Psalm 126 | Learning to Live Here
Let’s open the Bible now to Psalm 126. We’re taking time today to look at this psalm because I think it’s a perfect meditation as we begin the new year. It’s incredibly insightful into our emotional life as Christians and how we deal with our good memories of the past and expectations of the future.
126 A Song of Ascents.
1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
3 The Lord has done great things for us;
we are glad.
4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
like streams in the Negeb!
5 Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
6 He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
So, here we are in 2021. How does it feel? Maybe you have some plans for the year, some goals, some things you’d like to do. And that’s all great. After the year we’ve had, we’re all hoping for something far better, for a restoration of sorts, aren’t we?
Psalm 126 is perfect for a day and time like ours. It’s the story of a group of people remembering a time of great joy and hoping for it again. But they’re currently experiencing a time of weeping and sorrow. Their life isn’t as great as it once was, and they’re looking to God to do something that they cannot do for themselves. They’re looking for a great turn-around, a great restoration.
And you are too, aren’t you?
This Psalm is us. It’s a view into our life: joy and sorrow. We have both. No one has only joy, and no one has only sorrow. We all have both. As we enter 2021, life is still not “normal.” We think back just a year ago and it feels like a different world. I look at the plans I made in January 2020 and have to just laugh so I don’t cry. I want to go back to that kind of world—one without a pandemic and all its effects, one without the suffering of 2020, one without the removal of so much that made life feel full. Entering 2021 is a great joy, but here we are three days into it and I don’t feel restored yet. Do you?
Psalm 126 helps us with that feeling. Tim Keller says it, “is a perfect emotional map for a person who believes in God. It’s a picture, an overview, of the emotional life that the life of faith brings.” I think that’s true. This psalm can be our guide as we enter this year, helping us discern the feelings of hope we don’t want to lose while living inside the reality we can’t wait to get out of. It’s a Psalm for people looking for a restoration, a release, a joyful return. As we enter 2021, let’s just all admit it: we’re looking for a miracle.
Well, let’s start with the good news. If you’re a Christian, you are a miracle. Your conversion was a restoration of fortunes, a miraculous release from captivity, and a joyful homecoming. But over time, life gets boring and stale, and less than we hoped. We want the good times back. More than that, we want a future of greater glory.
Israel felt the same thing. Their once-great city was a shadow of its former self, and they anticipated the hopeful restoration of Zion. But they didn’t just hope for a prosperous city—they looked forward to a reigning king, the promised Messiah. They looked forward to the time when, after the anticipation and the hope, after the promises and the prophecies, Jesus would come. The savior who, we know now, would do more than restore a broken city but would live and die and rises again to save his people from their sins.
But even the historical work of Jesus is not the end of the story. The Bible concludes not with a deep sigh of rest but cries out in desperate anticipation, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). God’s people aren’t home just yet. We have miles to go before we sleep. Psalm 126 tells us that there is a proper place to put our sadness over dashed dreams and our hope for future dreams.
So, let’s explore this Psalm and see how it can help us. We will organize it in three points.
Longing for Better Days (vv. 1-3)
Learning to Live Here (v. 4)
Looking Ahead to the Harvest (vv. 5-6)
Longing for Better Days (vv. 1-3)
We don’t know the context here. Verse 1 alludes to something but no one is sure exactly what. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.” Some say that’s referring to their return from exile in Babylon. Others say it’s not. It doesn’t matter. Even without knowing the context, it’s easy to it speaks of an Israelite restoration so grand that even the surrounding nations remembered it. Look at verses 2 and 3. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.”
We don’t know what those great things were, but whatever it was, it was like a dream. You know what that’s like, don’t you? Some deliverance that seems too good to be true? For these people, that day was the happy day from which all others orbited, evoking laughter and joy, like Job after his suffering (Job 42:10). And the psalmist wanted another hopeful and joyous restoration just like it. The Lord had done great things for them, and they were glad. But that gladness faded, as it tends to do. We need more than memories of great things done, don’t we? We need the hope of great things to come. Our past, as great as it was, is the past. Who doesn’t want a brighter future?
An initial reading of this psalm can leave us with the impression that nostalgia weighed the psalmist down—remembering “the good ole days” that are now long gone. Is the Psalmist a poetic Uncle Rico, wanting to re-live his high school football days, wishing for just one more minute? Many people have thought so, but that’s not quite the tone. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s biblical hope and faith—looking back to look forward.
Sometimes it’s good to know where words come from. This is one of those times. Nostalgia first appeared as a word in the 1770s, springing from the combination of the Greek words nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain.” In the 1800s, encyclopedias of medicine listed nostalgia as a disease: “severe homesickness.”
Isn’t that what we all are, to some degree or another? Homesick.
Israel sure was, even at home. So are we. We’re homesick for God, for what only he can provide. We’re homesick for final freedom, forgiveness, refuge, victory, and peace.
Nostalgia is a common feeling. It’s understandable. Looking back on the glory days isn’t a bad thing to do. But the problem with nostalgia is it takes us half-way home; it takes us back to the place of our former blessing, but it can’t take us to future hope. Like the glory days of old, only God can take us to that future blessing. Only God can gather us together with lasting joy, like Israel bringing in plenty during the harvest (Ps. 126:5-6).
What the entire world experienced in 2020 is a world that looks like home without the satisfaction of home. You can’t see the pandemic swirling around outside like an invading army. Everything looks normal out there, but it is very abnormal. Christians are actually really used to this reality. We live as citizens of heaven, as Paul showed us in our series on Philippians we just finished. We can make a home here but can never fully be at home here. C.S. Lewis put it perfectly, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
We are made for smother world, but we’re in this one now, and we must learn to live here, which is our next point.
Learning to Live Here (v. 4)
Verse 4 is kind of the hinge point like the door that opens from the past to the present and on to the future.
“Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negeb!”
Far from a disease bringing one down, the memory of Psalm 126 is actually a hopeful one. This is a psalm of ascent, a hopeful song about God’s future deliverance. Today may not be like yesterday, but God doesn’t intend to take us back to what was. He intends to bring us forward to what will one day be. Of course, we’re not in either place yet, are we? We’re stuck in the middle. Hoping for more but experiencing that same old thing. Not as good as it once was, and not good enough yet.
But that’s the story of the Bible. Even the Garden of Eden, as perfect as it was, wasn’t the home God prepared for his people in the future. The Garden of Eden was a pointer to—not the culmination of—the glory to come. God’s gift of your future is better than the varied gifts of your past. In the end, even all the revivals of history will pale in comparison to the great revival coming on the clouds when Jesus comes again. What we need to reclaim as we head into 2021 is that walking with Jesus is a journey of hope!
So this psalm is not a great and longing sigh; it’s a new and hopeful song. Yes, there is a plea for restoration, as verse 4 makes clear, but it’s not a cry of desperation. It’s a cry of expectation. It’s a cry for God to do it again, grounded in faith that he will. If the first three verses are a wonderful memory, beginning in verse 4 is the start of a prayer. The memory is turned into prayer. And it’s no small prayer.
Notice the phrase in the second line, “like streams in the Negeb.” What does that mean? The Negeb is a desert. Streams do not flow in the desert. In fact, the name Negeb means dry or parched. The Psalmist is asking for the kind of restoration that feels like a watering of the driest desert. A sudden and satisfyingly refreshing outpouring of grace. It’s the kind of thing only God can do. We cannot bring it to pass, only God can. And the Bible tells us, one day, he will do something just like that. One day, the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. Our lives may be more like a desert right now, but God can bring the rain.
The lesson is that learning to live here is more than coping with a happy memory, it’s rejoicing in a coming glory. That doesn’t mean homesickness is easier to bear. It means, given to Christ, nostalgia points us homeward to glory rather than backward to the Garden.
Jesus reverses nostalgia’s direction. With him, as good as our past was, the best is yet to come, which takes us to our third and final point.
Looking Ahead to the Harvest (vv. 5-6)
As glorious as the future is, that future glory doesn't make the present angst disappear. Life is full of disappointments. So God gave us the Psalms—as Tim Keller says—to pray our tears. You see that in verses 5 and 6.
“Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”
Weeping in the Christian life is not a problem. Lament isn’t a problem. Crying out to God for something more isn’t a problem. It’s thoroughly biblical. Throughout the Old Testament, other than sin, it’s about all God’s people do. They cry out. They lament. They ask God to do what only God can do. Psalm 126 shows that our tears are an investment—those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! Only those who sow in tears can reap with shouts of joy. Only he who weeps brings sheaves home.
God is not asking us to live on our great memories of the past. He’s not asking us to go back to the revivals of history and let those be enough to sustain us. He’s not asking us to let our own personal times of refreshing nourish us into the future. No single event of past blessing is enough to fill us forever. We forget. We weaken. We falter. We fall. We cry and we weep and we lament.
The question is, where do we put those tears? Do we invest them?
The truth is, we need a hope bigger than we can even imagine. How many of us are looking for a restoration of the old normal? We’d be happy with that right? But God is always preparing us for a greater hope. In fact, the Bible says God prunes the fruitful branches in our lives so he can do something new and better, bringing even more fruit than before. The entire Bible and our entire lives are preparing us for a resurrection hope. That's why God sent his Sower to sow gospel seeds into our lives (Mark 4:1-20). But that seed doesn't grow instantly. Cultivating takes time we don’t want to spend. It takes watering when we don’t want to. It takes, in a word, maturing, and no one matures easily. There are tears involved. But we can invest those tears wisely, hopefully, God-wardly.
Learning to pray our tears is the maturing process by which we prepare for a greater harvest. As we weep toward God, he takes our tears and plants them in his garden of grace. They take root and grow. But the harvest comes later—as late as the resurrection.
In Matthew’s gospel, we see Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb of Jesus the day after his crucifixion (Matthew 28:1-10). Imagine their sadness, weeping as they walk. What a joy it was to know Jesus, to be by his side as he taught, as he healed, as he filled the world with happiness and hope. But that was yesterday. That sad day, their tears were with him in the grave, buried in the ground.
As they approached the garden tomb, the earth quaked and the stone rolled away. Someone stood before them, his appearance like lightning, his clothing white as snow. He seemed to know their tears. “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen.”
Then, Jesus appeared and said, “Greetings!”
They fell and worship. Then they rose and went to tell his disciples that they too will see him.
In other words, they went home with shouts of joy.
Sally Lloyd-Jones captures this joyful mood in The Jesus Storybook Bible. Mary runs,
And it seemed to her that morning, as she ran, almost as if the whole world had been made anew, almost as if the whole world was singing for joy—the trees, tiny sounds in the grass, the birds . . . her heart.
Was God really making everything sad come untrue? Was he making even death come untrue?
She couldn’t wait to tell Jesus’ friends. ‘They won’t believe it!’ she laughed.
She laughed! Her mouth was filled with laughter, as Psalm 126:2 says, because the Lord had done great things for her, as Psalm 126:3 says. But not only for her. The Lord had done great things for all his people, for all his friends, for all of us.
How did those great things come to us? They didn’t come without tears. In fact, they came by way of death. That’s the Christian life: first the cross, then the crown. It's the planting that produces the harvest, the death that produces life. As Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).
Jesus is the proof that buried hope grows into glorious reality. The tears of the cross bore the fruit of the resurrection. He went out weeping, bearing his life for sowing; he came home with sheaves (Ps. 126:6), bringing many sons to glory (Heb. 2:10).
Israel’s story was a good one, but a better one was yet to come. And there’s a better one coming for us, as well.
One day, the Lord will restore our fortunes. We will be with him, without the sin that ruined us and created this problem in the first place. The first earth will pass away, and the holy city, the New Jerusalem, will come down out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
We will receive our glorified bodies on the new heaven and new earth, and God will say to all his people, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev. 21:1-4). He will wipe every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more!
No more mourning. No more crying. No more pain.
The former things will have passed away.
We’ll finally be home.
Conclusion
So as we enter this new year, let’s just remember that everything coming in our lives is an investment in that great and final day. Psalm 126 is a psalm of ascent. Yes, there is sorrow in life, but we Christians are on our way to unending joy. We are, whether it looks like it or not, always ascending with the Lord. He himself is bringing us home to him. Maybe some things won’t be restored to us as we hope with the turning of a new year, but we can be sure, no matter what, that the promises of God for his people are sealed and guaranteed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
God can turn dry places into rivers. He can turn sorrow into joy. He can bring flowers from tears. He will restore our fortunes. We will reap with shouts of joy. God will make it so. Maybe not today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But certainly in eternity where every day will be better than the last. Every moment will be brighter than the one before it. Everything your heart most longs for—that miracle of perfect peace and love and hope and joy and everything else—is yours forever in Christ. All you have to do is receive it and wait for it.
Maybe you’re weeping today. That’s ok. Plant those tears in God’s promises. You will reap with shouts of joy.
Let’s pray.
