When God Restores Us 5: The God Who Forgives

This podcast is brought to you by Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley, BC, in the hope that it will draw you closer to the one who loves you most.

I think I would be fairly safe in saying that all of us want to live a life of significance.

We want our lives to write a story that's good and beautiful and true.

Often, though, we don't know how to get there.

Even the possibility of such a thing can seem remote for some of us because of our mind keeps replaying painful memories and shameful failures from the past.

And then discouraged and downtrodden, it can feel like there's no hope for us.

And that's because the trajectory of our life is often set by the memory that has the deepest hold on us.

We could even say we become what we remember.

Now here's a real life example of that.

So on May 27th, 1943, while searching for a lost airplane and crew, the B-24 bomber on which Louis Zamporini served crashed into the Pacific Ocean because of a mechanical failure.

Out of the 11 crew members, only Louis and two others survived and were able to scramble into a life raft.

After 47 days at sea, only Louis and one other crew member were still alive, and when they reached the Marshall Islands, they were immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese Navy.

They were sent to POW camps, and while in a Japanese POW camp, Louis was brutally mistreated by one of the prison guards, a person by the name of Mutsuhiro Watanabe.

He had a nickname The Bird.

Nobody in the United States knew that Louis was still alive, and in 1944, he was listed as killed in action.

After the war, Louis returned to the United States as a hero, but he was suffering from what we would now know as PTSD.

He would have recurring nightmares about his POW experiences, and in his heart, he was filled with thoughts of getting revenge on that prison guard who tormented him, the bird.

He began to drink heavily.

In 1949, at his wife's urging, he reluctantly attended a Billy Graham crusade.

Graham's preaching reminded Louis of the prayers he prayed while in that life raft and in the POW camps.

And Louis committed his life to Jesus Christ.

With that, the trajectory of his life changed dramatically.

He became a Christian evangelist, and the main theme of his message was forgiveness.

In 1950, he visited Sugamo prison in Tokyo, where many war criminals were held.

Louis expressed forgiveness to those prisoners, and some of them became Christians.

And then when he was in Japan again in 1998, Louis reached out to the bird and offered to meet with him in person.

But that offer was met with refusal.

So Louis wrote him a letter.

And in the letter, Louis said that though Watanabe had caused him great suffering, Louis forgave him.

He never received a reply.

Now that lack of acknowledgement did not hold Louis back in any way because he was on a totally different path now.

The trajectory of his life had totally changed because his remembering had changed.

The transformation of Louis Zemperini's life is inspiring, but we may wonder how helpful it is for us personally.

For there's an aspect of our memory that is beyond our control.

Many of us have had traumatic experiences which we cannot possibly forget.

Our minds are scarred by memories of bad things that others have done to us, or marred by other memories of bad things we have done to others.

We want to forget, but we can't.

So where can we turn for hope when the things we remember torment our soul?

And for God's answer to that question, let's open our Bibles to Psalm 103.

Now, as we do that, let's look at some background information that will help us to better understand what God is saying to us.

First and most importantly, Psalm 103 is part of what's called book 4 of the Psalms.

That book runs from Psalm 90 to 106, and this section of the Psalms has a very, very special purpose.

You see, just before book four begins, Psalm 89 highlights the crisis that God's people faced during the exile.

That was that time period when the Babylonians crushed the kingdom of Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, and brought to an end the royal line of kings descended from David.

And all of this happened because God's people were faithless.

Despite repeated warnings from God through his prophets, the people continually worshipped and gave themselves to the foreign gods of their neighbors.

Finally, God's patience came to an end, and he allowed his people to experience the consequences of their actions through the Babylonians.

And as they sat in devastation and exile, the people knew that God was giving them the punishment that they deserved.

But that realization did not give them any hope.

They wondered, how long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?

How long will your wrath burn like fire?

Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?

In other words, God's people living in exile in Babylon were having a crisis of faith.

And the books then in Psalm, sorry, the Psalms in book four then give a surprising answer that can be of great help to us today.

They call God's people to remember an earlier time when they were also going through tumult and they had no king.

And as people look back to that earlier time, the time of the Exodus, and remember that God was compassionate and merciful to his people back then, they could know and trust that he would also be compassionate and merciful toward them now.

Even though, from a human perspective, it looked like everything had been stripped away.

And it's the same with us today.

We too are living in a world filled with turmoil.

Plus, we all have personal struggles that we are also dealing with.

And then on top of everything else, we have those memories of the past, those wounds that the sins of others caused us, the awareness that our sins have caused wounds in the lives of others.

And through the Psalms, God is calling us to go back in time and remember that his, remember his faithful history of love, compassion, and mercy that he had for his people back then, so we can be assured that he has that same love, compassion, and mercy for us right now.

So by quoting earlier scripture, they didn't have footnotes at that time, but using a quote from earlier scripture, Psalm 103 draws us back to a very specific time in the history of God's people, which we find recorded for us in Exodus chapters 32 and 30 to 34.

Exodus 32 · chapter mention

And what was happening there was Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments and God's other instruction for life.

And while he was up there, the people formed a golden calf, which they worshiped as God.

And when Moses became aware of this, he destroyed the tablets of the Ten Commandments in anger, and God poured out his wrath on his people's idolatry by sending a plague.

Now, people living centuries later in the time of the exile would have recognized the parallels between what was happening during the Exodus and what was happening during their own time.

And Psalm 103 is saying to them and us, in essence, remember what happened next and why it happened.

And what happened next is that God called Moses back up onto Mount Sinai and gave him two new stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on it.

And then picking up in the account in Exodus 34, we read this.

Yes, God unleashed his anger against sin, but it was only for a limited time.

And the chief characteristics of God, the ones that define his core character and direct his main actions toward humanity, are repeated and re-emphasized for us in Psalm 103.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

This is who God is.

God does not keep a record of wrongs or rights, nor does he weigh out our good versus our bad like human beings tend to do.

Those calculations would never turn out in our favor anyway.

Instead, he operates from the core of who he is: merciful, gracious, and abounding in steadfast love.

And because of his core characteristics, God gives us great and wonderful blessings we do not deserve.

And it is these divine benefits that the psalmist urges us to remember.

For it is through remembering those benefits that God transforms us.

We read, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

And how do we know that this side of God is for us?

It's because of the relationship that we have with him.

Now, in ancient times, that relationship was defined by God through the old covenant that he made with the Israelites.

But for the past 2,000 years, that relationship is defined through the new covenant God has made with humanity through his Son Jesus Christ.

Because Jesus fulfilled the old covenant with his perfect obedience, something that God's people could never do.

And now, because of Jesus, everyone can have a relationship with God as a free gift through faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of all our sins.

And Psalm 103 describes for us just how far God's compassion reaches.

We read, as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame, he remembers that we are dust.

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.

See, dear friends, God remembers us.

And he also invites us to remember him and the way he remembers us.

The way he thinks of us.

In his book, Answering God, the Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Eugene Peterson starts off by making the point that one characteristic that separates humans from angels and animals is that we use tools.

And using tools is not just an option for us, we actually need to use tools to live well and completely in this world which God created to be our home and in which He is still at work.

And included in those tools is prayer.

But prayer is a different kind of tool.

It isn't a tool that helps us to do or get things, it's a tool that helps us to be and become.

Most tools are for external use.

So a shovel, a computer, or a car, they're all things that we use in the world around us, outside of us.

But prayer is designed for use in the vast and usually overlooked and impoverished inner world within us.

And the best prayer tools available to us are the psalms.

Peterson writes, if we wish to develop in the life of faith, to mature in our humanity, and to glorify God with our entire heart, mind, soul, and strength, the psalms are necessary.

We cannot bypass the psalms.

They are God's gift to train us in prayer that is comprehensive and honest.

These prayers don't seek God, they respond to the God who seeks us.

Now, one of the ways in which the Psalms shape us is by giving us a memory map of God's salvation.

Peterson beautifully illustrates the vastness of that territory.

He writes: if creation is the North Pole of our memory and sin the South Pole, salvation is the seven seas and the five continents between.

We commonly have no idea of how large it is and how many lifetimes it would take to explore it.

Psalm 103 helps us to explore the country of our salvation, the territory of our salvation.

It encourages us to lift our eyes from our self-centered focus and forget not all his benefits.

Our tendency is to only see the brokenness around and within us.

And so we overlook, at least we tend to, overlook the incredible benefits God has already given us.

Blessings intended by him to help us to grow in becoming the people he created and redeemed us to be.

We forget that we are God's works in progress, who are being molded and shaped into the image of Jesus by his saving actions for us.

Praying the Psalms trains our memories so that we can fully live as God's beloved, forgiven children.

All of God's benefits to us, all of the healing, redeeming, crowning, satisfying, and renewing He does within us all spring forth from the forgiveness he accomplished for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Only by embracing the incomprehensible vastness of our forgiveness can we fully inhabit the vast territory of our salvation.

It was God's steadfast love, mercy, and compassion that moved God the Father to send his son into the world.

That same steadfast love, mercy, mercy, and compassion moved Jesus to become fully human, to live a life of perfection for us, and then offer his one and only perfect life for us, as the ultimate sacrifice to pay the full cost of forgiveness for all the world's sin.

Raised from the dead on the third day, Jesus opened the door for us to live in God's new country of salvation.

And we receive the gift of that new life by faith as the Holy Spirit, motivated by the same steadfast love, mercy, and compassion, works within us.

However big our sin may be, God's forgiveness is way, way bigger.

We become what we remember, so let's remember well.

Let's focus on Jesus.

Pray Psalm 103, and remember, He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

So the challenge I'm setting before you today is this pray the Psalms to remind you of the incredible benefits of salvation that God has given to you.

You could start this week with Psalm 103 if you like, because it's fresh in your memory.

Just find a plot quiet place and read it aloud.

Make God's words to you into your words to him.

Let those words seep deep into your memory and live by them.

Let them heal your old memories of shame and pain, and let them give you new memories of all that God has done, is doing, and will do for you.

Over time, as you do that, you will see your life transformed by God because we become what we remember.

Let's pray.

And we pray that by your Spirit, wrapped in the Father's love, that you would heal our old wounds and painful memories, and that you would give us new things to remember, all the blessings and benefits that come to us from you as a free gift.

May our lives glorify you, and may others see your love through us.

In your precious name we ask this, and all God's people said, Amen.

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Thank you and God's blessing.