When You're Ready to Climb

The Psalms of Ascent are a guide to prayer

The book of Psalms has always been the best guide for learning how to pray. Long before modern evangelical leaders began publishing books and hosting conferences on the topic, the Psalms already had laid out the authentic pattern for talking with God. Whatever Mark Batterson, Dutch Sheets or Stormy Omartian may say, the Psalms say better.

For example, the familiar lines of Psalm 23 are an invitation into the kind of relationship that only prayer makes possible:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. (Psalm 23:1-2)

Psalm 51—widely used in corporate worship—tells us how to pray through those times when we fall into sin:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Psalm 51:1)

And the well known Psalm 139 assures us that we can pray with confidence because God already knows everything about us, good and bad.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139:1-3)

Tucked away in the latter third of the book, though, are 15 lesser known Psalms collected in a single group—Psalms 120-134. These short prayers (the headings call them “songs”) reflect the experience of ancient Jews as they travelled to Jerusalem for religious festivals. Since Jerusalem was located in mountainous country that the pilgrims had to climb along the way, the collection is called the “Psalms of Ascent.” But make no mistake, the physical landscape is only a prelude to an inner terrain. These Psalms are a roadmap for the soul and a sure guide for all who long to climb the spiritual heights.

Derek Kidner points out in his commentary on Psalms that the 15 Psalms of Ascent reflect the 15 steps that climbed up from the Court of the Women in the ancient temple to the Court of the Israelites. In other words, in the same way as pilgrims made their way up through the mountains on their way to the temple, once they got there they were faced with another climb from one court to another.

Before we move into the Psalms of Ascent themselves, I need to mention two preliminary features. First, the initial verse of the collection reveals the theme of prayer that runs through all the rest:

In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. (Psalm 120:1)

Prayer is also the theme of the last Psalm in the group:

“Come, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who stand by night in the house of the Lord! Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord! (Psalm 134:1-2)

From beginning to end, then, the Psalms of Ascent call us to prayer and give us the means of prayer to take us into the very presence of the Lord. They lead us upward to God.

The second preliminary feature is the collection’s larger setting. It’s no accident that it comes immediately after Psalm 119, the chapter in the Bible most dedicated to the divine origin and the enduring power of the Word of God. My takeaway from that placement is that the kind of prayer revealed through the Psalms of Ascent isn’t magical thinking, a means of manipulating God or some sort of performative religion. When rooted and grounded in God’s Word, prayer is the dynamic, mysterious and life-giving interplay between divine sovereignty and human will.

Let’s turn now to a few of the Psalms themselves. In this brief survey I don’t have time or space to look at all or even most of them. I hope you’ll have the opportunity over the next few days to do that for yourselves. For now, here are a few promises the Psalms of Ascent make for adventure-loving souls ready to climb into the higher regions.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand…The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. (Psalm 121:5, 7)

To say the Lord “keeps” us is to affirm his care, his protection, his guidance. You don’t have to rely on your own strength, intelligence, resources or even maturity as you move upward. God himself provides for those who seek more of him.

Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maidservant to the hands of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he has mercy on us. (Psalm 123:2)

The Lord responds to need, and the more we risk relying on him through prayer, the more we know of his heart. Our soul’s movement higher up is really a movement deeper in—that’s the message C.S. Lewis gives at the conclusion of “The Chronicles of Narnia” with the victorious cry of the redeemed characters as they run up into the heavenly mountains, “Further up and further in!”

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, from this time forth and forevermore. (Psalm 125:1-2)

God’s grace is as high and immovable as the mountains themselves. It encircles his people in this life and into the life to come. Prayer that moves God begins with this bedrock of confidence in him.

Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing seeds for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him. (Psalm 126:5-6)

When we learn to pray with tears, we enter an altogether higher level of relationship with God. Our greatest joy becomes the fulfillment of his will, our deepest satisfaction becomes loving others in his name.

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. (Psalm 127:1)

No government, job, income level, position, health status or human relationship can guarantee our security. Only God. Our movement higher is directly linked to the growth of our confidence in his provision and direction.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!…I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning (Psalm 130:1. 5-6)

Finally, the passage from the Psalms of Ascent that’s closest to my own experience as well as to that of many others. It’s a passage that captures the paradoxical truth of grace that the lower we sink, the higher the Lord takes us.

Years ago I came across a poem by Amy Carmichael—an Irish Protestant missionary and writer from the last century—that describes the soul’s longing for the upward movement toward God in a remarkable way. She entitled it “The Last Defile.” It captures exactly, I think, the vision behind the Psalms of Ascent.

Make us Thy mountaineers—

We would not linger on the lower slope.

Fill us afresh with hope, O God of Hope,

That undefeated we may climb the hill

As seeing Him who is invisible.

Let us die climbing. When this little while

Lies far behind us, and the last defile

Is all alight, and in that light we see

Our Leader and our Lord—what will it be?

Let the stern array

Of the forbidding be a constant call

To fling into the climb my will, my all.

Teach me to climb.