Psalms 122 The Joy of Assembly

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan, where we are growing in faith, community, and service. This is a sermon series on the Psalms of Ascent by Pastor Don Filsack. Let's listen in.

Good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here, and we're going to go ahead and get started, so if you can find your way in and find your seats, that would be great.

The Joy of Gathering with God's People

I hope that you have some sense of joy gathering together as God's people this morning. We're going to be covering Psalm 122, which is a psalm about joy gathering together as God's people. So I hope that that's literally your experience to some degree this morning, and as we dig in that text, we're going to be talking through that and explaining what that's about.

But before we jump in, be sure to fill out the connection card you received when you walked in. Hopefully, you got one of those. Otherwise, there's some available back there on the welcome table, but if you fill that in and it's your first time with us, you turn those in in the black box back there, and then there's a free coffee mug for you.

If you haven't taken one of those before, you can take one of those just our way of saying thanks for coming and joining with us this morning. We're glad that you're here, and we recognize that it can be a little bit scary visiting someplace for the first time, and it's a little bit, for many of us, that's stretching us outside of our comfort zone, so just welcome, glad that you're here.

There is coffee, juice, donuts available up there for you, table over here as well. And then any offerings you would choose to give, an envelope's been provided. We don't pass an offering plate here. We want your giving to be between you and God and ultimately an act of worship to him, and so we don't want anybody to feel that pressure of a plate going by, like, oh, I guess I'm supposed to give something.

That's between you and God, but there is that same black box where you turn in the connection cards is the same place where you would give if you choose to. Otherwise, we ask that you do us a favor and recycle that envelope.

If you're not gonna use it this morning, then we can just reuse it again and insert that in another bulletin next week, and so that saves us on some printing and costs there, so we recognize that not everybody gives every week, and so just recycle that there.

And then remember that any gifts on the envelope or on the check memo line that are marked Expansion Fund goes towards our desire to eventually build a building on the property that we purchased. We own 12 acres just a little bit east of here and a nice rural area there that we hope to eventually build a building there.

So anything marked Expansion Fund goes into a specific fund dedicated towards that end. With all that out of the way, we kind of consider jumping into Psalm 122. I want to introduce this message. Read the text before the worship band comes, and I think some people, like, they think that worship is setting your heart ready for hearing the word, right?

But sometimes I think we need the word to set our heart ready for worship. Sometimes it's as we really ultimately as we know God better and we come in contact with him that we're able to worship him more accurately as he truly is.

Some of us have a lot of fuzzy notions about who God is, and we must continually come back to the word of God to see who he is and how he works and how he rolls and how he desires for us to interact with him as well.

And growing in community is an essential part of the Christian life, and ultimately gathering together with God's people is an essential part of the Christian life. Throughout scripture, it's very, very clear that God has created us for community, and the notion, it's really only been maybe within the last hundred years or so that there's been the notion that you could be a Christian detached from church.

How many of you have met somebody who said, I'm a spiritual person, but I don't really have a whole lot of, I don't really have a lot of need for the church? I think a lot of us have met somebody like that.

Maybe at some point in our history, we can look back and we can say, I've been that person.

Before.

I've been a little bit burned, I think. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand, but I'm sure that many of us have been burned to some degree by a church in the past, and so we look at that and we go, hey, if I've been bitten once, maybe I won't stick my hand close to that again.

And so we have a tendency to pull back and withdraw, but God desires us to be engaged in community. And we've been following a series through the Psalms of Ascent, starting from Psalm 120 and we're going on to 134.

Those 15 songs were sung by pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem. They were on their way to make sacrifices at annual festivals and annual celebrations in the temple of God, and so this was like a collection.

I mentioned last week, like, you have a collection of, maybe you have a playlist of Christmas songs on your iPhone or on your devices or whatever. How many of you have something like that? You have a playlist of Christmas songs.

You don't really play them in June, you don't really play them around the year, but there's a certain time where you pull those songs out and you sing them. That's the way that these songs were used in ancient Israel.

These were the traveling songs. These were the pilgrimage songs. You're going up to Jerusalem, you pull out these songs and you listen to this playlist on the road trip to Jerusalem. That's what these songs were for.

These 15 specifically labeled in the original, as far as the most ancient manuscripts that we have, these all have the heading in Hebrew, Psalms of Ascent, the Psalms of the Stairs, the Psalms of the Steps, Up to the Place of God.

And as much as we might think about our own journey as an individual thing, we think of a pilgrim as a solitary individual, we think of a road trip sometimes as just, you know, me in the car, on the way, we speak in terms in our spiritual journey of a personal salvation.

We talk about the road God has for each one of us. We think in terms of my work, my ministry, my personal quiet time with God, my own growth, my calling, my, my, my. But the pilgrim arrives with joy and he celebrates the gathering of God's people.

He's not like, I'm here so the party can get started, or finally I've arrived, and it's been a long trip, but finally I'm here. But instead, everything in this psalm this morning that we're going to look at, Psalm 122, drips of community.

The pilgrim hasn't been called alone to a solitary journey alone, to the solitary place of arrival alone, but he has been called together in community. He has been called to journey with others. He arrives to a city alive with celebration.

He arrives to community. He arrives to accountability. And he recognizes his role in maintaining the peace of that community. Shalom is a word about society. The word peace is a word about society. Certainly, we often internalize that in our individualistic Western society, we talk about inner peace, we talk about personal peace, but the word shalom is not about your heart.

The word shalom is about your relationship with other people. It's about your relationship to society and ultimately your relationship to God and correctly ordered life. That's the word shalom, that's the word that appears all throughout these 15 songs of pilgrimage and journey, and it's a relational word.

And this psalm is full of joy and exuberance, speaking of the shalom of the people. The tone of this is a celebration of arrival into community together. So let's open our Bibles. If you haven't already, you know where we're going.

Psalm 122. If you don't have a Bible on your lap or a device to navigate over to Psalm 122, if you could just do me a favor and raise your hand, somebody will bring you by a Bible. We've got some guys back here who will bring you a Bible, but we want everybody to have a copy of the word of God.

You can see that that's where this is coming from, and then to have that open and available as we are going to dig in a little bit later as well. So having a Bible will be helpful. And consider, as I read, the tone, the celebratory nature of this psalm, which is God's very word to us here at Recast Church.

This is what God desires for us to know this morning. Psalm 122, a song of ascents. I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord. Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem built as a city that is bound firmly together, to which the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, as was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord. There, thrones for judgment were set, the thrones of the house of David.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

May they be secure who love you.

Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers. For my brothers' and companions' sake, I will say, peace be within you. For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.

Let's pray. Father, I pray that you would move in our midst this morning. I recognize that we've had all different kinds of weeks, all different kinds of mornings. Some of us woke up with a song in our hearts, and a swing in our steps.

Some of us barely rolled out of bed, and kind of grumbled our whole way here, and it's been a struggle and a wrestling match with kids to get ready, and all different kinds of things have gone on, and for some of us, it hasn't looked like a lot of gladness and joy and delight together in this place.

And then we read this psalm about a man who was just enthusiastic and delighted and beside himself with the notion that he had the opportunity to come into your presence and to gather with.

Your people.

Father, I pray that you would be transforming us and changing us by the reality of this example that we have, and Father, even as we have an opportunity to lift up our voices, it is a great thing that you've called us into community.

We can certainly sing songs in our car, sing songs in our shower, sing songs on our own, but Father, to gather together with your people, and let our voices be combined to raise up to you as an awesome sacrifice of praise before you.

Father, I pray that you would be delighted with our hearts, and that our hearts would be delighted in you this morning as we sing these songs. So much more than an exercise of our mouths and our vocal cords, but an exercise of our hearts on our knees before the Almighty, and it's in Jesus' name that I pray, amen.

Thanks a lot to the band for leading us this morning. I'm very grateful for the time and energy they put in every week, and it is my desire. I mean, it's my prayer every week that God would change us as a result of coming in contact with his word, and I want it to be an inside-out kind of change.

I don't want you to walk out of here with a list of dues, a checklist of things to accomplish without your heart engaged in it, without a hunger and a desire to know God more and driven out of a passion for him.

And so I love that song, just it's been one of my favorites all down through the years and since we started the church. I want to encourage you though, since it is our desire and our belief that getting in contact with God's word is what's going to change us from the inside out, that we want to keep our focus as much as possible on the word of God, and if that means that you need more donuts or you need more coffee or juice at any time during the message, those are there to serve the purpose of keeping you comfortable in hearing the word.

Obviously, if you get uncomfortable here, I want it to be because the word has made you uncomfortable, not because of your setting. That means if you need to get up and stretch out, if the chair makes you uncomfortable, you can get up, stretch out.

Restrooms are out the hall and down this way. Women's downstairs, men's upstairs, and take advantage of those if you need them. Starting off this week, thinking about community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor during the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, during the rise of Nazism during that time.

Actually, he was assassinated or killed just weeks before the liberation of the camp in which he was being held. A Christian pastor had worked in England, in Anglican churches, a man of God who loved him who also was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that's why he, in turn, was killed himself.

He wrote prolifically some amazing things. By the way, an awesome book that I read this past year, it's just called Bonhoeffer by a man named Eric Metaxas. It's a really thick commitment to read and well worth every page and every dollar spent.

It is an awesome, awesome book. If you're looking for a book to pick up over the summer and read, I would highly recommend.

It.

Another book by him, however, his classic book called Life Together, he says this about community. Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair.

Now he talks about two sides of the table to fall off of. How many of you have noticed that most issues have two separate cliffs, and the balance of the Christian life is often walking in some kind of a balance, in this case, between alone time and together time, right?

And how many of you know that it can be hard to strike that balance? And you know your own heart. And I'm not sure which of those is more problematic for our society. I haven't been able to diagnose one of those.

I think it really kind of seems to run down the lines of personality. And the tendency in our community and in our society is to think that it runs down the lines of extroverts and introverts, or those who charge their batteries by being together with people.

That's extroverts. And those who charge their batteries by alone time. Extroverts love being with people, and they get anxious when they're alone more often than not. And that's the case for, obviously, I'm generalizing.

Introverts get nervous in groups of people and feel less comfortable with alone time, just generally. But the reality of our need for community runs much deeper than these psychological distinctions. We can be an extrovert and enjoy being with people and simultaneously be avoiding community.

How many of you know that you can do relationship in such a way that everything remains surfacy and you never get down to any depth whatsoever? But you just had a great time. You were at a party and had a lot of fun, and boy, it was just great.

But there was no substance there. There's something more that's needed. I believe that in America, we have a fundamental issue in our hearts that Scripture addresses time and time again, and it is a need for community.

It is a need for depth in our relationships with one another. Scripture seeks to correct us where we are wrong, and I believe that each one of us is indeed wrong and off to some degree when it comes to the concept of community, life.

Together.

And in verse 1, the songwriter says, right off the bat, I was glad.

He was glad.

Another way of saying this, another translation of this, depending on what Bible you have sitting on your lap, says he rejoiced. I rejoiced when. And whatever comes next has caused this songwriter's heart to lighten.

It has lifted his burden to some degree. He's enthusiastic. He has a swing in his step, and the reason that his heart has been lightened is that some members from his community, possibly friends, possibly people who in his context he attended synagogue with or whatever, they suggested a road trip.

They said, let's do a road trip, a spiritual road trip. Let's go to the house of the Lord. That's what his friends or someone in his community spoke this to him. And the songwriter has enthusiasm to the point, at the point of even the suggestion that he joined together on this pilgrimage to the house of God, to the temple, to Jerusalem for the festival that was going to be taking place.

And notice, he doesn't merely respond with his intellect. It's not just merely a transactional, hey, would you like to go with us? Well, hold on a second. Let me check my calendar and see if that fits in.

Or, what you're proposing is a significant undertaking of time, energy, and resources. Let me weigh the pros and cons, and I'll get back with you in a week. Is that the way that the songwriter responds?

He says, I was glad. I rejoiced instantly. They suggested it. They said, hey, let's go to the house of the Lord, and he was like, I was glad, and I rejoiced at this notion of going with God's people to worship Him.

His heart was glad at even the suggestion, and in this song, his emotions, his feelings are engaged. But notice the past tense nature of verse 1. Verse 1 says, I was glad. Well now, is he not glad now?

Well, we're going to see that here in a second, because verse 2 brings us up to the present. He's looking back in verse 1 at before the trip, but verse 2 tells us he's already taken.

The trip.

He's already arrived.

Verse 1 is the pilgrim remembering the suggestion of the journey by his friends, but now they've arrived in verse 2. Like someone sitting on the beach in Cancun in February, I don't want to distract you too much, but someone sitting on the beach in Cancun in February might look over at her husband and say, I was so glad when you suggested this trip.

She's reminiscing and remembering just kind of the steps of how we got to where we're at right here sitting on this beach. So glad when you suggested this trip. Our pilgrim steps into the city gates of Jerusalem and is reflecting back before the journey even began.

And just as delightful or potentially delightful as the soft sand of Mexico might feel to us in February, the entrance to the gate of Jerusalem brings an exclamation of delight to the songwriter. And I would suggest to you that it's more than just simply the presence of God in that place, but that there's an actual material blessing that he is glad to be there.

He's glad to be within the gates of the city of Jerusalem, and there's an actual physical like gladness and delight and joy in the place and the location that he is now at. Certainly, it is primarily focused on the presence of God, primarily focused on community, but there is equally a delight over these things.

We can tend to think, oh, this guy is hyper spiritual. I know this kind of guy. He's just like, oh, church, yeah, sounds great. And everything churchy and everything spiritual and everything, you know, and.

But this guy is just he's glad to be there. And it's as if in verse two, he says, can you believe it? Can you believe this? Our very feet have entered the gates of Jerusalem.

Can you believe this? We're here.

We've arrived. We made it.

And he's there's exclamation points. Notice the exclamation points all throughout this text. The English translators had to put exclamation points because the Hebrew bears the enthusiasm and requires that we put exclamation points at the end of most of these sentences because it's emphatic language that the songwriter is using for his just sheer delight.

Can you believe it? Our feet are here in the gathering of God's people.

We made it.

We've arrived to the place of the worship of our great and holy God together.

He's excited to be there.

He goes on gushing about the experience of arriving at Jerusalem for the festival. He's in awe of the city that is bound. He takes in the city. I don't know if there's a graphic of the city up there. If you can throw that up there on the screen.

He gushes about the arrival of Jerusalem and he talks about the architecture that he sees. This is a rendering, obviously an artistic rendering of Jerusalem about the time that the pilgrims would be going in to the temple.

This is kind of the city of David around that era. Obviously, Jerusalem has sprawled to 10 times the size of that hill that it's on right there. But this is ancient Jerusalem that we're talking about.

And he talks about how the city is a place of tight community, bound firmly together,.

The text says.

He takes in the architecture and uses that as somewhat of a metaphor because the songwriter scans the layout of the city and it's a word picture for community, relationship. The words he uses in the text for bound firmly together are like relational bonds between.

Friends.

Like the buildings are tightly organized, so is the community of God's people. And this city, this city is busting at the seams. The tribes go up, which is the word for ascend. This is the place to which the tribes ascend.

The word that reminds us that this is one of the songs of ascent. This is the tribes ascend to, go up to, walk up the steps to Jerusalem. A reminder that that's exactly what the song is, a song of going up to Jerusalem.

God's people, the tribes of the Lord, who possesses the tribes according to the text? The Lord. They are his people. And they are ascending to Jerusalem as was decreed. Why are they going there? Well, think this through.

They are going out of obedience. It's been decreed that they would do this trip, that they would go and gather together as God's people. That's been decreed. But can they both be obeying and simultaneously have delight and joy in it?

I think sometimes we think of those as mutually exclusive things, right? We have a tendency to go obedience, that's work, and then thankfulness is delight. Verse 4 ties those things together that we don't readily tie together.

The people are responding to the command of God to make this pilgrimage. But equally, they have another purpose, an underlying purpose, and that is to gather together to give, the text says, thanks to the Lord.

There's a dual motivation, obedience and thankfulness. Obedience sounds like work, and thanks sounds like joy. But the people of God gather together as they were commanded to, but equally, the purpose is the giving of thanks, as I said.

And rather than grumbling, think this through, my point in even stating any of this, is that rather than grumbling, I have to do this because God told me to. I have to get together with God's people. I have to, and we're going to talk about it here in just a second and make the parallels, I have to go to church.

I had to get up this morning and go, and God made me. I'd rather be sleeping, rather be on the golf course, but I had to, so I guess I'll do it. God will love me more. Imagine that kind of attitude, versus thankfulness, talking about the heart, heart motive, what's pulled us together, and I recognize there's all different kinds of things sometimes.

Some mornings I don't feel like, did I just say that out loud? I know what it's like, I know that there's all different kinds of motivations for what's brought you together, and I would suggest to you that that you're here is a great thing, like that in itself is half the battle.

Sometimes you come in grumbling and you walk out rejoicing, have you ever had that happen? I can tell you that you won't come in grumbling and walk out rejoicing if you never come in. That can't happen, right?

And so that you're gathered here is a great thing, but I recognize that there's all different kinds of motivations that bring us together, but the best motivation to be here, the best reason to have your rear in a seat right now is thankfulness to God for what he's done.

For you.

That's the greatest motivation for you. And then, I mean, obviously, he wants you to be here. You know that from his word. Do not forsake the assembling together. A theology professor, Dr. Whitmer up in Grand Rapids, pointed this out in my last theology class that I took last semester, and it was just really revolutionary in my mind.

It's so simple and it's obvious, but there's only one thing that you cannot do in your quiet time, there's only one thing spiritually that you cannot do alone, and that's assemble together with God's people.

You have to have other people to assemble together. This is the only thing, I mean, without each other, you can't do this. Can you read your Bible? Can you sing songs? Could you eat a cracker and drink some juice?

You can do all of these things spiritually alone, right, but you can't gather together.

Alone.

We need each other, and that's something that the assembling together is the church. This space, we already know this is an elementary school cafeteria. This space isn't the church. We're not hoping to build a church.

God has already built a church, look around you. We are the church, and wherever we gather together and assemble, we're the church. The glorious reality and glorious beautiful truth that it's the people, it's not the place.

I wish we had a different word in the English language for the building, or a different word for the gathering, so that we could distinguish those two things, because in our culture and our society, everything gets wrapped up in building and bricks and mortar and architecture, and that's a church, and other people are the church.

Some of that was not in my notes, and I might take a second to reign that back in. Obedience and thanks and motivation, that's where I started off on. They hear in this text, this author is offering thanks to the Lord, and the tribes are going up for that purpose, decreed, yes, told to, yes, giving thanks, yes.

And the pilgrim was not called to this journey alone, and he has not arrived alone, but instead, he has come to the gathering of the tribes of God. And as the pilgrim stands within the city gates, a prominent feature stands out to him in verse 5, something that might be strange to us in context, he's all delighted, he's all joyful, he's all enthusiastic, and then he talks about judgment.

How many of you think that sounds like a wet blanket on the conversation? Talks about thrones and seats within the gates for judgment. Well he's standing there, and we already got the context of where he's standing, his feet are within the gates, and he notices a prominent feature in the ancient city.

The city gate was a large, secured courtyard, often overseen by towers. So in other words, to get this picture right, when you're coming into the city of Jerusalem in this day and age, you pass one set of gates from the outside of the city, you're out in the countryside, you come to the city wall, there's gates, gates open, you walk through those gates, and now you're in an enclosed courtyard, maybe the size of this room, so you've walked in the gates on one side, and there's another set of gates on the other, and you're still not in the city yet.

You're within the gates. That's what this area is called, in the gates. And within the gates, there would be thrones, this was the place, this was the courtyard, literally where court cases were heard.

This was the place of judgment, the place where disagreements between two people would be resolved by judges that would come down at set times and sit there in the city gate and cast judgment, and occasionally, even the king himself would come and hear civil suits and things like that and give his decrees and judgments.

For the pilgrim here in this text, he's reminded, how can he be enthusiastic about this? Why any delight? Why any joy? He's driving towards shalom. He's driving towards peace. He's driving towards a rightly ordered society.

And so, he's enthusiastic and excited because he has come to the place of accountability. He recognizes that the need on a fallen planet with fallen humanity is a need for a place of justice to be meted out.

Have any of you ever delighted over justice? Have any of you ever been glad that justice was served? A few times, a few times. Very rarely do we think it needs to be meted out on us, and I recognize that.

I mean, it's very easy for us to squirm out from underneath what we justly deserve, but at the same time, we can recognize that sometimes, man, you're here in a court case, it's pretty locked down, and it's like, man, this needs to be resolved.

This needs to be taken care of. This needs to be handled. And he recognizes that coming into Jerusalem, this is a place of accountability in the city.

Gates.

It's a place where the peace and the correct order of society and community is maintained. For many pilgrims who would only maybe annually make it up to Jerusalem, this would be a time for setting wrongs right.

This would be a time for them to oversee property boundaries, and this guy keeps moving his, letting his cattle come over onto my property and graze and take all the good, all the good pastures from my flock, and so that would be adjudicated there, and at this time of the year, it would be very busy for the judges there in the gates of Jerusalem.

Main point, he has not just come to community, but he has come to God's community, and God's community has order. God's community has structure. God's community has accountability. God's community is not like Meshach and Kedar, those of you who were here a couple of weeks ago from Psalm 120, the place that this pilgrim is coming from.

He declares to us, he tells us, I'm coming from a warring tribe, warring type people all the way up in the north, or like those all the way in the south, from a barbaric people who love war and hate shalom.

They hate peaceful society and they are, they are, they have lying lips and deceitful tongues and he says that's not God's community. God's community is a place where shalom is supposed to reign, correctly ordered society.

Peace is supposed to be the reality in Jerusalem, the city of peace. Of course, we know that in this fallen world, things are rarely the way they are supposed to be, so we know that the city of peace has been anything but historically a city of peace.

Jerusalem lived up to its name?

Not yet.

There's a day coming when there's going to be a new Jerusalem where it will indeed be finally the city of shalom, the city of correct ordering, where Jesus Christ himself is over all and is king on the throne of that city.

Of course, we know that in a fallen world, they're not the way they're supposed to be, so children are supposed to grow up to be adults, parents are supposed to love their kids, leaders are not supposed to abuse their authority, husbands are supposed to sacrifice for the cause of their wives, and so the plea in verse 6 is extremely realistic.

Look at verse 6, pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Without this plea, we may be left thinking that the songwriter is just an optimistic idealist. Oh goody, I've arrived in Jerusalem, now everything is going to be excellent.

Now I've arrived at the place of shalom, now I've arrived at the place of peace. Man, I'm never going to leave this place because it's so awesome and everything is great and there's never any murder, there's never any lying, there's never any cheating, there's never any problems because this is Jerusalem.

No.

Pray for the peace of the city of peace. Pray for the city of Jerusalem. You recognize that even amongst the gathering of the pilgrims who love God and are called by His name, even amongst God's people, there is a need to pray for shalom, for true peace.

And rather than just plead with others to pray for peace, which he does, he encourages us all to pray for peace, but he in turn offers a prayer as well, he doesn't just leave it at that, well why don't you guys pray?

Shows himself willing to pray himself and he says, may they be secure who love you Jerusalem. May they be secure who love the city, the place of true shalom. The songwriter prays for security for all who love the place of God's presence.

He wants everyone who loves the city of peace to be secure and kept safe. He has appealed to the internal peace that is found through justice in the law and the community outside, in verse 5, but he also refers to the peace that is found in protection from external enemies as well in verse 7.

Shalom is within the walls of Jerusalem and within her towers. You know that a correctly ordered society requires that we are protected from ourselves and protected from without as well. That's a correctly and a healthy society, is one that's protected from outside of us and one that's protected from within us as well because sin is everywhere.

Sin isn't those guys out there, sin isn't here, it's in there, right? So we need God's movement and we need to pray for peace even here in our midst, praying.