Eugene Peterson's book A Long Discipleship in the Same Direction is a set of meditations on the pilgrim psalms. In chapter 2, Peterson explains Psalm 120, showing that it is the Psalmist's decision to renounce the way of the world and follow the Lord's way. And when we repent, we renounce the world's value system--its ideas of success and prestige and power.

The whole history of Israel is set in motion by two ... acts of world-rejection, which freed the people for an affirmation of God: "the rejection of Mesopotamia in the days of Abraham and the rejection of Egypt in the days of Moses." All the wisdom and strength of the ancient world were in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But Israel said no to them. Despite the prestige, the vaunted and uncontested greatness, there was something foundationally alien and false in those cultures ... Mesopotamian power and Egyptian wisdom were strength and intelligence divorced from God, put to wrong ends and producing all the wrong results.

. . . Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.