❖ Video
❖ Audio
What It Means To Forgive
Psalm 61:1-9
Yasunobu Ishimaru(The UCCJ Pastor / Joshigakuin School Teacher)
Thank you for inviting me to the worship service of Your Church. I heard that you have been hearing the messages from the Bible focusing on the subject of peace this August.
We all, indeed, need peace.。 It’s important for us to pay attention with love to various events happening in the world to seek peace. However, it is also necessary at the same time for us to spend time to reflect on ourselves who are living in this world.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” He calls us “peacemakers.”
Peace is not something that comes to us from somewhere in the way we can know easily that it’s coming. It’s entrusted to our hands. That’s why I want to pay attention to ourselves who are the peacemakers. To that end, I’d like to read Psalm 61 with you today.
For the director of music. With stringed instruments. Of David.
1 Hear my cry, O God;
listen to my prayer.
2 From the ends of the earth I call to you,
I call as my heart grows faint;
lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
3 For you have been my refuge,
a strong tower against the foe.
4 I long to dwell in your tent forever
and take refuge in the shelter of your wings.
5 For you, God, have heard my vows;
you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.
6 Increase the days of the king’s life,
his years for many generations.
7 May he be enthroned in God’s presence forever;
appoint your love and faithfulness to protect him.
8 Then I will ever sing in praise of your name
and fulfill my vows day after day.
Psalms are the words of prayer. We can learn many things from this prayer of Psalm 61. But there are a few things that are difficult for us to understand as well, because Psalm is old.
Verse 1 says, “For the director of music. With stringed instruments. Of David.”What does it mean “Of David”?
David’s song. Song for David. Was it David’s song that he himself wrote and sang? Or was it a song for David, that someone else wrote and sang for David? We no longer have a clear answer.
At a glance, it seems it is a song that David himself wrote and sang to God as his own expression of trust in Him. Because verse 1 says, “Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer,” and this “my” seems to indicate David himself.
However, verse 6 says, “Increase the days of the king’s life, his years for many generations.”
As David was the king himself, some people thought that it would be strange for him to sing for himself and ask God to “increase the days of the king’s life,” so they concluded that this psalm must have been a song for David.
But I think we can read this Psalm 61 as a whole simply as David’s song. Then, we need to understand when and where, and why David wrote this song. Why did he pray, “increase the days of king’s life,” while he was the king himself?
There were many events in David’s life. He was once just a shepherd boy, but succeeded in defeating Goliath the Philistine, became a king, but made a mistake in the event of Bathsheba.
Among these various events in his life, David had an experience of crying out to God like this Psalm sings, “From the ends of the earth I call to you.” It was when he was not yet a king.
It was in the time of his previous king, King Saul, as written in the first Samuel chapter 18, when Saul got angry with David, and bullied him persistently. David was nearly pierced by Saul by his spear two times. He was forced several times to stand in the front-line of battle that was hard to win. He was forced to run away all by himself and had to hide himself in a cave, because King Saul ordered his subordinates and even David’s friends and close ones to kill him.
Then, what he prayed was this prayer of Psalm 61. He prayed for the king, “Increase the days of the king’s life, his years for many generations.” On the one hand, while he was thoroughly bullied and forced to live in a cave, he cried, “Listen to my prayer. My heart grows faint. I am at the ends of the earth.” On the other hand, however, he also prayed, “Increase the days of the king’s life, his years for many generations.”
I myself have a painful experience. It’s more than 10 years ago, but I was made to suffer for a long time by a particular person, by his abuse of authority and his mental harassment. I think one of the greatest pains that we can get from someone is to be blamed for something that we did not do. They say, “You did it. Apologize!” We can’t apologize, because we didn’t do anything, but they don’t listen to us.
After I finally got away from the harassments, I heard rumors about that person from time to time. When I heard his career was going well, I felt like cursing him. But when I heard he was failing, I felt I won and he just deserved it.
After abused and treated unfairly, I became happy by hearing he was not doing well, while I became unhappy when I heard he had made some success. That’s wrong, as you may think. It’s like a sickness. It is indeed a sickness.
When that awful person succeeds, I feel like it is my failure. When that awful person fails, I feel like I won. If that person is unhappy, I’m happy. If he is happy, I feel I became an unfortunate person.
I guess you all think this is something wrong by hearing this. It is wrong. Our happiness should not be built on something that is so unstable and fragile. But when we hate someone, and when we cannot forgive someone, we cannot help but be controlled by that person. This is a disease we have.
A good news is that this disease is curable. Although there are many other diseases that we have to bear for long, as some of you are actually fighting against them, this disease I’m talking about now is curable and will be healed for sure.
How can it be cured? It is by saying this prayer, “May that person live eternally.” “May he be enthroned in God’s presence forever; appoint your love and faithfulness to protect him.” “May that person live in God’s presence and in His grace forever; May he be protected by His love and faithfulness.”
Among many other songs in Psalms, which sing of lamentation and grief, this song of Psalm 61 does not end in just lamentation, but breaks through to reach the state where you pray for God’s blessings to the person whom you suffer for.
In the Greek, the original language used in the Bible, the word to mean forgiveness in forgiving someone is “aphiemi.” When this word “aphiemi” is used in the Bible, it is usually translated as “forgive” in Japanese, but its original meaning is “let go.”
When we hate someone and cannot forgive them, we are like trying to bind them up. Because we don’t want to forgive them, or we are determined not to forgive them, we are binding them up by a chain round and round. To release such a chain from our hands is what the word “aphiemi” means. And that is forgiveness the Bible teaches us about.
Why do you think I get disappointed and angry when someone I cannot forgive seems happy? It’s because I get frustrated and regretful to see that person smiling, because he should be in pain as I’m binding him up.
But here is a story I want to share with you. I have a friend, a lady who is married and has a small child. She always looked happy, but one day I found out that she had never brought her child to see her mother, not even once. I asked her why, and she said she couldn’t forgive her mother. She said her mother told her various things to hurt her when she was a high schooler, which made her feel betrayed, so that she was determined not to forgive her and not to let her see her child. I can talk with her about her job, her child and other things all enjoyably, but whenever we talk about her mother, she always seems to go back to her memory from her youth, a bitter feeling of being betrayed.
Why is she like that? Because it is herself being bound up, when she says she would not forgive her mother and she thinks she is binding her mother. That’s why she could not have moved on from where she was when she was a high schooler, only in her relationship with her mother. Although she is no longer a high schooler, and has grown up so much in everything else in her life, she is still in bondage and cannot move on, as if even time has stopped, only in her relationship with her mother.
Jesus taught us in the New Testament the Lord’s Prayer, and told us to pray this way. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” He taught us to pray for our forgiveness while we also need to forgive others. He tells us to forgive others in our prayer.
When the Bible says to forgive others, it does not mean we should forgive them out of our pity on them.
It neither means that we should forgive them because it is something noble and gives something in return for a believer to forgive. Rather, it teaches us to forgive others for our own salvation, in order for ourselves to be forgiven by forgiving others. By forgiving, you will be freed from your bondage. That’s why you need to forgive others.
We will never get released from the chain binding us, unless we forgive others. That’s why the Bible says to us to let it go, let the chain in your hands go.
Also it tells us to pray that we can let go of this thing and that person. So I encourage you to pray for yourself that you can let it go.
Now, how can we let the chain go from our hands? How can we release the chain we thought we bind someone else with, but actually biding ourselves? It is when we rely on God.
It is when we pray, “God, I want to let go of this chain I have been holding in order to bind that person up. So I rely on you about that person.” “I’ll accept either you bless that person or not. It’s all up to you, and I trust you.” When we can pray like this, I think it is when we will be finally freed from that bondage.
You may think you can never forgive others. You may have someone in your mind now that you feel you can never forgive. Or perhaps some of you may feel that it is yourself whom you can never forgive. You may keep blaming yourself, asking why you did it. You may be bound and stuck in that place.
However, as I said, we have the option to forgive. We can choose to entrust everything to God.
When we can release from our hands and entrust to God someone or something that we cannot forgive, we can make David’s prayer we read today as our own prayer.
We may pray like this. “I still cannot get over my hatred toward that person, but I pray that he or she may live in Your presence forever.” Or like this. “I still feel bitter about my past, but please change my heart so that I can ask for your blessings on my past as well.”
To forgive means to entrust to God. To entrust to God means to believe in Him. When we say, “I believe in God,” many people just assume that we are talking about whether or not a god exists, and that we believe the god exists. However, what it means to believe in God goes much further than that. It means to put our trust in Him and that we totally depend on Him.
If we pray to God while we don’t trust in Him, our prayer may only end in our lamentation and grief. But the prayer Jesus taught us breaks through it. It is to decide and pray that we entrust that person and our future to God.
To pray and trust starts with to love. To love takes time. If you love your children, you spend time for them. If you love your family, I assume you spend much time with them.
On the contrary, if you hate someone, you wouldn’t take your time for them. You may even avoid seeing their face. Likewise, if you hate your past, you don’t want to take time to look it back.
But just try to spend a little of your time to pray for that person. Try also to take your time to pray for your past, asking God to forgive yourself, as you confess you forgive yourself. It’s not easy. It takes time. But we are surely given the strength to do it.
Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether or not we can actually forgive others. Only if we try to pray to forgive, I believe our world will start to change, from the world we cannot forgive each other to where we can forgive each other.
Summary
Jesus repeatedly taught us the importance of “forgiving anyway.” Why should we forgive someone who has brought trouble into our lives? It is not because we should feel sorry for them or because we gain something from forgiving. We forgive for our own salvation. Only forgiveness frees us from the bondage of hatred. That is why Jesus tells us, “Forgive.” When we can trust his word and surrender to him, we can make the words of the psalmist in Psalm 61 our own. This gives us peace that only comes from forgiveness and opens up a whole new world.