Lift Up Your Head and Hearts

Psalm 24:1-10 This psalm has special meaning to me because it is one of the psalms I memorized when I was in grammar school. The first thing we did each morning in school was pray the Lord’s Prayer together, read a psalm and work on memorizing it, pledge allegiance to the flag and sing the national anthem. Can you imagine the stir this would cause in public schools today if this was done? It is illogical that God and country have been removed from our children’s education when education has its roots in Christianity. The first schools that existed in our country were church schools. How I pray that one day we will be able to once again have freedom of speech that includes praying aloud in public schools. Until that time we as parents can teach our children the importance of honor for country and the value of the Word of God. We need to exhort our children to memorize Scriptures because the Word that is hidden in children’s hearts at a young age will be with them always. I actually paid my boys to learn Proverbs. They were given $1 for every verse in Proverbs they memorized. When our Russian son took this on as a challenge, he just about broke me.

The verse I remember in this psalm is as follows: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in” (Ps. 24:9, KJV).

I have always wondered what that verse meant, but now I think the Holy Spirit has helped me to understand it. We are the temple of the living God, and there are gates and doors to that temple. We are a spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a body. The spirit is the holy of holies part of our tripart being. This is where we commune with God in the spirit. The soul has three parts—mind, will and emotions. The soul represents the inner court of the temple, and the body represents the outer court of the temple. The gates to our soul are our five senses—touch, taste, see, smell and hear. Everything that enters our souls enters through those gates. We have a responsibility to God to be careful about the material that enters these gates to our soul. This psalm also exhorts us not to lift up our souls unto vanity. Instead we are to lift our souls daily up to the Lord. This is what “Lift up your heads, O ye gates” means.

We are also to lift up or open up the doors to the Lord, and the promise is the King of glory will come in. The holy of holies in the physical temple was blocked from anyone entering except the high priest, and he was only allowed to enter once a year on the Day of Atonement. The mercy seat was behind a huge veil in the holy of holies. It was here at the mercy seat that the high priest communed with God and saw and felt His presence. We also have doors to our spirit (the holy of holies in our tripart being). Those doors are our hearts. We are to worship the Lord our God with all our minds and all our hearts. When we open the doors of our hearts to the Lord, we go boldly to the mercy seat and find grace in time of need.

READ: Exodus 8:1-9:35; Matthew 19:13-30; Psalm 24:1-10; Proverbs 6:1-5