How to Forgive Someone Who Hurt You

If you have ever tried to forgive someone who hurt you and walked away feeling like you failed, you are not alone. Forgiveness is one of the most overlooked and most difficult parts of following Jesus. I will be honest with you: I struggle with it too. I like to be in control. I am highly competitive. So when someone wrongs me, my sinful nature actually wants to hold onto that offense so I have an advantage over them. It is kind of gross, but it is who I am naturally, and I suspect some of you are wired the same way.

So before we can talk about how to forgive, we have to clear away what our culture gets wrong about the word. Because most of us are carrying around a definition of forgiveness that Jesus never taught.

What Forgiveness Is Not

When Jesus teaches us to pray, "forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us," He is not erasing consequences. Releasing forgiveness to someone does not mean that person no longer faces the results of what they did.

Think about the courtroom scenes we have all seen in our culture. A person stands up, genuinely remorseful, truly repentant for taking a life. And the family of the victim rises and says, "We want you to know that we forgive you." It is an incredible act of mercy and grace. But that forgiveness is not a pardon. It does not remove the fact that a life was taken, and our judicial system will still require a price, whether that is life imprisonment or something else. There are consequences to sin. Forgiveness is not the absence of them.

There is a second thing forgiveness is not. It is not an internal project of getting your emotions under control. A lot of people struggle to forgive, and that is an honest struggle. Sometimes it is not even about the size of the offense. Some things are simply harder for certain people to release than others. But if we are not careful, we start treating forgiveness as something we have to feel rather than something we choose.

Is Forgiveness a Feeling or a Choice?

Here is the heart of it: forgiveness is an act of your will, not a feeling that has to arrive first. According to the Lord's Prayer, receiving God's forgiveness is directly linked to how we forgive others. So it is not about waiting until I feel ready. It is about putting myself out there and saying, "I am not feeling great about this, but I know I want forgiveness from God, so in the same way I am going to choose to forgive him or her."

Forgiveness is not about releasing people from the consequences of their actions. It is about me no longer holding the offense against them. One author put it this way: there is nothing as important in your life as asking God to forgive your debts, and maybe nothing as hard as God asking you to forgive your debtors.

That first part matters deeply. You and I cannot come before God without a broken and repentant heart. If we confess our debt to God, that is the most profound thing we can do. A broken and contrite heart He will not deny. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). This is how good He is. This is critical to your spiritual development.

But there is a second piece, and the Lord's Prayer links the two: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Now my forgiveness is connected to the forgiveness I extend. I want to receive it, and He is asking me to release it. So when Paul writes, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32), we need to read it through the lens of the Lord's Prayer.

What Jesus Taught About Forgiveness in Matthew 18

Jesus tells a story later in Matthew 18 while teaching about biblical conflict. A servant begs his king to forgive an enormous debt, and the king relieves him of all of it. But that same servant runs out, finds someone who owes him money, and demands it. When the man cannot pay, the servant has him thrown into jail.

When the king hears about it, he calls the servant back. "You wicked servant," he says. "I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?" The king hands him over to be tortured until he could repay the debt. Then Jesus makes the statement that should stop all of us in our tracks: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart" (Matthew 18:35).

This is not a one-time theme for Jesus. Right after the Lord's Prayer there is almost a postscript. Two verses later He says, "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" (Matthew 6:14-15). It is as if Jesus is saying, I just want to reiterate this. This really matters.

So here is the question I want all of us to sit with: what would it look like if God treated you and your sin in the exact same way that you treat those who have sinned against you?

Why Is It So Hard to Forgive?

I am asking you to be willing to release the offense and forgive. I know it is hard. I am not saying the offense did not happen. I am not making light of it or pretending it is not a big deal. Jesus is not saying that either. But if we are going to follow Christ with our lives, then releasing forgiveness is an act of our will. It is not a feeling that finally shows up and says, "Okay, I think I am ready now."

So why don't we see forgiveness more in our world, in our churches, among people who follow Christ? Why is this principle so hard for me personally? I will tell you why. If you are anything like me, you want mercy in your own life and justice in everyone else's. That is me being honest with you. I would rather have justice than mercy, at least when it comes to other people. I like when people take ownership of their sin. I respect people who confess and are honest about it, and it is easy for me to say, "Thanks for owning it, let's move on."

But forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person owning it. The command simply says: release forgiveness.

How Jesus Forgave People

I know that is right, because when you examine the ministry of Jesus, that is exactly what He did. He did not walk into every situation to fix a problem. He walked in to heal people.

Consider the woman who had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband. Jesus did not condemn her in that moment. He did not say, "Before I forgive you, I am going to expose what you have done, and you had better go repent and get right before you come back to me." That was not His attitude at all.

Or consider the woman caught in adultery, with a crowd ready to stone her. Jesus bent down and wrote something in the sand. The Bible does not tell us what He wrote. Maybe it was a line, maybe it was something significant. But He said, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7). And one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, they dropped their stones and left, until it was just Jesus and the woman. He asked her where her accusers were, whether anyone remained to condemn her. She said they were gone. And He said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more" (John 8:11). Forgiveness was released on the front side.

That is pretty stunning. As the author N.T. Wright observed, forgiveness is richer and higher, but also more difficult and more shocking, than we usually think.

Where to Go From Here

That statement would not be true if forgiveness were simply about getting justice and then feeling good about it. The reason forgiveness is harder, higher, more shocking, and richer than we expect is because it is God's mercy on display in the hearts of humanity.

So the invitation today is simple, even if it is not easy. Is there an offense you are still holding? You do not have to wait until the feeling arrives. You do not have to wait until the other person owns what they did. Choose, as an act of your will, to release it, in the same way your heavenly Father has released so much for you. That is what it means to forgive someone who hurt you, the way Jesus actually taught it.