Joy (Psalm 126)
Summary
In this guest sermon, Pastor Carlos Sims opens Psalm 126 to explore one of the most countercultural invitations in scripture: the path to joy runs directly through lament. Drawing from the Israelites' cry for restoration and the hope of the gospel, Carlos makes the case that bringing our tears honestly to God is not a detour from joy— it's the very seed of it.
Questions for reflection
Carlos defines biblical joy as "a steady stream of hope that knows, come what may, that God remains good — and that God remains good to me." How does that definition differ from how you usually think about joy? Where have you experienced it?
Have you ever practiced lament as a spiritual discipline — not just crying, but honestly directing your sorrow toward God in prayer? What did that feel like, or what might it feel like to try?
The psalmist looks back at what God has done in the past to fuel hope for the present. What has God done in your own story that you can hold onto when joy feels distant?
Carlos says lament "sows the seed of need in the soil of God." What need do you need to bring to God right now — honestly, without cleaning it up?
The sermon closes with the image of our mouths one day being "filled with laughter" when Christ returns. How does that future hope change the way you carry your present suffering?
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Dementors Are Real
Every year I work through the Harry Potter films. And this year, as I watched The Prisoner of Azkaban, something stopped me cold.
Harry and his classmates board the Hogwarts Express for another year. The train suddenly comes to a halt. The power cuts out. Frost begins to paint the windows. As the camera pans to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, their breath becomes visible as the temperature in the car drops. Then an enormous, ominous hand grabs the door and slides it open — and we're introduced to creatures called Dementors.
Dementors are cloaked figures that float just above the ground — ten-foot skeletal forms that, when they encounter Harry, begin to seemingly suck the soul from him. He's saved at the last moment by one of his professors. When he comes to, his friends ask him: what was it like to be in the presence of a Dementor?
Harry says: It felt as though all the joy in the world had left.
It's just a movie. But we all know that feeling. Christian or not, we know what it is to have joy sucked from us.
You're on the treadmill at the YMCA and a fundraising campaign for starving children comes on the TV, and you're suddenly confronted — in the middle of just trying to find some solace — with the reality that people in our world, and in our own city, don't have their basic needs met. You lose someone you love, and every holiday season arrives with the fresh weight of their absence. You go home to visit family and find yourself looking into the face of a grandparent, face to face with the reality that cancer is real. And those are just the external factors. That doesn't even account for the joy that gets drained from us when we turn inward and face our own sin and our own struggles.
We can all agree: dementors are real.
And as we follow Jesus — as we apprentice ourselves to him — there are going to be seasons where we find ourselves in a fight for joy. Even though we've declared that Jesus is good. Even though it's true that he has saved us. Even though it's true that before the eyes of the Father we are loved and accepted. We still find ourselves seeking joy, feeling like we have to contend for it.
But this is not a new phenomenon. The road of fighting for joy has been walked by many people before us. The pursuit of joy — what Paul calls the second fruit of the Spirit — has been hiked by followers of Jesus throughout history.
And Psalm 126 is a glimpse of a people in the middle of that very trek.
A Psalm of Ascent
Psalm 126 is a psalm of ascent. Three times a year, the people of God would ascend toward Jerusalem, reciting these psalms as they walked. It almost mirrors what it means to live as Christians now — journeying toward heaven.
And as they ascend toward Jerusalem, what we find in this psalm is a people caught between two realities: God's past restoration and his promised future restoration. They can see what God has done before. They know the stories. And standing in their present moment, they ask: will you do this again? Can you do this again?
When faced with a joyless present, they look back to a painful past and cry out: God, can you make us joyful again?
What we see in Psalm 126 is a people fighting for joy.
So my question this morning is: how do we do that? As we journey toward Jerusalem, what does it look like to move from joylessness to joy? What does it look like to be people who have an indomitable joy — not just a surface-level cheerfulness, but a joy that holds no matter the circumstances?
The answer is right here in our text. And it might surprise you.
It's lament.
What Is Joy?
Before we get there, let's define what we mean by joy. Because when I say joy, I don't mean cheerfulness. I don't mean blind optimism or shallow happiness.
Biblical joy is a steady stream of hope that knows — come what may — that God remains good, and that God remains good to me. It's the settled disposition of a person who knows they exist under the constant, loving gaze of the Creator of the cosmos. And because of that — because God looks at us and says, I am pleased with you, daughter; I am pleased with you, son — what's produced within us is a quiet, confident happiness in the depths of our souls that nothing can take away.
That's what I was looking for in 2009 when I looked at my hallmate at Grinnell College and thought: what is that? What does she have? I need that in my life.
That's biblical joy. And the path toward it — revealed in Psalm 126 — is the path of lament.
What Lament Is (and Isn't)
Let me be clear about what lament means, because lament and crying are not the same thing.
Everyone cries. Not everyone laments. Lament is a distinctly Christian spiritual exercise — as much a spiritual discipline as reading scripture or practicing meditation. What we see in Psalm 126 — and in roughly one-third of all the psalms — is not simply the shedding of tears. It is an honest prayer toward God in response to real pain, sorrow, and heartache.
One writer put it this way: Lament is different from crying because lament is a form of prayer. It is more than an expression of sorrow or a venting of emotion. Lament talks to God about pain, and it has a unique purpose: trust. It is a divinely given invitation to pour out our fears, our frustrations, our sorrows — for the purpose of renewing our confidence in God.
Lament turns us toward God when sorrow would seek to turn us away from God.
During one of the darkest periods in American history, when slavery was legal, enslaved African men and women sang what we call Negro spirituals — songs of lament that kept them joyful and faithful while suffering under brutal, demonic oppression. Lament was not a sign of defeat. It was a lifeline.
Lament is like the navigation system of the soul. It says: turn back to God. You're going the wrong way. Turn back to God.
The Psalm, Up Close
With that as our foundation, let's walk through the text.
Verses 1 through 3: the psalmist begins by recalling what God has done.
"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed."
They remember. They remember how God delivered them from slavery with a mighty hand. How he brought them through the Red Sea on dry ground. How he drowned their enemies in the sea. How they shouted with joy. It was like a dream, they say. God, you were so good to us.
And then a single, telling word: we were joyful.
Were. Past tense.
Which means joy is not their current reality. They would not describe themselves, right now, as people of joy. What they once had feels like a familiar stranger — known, but distant.
So what do they do? They continue their lament by looking forward and asking God to change things.
There's a shift in the text right here. Their honesty with God about the present somehow stirs their memory of what God has done in the past. Their prayer of lament begins to preach a sermon to their own souls: the same God who did it then can do it now. The same God who made a way out of no way is the same God standing before us today.
Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev.
For those unfamiliar with Middle Eastern geography: the Negev is a desert in southern Israel. Dry, barren. But every year, with the seasonal rains, something extraordinary happens: the desert floods in an instant. A waterway where there was nothing. This is what they're pleading for: God, overwhelm us with restoration. Right now. All at once.
They are honest about their barrenness. And here is the lesson we need to hold closely: it is entirely appropriate for the people of God to ask hard questions of God. How long will this sickness ravage my body? How long will the cloud of sadness hover? How long will anxiety have its grip on me? How long will death reign in this place?
This psalm gives us permission — and more than permission, an invitation — to bring all of it to God. Our disappointments, our doubts, our worry, our tears. All of it. Because what this psalm reveals is this:
Your tears are the seeds of joy.
Verses 5 and 6 say it plainly:
"Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them."
Lament sows the seed of need in the soil of God. It isn't just crying. It's crying out — toward God. Lament postures our hearts in the capable hands of the One who can actually cultivate our need into something new. It takes the burden off of us and places it on God, who is able to grow our joy.
How God Responds
You might be thinking: How can you be sure? You don't know my pain. You don't know what I've been through.
You're right. I don't. But I can say this with confidence: God sees you. God hears you. And God responds to your suffering.
And how does he respond? Not by staying in heaven and snapping his fingers. He comes.
In the Exodus account, God comes to his people in a burning bush. He comes through the plagues to free them from slavery. He leads them by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. He directs them to water in their wandering. He provides manna and quail in their hunger. He preserves his people for forty years in the wilderness and brings them to the land he promised.
But there is a truer and better way that God has restored our fortunes. The Gospel of John tells us that the Word of God took on flesh — that the second person of the Trinity came to his people, heard their cries, and entered their suffering.
Like the burning bush, Jesus comes as burning light in the darkness. Like the plagues, he comes in power to overthrow the rulers and principalities. Like the pillar of cloud and fire, he comes to lead us through the desert of suffering and sorrow. He is the water in our wandering. He is the bread that satisfies our soul's hunger. And it is his work that preserves us as we ascend toward Zion.
When the psalmist cries restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev — we now read those words knowing that God has answered. Like water flooding a desert, God's joy and restoration came rushing toward us in the gospel.
Jesus lived among us. He suffered alongside us. He wept with us. And he died a death in our place — a death we deserved. And yet he said: I still love you. I'm coming after you with everything I have.
Dane Ortlund writes in Gentle and Lowly that all the torrents of heaven came flooding toward us in Jesus Christ.
And three days after dying, Jesus rose from the grave — securing not only a spotless record before the Father (when God looks at you and you've said yes to Jesus, he sees the perfect image of his Son — nothing you do can change that) — but also a sure future. A future where death won't have the last laugh. Where sickness won't have the last laugh. Where heartache, racism, violence, and corruption won't have the last laugh.
You want to know who will have the last laugh?
Us. You. The redeemed.
"Then it was said among the nations, 'The Lord has done great things for them.' The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy."
When Jesus returns and we see him face to face, our mouths will finally and forever be filled with laughter. The nations will see it and say: the Lord has been so good to them. And we will say: yes. Yes, he has.
The Fight, Here and Now
As we wait for that day, we lament. We cry out to God honestly about our suffering. And here's what that does: it orients our souls. It points us back to the cross — to the love of God displayed on our behalf — and forward to the day of resurrection, when the ground that couldn't contain its Creator will do the same for our mortal bodies.
As you stand in the present — looking back at the cross, looking forward to resurrection — lament becomes the thing that holds you together in between.
Eugene Peterson — one of my heroes of the faith — writes about Psalm 126: "Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship will still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed."
Joy is nurtured by anticipation. It is cultivated and fed by looking toward the God who is going to make all things right. The brokenness out there. The brokenness in here. He is going to make it all right.
This is what happens when we lament to God — it turns our hearts toward him, and reminds us of the joy that is ours in Jesus, and the hope he has secured for us. And that anticipation produces joy — especially when life is hard.
Jesus has come. And he will come again. And when he does, all who have placed their faith in him will say: the Lord has restored the fortunes of Zion. We were like those who dreamed. Our mouths are filled with laughter.
Christian — do you know this is your song?
You can live this life, with all its suffering and sorrow, and still say: it is well with my soul.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, I pray that for everyone in this room — and especially for myself — that despite our circumstances, despite our lack, despite our need, despite the sin within us and the sin that comes at us, we would still be able to say with our brothers and sisters in Psalm 126: it is well with my soul.
I pray that you would cultivate a real joy in this church — a joy not based on circumstances, not based on prognoses or diagnoses, not based on how the marriage is going or how the kids are behaving. A joy that says: God is with me. And if he is with me, I can make it.
I pray that you would help this community bear one another's burdens well. I pray for these leaders — help them to bear the burdens faithfully, and when it's too much, Lord, help them to lay those burdens at your feet.
And Lord, grow this congregation — not just numerically, but in depth. In the knowledge of you. In maturity. Let them shine bright in this city, so that when people come to Gateway, they get a taste of heaven on earth.
We believe you can do this. And so we ask you humbly: would you? In Jesus' name, amen.