Continuing through the Psalms of Ascent, we come to Psalm 123:

I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. Like servants, alert to their master’s commands, like a maiden attending her lady, We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! We’ve been kicked around long enough, Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes. (1 – 4, MSG)

There’s a problem: kicked around by “complacent rich men…arrogant brutes.”

It’s a long-standing, continuing problem:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. (James 5.1 – 6, ESV)

The solution? Like “servants alert to their master’s commands…We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy.”

Eugene Peterson in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction focuses his commentary on our attitude as servants.

As a person grows and matures in the Christian way, it is necessary to acquire certain skills. One is service…

Service, in that we are the servants. God is not our servant, we are his.

But God is not a servant to be called into action when we are too tired to do something ourselves, not an expert to be called on when we find we are ill equipped to handle a specialized problem in living. Paul Scherer writes scathingly of people who lobby around in the courts of the Almighty for special favors, plucking at his sleeve, pestering him with requests. God is not a buddy we occasionally ask to join us at our convenience or for our diversion. God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.

Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. Then we go home and wait for God to be delivered to us according to the specifications that we have set down. But that is not the way it works. And if we thought about it for two consecutive minutes, we would not want it to work that way. If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do…

With respect to our service to God, Peterson writes:

The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.

For such reasons all Christian service involves urgency. Servitude is not a casual standing around waiting for orders. It is never desultory; it is urgent need: “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” And the gospel is the good news that the words of God, commanding new life in us, are already in our ears; “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”

He continues:

The best New Testament commentary on this psalm is in the final section of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 12—16. The section begins with this sentence: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1). The psalm’s emphasis on actual, physical service (not a spiritual intention, not a desire to be of service) is picked up in the invitation to present our everyday, ordinary life. The motivation for service (not coerced, not demanded) is picked up in the phrase “God helping you.” But most significant is the remarkable last phrase logikēn latreian, “place it before God as an offering,” which another translation renders “reasonable service.” Service, that is, that makes sense. The word latreia means “service,” the work one does on behalf of the community. But it also is the base of our word liturgy, the service of worship that we render to God. And it is precisely that service that is logical, reasonable.

Interestingly, Peterson wrote on Psalm 122 about “worship,” by which he meant attend a worship service at church every Sunday. But then in this commentary on Psalm 123, he refers us to Romans 12.1 which speaks clearly of “worship” in the context of “service” – it’s the same word! Worship doesn’t primarily occur on Sunday in church; it occurs in “your everyday, ordinary life.”

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship (Romans 12.1, NIV)