Psalms 126 Undignified Laughter

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, 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.

Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here, and we are going to get started, so if you can find your seats, that would be great. I know more people will be coming in throughout the morning, but please fill out the connection card that you received when you walked in.

You can turn those in in the black box back there. Any offerings that you would choose to give also go in that black box back there. A giving envelope has been provided for you, but you can recycle that.

There's a plastic bin right next to the black box back there, where if you're not going to use that envelope this week, we can just reuse those and recycle them, so that does help us out. Remember that any gifts that are given that are marked expansion fund will go towards our eventual goal of building a building.

I want to point out that we have recently migrated our database, and in that process, we have lost some of your email addresses. Through that process, what would really help us out a lot is if over the next few weeks, if you would do us a favor, and actually I know many of you that are sitting here, you've been here already.

You filled out that connection card before. If you could fill out that connection card again, even while I'm introducing and talking about the text. If you took just a minute to give us your name, address, email address, and phone number, so we can make sure that we have the best way of getting in touch with you, that would help us out significantly.

We'd like to see a stack of those connection cards this week, and the more that we get in the next few weeks, the more we can make sure that the information we have currently is accurate. Again, that's our main way of communicating with you is through email, and if we have the wrong email address, then you're not going to be able to continue to get the information.

So, let us know by filling out that card, and then we can just check over and against what we have in our records, and that would be very helpful for us. Well, obviously, it's a little bit different. We don't usually have cake and balloons up front in church, and so today, this very day marks our sixth birthday as a church.

So happy birthday, Recast. Six years. Six years, and it's pretty cool that April 19th falls on a Sunday, just like it did six years ago. So, six years ago on April 19th, it was a Sunday morning. That Sunday morning, I woke up and was prepared to go to the basement of

What's that? Greg and Jen Nitzel, sorry. Greg and Jen Nitzel went to their basement. We set up some folding chairs. We had this very same table there present, and I proceeded to preach to 16 people. We had 16 adults, and how many kids were there?

I think it was 15 kids there at that very first service. We ran a little kids program, basically with our own children sitting on our laps while we watched a video and kind of talked with them about scriptural things, and then we went downstairs.

We took communion there that first Sunday, and honestly, I have to confess that to some degree, it kind of felt like we were playing church. We were in the basement. That's where the kids play, right?

We were in the basement and set up the folding chairs and all of that stuff, and it was like standing up and preaching to 16 people. We had no idea what God was going to do, and obviously, what we're doing here this morning is quite different than just a small gathering in a basement of somebody's house.

We knew at that point from that first meeting that success would somehow look like some numerical growth. Now, you know that it's not all about numbers, but we did not anticipate that we would be just that 16 people meeting on a regular basis forever, and we wouldn't grow.

I mean, obviously, the point of the kingdom of God is that it continues to grow and that God continues to reach out, but we just didn't know that eventually we would outgrow the first facility that we met at there on Red Arrow and eventually that we would be here where we are today.

God has indeed been faithful, and one of the points of God's faithfulness, one of the cool things is just even the way that he's been faithful to bring up, I think, texts at appropriate times for us. As I go through, and my commitment is to continue through books of the Bible and continue just through chapter and verse and kind of keep moving on, and I'm not a particularly good planner as far as, I do plan out my sermons always in advance, kind of get caught up and then spend a day like really going over what I want to preach again over the next year, and so I didn't plan this text.

The Lord Restores the Fortunes of Zion

God is celebrating with us, in a sense, of providing a text of celebration this morning, the very text, Psalm 126, that we're going to be looking at this morning, speaks of shouts of joy, laughter, in the process of testifying to the great things that the Lord has done.

That's what our text is. It talks about gladness, it talks about hope for the future, and harvest, and that's what we're celebrating here this morning. It's an awesome thing, and so the Lord has indeed done great things for us.

He's granted us the privilege of seeing many come to faith in Christ. We've had baptisms, we've grown in faith together, we've grown in community together, we've grown in service together. There has been laughter, there have been shouts of joy, there has been gladness.

And I want to point out to you that the one who has been restored by the Lord is indeed one that ought to be joyful and enthusiastic. We need to celebrate what God has done, and we have every reason to pray for and believe that God will continue to reap a harvest through us.

So let's open to Psalm 126. If you need a Bible, just raise your hand and somebody will bring you a Bible. Mike has some in his hand back here, and if you need one, you don't have an app or some other means to follow along, that's helpful.

But Psalm 126, God's word for us, I think it's really cool how he picks out these texts and brings them alive to us at the proper time. Psalm 126, a song of ascents. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

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.

Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev. 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.

Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, we rejoice in the work that you have done here in our midst. It has been an awesome six years of seeing you move and seeing you do your work here through us and in us and among us and here in this community, an opportunity for us to reach out and to share your love with our neighbors and those out in our community.

Father, I praise you just for the many avenues of ministry that you have provided and the way that you have used us. Father, I pray that this text would come alive to us this morning as we just see so clearly what it is that you have planned for us this morning in this text of being glad and rejoicing for the great things that you have done.

May you receive the honor, may you receive the glory, may you receive all the credit for the good that has come out of Recast Church in these six years. And Father, we look forward to many more years of your service through us, Father, your work and your ministry to this community for more souls saved, for more baptisms, for more opportunities to see people come to understand who you are and what you have done.

So we look forward to this and rejoice that we have an opportunity to lift our voices.

Before you.

Father, I pray that you would receive this as thankfulness and praise and gratitude. This.

Morning. In Jesus' name. Amen.

I'll encourage you to get comfortable. Thanks a lot to these guys for leading us in worship, grateful for them. And keep your Bibles open to the few verses of Psalm chapter 126 as we're going to dive in and dig into that text.

Remember that if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice, I've got my little emergency supplies up here. Just as that sugar buzz, that crash happens, I've got another piece of cake right here just in case.

And there's more back there and stuff, whatever you need to keep your focus on God's Word this morning. That's the point. So remember that the Psalm that we're looking at, Psalm 126, have that open. We're going to dive in, walk right through it.

Remember that it's a part of a pilgrimage playlist. I mentioned that at the start of most of these messages, just to refresh our memory that this would have been sung by pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem during the annual festivals, like Passover and various celebrations.

They probably would have brought sacrifices with them to go up to the place of the temple. But the majority of the songs so far that we've read, starting in 120, the Psalms of Ascent go 120 to 134. And so far, the ones that we've gone over have talked about trusting God in the midst of difficulty, or they've talked about thankfulness to God for deliverance from the midst of difficulty.

But this song, this particular song is the first one that I would say ratchets things up a notch. It's going to take things up a notch in regard to our gratitude and our thankfulness. I've mentioned before that the Psalms utilize human emotion in the process of conveying.

Truth.

And this song is going to do so with reckless abandon. It's going to use some undignified phrases for our gratitude and our emotional explosiveness towards thankfulness to God in a way that probably doesn't show up so well in English.

So when we read the English, you're going, okay, you're toned down, the superlative's down, it's not that crazy, it's not that reckless. But in Hebrew, it is. Some of the things that we are being called to and identifying that the people did in worship and praise to God are crazy stuff.

So we'll talk about it here in a minute. But we start off this song with a look to the past. So if you look at verse one, really verses one and two, when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were, past tense, like those who dream.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy. This is a past tense look at the blessings of God. God has indeed blessed us. At some point in the history, the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, the text says.

Zion is a play on words for the people of God in a given location. Zion being the hill that the temple is on in Jerusalem. It really was during this era and this time, the entirety of the city was built on a hill.

Easily fortified, basically the crest of the hill was completely encircled by the city wall, the city of David at the time. And so that's the picture. When we talk about Zion, we're talking about that mountain, that hill.

But is it the geography then that he's talking about here? The Lord restored the fortunes of a hill? Well obviously we know that he's talking about a group of people. We use this kind of terminology all the time.

We might talk about geography, but what we really mean is the people. So we might say Michigan experienced a revival. You're not talking about the part of the peninsula that's shaped like a mitten with the upper peninsula and all that.

We're not talking about the geography, we're talking about the people when we would say Michigan is experiencing a revival. So that's what it means when it says the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion.

We're meant to think about the people of God in that area and in that location. But from the beginning, we are told it was the Lord who restored these people. Notice God is the one who is credited with the action.

The psalmist begins by identifying what he has done, which ought to be the focus of God's people, what God has done. He's the one getting credit for what has been accomplished in this psalm. He has restored the fortunes of his people.

The phrase restored the fortunes of is a bit tricky in English and part of it is due to the translation. When you and I think of fortunes, we most likely, like what comes to your mind? What pops into your mind when I say the word fortune?

It probably has some kind of financial value to it, right? Has some kind of monetary value or has something to do with money, right? Fortune is like, I found a bag of gold or something like that, right?

That's fortune, okay? But the phrase in Hebrew is, it's tough because it's actually a more relational word and to be technical, the literal translation, so you can understand why they might translate it differently, is he has restored to the restoration.

He has restored them to the restoration, okay? In other words, there's a sense of relational in here. He has brought them into a good relationship with them. It isn't saying the Lord gave them the winning lottery ticket.

The translation might make you think that, okay? The Lord has restored their fortunes. He's given them all that they had lost or something like that or that the Lord had restored to us a bunch of stuff that had been stolen from us, right?

So somebody's taken and jacked their stuff and taken away from us and God's restored it to us and brought it back to us, okay? So is that what the text is saying? Okay, you've lost everything and kind of like the image of Job or something like that.

Maybe Job would cry this out, you know, he's restored me, he's brought everything back to me. Well, this is a little bit more relational than that. So there's something going on here, particularly relational in this restoration.

To be clear though, there is an indication that if the Lord is in the process of restoring you, if he is in the process of restoring recast church, if he's in the process of restoring his people, then there's some visible component of that that the text makes clear.

Somehow, in some way, others are going to be able to see with their physical eyes that the people of God are being restored. When God restores somebody like this, others can see it and they can see that the Lord.

Is at work.

But let me be careful in saying, I do not believe that it's visible because there's gold flowing in the streets. It's not visible because our bank accounts keep growing. It's not visible because, you know, the primary visible thing that we're driving hundred thousand dollar cars or our wives are having a hard time lifting their hands because the diamonds are so huge, right?

Is that what it means? Is that what people are going to see when God is restoring a people? That's not it. Now, does he at times bless his people with riches and with good things like that?

Absolutely.

But that's not synonymous with the restoration of God. So what is it that people can see? We're going to see that here in verse two. Verse two describes the visible nature of God's restorative acts. But before we move on straight forward to verse two, we need to wrap up verse one.

Look at the end of verse one with me. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. He says in verse two, he's going to explain that others can see it. But what does it feel like to be in the process of being restored by God?

He's going to tell us what it's like to be the receiver, the receiver, the recipient of this restoration. And it's like living the dream. It's like living in a dream, like like when a person receives this type of restoration, they are floating off the ground.

It's like being on cloud nine. It's like nothing can shake me because God is restoring me. A person that's in this status, is in this process of being restored by the Lord, has a new purpose. And it's not just a new purpose, but a purpose where there once was dejection.

They have a new hope, and not just a new hope, but a hope where there was at one point complete despair. They have a new gladness, and not just a new gladness, but a gladness where there was only slavery and fear.

In other words, what I'm trying to point out is it's not like God took your life up to the next level, okay? Like you were going around, you were going pretty good. Things were going good, and then God has restored you to great, to awesome, or to much better.

No, your life was not going good when God began his restorative act on you and me. As a matter of fact, it was on a road that ended in condemnation when he grabbed us and won us over by the love of his son, Jesus Christ.

Are you getting what I'm saying? One of the earlier Psalms talked about being like a bird trapped in a snare. The only thing left to have happen was for the evil one, the enemy, to come and wrap you up and take you away.

You were already caught in the net. You were caught in the snare, and the more you struggled, and the more you flailed, the more you got wrapped up in the net, in the snare. God has, through his restorative act, come and set you free.

So, how desperate was your situation when God began his restorative act on you and me? How glorious, and majestic, and beautiful is the restorative act of God towards us? All the way, not like, well, I had a million in my account, and he gave me another.

He matched it. I didn't just have a million. It's not like I, it's not even that I had zero in my account, and he gave me two million. It's that I owed a debt I could never pay, and he gave me a positive, extremely high balance in my account that I could never, I couldn't have paid this debt.

Are you getting what I'm saying?

I couldn't pay the debt, and he's given me ten million dollars in my bank account. He's given me, it's immeasurable what God has done for us. It's like a dream. It's like a dream come true. How could this transfer happen?

I think of like an illustration of Joseph, who's in prison, and one morning he's called into the presence of Pharaoh, and the next day he is the highest in the land. Like that kind of transfer from, not just, not just from like common citizen to the, to the palace, for prison, enslaved to the, the master of the prison, and doing whatever they tell you to do, and probably sweeping out nasty dungeon cells, and doing all kinds of stuff, whatever they tell you to do, and going from there to the palace.

Are you getting what I'm saying?

That kind of transfer, that's what it's like to be a recipient of this. Now do you understand why the psalmist is saying, we're like those who dream. It's like a dream come true, this restoration of God.

What are we talking about in this restoration? We're talking about nothing less than God showing his covenant faithfulness to his people. And the psalmist is reflecting on a past event when God broke through faithfully for his.

People.

We don't have a very clear indication of the specific historical account that this author was thinking of when he's talking about the restoration of God towards his people, particularly in the life and history of Israel.

It's hard to tell exactly what he was talking about. Some people think it was the exile that was the context of the writing of this psalm, so the people have all been taken away to Babylon, and there in Babylon they are servants and slaves living in a pagan culture where there's the worship of all these idols and things like that.

And then slowly over time, God restored them to the land, brought them back in and gave them a blessing. They ended up rebuilding the temple around the time of Ezra, Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, and the prophet Malachi.

During the very end of the prophetic books, that's the era that some people think this was written, but I think this is a common story in the history of Israel. God's restorative act, time and time again, working for his people.

I imagine that the parting of the Red Sea would have felt like an occasion like this. Like beyond all measure, it felt like a dream walking through the water.

Are you getting what I'm saying?

It's like, we were there, and the Egyptians were over and opposed to us, and they could move in at any time and strike us, and we had our backs to the sea. No place to go, and God restored us and protected us.

All of that in the context of a covenant relationship with his people. I'm sure that David, slaying Goliath, felt like this to a large degree. The fall of the walls of Jericho would have felt like this.

Victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel would have felt like this. To me, I think about our church history, baptisms have felt like this. Meeting with people who are taking major steps and growing deeper feels like this.

Victory over sin feels like this. God changing the hearts of the school administration to allow us to meet here feels like this. I don't know if you know that in our history, when we were first starting as a church, we were looking for a place to meet.

This is like six and a half years ago now, before we even had a facility in mind. We didn't know necessarily where we were going to be going, and I sat down and I was blocking out time to just kind of be in the community here, meeting at the coffee shop, getting to know people, kind of connecting, figuring out what Matawan was all about.

I was living at Portage at the time, actually, maybe we just moved to Matawan right around.

Then.

I set up an appointment with the then-president superintendent, and I blacked off an hour to sit down, and he said, yeah, sure, I've got an hour here, and so we had blacked off some time, sat down with him.

What we had blacked off for an hour took about ten minutes, maybe five to ten minutes. I walked in, shared with him who I was, what I wanted to accomplish, said, is there any facility at the school that we could use?

He said, no, thank you very much, and I went, that was it. That was the extent of the meeting. I mean, there was, this facility was completely shut down to us at that point in history. There was no way that he said, we've set a set of precedents, we've told other churches, no, they can't meet in this place.

Well, fast forward a couple of years, and the economy's taken a bit of a downturn, there's a new administration, and I set up a meeting with him around the time that we were kind of pressing the limits of our previous location, set up a time, he said, yeah, this sounds.

Great.

We said we'd be willing to pay for it, and here we are. So you can see how there's just a turn of things that God has done. Even just simply, if you could go back through my journal, and I've done this recently, to go back through my journal and see all the times that I have prayed over the last six years that God would raise up somebody from our midst to send them to be our representatives around the world, to some foreign people who do not know the gospel, that we might have a reach out beyond the United States of America, and God, in his faithfulness, has raised up Zach and Lee to answer a very specific prayer that's been on my heart since we started Recast.

I would suggest to you that anywhere, though, and I want to be careful about this, because I can highlight, how many of you know that sometimes in life we can highlight these really awesome things, like the parting of the Red Sea, or these mountaintop experiences?

But I would suggest to you that anywhere you see the values of the kingdom, when you think values of the kingdom, think love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, where you see those things breaking into our world, we are seeing glimpses and hints of God's restoration.

The seeds of the restoration that God is working is not limited to the really big stuff that our minds often turn to. But the restoration of our fortune is often found in a gentle answer towards an angry.

Spouse.

I mean, it wouldn't be natural to us, but something where you see the spirit of God working in your life to give victory over your own anger, or your own quick wit, or your own snappy response. The seeds of restoration are found in the patience to smile and coo at an infant while changing the third dirty diaper in a half an hour.

The peace that settles over our hearts when we get a bad diagnosis, or the love that compels a daughter to forgive her mother after years of animosity. These are the places where the restoration breaks into our everyday lives.

And I consider myself a privilege to have a front row seat for these past six years watching God break in with His restoration. In ordinary, everyday, routine, glorious, and beautiful ways. Here in our midst, here in our community, here in our fellowship, where God is breaking in and demonstrating His power to rule and reign in the lives of His people.

But verse two gets back to that, what I talked about. There's a visible aspect to this, and you might be wondering, what does He mean there's a visible aspect? I already said it wasn't, you know, it's not, when He was restoring our fortunes, when He's restoring us to the restoration, again, it's not your bank account, it isn't the size of your house, it isn't the ripness of your abs, you know, what does it look like when God's restoring a guy, you know, it's like big biceps and he's ripped or what, how do you know, what can you see when somebody is undergoing the restoration of God, and here it is, look at verse two.

Our mouths, you're going to be able to hear it, you're going to be able to see it with your eyes, you're going to be able to hear it with your ears, our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy, shouts of joy.

Notice the corporate nature of this verse. The people of God are gathered together, they're talking about their mouths corporately. Our mouth was filled with laughter. The people of God gather together to recognize that God is restoring them.

It's one of the reasons we're in this room today, is a recognition of God's restorative act in our lives. It's a great thing, an awesome thing to gather with God's people and reflect on the great things that He has done for us.

And I love how the Hebrew language, in no uncertain terms, begins to get a little undignified in this process. Rather than a formalized, somber testimony time of declaring in respectful terms what the Lord has done for His people, there is laughter, there's laughter and shouts of joy.

The phrase in Hebrew, mouth filled with laughter, is an extreme statement in Hebrew. It's not a demure, polite chuckle that some might find appropriate for a church gathering.

Ha ha ha.

This is a throw your head back, your coffee comes out your nose, snot bubble, snorting kind of can't gain my breath kind of laughter that's being used in Hebrew here. This is an obnoxious kind of laugh that grabs everybody's attention.

You know the kind of laugh that I'm talking about because you have one of them. There's that laugh when you, there's that laugh when you're trying to control it in a public setting and then there's that laugh when you can't control it any longer and each one of us, whether it's the high pitch or the, you know, whatever it is that you can't control once it starts to lose control, you know what I'm talking about.

Each one of us has one of those. And that's this laugh that it's talking about. In the gathering of God's people, a laugh of He has saved us, He's redeemed us, there's.

No shame in it.

It's this shouts of joy and praise that can you believe that He has made this transfer for you and me? Can you believe this? Like, like I found the pearl of great price, I found the treasure and I can't help but just rejoice and be thankful.

He loves us. He died for us that we might live for eternity with Him.

Thank you. Amen.

He loves us.

And all of the stuff of life that gets in the way that clouds us or our own dignity or our own, you know, I've got to have an appearance, I would say that that's one of the biggest things with stage fright for me when I first, that I might lose control like.

I just did.

I mean, seriously, that was in high school, in college, it was always just a fear of people, a fear of what, man, I might look like a fool. Man, I want to look like a fool if it's for Jesus. I don't care if a snot bubble comes out of my nose in the praise of God.

I don't care if I snort a little once in a while, it's for the cause of rejoicing in.

My Savior and what He has done.

That sugar, that cake, I'm not, I'm not going to eat that piece of cake right there, I'll just turn that, turn that aside for a second. You know, laughter, laughter is a powerful thing in our culture and in our lives.

And we know that we can unfortunately be moved to laughter by all kinds of things, right? There's some very inappropriate humor that I find funny, I'm going to be honest. There are times where you could make me laugh by saying something that I wish didn't make me laugh, do you know what I'm talking about?

Have any of you been there? But man, there is a righteous, awesome, glorious cause for real laughter. Just that turn, sometimes good humor is like the turn, the change, the thing that you weren't expecting to come and that's what redemption is for us.

We don't deserve it and all of a sudden, boom, there it is, the restoration and the treasure,.

Jesus Christ.

Many consider God to be a killjoy. This verse testifies to an appropriate human response to the restoration of God. Laughter and shouts of joy. How many of you, go ahead and raise your hand if you're a shout at the TV kind of person while you watch sports, okay?

Few of us are, and then some of you are like, I don't know if I'm, am I going to get singled.

Out for this or whatever?

I kind of am, I'm up on my feet, you know, when somebody goes yard or when my team scores a touchdown, I've actually got a bruise on my knuckle right here from scraping the ceiling after a University of Michigan touchdown a few years ago that I thought mattered at the time.

I don't know, so I'm a little bit more like kind of one of those people that's a little bit more emphatic and jump up and down and when you, have you ever been to the park? Have you ever been like at Comerica when somebody hits a home run or something?

You're high-fiving people you don't even know, you know what I mean? Everybody around you is just celebrating, jumping, you know, it's awesome and it's exciting when that kind of thing happens and that's the kind of picture that we have with these shouts of joy.

The text is talking about, again, an undignified celebration of just, amen, hallelujah, praise God, this is awesome. One of the most confusing things to me is the way that the church, I'm saying in general, not necessarily specifically our gathering, but it definitely affects our gathering and that's that the church in general has inherited a tradition of somber quietness in worship and we ought to ask ourselves, what is it that we're celebrating here this morning?

Quite a bit more than a touchdown, quite a bit more than a, than a playoff goal, quite a bit more than that, right? God. We're celebrating God breaking into our everyday in the process of restoring us.

God exchanging eternal torment for Him in exchange for eternal joy for us. God reforming us more and more into the image of His Son. God faithfully keeping His promises to each one of us. God doing great things.

And notice the response of the people that are observing this. They can see it, they're watching. And the nations observed Israel in celebration and they heard the shouts of joy and they heard the laughter and they heard all of that delight and they declare that the Lord has done great things for them.

The Lord has done great things for them. People out in the world are watching the people of God. Did you know that?

They're watching.

And I believe that one of the best testimonies we have to offer the world around us is our celebration, is our joy, our rejoicing, our delight in God, our laughter, our gladness. I fear that many watch us and think, man, whatever they've got, I want to make sure that I don't take any of that.

You know? It apparently makes you take yourself way too seriously. It causes you to withdraw from everybody around you. And it must taste horrible because, man, look at their faces. It must just, ooh, it must be really sour to take whatever they're drinking or eating.

Or whatever.

Instead, in this text, the nations come to the people of God in the psalm and want some of whatever they're taking. And we can say, it's called restoration. And his name is Jesus Christ.