Psalm 134 (ESV)

1 If it had not been the LORD who was on our side-
let Israel now say-
2if it had not been the LORD who was on our side
when people rose up against us,
3then they would have swallowed us up alive,
when their anger was kindled against us;
4then the flood would have swept us away,
the torrent would have gone over us;
5then over us would have gone
the raging waters.

6Blessed be the LORD,
who has not given us
as prey to their teeth!
7We have escaped like a bird
from the snare of the fowlers;
the snare is broken,
and we have escaped!

8 Our help is in the name of the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.

Psalm 124 is a song of hazard and of help. Among the Songs of Ascents, this is the one that better describes the hazardous work of all discipleship and declares the help that is always experienced at the hand of God.

A Clerk in the Complaints Department of Humanity:
The first lines of the psalm twice describes God as “for us.” The last line is “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” God is for us. God is our help.

The proper work for a Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm124 is an excellent model. It does not argue God’s help; it does not explain God’s help; it is a testimony of God’s help in the form of a song. The witness becomes vivid and contagious. God’s help is not a private experience; it is a corporate reality—not an exception that occurs among isolated strangers, but the norm among the people of God.

There is no other literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than the Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Psalm 124 is not a selected witness, inserted like a commercial into our lives to testify that life goes better with God. The people who know this psalm best and who have tested it out and used it often tell us that it is credible, that it fits into what we know of life lived in faith.

Hazardous Work:
Christian discipleship is hazardous work. There are no easy tasks on the Christian way; there are only task that can be done faithfully or erratically, with joy or with resentment. Throughout your work you need to remember that God will accomplish his will, and you get to cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing will separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

The psalm, though, is not about hazards but about help. The hazardous work of discipleship is not the subject of the psalm but only its setting. The subject is help. During this time God wants us to not be fussy. To not become moralist who cluck their tongues over a world going to hell; Christians are people who praise the God who is on our side.

Enlarged Photographs of Ordinary Objects:
The final sentence, “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth,” links the God who created heaven and earth to the God who helps us personally.

Psalm 124 is a magnification of the items of life that are thought to be unpleasant, best kept under cover, best surrounded with silence lest they clutter our lives with unpleasantness. Psalm 124 is an instance of a person who digs deeply into the trouble and finds there the presence of the God who is on our side. Our faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.

The assumption by outsiders that Christians are naïve or protected is the opposite of the truth: Christians know more about the deep struggles of life than others, more about the ugliness of sin. This psalm looks into the troubles of history, the anxiety of personal conflict and emotional trauma. And it sees there the God who is on our side, God is our help.

We speak our words of praise in a world that is hellish; we sing our songs of victory in a world where things get messy; we live our joy among people who neither understand nor encourage us. But the content of our lives is God, not humanity. We are not scavenging in the dark alleys of the world, poking in its garbage cans for a bare subsistence. We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, who defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shape our days.

If the LORD was not on our side we would have been swallowed alive. But our help is in the name of The LORD, the one who made heaven and earth.

(This post is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.)

Psalm 123 (ESV)
1To you I lift up my eyes,
O you who are enthroned in the heavens!
2Behold, as the eyes of servants
look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maidservant
to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the LORD our God,
till he has mercy upon us.

3 Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us,
for we have had more than enough of contempt.
4Our soul has had more than enough
of the scorn of those who are at ease,
of the contempt of the proud.

As a person grows and matures in the Christian way, it is necessary to acquire certain skills. One is service. Psalm 123 is an instance of service. In this, as so often in the Psalms, we are not instructed in what to do, we are provided an instance of what is done. In Psalm 123 we observe that aspect of the life of discipleship that takes place under the form of servanthood.

If God Is God At All:
Service begins with an upward look to God. We need to place him in the appropriate role. God is over us or above us not beside us or below us. God is not a servant to be called into action when we are too tired to do something ourselves, not an expert to be called on when we find we are ill equipped to handle a specialized problem in living. God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.

If God is God at all, he must know more about our need than we do; he must be more in touch with the reality of our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies than we are; he must have a more comprehensive grasp of the interrelations in our families and communities and nations than we do.

If we want to understand God, we must do it on his terms. If we want to see God the way he really is, we must look to the place of authority—to Scripture and to Jesus Christ. The moment we look up to God (and not over him, or down on him) we are in the posture of servitude.

Mercy, God, Mercy!
A second element in service in has to do with our expectation. What we expect is mercy. Three times this expectation is voiced in Psalm 123.  The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for the kingdom.

The word mercy means that the upward look to God in the heavens does not expect God to stay in the heavens but to come down, to enter our condition, to accomplish the vast enterprise of redemption, to fashion in us his eternal salvation. Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it expects is mercy.

Urgent Service:
A third element in the servant life is urgency. The Psalms is part of a vast literature of outcry, a longing for deliverance from oppression. The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. For this reason all Christian service involves urgency. The urgency of trading a master that kills us for the Master that died for us.

Reasonable Service:
The service we offer to God (in worship) is extended into specific acts that serve others. We learn a relationship—an attitude toward life, a stance of servitude before God, and then we are available to be of use to others in acts of service. The Psalm has nothing in it about serving others. It concentrates on being a servant to God. Its position is that if the attitude of servanthood is learned, by attending to God as Lord, then serving others will develop as a very natural way of life.

The Freest Person On Earth:
For freedom is the freedom to live as persons in love for the sake of God and neighbor, not a license to grab and push. It is the opportunity to live at our best, not as unruly beasts. The work of liberation must therefore be accompanied by instruction in the use of liberty as children of God who “walk by the Spirit.”

As Psalm 123 prays the transition from oppression, to freedom, to a new servitude, it puts us in the way of learning how to use our freedom most appropriately, under the lordship of a merciful God. A servant Christian is the freest person on earth.

(This post is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.)

Psalm 122 (ESV)
1I was glad when they said to me,
“Let us go to the house of the LORD!”
2Our feet have been standing
within your gates, O Jerusalem!

3Jerusalem-built as a city
that is bound firmly together,
4to which the tribes go up,
the tribes of the LORD,
as was decreed for Israel,
to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
5There thrones for judgment were set,
the thrones of the house of David.

6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!
“May they be secure who love you!
7Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers!”
8For my brothers and companions’ sake
I will say, “Peace be within you!”
9For the sake of the house of the LORD our God,
I will seek your good.

Psalm 122 is the song of a person who decided to go to church and worship God. It is a psalm of worship and a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere, always do: gather to an assigned place and worship their God. As Christians we must decide to worship God, faithfully and devoutly. It is one of the important acts in a life of discipleship.

An Instance of the Average:
A great deal of what we call Christian behavior has become part of our legal system and is embedded in our social expectations, both of which have strong and coercive powers. But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because they want to. Worship is the single most popular act among Christians.

A Framework:
The psalm singles out three items: worship gives us a workable structure for life; worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God; worship centers our attention on the decisions of God.

Jerusalem was the Hebrew word for the place of worship. When you went to Jerusalem, you encountered the great foundational realities: God created you, God redeemed you, God provided for you. The city itself was a kind of architectural metaphor for what worship is: All the pieces of masonry fit compactly, all the building stones fit harmoniously. There were no loose stones, no leftover pieces, no awkward gaps in the walls or the towers.

In worship all the different people who went to Jerusalem functioned as a single people in harmonious relationships. With all of are different backgrounds, economic status, ethnic heritage, we are still one people and we worship gather together as one whole. When we go to worship we get a working definition for our life: the way God created us, the way he leads us. We know where we stand.

A Command:
Worship is the place where we obey the command to praise God: “To give thanks to the name of the LORD—this is what it means to be Israel.” This command is a word telling us what we ought to do, and what we ought to do is praise. When we praise we are functioning at the center, we are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being.

Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But, they do not always worship because they feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be very little worship. We live in an “age of sensation.” We think that if we don’t feel something then there can be no authenticity in doing it. But God says that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.

A Word of God:
When we worship our attention is centered on the decisions of God. Every time we worship our minds are informed, our memories refreshed with the judgments of God, we are familiarized with what God says, what he has decided, the way he is working out our salvation. We want to hear what God says and what he says to us: worship is the place where our attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.

Peace and Security:
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens. Our basic needs suddenly become worthy of the dignity of creatures made in the image of God: peace and security. Shalom, or peace, is one of the richest words in the Bible. It gathers all aspects of wholeness that result from God’s will being completed in us. It is the work of God that, when complete, releases streams of living water in us and pulsates with eternal life. Shalvah, or prosperity, is the foundation of security. It is the feeling that everything is going to be all right. Worship initiates an extended, daily participation in peace and prosperity so that we share in our daily rounds what God initiates and continues in Jesus Christ.

(This post is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.)

Psalm 121 (ESV)
1I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.

3He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
4Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

5The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.

7The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
8The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.

The moment we say no to the world and yes to God, all our problems are solved, all our questions answered, all our troubles over. If this is what you believe about Christianity then you are wrong. We live in the same world as people who do not love Jesus, and are subject to the same perils that face them.

Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way that we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way. For many, the first great surprise of the Christian life is in the form of troubles we meet. Psalm 121 helps us deal with this discovery.

Travelers’ Advisory
Three possibilities for harm to travelers are referred to in the psalm. A person traveling on foot can at any moment step on a loose stone and sprain there ankle. A person traveling on foot under protracted exposure to the sun, can become faint with sunstroke. And a person traveling under pressure and anxiety can become emotionally ill. In reference to these hazards the psalm says, “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber…. The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day.” Any Christian who is honest is challenged by this truth. We have all sprained our ankles and been stuck in perils that have affected us. This psalm is not saying that we will not face any adversity, it’s saying that the evil of this world and the adversity we encounter will have no power over us because it has no power of God.

Help Form the Hills:
A person of faith encounters trouble and cries out help. A look to the hills for help ends in disappointment. For all their majesty and beauty, for all their quiet strength and firmness, they are finally just hills. Psalm 121 rejects a worship of nature, a religion of stars and flowers, a religion that makes the best of what it finds on the hills; instead it looks to the Lord who made heaven and earth. The Creator is Lord over time: he guards you when you leave and when you return, in your beginnings and in the end. God guards you from every evil.

The promise of the psalm is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no accident, no distress will ever have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he’ll never let you be pushed past your limits because He has no limits; He’ll always be there to help you come through it.

Three times in Psalm 121 God is referred to by the personal name Yahweh, translated as LORD. Eight times he is described as the guardian, or as the one who guards. He is not an impersonal executive giving orders from on high; he is present help every step of the way we travel. All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us. From the point of our repentance God guards us from every evil.

The only serious mistake that we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God had gotten bored looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that he is disgusted with our meandering obedience. Psalm 121 prevents this mistake: the mistake of supposing that God’s interest in us waxes and wanes in response to our spiritual temperature.

We know that God created the universe and has accomplished our eternal salvation. But we can’t believe that he cares to watch the soap opera of our daily lives. But Psalm 121 says that the same faith that works in the large things works in the small. As the psalmist says; “The LORD is your keeper….The LORD will keep you from all evil…The LORD will keep…”

Traveling Companion:
The Christian life is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord. The Christian life is simply, going to God. We will face dangers, and troubles, just like those who do not call Christ their Savior, or fall at the feet of God their King. The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we take, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will guard us from every evil, He guards our very life.

Faith is the solid, massive, secure experience of God, who keeps all evil from getting inside us, who guards our life, who guards us when we leave and when we return, who guards us now and guards us always.

(This post is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.)

Psalm 120 (ESV)
1In my distress I called to the LORD,
and he answered me.
2Deliver me, O LORD,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.

3What shall be given to you,
and what more shall be done to you,
you deceitful tongue?
4 A warrior’s sharp arrows,
with glowing coals of the broom tree!

5Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech,
that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
6Too long have I had my dwelling
among those who hate peace.
7 I am for peace,
but when I speak, they are for war!

A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find motivation to set out on the Christian way. They have to be fed up with ways of the world before they acquire an appetite for the world of grace. Psalm 120 is the product of such a person. This person, sick with lies, and crippled with hate. Cries out with pain that penetrates despair and stimulates a new beginning—a journey to God that becomes a life of peace.

The fifteen Songs of Ascents describe elements common to all those who apprentice themselves to the Lord Christ and who travel in the Christian way. The first of them is the prod them gets them going.

Lies Without Error:
I’m in trouble is the opening phrase. The last word is war. This is not a happy Psalm but an honest and necessary one. The distress that begins and ends the song is the painful awakening to the no-longer-avoidable reality that we have been lied to. The lie, everything is o.k. This lie covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, and the rapacity.

Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie. Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit. They are lies because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God.

Lightning Illuminating the Crossroads:
God, revealed in his creative and redemptive work, exposes all the lies. The moment the word God is uttered, the world’s towering falsehood is exposed; we see the truth. The truth is that God made and loves us. The point at which we need illumination is the point at which the paths of our lives fork. Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way over another. The people who follow the same path as the psalmist are people who take delight in God and are Christians.

A No That Is a Yes:
The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. We move away from things that are strange and hostile. We recognize that this world that we live is not our homes. The biblical word that describes our desire to say no to the world is repentance. Repentance is not an emotion. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been in the wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own God. It is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are no going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is the most practical of all the words, and the most practical of all the acts.

Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.

(This post is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.)

The following content is a summary and partial abridgement of Eugene Peterson’s book “A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.” It is based solely on Peterson’s work and any help that this content gives should be credited to God’s grace through Peterson’s effort. In other words, give God glory, thank Eugene Peterson and consider buying the book.

DISCIPLESHIP: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN RACE AGAINST HORESES?

The fifteen “Songs of Ascents” (Psalm 120-134) provide the study for developing discipleship in an instant society. The use of these Psalms is to aid in encouragement for a life of obedience to God. This obedience takes root over a long period of time and is often anything but instant. As you journey through these God-sung “songs” may your affections be stirred as you see your Savior and find in Him satisfaction in every sphere and season of life.

Tourist and Pilgrims:
One aspect of the world that is harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. It is not difficult in this environment to get someone interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. People have developed the lifestyle of a tourist and only want the high points. There is no desire to wait patiently and devoutly for a true relationship with God.

An essential thing in heaven and earth is that there would be a long obedience in the same direction resulting in something that makes life worth living. For recognizing the world’s ways there are two biblical designations for people of faith that are extremely useful: disciple and pilgrim.

Disciple: Says we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ. We are in a growing and learning relationship, always. A disciple is a learner, but not primarily in the academic setting of a school-room, but rather, at the work of a craftsman. We don’t just acquire information about God but skills in faith.

Pilgrim: Being a pilgrim means being a person who spends their life going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way of Jesus Christ. This is because Jesus is the “way and the truth and the life” (see John 14:5-6).

A Dog Eared Songbook:
The shiray hammaloth, or Songs of Ascents, is a resource to guide people in the Christian way and direct people of faith in the conscious and continuous effort that develops into maturity in Christ. The songs are numbered 120-134 in the book of Psalms. These fifteen songs were likely sung, possibly in order, by Hebrew pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem to the great worship festivals.

However, the song was not only literal, it was also a metaphor: the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward toward God, an existence that advanced from one level to another in developing maturity. Three times a year faithful Hebrews would make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While doing this they refreshed their memories of God’s saving ways at the Feast of Passover in the spring; they renewed their commitments as God’s covenanted people at the Feast of Pentecost in early summer; they responded as a blessed community to the best that God had for them at the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn. This picture of the Hebrews gives us a good look at life as a faith-journey. These songs convey a wide range of emotions and ideas to God. Singing them is a way both to express God’s amazing grace and to quiet fears. Since many essential items in Christian discipleship are incorporated in these songs, they provide a way to remember who we are and where we are going. Ultimately, the Songs of Ascents, teach us who we are in Christ because of the Gospel of Christ and that our ultimate destination is Christ so we can be with Christ.

Between the Times:
Everyone who travels as a pilgrim needs assistance and encouragement from time to time. Christians will recognize how appropriate these songs are during the between times. They are songs of transitions, brief hymns that provide courage, support and inner direction for getting us where God is leading us in Jesus Christ. For those who choose to live no longer as tourist but as pilgrims, the Songs of Ascents combine all the cheerfulness of a travel song with the practicality of a guidebook and map.