Of all the things Jesus taught, forgiveness may be the one most people claim to believe in and find hardest to actually do. It is easy to say the word. It is easy to agree that forgiveness is important, that bitterness is destructive, that we should not hold grudges. What is not easy is sitting with the specific face of the person who hurt you and choosing, genuinely, to release what they owe you.
The difficulty is compounded by confusion about what forgiveness actually means. People refuse to forgive because they believe it would mean pretending the harm was acceptable. Or they attempt forgiveness and feel like they have failed because the pain does not immediately disappear. Or they confuse forgiveness with reconciliation and cannot see how to forgive someone who is not safe to be around. Or they wonder whether they are even supposed to forgive someone who has never said sorry.
This article is the third in a series on great life lessons from Scripture. It takes the topic of forgiveness seriously enough to ask the hard questions rather than papering over them. Because Scripture does the same. Jesus does not offer forgiveness as an easy principle. He offers it as a radical demand, grounds it in something costly and specific, and connects it directly to the most fundamental question of our own relationship with God.
What Forgiveness Is Not
Before going to what the Bible says forgiveness is, it is worth clearing away some of what it is not. Many people carry misconceptions that make forgiveness feel either impossible or dishonest, and addressing those first creates space for understanding the genuine thing.
Forgiveness is not the same as excusing what happened. To excuse something is to say that it was not really wrong, or that it was understandable given the circumstances, or that it did not really hurt. Forgiveness says none of those things. In fact, forgiveness only applies where there is genuine wrongdoing. You cannot forgive someone for something that required no forgiveness. The acknowledgement that a real wrong occurred is part of what makes forgiveness meaningful rather than mere sentiment.
Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting. The phrase “forgive and forget” is not in Scripture. Memory is not something we can simply switch off, and the command to forgive does not require that we act as though harmful events never occurred. What changes in genuine forgiveness is not the memory but the relationship of the heart to the memory. The event is not erased; the claim of the event over your inner life is released.
Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Reconciliation is the restoration of a broken relationship. It requires two parties and it requires trust. Forgiveness requires only one: the person doing the forgiving. You can forgive someone who has never apologised. You can forgive someone who does not know they harmed you. You can forgive someone who is no longer alive. Forgiveness does not depend on the other person’s response. Reconciliation may or may not follow, depending on whether it is safe, whether the other person takes responsibility, and whether the relationship can genuinely be rebuilt. But it is a separate thing from forgiveness itself.
And forgiveness is not the same as a feeling. This point matters enormously in practice. Forgiveness is not the sudden arrival of warm feelings toward someone who hurt you. It is a decision, an act of the will, that may well precede the feelings by a long time, and the feelings may arrive slowly or not entirely. People sometimes believe they have failed to truly forgive because the anger or sadness returns. But the returning of painful feelings is not evidence of unforgiveness. It is evidence of being human.
The Weight of the Demand: Matthew 6 and the Lord’s Prayer
The most searching statement Jesus makes about forgiveness comes embedded in the prayer He teaches His disciples, and in the brief commentary He appends to it immediately afterwards:
“For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.”
(Matthew 6:14-15, NASB)
These verses sit immediately after the Lord’s Prayer, in which Jesus has taught His disciples to pray: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12, NASB). The connection is explicit and deliberate. When you pray for God’s forgiveness of your own failures, you are doing so as someone who has already extended forgiveness to others. The two things are not sequential; they are simultaneous. The measure you bring to others is the measure you invoke for yourself.
This is one of the most uncomfortable passages in the Gospels. It does not soften the connection or offer a clause for exceptional circumstances. The conditionality here is not about merit: it is not saying that you earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving others. It is saying something about the inner posture of the person who asks. A person who is genuinely aware of the enormity of their own need for forgiveness and who has received it, finds themselves in a different relationship to the forgiveness of others than someone who has not sat with that reality.
Put differently: if you understand what God has forgiven you, you cannot maintain a position of withholding forgiveness from others without a deep inconsistency. Not an inconsistency of behaviour only, but of heart. Jesus is pointing to that inconsistency and naming it as spiritually serious.
The Parable That Will Not Let You Off: Matthew 18:21-35
In Matthew 18, Peter asks Jesus a question that reveals how he has been thinking about forgiveness. He suggests seven as a generous number of times to forgive someone who sins against you, which would have sounded magnanimous to a first-century Jewish audience: the rabbis generally taught three times as sufficient. Jesus upends the whole framework:
“I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”
(Matthew 18:22, NASB)
Seventy times seven is not a revised upper limit. It is a way of saying: stop counting. The question itself, how many times must I forgive?, reflects a mindset that treats forgiveness as a scarce resource to be rationed. Jesus declines to operate within that framework at all.
He then tells a parable that is one of the most penetrating in the Gospels. A servant owes his master ten thousand talents. The talent was the largest unit of currency in the ancient world, and ten thousand was the largest number used in ordinary Greek reckoning, so the debt is intentionally beyond any plausible calculation. It is an impossible, unrepayable sum. The servant begs for patience, and the master is moved with compassion and forgives the entire debt.
That same servant then finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was roughly a day’s wage; a hundred denarii was a real but comparatively trifling amount. He seizes his fellow servant by the throat, refuses his plea for patience, and has him thrown in prison. When this is reported to the master:
“Then summoning him, his lord said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?’ And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him.”
(Matthew 18:32-34, NASB)
The parable’s logic is simple and devastating. The servant who received a cancellation of an astronomical debt then refused to extend even the smallest mercy to someone who owed him a fraction of a fraction of what he himself had owed. The disproportion is so extreme as to be grotesque. And that, Jesus says, is what it looks like when a person who has been forgiven by God refuses to forgive a fellow human being.
Whatever someone has done to you, it is a hundred denarii in comparison to what you have owed and been forgiven. That is not a minimising of the harm done to you. It is a statement about scale. The ten-thousand-talent forgiveness you have received changes what it means to hold on to a debt against another person. Doing so in the light of that larger forgiveness is, in Jesus’s word, wickedness.
The Motivation for Forgiveness: Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3
Paul returns to this foundation repeatedly. The ground of Christian forgiveness is always the same: what has been received shapes what is extended. In Ephesians 4, he works up to forgiveness through a description of the whole cluster of behaviours that belong to the new life in Christ:
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.”
(Ephesians 4:31-32, NASB)
The list in verse 31 is worth pausing over. Bitterness. Wrath. Anger. Clamour. Slander. Malice. These are not simply bad habits or character flaws to be improved. They are the natural product of an unforgiven heart, the things that grow in the soil of resentment when it is cultivated rather than released. Paul is not listing them to produce guilt but to name what actually happens inside a person who holds on to what they are owed. The accumulation is real and destructive.
Verse 32 does not offer a technique to get rid of the list in verse 31. It offers a foundation. You forgive each other “just as God in Christ also has forgiven you”. The Greek word here is charizomenos, from charis, grace. You extend grace to others because you have received grace. The forgiveness flows from the same source that brought your own: the gift of God in Christ.
Colossians 3:12-13 extends the same argument in a slightly different register, placing forgiveness within the full garment of the new life:
“So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.”
(Colossians 3:12-13, NASB)
The phrase “whoever has a complaint against anyone” is deliberately broad. This is not limited to minor offences or easy cases. The forgiveness Paul describes applies wherever there is a genuine grievance. And the model is the same: “just as the Lord forgave you”. Not as a technique, not as an emotional state to achieve, but as a response to what has been received.
The Hardest Question: When They Are Not Sorry
The most honest question people ask about forgiveness is this: am I supposed to forgive someone who has never apologised? Someone who shows no remorse? Someone who may still be causing harm?
Scripture does not avoid this question, though it does not answer it in the way some people want. The model most frequently pointed to is the cross, and it is an uncompromising one. As Jesus was being crucified, He prayed:
“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
(Luke 23:34, NASB)
The people He prayed for were in the act of crucifying Him. They were not sorry. They were not asking for forgiveness. Some were gambling for His clothes while He spoke those words. The forgiveness Jesus prayed was not conditional on repentance. It was offered in the middle of the offence, to people who had no idea what they were doing in the larger sense.
This does not mean that every wrong will be left without consequence. Paul’s letter to the Romans is careful about this. He writes: “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19, NASB). The release of your own right to retribution is not the same as the claim that wrongdoing faces no reckoning. God’s justice is not bypassed by your forgiveness. It is simply not your responsibility to execute it.
For the person who has been genuinely wronged and whose forgiveness will never be acknowledged or received by the other party, this is not a small thing. It is the freedom to stop carrying the burden of a debt that the other person will never repay. You cannot make them sorry. You cannot make them acknowledge what they did. You cannot make the relationship whole if they are unwilling. But you can release your claim, and in doing so, you are released from what that claim costs you to maintain.
It is also worth being clear: forgiving someone does not mean placing yourself back in a position where they can harm you again. Forgiveness does not require you to trust someone who has shown themselves untrustworthy. Wisdom about safety and wisdom about forgiveness are not in conflict. You can forgive a person and still decline to remain in relationship with them, especially where genuine danger is involved. These are separate questions.
From the Heart: The Final Phrase of the Parable
Matthew 18 ends with a phrase that deserves its own attention. After the master hands the wicked servant over to the torturers, Jesus says: “My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35, NASB).
“From your heart.” Not from your mouth only. Not as a formal act, a spoken declaration that technically discharges the obligation. The forgiveness Jesus describes is an interior reality, a genuine release at the level of the will and the heart, not merely a performance of forgiveness while the resentment remains intact underneath.
This is where many people feel they have failed. They have said the words of forgiveness and the bitterness persists. They have decided to forgive and found themselves thinking about the injury again the following morning. They wonder whether they have really forgiven at all.
The honesty of the struggle does not indicate its failure. Forgiveness from the heart is not a single moment after which the matter is permanently closed. It is often a repeated act, a returning to the decision, a re-choosing of release when the grievance surfaces again. The fact that you must choose to forgive again is not evidence that the previous choice did not count. It is evidence that forgiveness is a way of living rather than a one-time event.
The Greek word afiemi, the word for forgiveness used across the Gospels, means to release, to let go, to send away. It is an active verb. Forgiveness is something you do; it is a motion away from holding. And for deep wounds, that motion may need to be made more than once, more than many times, as the injury resurfaces and the old claim reasserts itself. Each time, the choice is the same: to release rather than to hold.
The Gift Forgiveness Gives
There is a dimension of forgiveness that is sometimes framed in therapeutic terms, that it benefits the person doing the forgiving as much as or more than the person being forgiven. This is true, though it is not the primary reason Scripture gives for forgiving. Scripture’s primary reason is the character of God and the experience of having been forgiven. But the ancillary truth is real.
Bitterness is an expensive thing to carry. Ephesians 4:31 lists it first in its catalogue of what needs to be put away, and it is not accidental that bitterness heads the list. Bitterness is a posture of the heart that attaches itself to the memory of a wrong and refuses to let go. It is not a feeling that visits occasionally; it is a resident that shapes how you see everything. It colours your reading of new events, your interpretation of people’s motives, your capacity to trust, your ability to receive love without suspicion.
Paul places the antidote to bitterness not in a technique but in a relationship: kindness, tender-heartedness, the grace of God received and extended. The freedom forgiveness offers is not a psychological management strategy. It is the natural consequence of releasing a claim you were never designed to carry permanently.
Forgiving does not rewrite what happened. It does not make the relationship what it was before, if it was good, or what it should have been, if it was not. It does not guarantee healing, though it makes space for it. What it does is release you from the position of creditor to someone who may never pay, a position that keeps you permanently oriented toward the wrong done to you rather than toward anything else. Forgiveness turns your face away from the injury. Not as denial, but as a decision about where you will direct the energy of your life.
The Ground It Stands On
Every thread of what Scripture says about forgiveness leads back to the same place. “Forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” “Just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.” “My heavenly Father forgave you all that debt.” The foundation is always the same, and it is always prior to the obligation: what God has done first.
The parable of the unmerciful servant does not begin with the servant’s refusal. It begins with the master’s compassion. The command to forgive does not arise from nowhere; it arises from a specific experience of having received something extraordinary. That experience is meant to be the engine of the forgiveness you extend, not willpower, not the suppression of pain, not a rule to be complied with.
Which means that if you are finding forgiveness genuinely hard, that difficulty may be pointing you toward something more fundamental than technique. It may be pointing you toward the question of whether you have really sat with what you yourself have been forgiven. Not as a way of inducing guilt, but as a way of finding the actual resource. The ten-thousand-talent forgiveness is real. What you owe and what has been cancelled on your behalf is real. And the person from whom you are withholding a hundred denarii is someone who matters to the same God who cancelled your debt.
Forgiveness will not always feel possible. There are wounds that are so deep, betrayals so total, that the very idea of releasing the claim feels like an outrage. Those wounds do not resolve quickly, and Scripture does not pretend they do. But the call remains, grounded in the same reality it has always been grounded in: the grace that found you when you were not looking for it and gave you what you could not repay, and that asks, in return, that you pass some of it on.
This article has focused on what you extend to others. The companion article “Embracing Repentance: A Deeper Journey of Transformation in Christian Faith” faces the other direction: what you do with your own sin and failure. If working through forgiveness has brought you face to face with your own need to return to God, that article explores what genuine repentance actually looks like in Scripture, why it so often degenerates into guilt rather than freedom, and what the prodigal’s father running down the road tells us about the God we are turning back toward.
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All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) 1995 edition.