When something wears out, our instinct is to replace it. Psalm 126 offers a different picture, and this week Will Sopwith closed our summer "Restored" series on it. He unpacks joy as something you can't talk yourself into, only grow into, and then three everyday pictures of restoration, the old chair stripped back to the wood, the oil painting cleaned of years of grime, the relationship rebuilt slowly. In each one, someone looks past the damage to what the thing could be again. It's a picture, Will suggests, of how God sees people, and of why Christians say their hope is in Jesus the restorer.
01Talk notes
There's a particular logic that kicks in when something you own gets worn out. You don't mend it. You replace it. The kettle, the phone, the car that's cost you one repair too many. Out with the old, in with the new. And somewhere along the way it becomes easy to wonder whether the same rule applies to people. Maybe to you.
Psalm 126 is not about replacement, but restoration. The slow, patient work of taking something worn and bringing it back rather than throwing it out. This week Will Sopwith, part of the Crowd leadership team, took the final week of our summer series on the Psalms, looking at the whole "Restored" theme. It's about joy you can't manufacture, and about a God who mends rather than swaps.
02The joy you can't talk yourself into
Will started by noticing the word that turns up in four of the psalm's six verses. Joy.
He drew a line between joy and happiness. If you ask someone whether they're happy, they'll usually think about it. Weigh it up. Check the balance of the day. Joy doesn't work like that. It's less something you decide and more something that arrives, touching your thoughts, your speech, even the way you're standing. You can't really reason your way into it, and it doesn't fold the moment your circumstances shift.
Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. (Psalm 126:2)
Joy tends to burst out. Not a carefully written piece of music, just an explosion of delighted sound.
We were like those who dreamed. (Psalm 126:1)
Caught up in the moment, pinching yourself to check it's real. He talked about the flying dreams he used to have, still has sometimes, where he was completely convinced he could lift off and swoop and circle, and he'd wake up still carrying the delight of it. Maybe you know that feeling. Something so good it seems otherworldly and yet feels utterly real while you're in it.
So where does joy like that come from? In the New Testament, joy gets described as a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Will said he's been struck over the years by how many people describe joy and peace as the most powerful things they found in Jesus. They'd gone looking in plenty of other places first and kept coming away with a nagging sense that it wasn't quite the real thing.
03Remembering what God has already done
The second half of the psalm is about restoration.
The psalm splits neatly in two. The first half is a memory. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion. Zion is just the old name for Jerusalem, the city God's people called home. The second half is a request.
Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. (Psalm 126:4)
The Negev is desert. Bone dry most of the year, and then the rains come and the dry riverbeds run again almost overnight. That's the picture. We've seen You do it before, would you do it again?
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. (Psalm 126:5)
The tears are real. So is the promise that they're not the end of the story.
04Three pictures of restoration
This was the heart of the talk. Will described three ways we already use the word restore, and let each one open the idea up.
The first is restoring furniture. You'll have seen the videos. Someone takes an old piece that's been given up on, well made once but not much to look at now, and the first thing they do is carefully take it apart, keeping every component. Then comes the scraping. Layers of old polish, a badly chosen colour, a paint job someone slapped on to hide the marks. You have to get right back down to the original wood. That's the difference between refurbishment and restoration. Refurbishment makes something look a bit more presentable. Restoration is a deeper kind of care, mending the dents, replacing what's broken with matching wood, refinishing it, cleaning up the original screws and hinges, and putting the whole thing back together the way it was designed to be. The same piece, renewed, with a longer life ahead of it.
The second is restoring an old oil painting. Years of grime and grease build up over the original colour. It cracks with age, fades in the sun. Restoring it is slow, gentle work, lifting the dirt off with cotton buds so the artist's original vibrancy isn't spoiled. But you never paint over the original. It's the original that's precious, not someone else's version of it. You're not redoing the painting. You're clearing away what time and dust have left on it, until it looks the way it did in the artist's studio.
The third is restoring a relationship. This one can't be rushed either. It takes time, a lot of listening, rebuilding trust, sometimes saying sorry, sometimes giving and receiving forgiveness. It can be uncomfortable. You can't just say "let's forget that bit and move on". There are layers that have to be revealed and worked through, and bit by bit, the relationship comes back.
Three pictures, one thing in common. Restoration is an involved, often lengthy process. Nobody who's serious about it looks for a shortcut.
05What the restorer is actually looking at
Will made one more observation about all three...think about the person doing the restoring. They're not really interested in how the thing ended up in such a state. They're not picking through the history, cataloguing the damage, working out who's to blame. Their eye is on the finished result. Sometimes a bit of the backstory helps them know how to go about it, but restoration isn't an inquiry into everything that went wrong. It's a vision for what the thing could be again. It looks forward. It's full of hope.
Will said this is very much a picture of God's heart for us. The Bible describes people as the high point of God's creation, made in His image. Out of all the beauty and complexity there is, people are the gem of it. You are.
And that same thread of restoration runs the whole way through the Bible, from a garden at the very start to a flourishing city at the very end. Out of slavery and back to a homeland. Out of darkness and into the light.
06Jesus the restorer
Jesus is the one who can come lift off the layers of dirt, that can mend what has been broken in our hearts, in our thoughts. (Will Sopwith)
That's why Christians say their hope is in Jesus. Not that everything gets painted over and pretended away, but that the original, the person God had in mind when He made you, can be uncovered and mended and brought back.
If you've known something of that before, maybe a long time ago, a moment when your heart or your thinking got cleaned up and something of its original peace came back, then remember it. Let it fuel your prayer now, wherever you find yourself. Don't lose hope that the One who restored you before can do it again.
And if you've never known it, but you're aware that your heart or your circumstances have, like that old piece of furniture, seen better days, then here's the invitation. There's no entry test on it. You don't have to explain how you got here.
Please restore. Please bring me to that place of hope, of future, to the original beauty that You saw in me when You knit me together. (Will Sopwith)
07Something to do this week
- Read Psalm 126 out loud. It's six verses. Read it slowly enough to notice the two halves, the memory and the request.
- Name one thing that's been restored before. A relationship, a stretch of peace, a change you didn't think would come. Not to tick it off, just to remember it happened.
- Turn that memory into a prayer. The psalm's pattern is simple. You did this before, please do it again. Borrow it.
- Pick the "better days" thing. The bit of you that feels worn out or given up on. Instead of writing it off, ask whether it might be something to bring for restoring rather than replacing.
If the idea of being restored rather than replaced is the part you'd want to talk through, that's exactly the kind of question Alpha is built for. The next course starts on Wednesday 9 September at 7:30pm.
08Where this leaves us
The old chair gets stripped back to the wood. The painting gets its colour back. The relationship gets rebuilt one honest conversation at a time. In every case, someone decided the thing was worth keeping.
Psalm 126 makes the same claim about you. Not too far gone. Not easily swapped out. Worth the slow, careful work of being brought back.
So here's the question the psalm leaves open. What's the part of your life you'd assumed was beyond being mended? And what would it change to think of it as something God wants to restore rather than replace?
Topics in this talk
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Matt Edmundson (intro):
Well, hello and welcome to Crowd Church's non-live livestream August series. My name is Matt Edmundson, and I just wanted to jump on before we get started with today's talk and tell you what's going on. So this isn't our usual Sunday service. I know, but it is our usual August Crowd service. If you're a regular to Crowd, you will have twigged already that we are not live.
We're not in our studio as we would usually be when we livestream. Which means I won't be fighting the usual technical difficulties, but I may well fluff the odd line. Just putting that out there. And here's why it's a little bit different. Because in August, half of Crowd Church kind of disappear to somewhere hot, and the other half of us are trying to kind of figure out, well, why did we not book somewhere, right?
It is the month in the UK that most of the team get to book their holiday because of family. So we lean in, we lean, see, messing my lines up, we lean into that every August. And we pre-record the talks. So we don't have the Conversation Street. We don't have Live Lounge. And the whole team just gets to stop for the entire month of August.
We think of it as our Sabbath rest. And it's a practice we've done every year. Yeah, so that people who serve you week in week, they get some proper Sabbath rest and you still get something worth turning up for. The talks are actually Brilliant. Uh, you'll get a lot out of them. So make sure you keep watching on a Sunday with your cup of tea, or possibly in August on a Wednesday afternoon when you're avoiding something important.
I don't know, whatever suits you. And of course, if you're new here to Crowd, let me give you a big fat hello. Crowd is an online church, uh, actually with, uh, members all over the place. Everything we do here at Crowd, from the Sunday livestream to our midweek community groups, even the online course for those exploring Christianity All of it is on the website, which is www.crowd.church.
Now, this August we are in the Book of Psalms for 5 weeks, 5 Psalms. These are sort of Psalms written by people that— it's the book in the middle of the New, uh, Old Testament, uh, and there's going to be a thread running through this, uh, series, which is what restoration actually looks like when your life is all over the place, which Hands up if you need to hear that right now.
One more thing before we get started, make sure you stay with us to the end of the video because there are some changes coming to Crowd starting in September, all of them good ones. And I'm going to tell you about a few of them after the talk. So hopefully that's created enough intrigue. But that's it. Let's settle in. Grab your notebooks, grab your pens.
Let's enjoy the talk. I'll be back. After this.
Will Sopwith (talk):
Hi, I'm Will, and this summer at Crowd Church we've been running a series on the Psalms with a theme broadly of being restored. And I'm here to do this evening's, and if you've listened to these recorded sessions, they've covered an awful lot. We've been challenged to lament Honestly, we've heard about those efforts that we might attempt to fill the gaps that really only God can fill, and that God's grace just is streets ahead of anything else we might try.
We've been challenged to run to God with our needs, to be honest about our needs, and to remember God's interventions in the past. And then last week, there was a promise of wholeness and restoration and a picture of being crowned with God's goodness. And our prayer for you as you've accessed these through August is that you know something of restoration.
We've kind of set up the theme of restoration. We've begun to explore how. And our final psalm before we go back to the livestreams on a Sunday evening is Psalm 126, and it kind of draws together all those other talks and name checks some of the same sort of themes, but it's quite a good and quite short summary of it all. So I'm going to read that now.
Psalm 126, a Song of Ascents. And you'll see in the Psalms there's a number called a Song of Ascents, and ascents were songs that the whole community would sing together as they go up to worship in the temple, maybe at some of the, one of the annual feasts, and people would gather from all over the nation. And these were songs designed to be sort of sung in a choir as you're walking up to the temple, ascending up to the temple steps.
And so often they're a theme of remembering God's goodness, and they're also prayers, but that's the context. So Psalm 126. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. 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.
Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. 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. Psalms are poems of worship translated from the original Hebrew, so losing some of their heart language poetry, but nevertheless they remain poetic even in English.
So one way I sometimes approach reading them is just to notice the prominent words and themes and reflect on the imagery around them. The first thing we notice about this psalm is joy. It's mentioned in 4 out of the 6 verses in the psalm. And joy isn't just happiness, but something, something more unfettered, something spontaneous about joy.
It's something that can't really be worked up or that you can reason your way into. If you ask me, are you happy? It's something I'd perhaps think about, consider, balance, come up with a response. Maybe that's just me and the way my brain works, but joy feels a whole lot more inescapable reality. It touches everything, your thoughts, your speech, your physical demeanour.
You can't help but feel it. Joy, I think, is also more deeply rooted and less vulnerable to shifting circumstance. And the psalm describes its outpouring in song. And that's often a great expression of joy. It just has to burst out, not in a well-crafted piece of songsmithing, but an explosion of delightful sound. What's the source of joy?
Well, lots of things. In the psalm, The source is God's blessing. The language of harvesting a healthy crop is very much of its time. It talks about the relief and the excitement of securing a winter's worth of food for your family. For us, it might be something very different. It might be a relationship. It might be a turning around of circumstance, like the restoring of fortunes this Psalm highlights, or the removal of a sorrow.
That's been with us for a long time. I love the image of "we were like those who dreamed," utterly caught up in the moment, pinching yourself to prove it's real. Maybe you can relate to that feeling. Transported in your dreams to an impossible level of beauty or peace or adventure that's otherworldly but seems utterly real in the moment. I used to have flying dreams.
I used to— I sometimes still do— where I was absolutely convinced in my sleep that I could fly. I'd just lift off and circle and swoop, and I would wake up with that sense of joy and excitement at being able to fly. Joy is described as a fruit of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Which means it's a naturally growing outcome of following Christ and allowing the Holy Spirit to influence our thoughts, our decisions, our actions.
Lasting joy is something that comes from our walk with God, something outside of ourselves, something that's hard for us to manufacture. And I've been struck over many years by the number of people I've known expressing that joy and peace were the most powerful things they encountered in Jesus, and the things that persuaded them to follow Jesus.
That they'd been looking for them in many other things, in many other pursuits, but always left with a sense of inauthenticity. Joy is a gift to us, as this psalm celebrates. The other core theme I noticed in this psalm is restoration, and that's been the broad theme of our summer. The psalm is split in two. The first half is the writer's testimony.
It's a story. It's a recounting of restoration. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion. The second half, starting in verse 4, is a plea. It's a request to God: restore our fortunes, Lord. You could legitimately add, like you've done before. I think this is an important pattern as we seek to follow Jesus in our lives. Each thing that happens, each breakthrough, each change of our heart or of our circumstance of our perspective, our outlook.
It raises faith. Each time that happens, it says, this stuff's real. And this psalm says, yeah, remember those. Remember that restoration. Let it fuel your prayer for the new, for the next round. Build on what's gone before to seek God for what's next. And the person writing this psalm remembers that feeling of joy. At being restored. And they're asking again, "Lord, bring that again.
Restore our fortunes, because I know that those who sow with tears can reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping can return with songs of joy." It's a faith statement. It's a prayer. But it's in faith. You've done this before. Please, Lord God, do it again. And those stories are so important in our lives. It is so important to remember those moments of joy, those moments of restoration, because it fuels our faith for future.
I want to spend a bit more time on what's it— what it's like to have something restored. It's a word that I really love, and it's a rich word. It's full of Hope. Don't bin that. There's a chance we can restore it. Restoration values what has gone before, but also recognizes there's more that could be done. And I was thinking about 3 analogies as I read this Psalm.
The first is restoring furniture. And I'm sure, like me, you've come across reels on social media or maybe it's just my algorithm, but someone taking an old piece of furniture that has been discarded, has been given up on. It might have been quite fancy in its day, normally well made and using some good solid wood, but not much to look at now.
And the first step to restoration is to carefully take it apart, keeping all the components. Then there's a lot of scraping off the old coverings the layers of old sticky polish, the poorly chosen colour scheme, the inappropriate paint job, whatever it is that's been used to mask marks or stains acquired over years of use. To restore, you need to get back down to that original wood.
It's different from refurbishment. Restoration doesn't aim just to make something look a bit more presentable. It's a more fundamental process of care. And preservation. Maybe you're getting the analogy. Once the wood is exposed and clean, there might be all sorts of nicks, scratches, dents to mend with filler or carefully shaped bits of matching wood.
Some parts might need replacing altogether with a remodelled piece. Then each part is refinished with oil or wax. The original screws and hinges are cleaned and polished, and the whole piece of furniture is reassembled as it was originally designed to be. The same piece with a renewed finish and an extended lifespan. The person writing the psalm was talking in the context of a people who have lost their city being restored to their land, being restored to their homeland, a refugee coming back.
And it's not like everything is brand new. The land is recognizable, but they want to take what was before and improve on it and bring it back to that beauty that they remember. We remember what you've done, God. We remember what that felt like. We remember the beauty of it, the hope of it. Please restore us again. Strip off all that has spoiled it.
Clean it up. Replace what has been broken, reconstruct. Those are all senses of restore. The second analogy is restoring an old oil painting. And again, you may have seen videos of this or even seen it in a gallery. An old master that has been hanging on a wall for many years. And maybe there's been a layer of grime and grease that's built up on the original vibrancy of the colour.
It might have got cracked with old age. It might have been bleached out by being exposed to the sun. Restoring a picture is a really gentle and patient process. It's a very careful lifting off of dirt. With cotton buds so the original complexity and colour is not spoiled. You want to preserve that underlying beauty and that original vision of the artist.
You definitely don't want to be painting over the original, kind of loses its value. It's the original that is precious, not someone else's version of it. You're not just redoing it. Unlike the furniture, you're removing the stains and damage that accumulate with time and exposure of day-to-day existence. It's a very careful, meticulous, gentle process, and finally the picture is restored to the version it was in the artist's mind, how it was first laid down in the artist's studio.
Colours vibrant, light bright. The same analogy applies to restoring an old film, digitally remastering it. It's bringing it to that original vision of the creator. The final analogy of restoration is relationship. It's another way we use the word. If we're restoring a relationship, it normally takes time. It takes a lot of listening to each other.
It's building fresh understanding and communicating. It's remembering positive aspects of the relationship before, and it's rebuilding maybe trust between two people. It may be quite uncomfortable and challenging. It might involve saying sorry, giving and receiving forgiveness. And just like with a picture or with a piece of furniture, you can't rush this.
You can't just say, okay, let's just forget about that bit and move on. There are layers that just need to be revealed and exposed and resolved. And bit by bit, that relationship restores. So in all these three analogies, we have this sense of an involved and perhaps lengthy process. What does that mean then? How do we apply that to our own lives and what the Bible is talking about here in this psalm about what, what restoration looks like?
If you think about the person that's doing the restoring, whether it be furniture or painting— maybe less so for a relationship, but it, it kind of holds— the perspective and the aim of the person seeking to restore is the finished result. They're much less interested in how it came to be in the state that they found it. They don't really care too much about the circumstances that have left the thing needing restoration.
Sometimes there may be bits of context that are helpful in informing how you go about restoring, but restoration is not picking through all the things that have happened. It's a vision for renewal. It's a vision for the final restored piece of furniture or painting or relationship. There's hope in it. There's forward-looking. And this, for me, is very much a picture of God's heart for us.
Part of his creation, people are described in the Bible as the pinnacle of his creation, literally made in the image of God. Out of all existing beauty and wonder and complexity, people are the gem, the supreme expression of God's creativity. You are. And the whole Bible has this thread of restoration all the way through, from the Garden of Eden right through to God's fruitful city in the last book of the Bible in Revelation.
It's a thread of restoration from slavery to being brought back to a promised land, which is fruitful in crops, a place of peace. The New Testament talks about restoration out of darkness, back into the light, where all is clear and safe. A lie. And Jesus is our ultimate restoration. Jesus is the one who can come lift off the layers of dirt, that can mend what has been broken in our hearts, in our thoughts.
Can restore trust. And this is why Christians say our hope is in Jesus, because Jesus is the ultimate restorer of our souls. So if you've already known some of that work, and maybe it was a long time ago, if you can remember a time when Jesus touched your heart or your emotions or your thoughts and restored them brought out something of their original peace or original beauty, cleaned them up, whatever it may be.
If you've experienced that, think back to that and use that to fuel your prayers wherever you find yourself now. Don't lose hope that the One who restored you before can restore you again. And if you've never experienced this but you're aware actually that your heart or your circumstance, just like a piece of furniture, has maybe seen better days.
It's not quite panning out how you hoped. Just know that we've got this thread of God's restoration throughout the Bible, exhibited through the way he's dealt with his people, his creation. And Jesus is the one that can restore finally our souls, bring us from darkness into light. From slavery into freedom, from banished wandering to homecoming, to glorious fruitful city where we belong.
Jesus is our restorer. And when you set your heart to know Jesus, to follow Jesus, and you ask, please God, in your mercy, thank you, you don't really care what's gone before. Please restore. Please bring me to that place of hope, of future, to the original beauty that you saw in me when you knit me together. Please restore me. Challenge you to pray that prayer and to allow God to gently, over a period of time, bring you to that place that maybe you always hoped to be.
That you too would be like someone who dreams, waking from a dream with hope and peace in your heart. Someone that's maybe sown seed with a lot of tears but can harvest a crop that's full of joy.
Matt Edmundson (outro):
So that's the talk, and you're going to be able to find all of the notes, a sort of a detailed blog post about it, all all on the website, which is www.crowd.church. And of course, if you'd rather listen than watch, you know, maybe you're on the school run, on a dog walk, washing up, whatever it is, every talk goes out as a podcast. Just search Crowd— uh, not crowd.church, that's our website— search Crowd Church wherever you get your podcasts from.
I reference back my previous point about fluffing lines. Now, I did say at the start that there were some changes coming to Crowd, so do let me tell you about them. Number 1, Live Lounge. Now normally Live Lounge is a chance to jump and chat to the team, to jump, jump on to call and chat with members of the team after the live stream has ended.
But from September, you're gonna be able to do that from the start of the live stream, you'll be able to watch the live stream in Live Lounge and watch it with actual people, for your community, your friends, maybe even make some new friends. And like I say, you're going to do that right from the start, which I'm really excited about, because it is going to help us build community.
We have a phenomenal community here at Crowd Church. And building on that, I think is going to just be exciting and phenomenal. So that's going to be one change. The second change, the Wednesday night community groups are changing a little bit. So instead of having scattered and disparate groups, we're going to gather together as one big community and then break into smaller groups.
And Each small group will be your regular sort of community group where people get to know your name. When they notice if you're not there, and you get to build your friendships. Alpha will run alongside Community from September. It's going to move to a Wednesday night, same time, 7:30. Um, and Alpha is great if you're new to the Christian faith or if you're just exploring the Christian faith.
The next Alpha course starts on the 9th of September, and you can register for that on the website at www.crowd.church. We have lots of people coming to Alpha. They are phenomenal things. Um, so yeah, go check out the website for more information about that at crowd.church. The third change is more in-person meetups. Yay! Go in-person meetups!
Now, we baptized, uh, some folks in Dorset, uh, last month, which was really phenomenal. We thought, actually, we need to do more these in-person meetups. So that's what we're going to do. We are planning gatherings throughout the year, from regional meetups to bigger events. Again, more information will be coming, more information on the website.
One thing to tell you about CrowdFest 27 will be held— with CrowdFest is going to be a big get-together where we all get together. And we're going to do that at the Wildfires Festival at the end of July in 2027. You can find out more information about Wildfires Festival and buy your tickets at wildfiresfestival.com. Um, or just follow the links from the website because there's going to be more information on the website about CrowdFest 27, crowd.church.
So yeah, if that's not it, there's more stuff coming. Yes, there are. So, but I don't want to bombard you. We're going to go through that in more detail in September. Yes, we are. So in the meantime, like I said, everything you want to know about Crowd from past talks to all the stuff we've talked about today is on the website, www.crowd.church.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel, uh, whilst you're here, because like I said, this is a 5-parter all the way through the Book of Psalms, and it's built to be taken as a whole. Each one's going to build onto the next one, so don't miss any of them. But that's it from me. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a phenomenal week wherever you are in the world.
I will see you next time. Bye for now.
