Why Forgiveness Feels Impossible — And Why God Asks It Anyway
You said you forgave them. But every time you see their name on your phone, your stomach drops. Every time someone mentions what happened, your jaw tightens. You have prayed about it. You have journaled about it. You have told yourself a hundred times that you have let it go. But your body keeps score, and the truth is — something in you is still holding on.
If that is where you are right now, I want you to know something before we go any further: that does not make you a bad Christian. It makes you an honest one. And honest is exactly where God can work.
This week, as part of our Discipleship Series, we are diving into what might be the hardest command Jesus ever gave. Not “go and make disciples.” Not “sell everything you have.” The hardest one is this: forgive.
And He did not just say it once. He built an entire parable around it to make sure we understood how seriously He meant it.
What Jesus Actually Said About Forgiveness
The conversation starts with Peter — and honestly, you have to love Peter for this. He comes to Jesus with what he thinks is a generous offer:
“Lord, how many times shall my brother sin against me and I still forgive him? Up to seven times?”— Matthew 18:21 (NASB)
In Peter’s world, this was extravagant. The rabbis of his day taught that you were obligated to forgive someone three times. Peter doubled it and added one for good measure. He probably expected Jesus to say, “Wow, Peter, that is incredibly mature of you.”
Instead, Jesus said this:
“I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy-seven times.”— Matthew 18:22 (NASB)
Some translations render this “seventy times seven” — and either way, the point is the same. Jesus was not giving Peter a math problem to solve. He was saying: stop counting. The moment you start keeping a tally of how many times you have forgiven someone, you have missed the whole point of forgiveness.
Then Jesus tells a story that would have made every person in the crowd uncomfortable. A king decides to settle accounts with his servants. One servant owes him ten thousand talents — a debt so astronomically large it was meant to be absurd. Scholars estimate it at roughly 200,000 years of wages. This is not a debt you work off. This is a debt that owns you.
The king has every legal right to sell the servant, his family, and everything he owns. But when the servant falls on his face and begs for mercy, the king does something shocking: he forgives the entire debt. All of it. Gone.
And then the servant walks out of that room — freshly forgiven, free, unburdened — and finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii. That is about three months’ wages. Real money, sure. But compared to what he was just forgiven? It is pocket change.
He grabs the man by the throat and demands payment. When the fellow servant begs for patience using almost the exact same words, the forgiven servant refuses and throws him into prison.
When the king hears about it, his response is devastating:
“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?”— Matthew 18:32-33 (NASB)
Here is what Jesus is saying: you are the servant. Every single one of us carried a debt before God that we could never repay. And He cancelled it — not because we deserved it, but because He is merciful. The question is not whether the person who hurt you deserves forgiveness. The question is whether you remember what you were forgiven.
Why Forgiveness Feels Impossible
Let me be honest with you. Some of you are reading this and thinking, “That is a nice parable, but you do not know what they did to me.” And you are right — I do not. I do not know the weight of what you are carrying. I do not know if it was betrayal, abuse, abandonment, slander, or a wound so deep you have never spoken it out loud.
Forgiveness feels impossible because the pain is real. And anyone who tells you to “just let it go” without acknowledging the gravity of what happened is offering you a bumper sticker, not the gospel.
The reason forgiveness is hard is because it costs something. It cost Jesus everything. And when He asks us to forgive, He is not asking from a place of ignorance — He is asking from the cross.
What Forgiveness Is NOT
Before we talk about what forgiveness is, we need to clear away what it is not. Because a lot of people are stuck in unforgiveness partly because they have been given a wrong definition.
- Forgiveness is not excusing what happened. What they did was wrong. Forgiveness does not change that. It does not minimize it. It does not say, “It was not that bad.”
- Forgiveness is not forgetting. “Forgive and forget” is not in the Bible. You may always remember what happened. Forgiveness means the memory no longer controls you.
- Forgiveness is not reconciliation. You can forgive someone and still have healthy boundaries. Forgiveness is a heart posture. Reconciliation requires two willing parties and, often, changed behavior.
- Forgiveness is not a feeling. You do not have to feel warm and fuzzy about the person who hurt you. Forgiveness is a decision — sometimes one you have to make daily.
What Forgiveness IS
Forgiveness is releasing the debt. It is saying to God, “I am not going to be the judge in this case anymore. I am handing the gavel to You.”
Paul puts it beautifully:
“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)
Did you catch the order? Put away the bitterness first. Then be kind. Then forgive. Paul is not telling you to paste a smile on your face. He is telling you to do surgery on your heart — to actively remove the bitterness that has taken root — and then move toward the person with the same tender-heartedness God moved toward you.
And Colossians takes it even further:
“Bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so must you do also.”— Colossians 3:13 (NASB)
The standard is not “forgive when it feels right.” The standard is “forgive as the Lord forgave you.” And how did the Lord forgive you? Completely. Sacrificially. Before you even asked.
Three Steps You Can Take This Week
Forgiveness is a journey, not a light switch. But every journey starts with a step. Here are three concrete ones you can take this week:
- Name it out loud. Write down the specific offense on a piece of paper. Not vague — specific. “They betrayed my trust when they…” There is power in naming the wound honestly before God. You are not telling Him something He does not already know. You are giving yourself permission to stop pretending it did not happen.
- Pray the transfer prayer. Hold that piece of paper and say: “God, I have been carrying this debt. I have been the judge, the jury, and the one keeping score. Today I am handing this to You. I trust You with the outcome. I release this person — not because they deserve it, but because You have already released me.”
- Watch for the echo. In the days ahead, the bitterness will try to come back. That is normal. Every time it does, say this: “I already made my decision. I gave that to God.” Forgiveness is not a one-time event. It is a daily discipline until freedom becomes your default.
The Bridge from Grace to Forgiveness
Last week we explored grace — the undeserved gift that changes everything. This week, we face the natural next question: now that you have received grace you did not deserve, can you extend it to someone else?
That is the entire arc of the gospel. Receive, then release. Be forgiven, then forgive. Not because it is easy. Not because the other person earned it. But because the King already cancelled your ten-thousand-talent debt, and He is asking you to let go of the hundred denarii.
You may not be able to do it in your own strength. That is okay. You were never meant to. Ask the Holy Spirit to do in you what you cannot do for yourself. He is faithful, and He is not in a hurry.
You are not alone in this. And you are closer to freedom than you think.
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All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation.
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