While you still have your Bibles in your hand, I invite you to turn to Psalm 126, which you’ll find on page 517, just a few pages over from what we’ve just read. We are continuing in our series on prayer, asking our God to teach us to pray. And I want us to consider an Old Testament teaching on prayer that grows out of this psalm.
And before we read that psalm, I’d like us to set it into context, our context. Back in March of 2020, the most frequently forwarded article in The Harvard Business Review, was published. Never before had but one article been forwarded and quoted and requoted as much as this article was quoted and shared. You remember it was the beginning of all our understanding of what the COVID pandemic was going to mean for us. This was the very front doorstep of that experience. And the article was titled, “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.” And that settled hard on a lot of people because we’re not accustomed to dealing with grief. But here’s what the article said. One brief paragraph:
“We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. And just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9-11, things will change. This is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy, the fear of economic toll, the loss of connection – this is hitting us and we are grieving, individually and collectively. And with it, the anticipation of still deeper grief yet presently unknown. That discomfort you are feeling is grief.”
And that grief expanded in ways that we did not anticipate, even then. Roughly a year later, another article was published that was widely distributed, again, dealing with what’s going on inside of us. What are we feeling that we don’t necessarily have vocabulary for? This article was published with this title, “There’s a Name for the ‘Blah’ You’re Feeling – It’s Called Languishing.” Short paragraph:
“Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health, the void between depression and flourishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness, the absence of wellbeing. It feels as if you are muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. Part of the danger is that when you are languishing you might not even notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of your drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude or that you are becoming indifferent to your indifference. And languishing might just be the dominant emotion of 2021.”
So if that’s true, if that’s your experience, the question is, “What do you do with that?” We went from grieving to languishing. And we ask, as we’re thinking about prayer, “How do we even pray through that? What does the Bible teach us in that new context for each of us?” Let’s ask the Lord’s help and then we’ll read what I believe the Bible would say to that.
Father, we come to You with hearts that truly are grieving, grieving in ways for which we may not even today have vocabulary. And we know the experience of languishing in ways we may never before have. And so we ask, by Your Spirit, please speak to our hearts in this unique moment. Teach us, Lord, to pray. Teach us to live with expectancy, all as we listen for Your voice through Your Spirit in Your Word. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
Psalm 126:
“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 Negeb! 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.”
Amen. This is God’s Word.
You may automatically be thinking, “What does that have to do with grieving and languishing?” And I would say, “Everything!” Think about it. We go back millennia, 2 1/2 millennia, to the first audience that sang those words as part of their psalms of ascent. And the psalm, as they sang it, really breaks down into two parts. There’s first a look backward to the past joy. That’s the first three verses of that psalm. And then it looks to their present experience of languishing in the last three verses of that psalm. And it’s in the tension between the first part and the second part that we’re taught to pray in our experience of grieving and languishing. Let’s look at those two parts in turn.
The Past Joy
First of all, the past joy, in the first three verses. The context was sobering. It was the year 586 when Jerusalem was finally destroyed and the people of Jerusalem were either dispersed in that area or they were taken into captivity in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of that empire, the dominant world empire of that time, was ruthless. And he took the significant, the people of substance, the people who mattered, and all those in that city and he deported them to Babylon, putting them into a home that they had never before imagined going to. The least of the people he left there, fending for themselves. He wiped out the city. The temple was destroyed. The walls were destroyed. Everything was left to languish. And then 70 years later, there was a restoration, a return. A new king, a new emperor was in power under the Persian Empire and he gave a decree that, really all of it is summarized in 2 Chronicles chapter 36. And you have 75 years of history compressed into four verses. Second Chronicles 36 verse 20:
“He,” the emperor, “He took into exile in Babylon,” Nebuchadnezzar, “those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: ‘Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.’’”
Seventy-five years in four short verses. The destruction of Jerusalem, the walls, the city, the temple – wiped out. And then a new emperor who says, “God’s put something on my heart. Whichever of you people wants to go back, God bless you. Go. Build Him a temple in Jerusalem. Do it under my authority.” And Psalm 126 speaks of their delight, speaks of the wonder that they felt. They felt as though they were in a dream, almost too good to be true. Imagine the thrill of coming home after 70 years in exile; a home which most of them in that return had never before seen, because the people who had been exiled, most of them had died in captivity. The celebration was rich. “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 so glad.” Almost too good to be true. What a delight it was!
But here’s the reality. That return from Persia to Jerusalem was a journey of over 900 miles. And walking, it took about 3 months of morning to night trudging. And there were no gas stations. There were no Motel 6s. There was no place to pick up provisions. It was a brutal and depleting journey. And after 3 months of sleeping on the ground, rain or shine, dark or cold, warm, however the weather met them, they arrived at a city, again, that most of them had never before experienced, which had lay for 70 years languishing. And sobriety set in.
The Languishing that They Experienced
That takes us to the second part of the psalm – the languishing that they experienced. That ecstatic joy shifted to languishing primarily for three reasons. Only a remnant of the people had returned. That’s the first reason. The majority of the people who had been taken into exile and the children who were born in Babylon and its surrounding regions, they stayed. I mean, why would you give up what was familiar? They now spoke the language of the Babylonians. They were accustomed to how things worked. It was a city with all the things that you would want in that era and they knew what they would likely find going back to Jerusalem. So most of them stayed and it was only a smaller, a relatively small group that returned.
The second thing they found was that the land was absolutely desolate, uncared for. The holy city was broken down. The temple was ruined. The walls were raised. Absolutely flattened. It was a defenseless disaster that met them when they returned.
And third, they found a whole new population there. Foreigners and foreign enemies had been moved in. It was empty land. Real estate was free and they just came in and took it over. They had occupied the ruined city and the villages that surrounded it. A people that were indifferent or even opposed to their God, Yahweh, the God who had called them to return, a people who were committed to their own gods and their own idols, a people whose lives were offensive to this God who had brought them back. And it set in a whole new languishing. It wasn’t just that the city and the land of Judah had languished for 70 years. Now they too had been enveloped into that languishing.
And so in this psalm you find just one request that they prayed. And I suspect they prayed it over and over again. It’s verse 4, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negeb! Restore our fortunes!” Interesting, in the Hebrew, the word “fortunes” is “captivity.” It’s the same as in the first phrase, “When the Lord restored,” literally, “the captivity of Zion,” meaning God overruled and restored what the captivity had brought. And so in their praying, they’re saying, “God, do it again. Restore us from captivity. We’re back in the land but it still feels captive. Would You do it again? Restore us. Renew us. Bring back what we once knew and took pleasure in. Restore our fortunes like streams in the Negeb!”
Well there are no streams in the Negeb, not usually. The Negeb was the southern, arid desert region of Judah. And it was the place that was desolate, that no one wanted to go to. And all you found there was deep ruts, gullies that wound their way through that arid, desolate place, until during one rainy season of the year, the distant rains to the north would converge and rush through the dryness with flooding power and would take those empty gouges, winding gouges in the desolate earth, and flood them with torrential rain and power. And it’s that image that the people of God would employ and say, “God, do it again. Do it in our lives. Refresh us. Flood our lives with joy, unexpected, unexplained joy. Would You do it again?” It happened repeatedly and powerfully. In April 1963, for example, the streams in the Negeb filled so quickly because of torrential rains to the north that people walking on dry ground were swept away in the flash floods. A nine foot deep wall of water swept through, killing 22 people who were on pilgrimage. That happened every year. The dry, arid land would flood with torrential rain. This is what the psalmist prays. And all God’s people on their way to Jerusalem in the psalms of ascent would sing this song, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negeb! Flood our dry, languishing lives with joy!”
And this is still our prayer today, isn’t it? If it’s true that our lives today, like maybe never before in the history of our country, are marked by grieving and languishing, this is our prayer. “God, would You do it again? Flood our lives with sudden, overwhelming, fulfilling joy. Would You do it again?” You know, it’s really uncanny when you think of how much our lives today are like the lives and the experience of the ancient people of God who first sang this song. Because like these ancient people of God, we too have been delivered from a lifelong captivity to a foreign power. The empire of sin and death and guilt and powerlessness and shame and addiction and the inexplicable languishing of being in a place where we know, “We weren’t meant for this. We were eternally exiled from the God who created us in His image and for His purposes. We were exiled from the life that we were designed to experience with joy.”
And yet through the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, we’ve been ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven. We have been in union with Christ, given a whole new joy, so that our song is the same as the song of the people of God – “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, our tongue with shouts of joy. Then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them!’ and we declare” – present tense – “The Lord has done great things for us. We are glad. Eternally glad. Marked by joy.” Yes, we have been rescued from an eternal exile that we rightly deserved. We are completely forgiven. We are royally adopted. We are dearly loved and we are strategically commissioned to a whole new battle.
And then that battle begins. And we discover that we are engaging an enemy that we never understood we had. And that enemy is ruthless. He exploits all of our weaknesses and all of our vulnerabilities. Paul speaks about this battle in Ephesians 6. The struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. You realize you are in a cosmic battle; the combatants you cannot even perceive, but they are there, intent on your destruction, so much so that even the apostle Paul in Romans 7 says, “For what I do is not the good that I want to do, no, the evil I don’t want to do, this I keep on doing.” That’s the nature of the battle and that’s what drives our languishing and our grieving. And we pray with the psalmist, “Lord, how long? Why is this so hard? Why do I keep falling into this over and over again? Who will rescue us from this body of death?” And so with the psalmist we pray, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negeb! Flood our dry, embattled, languishing lives with joy. Do it again. Please! Do it again.”
That’s the prayer of the Bible, over and over again. You find it throughout the psalms, throughout the Old Testament history, throughout the New Testament. “Restore us.” Psalm 80 says, “Restore us, O Lord God Almighty. Make Your face shine upon us that we may be saved.” Lamentations 5. “Restore us to Yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old.” Psalm 51, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation.” Do you know who prays that prayer? It’s people who are languishing in the reality that, “I keep failing. I keep doing the very things that I don’t want to do and the things that I really want to do, who I want to become, is not who I am. God, restore me.” It’s people who recognize that they are prone to wander and leave the God they love. “Restore me. Restore me, please. I’m languishing in this repeated, recurring, ongoing drifting and dulling and hardening. My ingratitude, my hardheartedness, my distrust, O God. Restore me. Like the flash floods in the desert, would You restore me?”
We too, with our ancient followers of their God and ours, we too long for this sudden deliverance, these flash floods of joy. And we celebrate when it comes. But here’s the fact. While what I really want today is the flash flood and God just floods me with joy, the fact is that God’s normal, usual way of working is much slower. It is rarely that flash flood of overwhelming, consuming joy. It’s usually very different and slower. And it’s in the last two verses that the psalmist illustrates how God is most likely to work in overcoming our grieving and our languishing. And he uses the illustration of planting and harvesting. “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.” There’s three principles here that I want you to see very briefly and then we’re done. Here’s how God works and what we can be certain about from these last two verses.
The Harvest is Certain
Number one, the harvest is certain. God will do what He’s promised. There is a certain harvest because the sowing and the harvesting are inseparable. On one level it seems like verses 5 and 6 are redundant; they’re sort of saying the same thing. They’re not. Actually it doesn’t come out in the English, but verse 6 is a doubling, an amplification of verse 5. Verse 5 simply says, “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!” And it’s as if the psalmist slows down and says, “No, no, you really need to hear me.” And the verbs are doubled in both phrases in verse 6. “He who goes out weeping, going out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, will come home with joy bringing his sheaves with him!” It’s not because he thinks we’re not paying attention, but it’s with a commitment to seeing the confidence, the certainty, the assurance that is ours that the harvest is certain. It is coming. God will not leave us in our grieving and languishing.
The Harvest is Always Consistent with the Sowing
Second principle in this passage is that the harvest is always consistent with the sowing. Right? It’s what Paul says in Galatians 6 verse 7. “Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man will reap what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction. And the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” And then the next verse is the summary, “Let us not then become weary in doing good, knowing that at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” That’s the certainty. The harvest is coming. The harvest will be consistent with the planting, the sowing.
Before the Joy of the Harvest, There Will Be Sorrow and Languishing
And the third principle – and this is sobering – before the joy of harvest, there will be the sorrow and the languishing of sowing. I mean think about what you’re planting right now. In what are you sowing? Where are you investing? You are investing in something. Naturally you and I will invest in our own comfort and our convenience and our pleasure. What makes us feel good? If we look at our schedules, there’s a lot that we have planned that’s designed to make us more comfortable and secure. Right? The question is, “In what are you sowing, in what are you investing that will really matter for eternity?” Because that’s what will define this third principle. The sorrow and the languishing that’s involved in this tension between sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting.
You see, sowing implies death. Actual death, yes, but also what will feel like death. Jesus put it this way in John 12:24. “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” And then Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, picks up on this and says, “What you sow does not come to life unless it first dies.” The sorrow and the languishing that has become so common in our experience is what lies at the core of the tension between sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting. They’re inseparable. It’s part of God’s design.
Robert Morgan wrote a story that illustrates this. He writes of a missionary serving in West Africa, the Saharan part of West Africa. And says:
“The rainfall in his region comes only in May through August. The other eight months are bitterly hot and bone dry. No farming is possible during those eight months. Everything must be grown May through August. In the fall, the granaries are full and so are stomachs. The people are happy. Their lives overflowing in song and dance and fellowship. But by December, supplies begin to recede and families begin eating but one meal a day. By February, the people are hungry. By March, food is rationed to one meal every two days. The children begin to cry from hunger. April is the month that is haunting. The dust filters down through the air and sounds carry for long distances. April is the month you hear the babies crying at twilight. Their mother’s milk is now stopped.
Then, inevitably, it happens. A little boy comes running to his father with sudden excitement, ‘Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain! I’ve found it in the hut where we keep the goats! There’s a leather sack hanging on the wall! Daddy! There’s grain out there! We can eat today!’ But the father is motionless. ‘No, son, we can’t eat that grain. That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and final starvation.’ And instead of feeding his desperate family, he goes to the field with tears streaming down his face, with the sound of his son’s wailing voice in his ears, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt, waiting, hoping, and pleading for the rain.”
“He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” You see, the sowing to which you are called, to which we are called together, is going to require effort and patience and risk and trust and hope. It’s going to feel a lot like languishing, which is why Paul says, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” And it’s to this reality that Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “You see, God is too good to be unkind and He’s too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.” What is God’s heart? What are we trusting? We’re trusting that what He said through the prophet Joel, Joel 2:25, is true for us today – “I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten. I will bring you back. I will restore you and I will restore to you the joy of your salvation. Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
Are you grieving? Are you languishing? The psalmist puts it this way. “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How do we know? It’s because the harvest is certain, the harvest is inseparable from what you’re planting and investing, and the harvest will carry us through sorrow and languishing as we invest our lives, even that which is most precious to us. Let’s pray together.
Our Father, we turn our hearts to You and we bring to You our grieving. We bring to You the many places of languishing where we, with Your ancient people, cry out, “How long, O Lord? Why, O Lord? Restore us, O God, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” Do it again. Do it for Your glory and for our eternal good. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.