The LORD Keeps Us
Lord, I humbly pray You would use these simple words You have written on my heart by the power of Your Spirit to reveal Truth from Your Word that will encourage, equip, and breathe life in Jesus’ Name. Amen.
The older I get and the more time I spend in the valley, I am constantly reminded just how much God uses His living and active Word to speak life into and over me. In my Bible, Psalm 121 has a lot of ink on it. It has a date of 9/20/23, most verses are underlined, and multiple family names are written in the margin. I know all Scripture is God breathed, but there are just certain seasons in my life that make me think the ink is still fresh on God’s promises and that they have been written just for me.
I encourage you to take a moment right now and read Psalm 121 aloud a few times, so you can clearly see and hear God’s promises that are true for you too.
Psalm 121 (NASB)
1I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
3 He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
4 Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
8 The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever.
Every time I read and declare this psalm it brings me peace—not the kind of peace we can find in this world, but supernatural peace that can only come from the Lord. I find peace in seeing the words “LORD” and “keep” repeatedly. But the verse that really jumps out at me is “the LORD is your keeper.” Isn’t it comforting to know that the LORD keeps us?
The psalmist starts off focused on self but then quickly starts taking us upward by counting all the ways that the Lord provides. The Lord is the One who is doing the keeping, and our part is to get our eyes up on Him who is the source of all help. Psalm 121 starts with a glance and invites us to look up, lift up, and live up trusting in the Lord who keeps us.
Psalm 121 is a call to Look Up Child! I agree with Lauren Daigle that the first and best place for us to look is UP to the Lord. I have found that we have to do whatever it takes to get our eyes off our circumstances and ourselves and UP on the Lord who is our Helper. Using the Word of God to turn our eyes upon Jesus and look full in His wonderful face is a powerful way to immediately shift our perspective from earth to heaven. I believe we need a “look up scripture” to turn our gaze upward. Psalm 121 is my “look up scripture.” I want to encourage you to ask the Lord to reveal to you what your “look up scripture” is. He is faithful and He will provide.
The Lord wrote Psalm 121 on my heart a few years ago in the valley when I encountered a medical crisis. I was experiencing chest pain in August 2023 that resulted in a multi-day hospital visit, during which they tested every organ and thereby tried to determine the root cause of unexplained symptoms … primarily because of my medical history, which includes breast cancer. While in the hospital, God blessed me with a Jesus loving quarterback (aka cardiologist) who relentlessly cared for me like his own family member and ultimately diagnosed me and determined a treatment plan for complete healing. Through it all I just kept declaring Isaiah 26:3 “the steadfast of mind He will keep in perfect peace because he trusts in You.” I was listening to praise music and old hymns all night long in my hospital bed to fight my fears and find peace, but God knew He needed to equip me with more Truth from His Word. He knew I needed a “look up scripture” to keep my eyes on and my trust in Him. It was in my hospital bed that I first heard the song “Your Word (Psalm 119)” and I have linked it here. Your Word (Psalm 119).
The chorus says…
“You have kept me.
How sweet is Your word to me.
Sweeter than honey, better than wine.
How sweet is your word to me
Always sustaining bringing me life.
You have kept me.”
The Lord often reveals biblical truth to me through worship, because that is my love language. He was showing me first through song that He has kept me and that He is keeping me. I was discharged and armed with a treatment plan that promised to bring healing. Sadly, when I “failed” the treatment protocol, my quarterback sent me to a handful of other specialists, each of whom had their own testing, scans, and more labs over the course of a 6-month period than I have ever experienced in my lifetime. Healing became a full time job, and the uncertainty of the outcome was robbing me of my peace. The Lord teed up my “look up” scripture in Psalm 121 during the testing. I recited it so many times that it became easy to write on my heart and to declare it repeatedly. I love how many times you see the word “keep” or some form of it in the psalm, and that it’s always present tense. The Hebrew word for keep is “Shamar,” and it means to guard, protect, watch over, and to treasure.
When we choose to lift our eyes to the mountains and acknowledge our help comes from the Lord, our hearts, minds, and souls will follow, and we can find hope and peace in knowing that the Lord keeps us. Our job is to look UP and trust our Keeper, who is the One who never fails.
Here are a few other scriptures that remind us where to fix our eyes, knowing that our focus determines our direction and our heart and mind will follow.
“So, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18
“Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:2
“Let your eyes look directly ahead and let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you.” Proverbs 4:25
Look Up Child! Gaze upon Jesus and His beautiful face, and glance at the things of this world so they grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. Pray about a “look up scripture.”
Psalm 121 is an invitation to Lift Up our praise. We see a spiritual progression in Psalm 121. It’s all about getting into God’s presence. First, we get our eyes up on Jesus. Then we worship our holy and faithful God and lift our hearts, hands, and voices in praise. Worship is a journey upward towards our holy God.
Psalm 121 is one of fifteen psalms (Psalm 120-134) that are called the Songs of Ascents. The term “ascent” describes the physical climb or walk up to a summit. More specifically, the ascent referenced in the psalms is the journey up to Jerusalem, located on Mount Moriah, which is the highest point in the region of Israel. We first learn about Mount Moriah in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac there and sacrifice him to the Lord … before He stops him and provides a ram for the sacrifice instead. This is the same mountain where King Solomon built the temple so the Lord could dwell among His people. The bible often speaks of people going up to and down from Jerusalem because it’s located at the highest elevation. Many Jews have made the pilgrimage up to Jerusalem each year to worship during the various feasts and festivals, and they have sung these psalms or songs of ascent on their journey with their gaze set on the holy city expectantly waiting to enter into the Lord’s presence.
While we may not sing the psalms as they are written, many Christian worship song lyrics are based on these Songs of Ascent. All Scripture points us up to Jesus. We have been created for worship. Worship helps us journey up from the physical to the spiritual, where we can worship the Father in spirit and truth.
John 4:23-24 “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
There is nothing more powerful than lifting up our praise to a holy God. We have been given an open invitation and an all-access pass to join the heavenly worship team while we are still on earth. John writes about the throne room in my favorite chapter in the Bible, Revelation 4. John entered this heavenly realm when God gave Him spiritual eyes and ears to see and hear the worship going on 24/7, all for the One seated on the throne whose name is Jesus. Notice in the first two verses how easy it is for John to go up and enter the throne room. “After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.” Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne was standing in heaven, and one sitting on the throne.” The same is true for us. We can spiritually enter the throne room anytime by the power of the Holy Spirit.
For me, worship is the easiest way to enter into God’s presence. I can access God’s presence on the mountaintop or in the valley and anywhere in between. But there is something so life giving to worship the Lord in the valley. I liken it to putting on your oxygen mask on a plane before you help your children put theirs on. It’s powerful because we have to breathe when we worship. Oftentimes in the valley we hold our breath. I have learned that the throne room is portable.
A little over a year ago, I had to access the throne room in the Vanderbilt Medical Center when our 24-year-old daughter suffered a seizure that revealed a massive brain tumor, which led to a 4 ½ hour surgery to remove it a few days later. I knew I would have to worship my way through so that I kept on breathing. The morning of her surgery, one of our pastors sent me a text with a song called “See You Right.” It was exactly what I needed in the moment.
The song begins…
“We’re in the room with the King of Kings.
My eyes are fixed upon you only.
Just a glimpse and I’m on my knees.
The savior of the world’s in front of me.”
I spent the entire surgery in the waiting room with the King of Kings singing to Him while He sang over me. I have never felt closer to the Lord than during my time in His throne room that day. As I was lifting up praise, He was holding me up and keeping me and encouraging me to lift up praise … so that my heart and mind were focused on my big God rather than our circumstances. I can assure you that God sees us in our suffering, and He is with us, and He will take whatever means necessary to keep us and hold us close to His heart.
I encourage you to do whatever it takes to get your eyes locked on Jesus and lift up a heart of praise. He is worthy, and He is with us always.
Psalm 121 is a call to Live Up. I am learning to live more vertically than horizontally and to spiritually “journey up” to where my help comes from. So, I look up and lift up praise and then seek to live up and walk more in the Spirit than in the flesh. Colossians 3:1-2 encourages us “therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.” Just like the Jewish people ascending to the city of Jerusalem for the feast days, our Heavenly Father is calling us up from earth to heaven.
We are citizens of heaven and sojourners on this earth. Our time on earth is a vapor. All of life is the great ascent toward heaven, where Jesus is seated on the throne, and He has given those of us who believe the seat next to Him. He gives us new mercy and a lot of grace every morning, but He also gives us a choice to climb up. Sometimes we have to leave some baggage behind in order to move forward. Philippians 3:13b-14 “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
While we have to keep moving up towards Him so that we are not drifting away from Him, He is the One who is keeping, protecting, and guarding us every step of the way. “The LORD is our keeper.”
Here are just a few ways the Lord keeps us from His Word.
- The Lord keeps our eyes on Him. (Psalm 16:8)
- The Lord keeps us close to his heart. (Isaiah 40:11)
- The Lord keeps our soul. (Psalm 66:9 and 121:7)
- The Lord keeps us in the palm of His righteous right hand. (Isaiah 49:16)
- The Lord keeps us from all evil. (Psalm 121:7 and 2 Thessalonians 3:3)
- The Lord keeps our mind in perfect peace. (Isaiah 26:3)
The Lord has been teaching me that to live more vertically we just need to dwell in His Presence. Psalm 27:4 “one thing I have asked from the LORD, that I shall seek; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD and to meditate in His temple.” When we live vertically from heaven, we can find peace in the suffering, see His goodness in the land of the living, and live horizontally trusting the One who never fails. We have to first dwell in order to be able to say it is well.
I encourage you to figure out how you can live more vertically than horizontally and more from heaven to earth, whether it’s through worship, the Word, prayer, or creation. Our God is faithful, and He will keep you and help you look up, lift up, and live up trusting in Him.
Thank You Heavenly Father for loving us beyond all comprehension and for sending Your Son Jesus from heaven to earth as the Word made flesh to walk out Your Word in complete obedience to You. Thank You for giving us Your Holy Spirit, who leads and guides us into all truth. Thank You for encouraging and drawing us close to You. Thank You that You are always with us. Thank You for all the ways You have kept us, and that You are and will continue to keep us in Your perfect peace. Thank You for being our front and rear guard and for being beside us and within us. Thank You for blessing us now and always for our good and Your glory.
Numbers 6
24The LORD bless you, and keep you;
25The LORD make His face shine on you,
And be gracious to you;
26The LORD lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.
We pray these things in Jesus’ Name.
