When It Seems Impossible to Forgive
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“Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times’” (Matt. 18:21-22).
Most of us have gone through the experience of being hurt badly by someone. Maybe the person asked for our forgiveness or perhaps seemed to think they had done nothing wrong. As Christians we know God commands us to forgive as we have been forgiven, so we strive to obey God and forgive the person with a sincere heart.
When we experience pain over past wrongs, we need to remember God’s word.
Yet, even when we’re confident that we have truly forgiven the person, it can happen that at some point the feelings come back suddenly and unexpectedly: feelings of rejection, pain, and anger, and the sense of being terribly wronged. What then? Did we not forgive well enough the first time? Do we need to forgive again (and maybe again and again) or perhaps somehow do a better job of forgiving?
I want to encourage you to have patience with yourself in the area of forgiveness. Because we have truly forgiven someone from the heart doesn’t mean all our memories are gone. Our act of forgiveness doesn’t mean all the pain goes away. This is particularly the case in very grievous wrongs committed against us and the people we love dearly, those in which the aftereffects plague us in one way or another for the rest of our lives. Instead of despairing over our struggles to forgive, we can take our struggles to God in our prayers.
It is God’s will for Christians to forgive others.
In the passage above where Jesus says we should forgive others “seventy-seven times,” he is telling us that there should be no limits to our forgiveness. There is no sin that anyone can commit against us that is beyond our forgiveness. Jesus emphasized the critical importance of forgiveness after teaching his disciples to pray, stating:
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matt. 6:14-15)
We can look to Jesus as our example when we are struggling to forgive.
But do we have to forgive others who haven’t asked for our forgiveness? While some Christians teach that this isn’t required of believers, it’s difficult to think of a good reason not to forgive others regardless of the level of repentance on their part.
On the cross Jesus asked his Father to forgive his persecutors because they didn’t know what they were doing (Luke 23:24). And what greater example do we have of what it means to be a Christian than the one our Lord has given us? If we are following in Jesus’ footsteps, we should want to forgive as he forgives. How can we be stingy with our forgiveness when God has so generously poured out his forgiveness upon us?
Forgiving others involves humility and wisdom on our part.
Charles Spurgeon once stated, “Humility is to make a right estimation of one’s self.” When we remember all that God has forgiven us, including the countless acts of selfishness and rebellious behavior that we never even recognize we’ve done, it should bring us to our knees. As we look inwardly and consider the evil thoughts and actions our own fallen hearts have produced, both knowingly and unknowingly, we remember that without God’s mercy we would be without hope.
Forgiving people, however, does not mean that they deserve our immediate trust. When trust is breached in a relationship, it takes time and work to build it up again, and hopefully the trust will be even stronger. Sometimes, however, trust can never be rebuilt. Sometimes it will be the case that we must never again risk placing ourselves in certain situations due to even the remotest possibility of being harmed. Still, we can—and should—forgive those who have hurt us as Jesus commands us to do.
We need God’s help to forgive others as God has forgiven us.
In her book The Hiding Place, Holocaust survivor Corrie Ten Boom describes meeting one of the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards her sister Betsy and she encountered at Ravensbruck:
It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself. (Baker Publishing Group, 2006, p. 247)
Our loving God makes seemingly impossible forgiveness entirely possible.
As Corrie Ten Boom so poignantly recounts, if we depend only on our own ability to forgive the most horrendous wrongs done to us and those we love dearly, we will likely fall short. We need God to give us his perfect, unending love so we can then give it to those who have trespassed against us. In forgiving others again and again we show compassion instead of condemnation—the very way we want God and others to treat us.
God sent his only begotten Son all the way to Calvary to die a horrible death so that we could be forgiven by Christ’s perfect righteousness and perfect sacrifice counted to us through faith in Christ alone. At the cross God found a way to be both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). Since God showed us such unfathomable love in redeeming us, we can be confident that he will not forsake his beloved children in their ongoing struggles to forgive.
Like Corrie, may we pray to our Lord to give us his love to forgive and then forgive again and again, even when it seems impossible, and may we trust that God will work in our hearts to help us forgive completely and love fully as we have been forgiven completely and loved fully by him in Christ.
This article is adapted from “When It Seems Impossible to Forgive” in Beautiful Christian Life’s September 2024 monthly newsletter, “Forgiveness.”
Related Articles:
“Forgive Us Our Debts”: Getting Specific When Confessing Our Sins to God
3 Reasons Why Christians Should Recite the Lord’s Prayer at Church
Recommended:
All of Grace by Charles H. Spurgeon
