Funeral Sermon For Elderly Woman

She Has Known You From My Youth

A Funeral Sermon From Psalm 71:17-19 And Psalm 90:1-17

Opening

We gather today because a long life has ended, and that is not a small thing. The years were many. The seasons of that life moved from youth to old age, from strength to frailty, from the world as it once was to the world as it is now. And we are left standing here, feeling the weight of what it means when someone who has been present for so long is present no longer.

Grief is honest. It does not need to be explained away or hurried past. The ache you feel in this room is real, and it is right. To love someone is to grieve when they are gone. So we do not come today to pretend that loss is not loss. We come to sit with it, and then to look up from it, because the Scriptures give us something to look up toward.

We are going to spend our time in two ancient poems, Psalm 71 and Psalm 90. Both were written by people who understood long life, the passing of years, and the question every aging heart eventually asks: when everything else changes, where do I stand? Both psalms answer that question with the same word. God. The eternal God who was there at the beginning is still there at the end, and that is the ground on which we stand today.

Exposition Of Psalm 71:17-19

Psalm 71 is a prayer of an older believer looking back across a lifetime. The voice in this psalm is not young. It is someone who has watched the years accumulate, who has known both trouble and deliverance, and who is now reflecting on what has been constant through all of it.

Listen to verses 17 through 19 in the Christian Standard Bible. "God, you have taught me from my youth, and I still proclaim your wondrous works. Even when I am old and gray, do not abandon me, God, while I proclaim your power to another generation, your might to all who are to come. Your righteousness reaches the heights, God, you who have done great things. God, who is like you?"

There is a phrase in verse 17 that deserves to be heard carefully. "You have taught me from my youth." This is a person at the far end of life looking back and recognizing that God was present at the beginning. The teaching did not start recently. It started early. It continued through the middle years. And now, in old age, the psalmist is still speaking of it.

This is what a long life of faith looks like from the inside. It is not a single dramatic moment. It is a lifetime of being taught, a lifetime of watching God work, a lifetime of finding that the wondrous works the psalmist first heard about as a young person turned out to be true. The faith was not abandoned. The God was not absent. And now, from that vantage point, the psalmist wants the next generation to know what he has come to know.

Verse 18 adds something tender. "Even when I am old and gray, do not abandon me." This is not a prayer of certainty that nothing will go wrong. It is a prayer of dependence. The psalmist is not pretending that old age is easy. He is asking God to stay close through it. And the reason he wants to stay close to God is not only for his own comfort. It is so that he can still proclaim God's power to another generation.

A long life, when it is rooted in faith, becomes a kind of testimony. It says to the people who come after: I have watched God work across many years, and he is faithful. That testimony does not end at death. It echoes. It lives in the people who were shaped by it.

Exposition Of Psalm 90:1-17

Psalm 90 is the oldest psalm in the Psalter. It is attributed to Moses, and it carries the weight of someone who has watched generations rise and fall. It begins with one of the most grounding statements in all of Scripture.

"Lord, you have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God."

Before the mountains. Before the earth. From eternity to eternity. The psalmist is placing the whole of human life inside a frame that is larger than we can fully grasp. And the point is not to make us feel small, though we are small. The point is to show us that the God who holds eternity is the same God who has been a refuge in every generation.

The psalm goes on to speak honestly about the brevity of human life. "Our years come to an end like a sigh." That is not a comfortable image, but it is an honest one. A life of eighty or ninety years, however full, is brief against the backdrop of eternity. The psalmist does not pretend otherwise. He names it.

But the psalm does not end in despair. It ends in prayer. "Satisfy us in the morning with your faithful love so that we may shout with joy and be glad all our days." And then this: "Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us; establish for us the work of our hands, yes, establish the work of our hands."

The psalmist is asking God to make a human life matter. He is asking that the work done in the brief span of years would be established, would be lasting, would count for something beyond the moment. And the answer to that prayer is not found in how long we live. It is found in whether we lived in the refuge of the eternal God.

Pastoral Application And The Gospel

Here is what these two psalms are saying to us today, together. A long life is a gift. The years are not nothing. The work of those years, the love given, the faith carried, the words spoken, the presence offered, all of it matters. And the God who was present at the beginning of that life is the same God who is present now, at the end of it.

For those of you who are grieving today, these psalms offer you something real. They do not offer you easy comfort. They offer you a refuge. The same God who was a refuge across the long years of the life we remember is a refuge for you in your grief right now. You can bring your sorrow to him. He is not surprised by it. He is not distant from it.

And for those of you who may not yet know this God, who may be sitting here today wondering whether faith is something real or something people simply say at funerals, I want to speak to you directly. The refuge this psalm describes is not a feeling. It is a person. The New Testament tells us that the eternal God entered human life in Jesus Christ, lived among us, died for us, and rose from the dead. He is the one who said, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live." That is not sentiment. That is the claim on which the entire Christian faith stands. And it is available to you, not because you have earned it, but because he offers it freely to anyone who comes to him in faith.

Conclusion

A long life has ended. The years were many, and they were real. The grief in this room is real. And the God who was present through all of those years is present in this room right now.

The psalmist asked, "God, who is like you?" The answer is no one. There is no one like him. There is no other refuge that holds across every generation. There is no other love that satisfies from morning to morning. There is no other name under heaven by which we may be saved.

We commend this life to him. We trust his mercy. And we hold onto the hope that the God who is from eternity to eternity holds all things, including this moment, in his hands.

Sources Consulted

Allen, Leslie C. Psalms 101-150. Word Biblical Commentary. Word Books, 1983.

Craigie, Peter C. Psalms 1-50. Word Biblical Commentary. Word Books, 1983.

Kidner, Derek. Psalms 1-72 and Psalms 73-150. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. InterVarsity Press, 1973 and 1975.

Longman, Tremper III. Psalms. Tyndale Old Testament Commentary. InterVarsity Press, 2014.

VanGemeren, Willem A. "Psalms." In The Expositor's Bible Commentary, vol. 5. Zondervan, 1991.