The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
— Psalm 121:5-8
I rejoiced when they said to me,
Let us go unto the house of the Lord!
— Psalm 122:1
Many of us love the Lord and love the church life, but are not able to go on buoyantly. We go forward a little bit, but then become afraid. Some of us here are around the age of thirty-five. Thirty-five is a crucial age, because the Bible says that a man’s normal life expectancy is around seventy. This means that thirty-five is a half-way mark. As we approach thirty-five it is easy to consider, “Is the Lord really that trustworthy?” If someone were to say, “Don’t believe in the Lord,” we would say, “No, I have to believe in Him.” But then if someone were to say, “You must trust the Lord in full,” we would wonder, “But is the Lord really able to care for me?” Some in the church life who loved the Lord when they were young gradually “migrated” from the kingdom of God to the kingdom of Satan in their daily life. Why? Because their vision was not so clear concerning the Lord. They didn’t have the full realization of who Christ is.
Finally, some Christians see that the world is empty and that the Lord is trustworthy, but they miss the vision of the church. They just cannot enjoy the church life. For this reason they cannot go on in a healthy and proper way.
This is why, in the first stage of the Psalms of Ascent, there are three psalms to show us three aspects of our vision. At the beginning of our Christian life we need a vision concerning the world. We need to see that the world is vanity and emptiness. Then we also need to see who our Lord really is, so that we will give ourselves to Him and fully trust in Him. Finally, we need to see the church, so that our life can be filled with enjoyment. Psalms 120-122 are concerning these three aspects of our vision.
Adapted from The Journey of Life, page 11-12.
Monday: “A New Heart”