Forgive as You Have Been Forgiven

Our God is the God Who forgives sins. Even the Pharisees, who knew so little of God’s mercy, recognized God as the One Who offered forgiveness. (Luke 5:21) God Our Father offers forgiveness to all of us who believe that Jesus is His Son, that Jesus is raised from the dead, and who put our hope and our trust in Him and make Jesus the ruler of our lives. (Romans 10:9, 1 John 5:13) Forgiveness is a universal part of the experience of believers. All of us as believers have experienced the forgiveness of God.

1 John 1:9

In writing about forgiveness and our relationship with God, John writes, “If we confess our sins to Him, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” (1 John 1:9) When we confess our sins to God, the result is that we experience forgiveness, which brings us closer in relationship with God.

There is a restorative element of forgiveness. To confess our sins and turn away from them is to say ‘yes’ to God. All such instances of saying, ‘yes’ to Him are going to draw us relationally closer to Him.

This restoration begins with our first repentance–the first time we pray for forgiveness and ask God to take away our sins. In this moment, we experience through Jesus something like what Isaiah experienced when the angel touched his lips with the coal from the altar. Through Jesus’s death for us, God comes to us and says,​​ “Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven.” (Isaiah 6:7)

Why do I Feel Guilty?

Praying for forgiveness continues to be part of our relationship with God. We are not chained through guilt to these prayers. Again, as God said to Isaiah, our, “guilt is removed, and [our] sins are forgiven.” 

The writer of Hebrews, speaking about the Old Testament sacrificial system, says that, “If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared.” (Hebrews 10:2) The writer continues by comparing the Old Testament reality with what believers in Jesus experience today, saying, “For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.” (Hebrews 10:10) In other words, our guilt–both in feeling and in status–is taken away by Jesus's sacrifice once for all. We are truly no longer guilty. Again the writer says, “For by that one offering he forever made perfect those who are being made holy.” (Hebrews 10:14)

Sometimes our feelings lie to us. As believers, we don’t have to feel guilty. When we do, we can ask the Holy Spirit if He is convicting us of something. If not, the enemy may be lying to us. Remember, for believers in Jesus, Jesus has taken away your guilt–once for all and forever. 

Praying for Forgiveness

The relational aspect of asking for forgiveness is essential. Again, after we have accepted Jesus as our Savior, we do not ask God for forgiveness because our relationship actually needs to be restored. All the restoration with God we could ever need was accomplished through Jesus and His death and resurrection. Even so, the Bible directs us to confess our sins to God (1 John 1:9) and to be cleansed from them. Built into this is an element of repentance.

When we repent of our sins, we are saying to God, “I leave behind my sin, and I choose your way instead.” Maybe we’ve made this declaration in our hearts over and over, but the important thing is that we do make it–as often as necessary. God has always been merciful to those who stumble in relationship with Him. What He wants is for us to continue in the relationship.

This need to confess our sins is built into us as believers. The Holy Spirit prompts us to pray for forgiveness. Remember, it’s not from guilt, and it’s not because God is distant from us. It’s because God has determined a good path for us to walk, and when we sin, we wander from the good way that He has planned for us. More than that, when we sin, we are rejecting not only His plan, but Him personally. He has already forgiven us, but it is right for us to return to Him and ask for forgiveness.

Forgiveness and the Lord’s Prayer

Given how important forgiveness is in the life of the believer in Jesus, it doesn’t surprise us that when Jesus teaches His people to pray, He teaches us to ask, “Forgive us our sins.” (Matthew 6:12) Praying for forgiveness is essential. Including it in the prayer here is not surprising.

What is surprising is what Jesus does next. He says we should not only pray, “Forgive us our sins,” but that we should pray, “Forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us.” 

Jesus has connected one of the most essential parts of the Christian life to one of the most difficult parts.

Jesus directs us, every time we need forgiveness, to remember to forgive the people who have wronged us. In fact, He doesn’t just say that we should forgive them, He says that we should forgive those who have sinned against us as we want God to forgive us.

Forgiving the way Jesus calls us to here may be the most difficult part of the Lord’s prayer. We can see that our Father God takes this incredibly seriously. He connects our receiving forgiveness from Him with the extent to which we give forgiveness to others.

The Unforgiving Servant

Jesus does not give this teaching as a one-off. To be clear, we would have to take it seriously even if He only mentioned it once, but He reinforced His teaching with a parable.

In Matthew 18:21-35, one of Jesus’s disciples comes to Jesus and asks how many times he has to forgive someone who sins against him. The disciple is trying to be generous, and suggests that he should forgive seven times; the cultural law of the day required much less. We can certainly empathize with this question. How many times do we have to keep dealing with people and their wrongs against us? It’s one thing to be generous with forgiveness, but surely there’s a limit, right? 

Jesus responds by telling the disciple that, for His people, we are to give forgiveness without limit. Not seven times, He says, but seventy seven times. The point is not that a larger number of sins must be committed before sins no longer need to be forgiven. The point is that we should be limitlessly forgiving as Jesus’s people.

Matthew 18:23

To illustrate this, Jesus tells a parable about a servant of a king who is called to give an account of a debt. We are meant to see ourselves in this story as the servant, and God as the King. When we sin against God, we owe God a debt we could never repay. This turns out to be the servant’s situation in the story as well. As Jesus tells the story, we find that the servant owes the king “10,000 talents,” which we can understand to be millions of dollars–a number beyond access to a sustenance farmer or a day laborer in Jesus’s audience. The servant of course, cannot pay, and the king decrees the punishment laid out in the law.

The punishment is severe–as is the punishment for sin–and the man does what any of us would do in this situation: he begs for relief. He makes promises that both he and the king know cannot be kept. “Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.” Of course both the servant and the king know that the servant will never be able to repay such a large sum, but the servant is frantically trying to remove himself from the consequences of his debt which is beyond repayment.

Matthew 18:27

At the moment of the servant’s greatest desperation, something remarkable happens. The king has pity on the servant and forgives the debt.

There are no threats. There is no demand for a payment plan. There is no insult to the servant’s financial acumen on the way out of the throne room. He just forgives the debt.

This is an outcome beyond the servant’s wildest dreams, and he leaves rejoicing, as any of us would rejoice. This is a joy that believers in Jesus know. It is the joy that we feel when we surrender our lives to Jesus for the first time and He says to us, “take heart, your sins are forgiven.” (Matthew 9:20)

Matthew 18:28

But then something unthinkable happens: the servant goes out into the street–newly released from this unpayable debt–and finds one of his fellow servants. This fellow servant owes him a lot of money–about 100 days wages. This is a significant debt, but nothing compared to what was just forgiven of the first servant. What will be the first servant’s response? 

Amazingly, the first servant has no compassion or mercy for the second servant. He attacks his fellow servant and demands to be repaid.

Matthew 18:29

The second servant knows that he does in fact owe the money. He’s in the wrong. He begs for more time. Again, it’s a heartbreaking scene. “Be patient with me!” he says, “and I will pay it.”  

We see the irony in Jesus’s story immediately. Jesus is showing us the relationship between what we owe God and what other people owe us. Yes, people have wronged us–even significantly. One hundred days' wages is no small thing. But nothing can compare with the debt that we owe God. That’s a debt that can never be repaid no matter what we would do. 

We recognize this as we experience Jesus’s parable, but the servant in the story did not. He had no mercy on his fellow servant. He had him thrown in prison.

Matthew 18:31

The newly forgiven servant didn’t realize the foolishness of what he had just done, but his fellow servants did. They immediately reported him to the king.

The King reprimanded the servant and explained that the servant should have shown the same mercy of forgiveness that he had received, but then he did something else. The king immediately reinstated both the debt and the punishment. Jesus concludes the story by saying, “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”

Forgive as God Has Forgiven You

Make no mistake: Jesus is taking forgiveness seriously. We are not to take lightly His teaching on forgiveness. The forgiveness we receive from God our Father was purchased by the blood of His Son Jesus. We cannot receive this forgiveness and then treat others as if they owe us an even greater debt than we have been forgiven. The Bible is clear–the debt we owe God is more than any debt between people.

The command to forgive is absolute, and the reason is essential to remember: forgive as God has forgiven you.

Colossians 3:13

Paul reminds the church in Colossae, “Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.”

This speaks to our motivation to forgive. We cannot motivate ourselves out of fear. John says that “the one who fears has not been made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18) Instead, Paul writes that we should forgive out of remembrance of the Lord’s forgiveness of us. We forgive as a response of God’s love to us.

Like so many things in the Christian life, we forgive because of the love that God has shown us. Love is the proper motivation for forgiveness.

Make no mistake, forgiveness is essential–Jesus’s parable reminds us of that–but the motivation is important. We will not forgive appropriately if we are motivated by fear or by duty. The goal, according to both Jesus and Paul, is that we would remember the forgiveness we have received, and we would forgive like He has forgiven us.

Forgive Us Our Sins as We Have Forgiven Those Who Sin Against Us

Jesus teaches His followers to pray not only that we would be forgiven, but that we would be forgiven like we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. In doing that, He has forever connected for us our own forgiveness with our forgiveness of others. We should keep that connection in our minds. 

There are promises in the Bible of forever forgiveness for believers in Jesus–but we can’t discount the words of Jesus on this subject either. His forgiven people are people who forgive. We should be known for it. When we pray, “forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us,” if we are reminded of people we need to forgive, we need to immediately turn to God and ask Him to help us to forgive them and ask Him to help us to remember the great forgiveness He has already shown us.

Forgiveness is a journey at times, but it is so important that we are progressing on the journey. We cannot stand still and allow unforgiveness to go on existing in our lives. We must fight it always with the help of the Holy Spirit–always remembering that what our Father God has forgiven us of is greater than anything that could have been done against us.

That is not to say that the sins committed against us are trivial–so many times they are not. Horrifying things happen to us and to those that we love. But we have received forgiveness from the Holy God, and this perfectly Holy God says that we too should forgive as He has forgiven us.

Read More: God is Father and Holy

Forgiveness may be a journey, but we must be on the road.

We must always remember the importance of forgiving others, just as we remember the importance of the forgiveness we have received from God.

A Last Word

I always want to remind people that forgiving someone does not mean allowing an abusive situation to continue. To forgive is to no longer hold someone’s sins against them and to not put their identity in what they have done. Forgiveness does not mean we stay in a harmful situation or that we allow ourselves to continue to trust people who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. We don’t intentionally put ourselves in harm’s way unless God commands it.

If you are in an abusive relationship, the Bible does teach forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean it teaches you (or your children if you have children) to stay in the relationship. You have a right to be safe and healthy. Forgiveness may be a process for you, but don’t let someone tell you that forgiveness means going back to the relationship the way it has always been. Those two things are not the same.

God has a wonderful plan for your life and he loves you more than your abuser and He wants to provide healing and wholeness for you. He has a wonderful journey ahead for you. It may be a long and hard journey, but He will walk it with you, and doing life with Him is going to be unimaginably better than what you’ve experienced before. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I plan to write much more about forgiveness and relationships. When I do, I will link those resources here.