Is This You?
Today, God is calling a generation of Christ-followers to higher ground.
Are you in that generation? How would you know?
Do you have a dissatisfaction, a deep ache, that just will not go away? A restlessness that doesn’t have a clean name? You may find yourself bored in your faith. Going through the motions, showing up, but knowing that something vital is missing.
Or you carry a low-key but persistent conviction that there is simply more. More presence and power. More Kingdom impact. You now instinctively know there is higher ground.
That stirring is not a problem to be ignored, managed, or suppressed. It’s a calling to ascend.
Three times a year, ancient pilgrims made their way upward toward Jerusalem. Families packed up. Communities journeyed. And together they climbed — on foot, through the hill country of Judea — toward the holy hill of the Lord.
It was a prophetic pattern, embedded in the rhythm of Israel’s worship life … pointing forward to a fulfillment that only Christ could bring.
The Kingdom that those pilgrims glimpsed from a distance is the same Kingdom Jesus declared paramount above everything else. Zion is real.
God is not looking for believers who simply know the right things. He is developing Kingdom people who are actually climbing — maturing, being formed into the likeness of Christ, and making the kind of contribution that only comes from ascending into the design and presence of the Kingdom.
“I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14, NASB).
This high calling has never been more alive than it is right now.
A Word You’ve Never Heard In Church
Paramount.
It comes from the Old French par amont — literally, above all, through the highest. In English it means supreme in rank, without rival, outranking everything else in the field. When something is paramount, nothing else is even close.
Of course Jesus wouldn’t have used a word which comes to us from the French language! But he meant what it means.
He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33, NKJV).
First. Not worked in alongside everything else. First — because the Kingdom is paramount.
Most followers of Jesus would agree with that statement on a Sunday morning. The question is whether Monday afternoon looks like it.
This is not a guilt trip. It is a call. It is a recognition that God is actively developing a remnant of His people in this hour who are determined to actually live this way.
People who don’t just affirm the Kingdom as paramount but who order their lives from that higher reality downward. People who are, in the language of the ancient Hebrew pilgrims, ascending the hill of the Lord.
Above and beyond everything else, the hill is real. The presence is real.
The question is whether you have the will and faith to climb.
The Mountain Is the Headquarters
In the ancient world, mountains meant something.
They were not merely topographical features. In the thought-world of the Hebrew scriptures, a mountain — particularly the mountain, Mount Zion in Jerusalem — was the place where heaven and earth converged. Where God’s authority was most concentrated. Where His presence was most tangibly manifest.
The ark of the covenant rested on that hill. The gold-covered chest represented the very throne of God among His people. Above the ark, between the outstretched wings of the cherubim, the shekinah glory dwelt.
When Solomon dedicated the temple, the glory of God filled it so completely that the priests could not stand to minister (2 Chronicles 5:14). The hill was the place where the reign of God was most fully operative on the earth.
To ascend that hill was to move toward the concentrated presence, order, and authority of the Eternal King.
This is the backdrop against which Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:33 land with their full force. “Seek first the kingdom of God.”
The word first — proton in the Greek — carries the same weight as the Hebrew understanding of the mountain. The Kingdom of Christ is first in order because it’s first in importance. It’s highest in priority because it’s highest in dominion.
The Kingdom is the holy hill that everything else is arranged around and beneath.
God is the Eternal King and His Kingdom is everlasting. From His throne, through His Son, He created, upholds, and governs all that exists. The Kingdom of God is not one theological theme among many. It is, as the Jesus Smart Core Beliefs state, “the central theological motif that gives definition to all that we believe.”
The Ancient Ascent — and the Question It Asked
Three times a year, something remarkable happened across the land of Israel.
Families packed up. Communities journeyed. And pilgrims from across the nation began moving — on foot, together — toward Jerusalem. Upward toward the temple mount. Upward toward the presence of the Eternal King in the City of God.
These were the pilgrimage feasts — Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles. And the ascent was never a solo journey. Clans traveled together. Psalms of ascent were sung together. The climb toward the holy hill was a communal act, a corporate movement of God’s people toward His presence and order.
Two of the psalms sung on that ascent have come down to us as what scholars call entrance liturgies. Worship songs designed for the approach to the temple. Psalm 15 and Psalm 24.
Both open with the same searching question.
Psalm 15 asks: “Lord, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?” (NKJV)
Psalm 24 echoes it almost word for word: “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who may stand in His holy place?” (NKJV)
Same question. Same psalmist. That is not coincidence — it is emphasis.
But notice what Psalm 24 does before it even raises the question. It establishes the cosmic frame first.
“The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1, NKJV).
David declares that the entire earth belongs to the King. The Kingdom is paramount universally before it is experienced personally. The hill doesn’t need to be established. It already is.
The sovereignty is settled. What remains is the question of participation.
The question is WHO. Who is actually ascending and dwelling in the holy hill of the Lord.
The hill itself was no mere geographical landmark. This was the place where the ark of the covenant rested — the gold-covered chest representing the very throne of God among His people, where the shekinah glory dwelt between the outstretched wings of the cherubim.
Psalm 24 was almost certainly composed for the occasion when David brought the ark of the covenant from the house of Obed-edom to Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The great procession is recorded in 2 Samuel 6:11-18.
Charles Spurgeon saw what David himself may have sensed: the psalmist’s eye looked beyond the ark’s arrival to a greater ascent — the King of Glory Himself entering into His throne at His ascension.
“The eye of the Psalmist looked, however, beyond the typical upgoing of the ark to the sublime ascension of the King of glory.”
So Who May Ascend?
Both psalms answer with a character profile. Clean hands. A pure heart. One who speaks truth, keeps his word even when it costs him, honors those who fear God. One who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, who does not swear deceitfully.
This is a portrait. The anatomy of a person whose life has already been reordered from the top down. We are the righteousness of God in Christ by faith. That is our position. And yet, we have to work that character out in our daily experience.
In a sense, you are declared righteous at the base of the Holy Hill, but you must work that out in experience as you climb. Justification, then sactification to use theological words.
These are a people for whom the Kingdom is not just a theological affirmation but a living reality that has reorganized their priorities, their relationships, their integrity, their words and actions.
This is Christlikeness in its Hebrew dress.
Dallas Willard captured the set-apart quality of such a person:
“When you are tied into the kingdom of the heavens, there is going to be something so obviously different about you that people are going to think, ‘What have you done?'”
The climber is recognizable. The ascent shows it.
The pilgrims didn’t make that ascent alone. Neither do we. The communal dimension is not incidental. It is native to the text.
We were never meant to climb in isolation. We ascend together, as a people, as a community of Kingdom-first followers moving upward toward the presence and order of the King.
“That we should no longer be children… but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head–Christ” (Ephesians 4:14-15 NKJV)
Selah
Selah — a Hebrew term from the Psalms. An invitation to pause, lift up, and let what was just declared do its work in you before moving on.
Pause here for a moment before moving on.
The question the psalmist asks is worth sitting with personally. Not as a doctrinal question, but as a personal one.
Am I actually climbing? Or am I living in the flatlands, admiring the hill from a distance, affirming its existence without ascending toward it?
The profile in Psalms 15 and 24 — clean hands, pure heart, truthful, faithful, and so on — where does my life actually land against that portrait today?
Lift it before the Lord:
“Lord, I want to be a climber. I want the Kingdom to be genuinely paramount in my life — not just something I believe on Sunday, but something that reorders everything. Search me. Show me where I’m still living from the flatlands. I’m asking for the courage to begin the ascent in earnest. In the name of King Jesus, Amen.“
The Ascent Continues
The question has been asked. The hill is real. And Psalms 15 and 24 have painted a portrait of the climber — someone whose life has been reordered from the top down, working out in daily experience what is already true of them in Christ.
Here is what makes the ascent possible:
When you come to Christ,“You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem… to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant” (Hebrews 12:22, 24, NKJV).
You have come to the Holy Hill, Mount Zion, in Christ. The Mediator of the new covenant has opened the hill, secured your access, and placed you on Zion.
The companion piece to this article picks up exactly there.