Those Who Sow in Tears Shall Reap in Joy

From Psalm 126, verses 5 and 6. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him. Sometimes we come to a place in our personal lives when there's a sudden awakening.

It's as if we're being snapped out of some enchantment that's been holding us in really a world of illusion. And now, suddenly our eyes are open and we see the life that we've been living in glaring daylight. And what we see is really terribly upsetting.

Up until the time of our disenchantment, we really believed that we were coming along pretty well. We were building a life that was quite beautiful. Our work, our family, our personal growth, our ministry seemed to be making progress and taking shape.

Now it becomes suddenly obvious that we haven't come nearly as far as we thought. This beautiful life we thought we were building is really quite a mess. Now we can respond to this shock of disenchantment in one of two ways.

We can sit down and cry for the rest of our lives over what failures we are, or we can take our tears to the Lord, thanking Him that He has made us to see reality, and then set about building under His direction something that's real. The same thing takes place in our corporate life as a body. It's possible for us to go through a number of years satisfied that we're really going in the right direction, we're making progress, things are coming along very well, to wake up one day and be shown by the merciful Spirit of God that we haven't even scratched the surface.

We haven't even begun to build the kind of house the Lord is calling us to build. Now this shock of seeing the discrepancy between where we're really at and the vision of what God would have us be can be responded to again in the same two ways. I mean, we can sink down into despair, or we can turn our weeping into tears of hope and begin to build according to the vision.

When the captives of Judah, who had spent now 70 years in battle, learned that King Cyrus had given them permission to go back home to Jerusalem, they were absolutely ecstatic. At last we're able to get back to where we came from, to our own land, to pick up where our fathers left off. We'll be able to have our own houses, our own vine, our own fig tree, our temple.

We'll be able to raise our children away from the distractions of this pagan world. And consider the sacrifices these people made in order to go home. They had to give up good jobs and leave well-furnished apartments and houses and pack together what few belongings could be thrown over a donkey or a camel and travel hundreds of miles on foot exposed to cold nights, dangers from bands of robbers, possible sickness on the way from water that they would drink or food that they would eat.

And while they traveled, they would picture the Jerusalem of old. Some of them remembered, for they had seen it, and others were told by their fathers and mothers what a glorious city it was. Then they got there and came to shock.

What did they see? Ruined walls, ruined houses, an overgrown rock pile where the temple had once been. Now they had two possible choices facing them. It's too far to go back.

You know, that's impossible now. So they either are going to sit down and cry for themselves and worry through the rest of their lives as best they can, or they're going to turn their weeping into a thing of hope and start to build. They took the second choice.

They wept. They really did. Plenty of weeping went on in that place as they returned.

But even while they wept, they built. And so we read in Ezra, chapter 3, And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord according to the directions of David, king of Israel, long ago. And they sang responsibly, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.

And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid. Though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of a joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping.

For the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard from far. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

There's not one redemptive thing that God ever does in our lives that doesn't involve, at its outset, and often all the way through, some tears, some pain. But they're never tears of idleness, and they're never tears of self-pity. They're tears of hope, of action.

They that sow in tears. They don't just sit there and cry. They sow.

They move into the vision. They pick up the seed, and they begin to sow. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed.

He doesn't just sit there and weep. He carries the seed while he weeps. He plants it while he weeps.

He waters it with his tears. He cultivates it. He watches over it.

And then the weeping becomes the doorway to a new life. And so the returned captives of Judah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, rebuilt their houses, rebuilt the cities around Jerusalem, and soon the vision that they had had back in Babylon was fulfilled. So it is with us.

In relatively recent days, it seems pretty obvious that the Lord Jesus has been showing us, as a body of believers, that what we are now, what we're now accomplishing, the fruit we are now bearing, the witness we now give, is but a fraction of what he has in mind for us. And when the Lord shows us this terrible discrepancy between his vision of what we should be and what we really are, he does this not to demoralize us, but to make it possible for us to come to the place where we can make a real beginning. When our eyes open and we begin to see how much is to be done and how far we are, how we've barely scratched the surface so many things are still in need of attention and things that need to be accomplished, when we begin to almost feel overwhelmed to the point where we want to weep, and when our eyes see it clearly, we do want to weep, what we need to do is mix the weeping with sowing.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. We need to follow the example of the returned captives of Judah. They wept when they saw the mess in front of them and how much needed to be done and how pitiful their numbers were and how weak they were, but while they wept, they sowed.

While they wept, they laid foundations, they built. Those returned exiled captives of Judah sowed in tears, first of all, by separating themselves from the kingdom of this world. They left the comforts of Babylon to return to Jerusalem, which offered them no comforts.

They left their foreign wives. They broke all attachments which in any way would hold them in some kind of bondage to the way of Babylon, and they fixed their hearts radically on the kingdom of God. Now, for us to sow in tears, exactly that kind of thing has to happen.

There has to be some clear-cut break with Babylon and everything that holds us in Babylon. This may mean the breaking of certain habits, or it could mean the throwing away of certain questions, or the withdrawal from certain relationships which hinder, distract us from the things of God's kingdom. It may mean reordering our use of time or reordering the way we handle money and things.

And all the while we're sowing in tears, we're doing it in hope. We know we're going to reap in joy. We're doing what we have to do in order to have the blazing presence of God freely moving among us.

The returned captives of Judah sowed in tears by committing themselves to God. And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. And they weren't just putting up a building.

They were totally reordering their lives around God. And these people, even back in Babylon, they almost thought of themselves as people of God. We're God's people.

Yahweh, the God of Israel. He's our God and we're His people. But now, they're beginning to put something into this.

They're beginning now to, in fact, make some changes in their lives. They are now ordering their lives so that the worship of God and the service of God are absolutely at the center for them. And we, likewise, often think of ourselves as God's servants.

We're God's servants. But we all have to admit that many times the worship of God and the service of God are not actually central in our daily life. To sow in tears means that we now begin to do whatever we have to do, reorder whatever we have to, in order to make the worship of God and the service of God absolutely central to our corporate life.

If, for instance, this means starting for the fiftieth time to try to have a daily prayer life, we do it. See, but this time, we do it soberly. We sow in tears.

We're serious. And we know we're going to reap in joy. Lord God, send me your Spirit.

Teach me how to pray. I don't know how to pray. We make ourselves available.

What if it means putting the responsibility of corporate worship coming together with other believers up at the top of the priorities in our lives instead of some little spiritual gesture we toss God's way, like tipping our hat to Him once in a while. We do this. And all the while, we're sowing in tears.

We know we're going to reap in joy. And this is the only way we're going to reap in joy if we begin to make a serious, sober start. The exiles coming back from Babylon to Jerusalem sowed in tears by committing themselves to each other.

You can't read the book of Ezra or the book of Nehemiah and not be struck by the way these people fit together, shared responsibility. Everybody pitched in and carried some of the weight of this tremendous burden of a new life together in a totally ruined land. Here's an example from Nehemiah 11.

Now the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem and the rest of the people cast lots to bring one out of ten to live in Jerusalem, the holy city, while nine-tenths remained in the other towns. And the people blessed all the men who willingly offered to live in Jerusalem. Because to live in Jerusalem involved sacrifice.

If you lived in Jerusalem, you couldn't have a garden. You couldn't have a couple sheep. You couldn't have a fig tree.

But they had to have people living in Jerusalem to get this thing established. And so some were chosen by lot, others volunteered. And it got done, and it got done because these people were committed to each other.

And for us to accomplish the kind of powerful corporate witness in the world to which we are now called sowing in tears will involve a commitment to each other far, far, far more radical and serious than we've ever done before. So that if I'm going to be in your Bible study, I'm going to be there. And if you ask me to pray, I'm going to pray.

And if you see I have a need, you're going to help take care of that because we're committed to each other. We're sowing in tears and we're going to reap in joy. Finally, these returned exiles sowed in tears by committing themselves to the work of rebuilding.

I mean, they rebuilt the wall. They rebuilt the temple. They rebuilt the houses.

They rebuilt villages all around Jerusalem. They opened up the wells again. They worked harder than they'd ever worked back in Babylon.

But it's worth it. They're sowing in tears and they know they're going to reap in joy. And for us to build a habitation for the Spirit on the foundation of Jesus, for us to accomplish the work of getting out into that world and effectively scattering the living seed of His work involves work.

Work that every one of us has a part in, a responsibility for. To sow in tears means that we commit ourselves to doing it. Here we are, Lord.

Send us. Probably, there hasn't been a Sunday, if any at all, maybe a few missing in bad weather or whatever, probably hasn't been a Sunday in 79 years that people haven't gathered inside the walls of this building to call on the name of the Lord, to seek His face, to pray, to intercede for others. God alone knows what things have taken place inside these old walls since 1903.

The world outside the walls has radically changed since 1903. And the call of the Lord upon us has begun to manifest a stepped-up urgency. Even the last year of our lives, just in this past year, the urgency of God's call upon us has radically increased.

Our ears are being opened to this urgency and our eyes are being shown this discrepancy between where we're at and where God's calling us to be. And the Lord is showing us this difference not to demoralize us, not so that we're just going to sit down and cry, but so that we'll begin to sow in tears, so that we'll begin to sow as we've never sown before. For they that sow in tears shall reap in joy He that goeth forth and weepeth bearing precious seeds shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

Let's pray. Lord God, when we read this Sermon on the Mount and we listen to the words of Jesus in the New Testament, we're so blessed, even when we're frightened or even when we're awestruck. We're asking, Lord, that you just help us as we have such difficulty taking those words and translating them into real living in our individual lives and in our corporate life.

And we're asking, Father, that the moving of your Spirit would help us to do just that and to be absolutely real and sober as we do it.