. Wisdom is not automatic with age. You can grow older without growing wiser.

Moses knew because he'd watched a whole generation prove it. Can I step aside just for a moment and, man, with as much tenderness and compassion as a longtime student pastor, say this to, and I don't know who I'm saying it to. I don't have anybody's name in particular in mind. Gulf Coast, you can relax.

But God spoke to me and told me to say this just as kind as I could. For some of you as dads today, this is the word: You need to grow up. Big words. Moms, you need to grow up.

Our children don't need another buddy. They need a mom. They need a dad. And it's time for some of us to put aside selfishness and childish things in order to lead our children to what really matters.

And I don't mean that as a guilt trip. Whoever that was for, take that home with you. We need to lead with wisdom. It's hard.

Man, it's an incredible struggle. I remember a time, Rayleigh was like six years old. Caden was four. Garen would've been about a year and a half old, and I had them all at the house.

Donna was gone, and I was doing the parenting thing. And I was sitting down watching TV, and I heard this crazy commotion. I'm flawed, too. I heard this crazy commotion in our kitchen, and man, it sounded like a cat fight.

Caden and Rayleigh were going at it, and at that age, girls are bigger than boys. Rayleigh was about a head taller than Caden, and I'd had all I could take, and I went in with as much tenderness and compassion and kindness, and I said, "Stop!" They both kind of froze, and I said, "Look, I'm tired of it. We're going to solve this." Now, let me put a disclaimer. I don't normally promote violence.

But I looked at both my kids, and they were all bowed up, and they had their fists and grabbing each other by the collar, and I said, "Hey, stop." No, I said, "Hey, stop!" They stopped, and I said, "We're going to solve this. I'm tired of it. I'm watching the football game." "And we're going to solve this. And so here's what we're going to do.

We're going to give each one of you a free shot." "And then I'm going back to watch the football game." Now y'all hang in there because there's a lot of wisdom here. "Free shot, anywhere but the face. That dental stuff costs a lot of money." Both their eyes got really big, terror. And I said, "Rayleigh, you get to go first." Caden's like, "What?" I said, "You get to go first, Rayleigh." Love my daughter's heart.

Started weeping, crying, big tears coming down her eyes, and I thought, "Dad of the year right here." "I am the man." I said, "No, you go ahead. Go ahead and hit your brother." "Dad, I don't want to hit my brother. I love my brother." I looked at Caden and I said, "See, son? You see how much your sister loves you?

Now you go ahead and you get a free shot, too." Pow, he hit her right in the stomach. Dropped her like a sack of potatoes. I was like, "What is wrong with you, boy?" He's like, "You told me to do it." "What are you doing, son? All right.

Here's the next move. We don't mention this to your mom." Right? We struggle. Having wisdom is difficult.

I want to give us a couple of things of what wisdom can simply look like for us. Number one, wisdom is being spiritually involved in the lives of our children. Hear me now, it's not perfect, and please hear this, it's not preachy. Our kids know we're flawed.

You realize how hard it is for me to preach a Father's Day message knowing my kids are hearing all this? We're flawed, so don't get preachy. But listen to this, Proverbs 9:10 tells us this, that, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom." Deuteronomy 6, also written by Moses, says, hey, "These commands are to be upon your heart and you're to teach them to your children as you go." As you go through the car line, as you sit in the fast food line, as you're having conversations at night. Our children need to see us simply model a dependence on Jesus Christ.

Don't make it too hard. And look, relax. We're not calling you to be perfect. As a matter of fact, you can't be perfection.

Let me say it again. You can't be perfection, but you can be a reflection. You can be a reflection of Jesus Christ to them. Second thing is wisdom.

Wisdom asks for help. Well, who in the world do we ask for help? Hey, I don't want to oversimplify this, but God's word is truth. In James 1:5 it says, "If any of you lacks wisdom," and if you've ever been a parent, we all lack it.

"If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, and it will be given." I love what Craig has led our church to say. He said, "Pray first." Man, there's not a greater word of advice in parenting I can give you other than pray first. I'll add to that, pray often. And then I would say this, don't only pray for your children, pray with your children.

Ask God. The second place you can go and ask is ask people who are further down the road than you. Borrowed experience is a lot better than bought experience. Proverbs 24:6 says it this way, "Surely you need guidance to wage war.

And victory is won through many advisors." There's no greater war than that for the hearts of our children. There's no shame in saying, "I don't know how to handle this. I don't know how to handle this moment. Can you help me?" Find somebody who you've observed that's further down the road than you are and ask for help.

Hey, as we land this Psalm, Moses lands the Psalm not in despair, but in prayer. I love this. At the end of that verse, he says, "Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days." Listen to this, "May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us. Establish the work of our hands, yes, establish the work of our hands." He's saying, "Satisfy us.

Establish us. Let our lives mean something." And that's the cry of every heart in this room. That's the cry of every human heart. God, let my life mean something.

And here's what Moses understood about that cry, though, and I want us to hear it clearly today. There's no satisfaction that lasts apart from God. There's no satisfaction that will last apart from God. Listen, we can run hard after the things, and be careful what we run after because we're modeling for our children, but we can run hard after things that will leave us empty at the end of the day.

We can chase the pleasure of a vacation. We can labor for the prestige of an education. We can desire our friends' adoration or the wealth of a vocation. But if we fail to experience God's transformation, we'll never find true gratification.

We were not made to be satisfied by any of those things. We were made for a relationship with the God who is from everlasting to everlasting. Colossians 1:16 says, "We were created by him, for him." Here's what I want every dad, every person in this room to hear today, especially if you're in this room and you're more on the painful side of the pain scale. If you're sitting here and you're carrying more regret than you want to admit, if you look back and you see years that you wish you could have a do-over, words that went unsaid Moments that you just missed.

I want to give you a word of encouragement today. Joel 2:25 says, God says this: "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts have eaten." I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts have eaten. You can't go back and change yesterday, but you can start numbering your days differently this day. I want to challenge you in that.

It's never too late to begin. Our God is a God of new beginnings. I also want to sit here and say if you're the child of a father who's gotten it incredibly wrong, I want to say from mine and Donna's own personal experience, her dad walked off and left their family when she was 15 years of age, and there is a promise that she has clung to and has lived out and experienced. And I want to say this to you as a child that may be hurting.

Psalm 68:5 says, "I will be a father to the fatherless." Amen. God will stand in the gap for you. God will provide through his people. I also want you to know this, that if you're here today, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

If you're here today and you don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ, I want you to know that our timeless God stepped out of heaven and into the bounds of time for you, for me, and today can be your one day, the day you begin numbering your days with a relationship with Jesus Christ. Not someday when you have it all together, but this day. Moses prayed, "Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love." And that satisfaction is available to every person. Every person in this room.

Let's pray together. Lord, we come to you and we ask you to teach us to number our days, not out of fear, but out of faith. God, that it's not a countdown, but it's just an accounting that we might spend our days wisely, that we might invest them with urgency, that we might lead with wisdom, and that we might experience the satisfaction of our lives that, God, only you can bring. God, satisfy us in the morning.

Establish the work of our hands. Let our lives mean something. Let our lives echo for your glory in the lives of our children and our grandchildren. In Jesus' name, I pray.

Amen.