How to Forgive Someone: The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Scripture reading: Matthew 18:21-35 ESV

How to forgive someone who has deeply hurt you begins with understanding how completely God has forgiven sinners in Christ. Jesus’ Parable of the Unforgiving Servant does not minimize painful wrongdoing or pretend forgiveness is easy. Instead, Jesus shows that those who have received immeasurable mercy from God are called to extend mercy to others.

Throughout our daily devotion series, Scripture repeatedly brings Christian obedience back to God’s grace. Forgiveness is one of the clearest examples. We do not forgive because another person’s sin suddenly becomes insignificant. We forgive because God’s mercy toward us is infinitely greater than the debt we are being asked to release.

Peter Asks How Much Forgiveness Is Enough

Matthew 18:21-35 begins with Peter asking Jesus:

“Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (Matthew 18:21, ESV)

Peter’s question is understandable. At some point, surely forgiveness has reached its reasonable limit.

Jesus answers, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:22).

Jesus is not replacing seven with a larger number that Peter can eventually reach. He is dismantling the idea that believers should keep a ledger of mercy.

This matters when learning how to forgive someone because our natural instinct is to measure the offender’s debt. Jesus begins somewhere else. He directs our attention to the mercy we ourselves have received.

That same gospel-centered perspective runs throughout our daily devotionals because Christian obedience cannot be separated from what God has first done for His people.

The Debt You Could Never Repay

Jesus describes a servant who owes a king ten thousand talents.

The amount is deliberately staggering. A talent represented an enormous sum, and ten thousand talents placed the servant’s debt beyond any realistic possibility of repayment. When the servant promises, “I will pay you everything,” his words cannot solve his problem.

Then something astonishing happens.

“Out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27).

The servant does not negotiate the debt downward. He does not work it off. The king cancels it.

Jesus gives us a picture that helps illuminate the grace of the gospel. Our sin against a holy God cannot be repaired through enough good behavior. Scripture says that God made believers alive with Christ, “having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us” (Colossians 2:13-14).

Forgiveness begins here.

Before asking how much another person owes us, Jesus confronts us with the immeasurable mercy we have received from God.

This is also why will God forgive me is such an important question. Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son approaches God’s mercy from another direction, showing the welcome awaiting the repentant sinner who has nothing with which to commend himself.

When the Forgiven Servant Refuses to Forgive

The servant soon finds another servant who owes him one hundred denarii.

Unlike the first debt, this one is substantial but payable. Jesus is not suggesting that offenses between people are imaginary or painless. The second servant really owes something.

That distinction matters.

Biblical forgiveness does not require calling evil good. It does not mean pretending betrayal did not happen, denying consequences, abandoning appropriate boundaries, or preventing lawful authorities from addressing wrongdoing.

The issue is what the first servant does with a real debt after having an incomparably greater debt forgiven.

He seizes his fellow servant and demands payment. When the man pleads for patience, using words remarkably similar to his own earlier plea, he refuses mercy and has him imprisoned.

The contradiction is unmistakable. He wants mercy for himself and strict justice for someone else.

This exposes why how to forgive someone is ultimately a gospel question rather than merely a relationship technique.

Forgiveness Flows From Grace

When the king learns what happened, he calls the servant wicked:

“I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:32-33)

Notice the order.

Mercy was received first. Mercy toward another should have followed.

We do not forgive others so that we can make ourselves worthy of God’s forgiveness. Salvation is by grace, not by accumulating sufficient acts of mercy. Rather, a life persistently characterized by mercilessness raises a sobering question about whether God’s grace has truly been received.

Jesus makes the warning unmistakable in verse 35: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

Forgiveness is therefore more than saying the correct words. Jesus reaches the heart.

The struggle becomes especially difficult when the same hurt remains vivid. How to forgive someone does not mean waiting until every painful feeling disappears. It means relinquishing personal vengeance and entrusting justice to the God who judges rightly.

Jesus develops this relationship between received mercy and extended mercy elsewhere as well. The question of who should I love receives a striking answer in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where neighbor love crosses the boundaries human beings naturally construct around compassion.

What Forgiveness Does Not Mean

Christians sometimes struggle to forgive because they have been given an inadequate definition of forgiveness.

Forgiveness does not mean the offense was acceptable.

It does not necessarily restore trust immediately. Trust can be damaged through serious sin and may require repentance and demonstrated faithfulness to rebuild.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are also related but distinct. Forgiveness concerns our posture toward the offender and our surrender of personal vengeance. Reconciliation ordinarily involves both parties and, where sin has fractured fellowship, repentance.

Nor does forgiveness require remaining in circumstances where someone can continue causing harm.

What forgiveness does require is surrendering our claim to personal vengeance. Romans 12:19 tells believers not to avenge themselves but to leave judgment to God. We can forgive precisely because final justice does not belong to us.

How to Forgive Someone Biblically

If you are struggling with forgiveness, begin with God’s mercy rather than your emotions.

Remember what God has forgiven. The king’s cancellation of an impossible debt is the controlling image of Jesus’ parable. Christians never outgrow their dependence upon grace.

Name the wrong truthfully. Forgiveness does not require minimizing what happened. Bring the offense before God honestly. Scripture gives us language for grief, injustice, anger, confession, and lament.

Renounce personal vengeance. Forgiveness places judgment into God’s hands. You are not declaring the offender innocent. You are acknowledging that God is the righteous Judge and that vengeance belongs to Him.

Pray for grace to forgive from the heart. Some wounds make forgiveness extraordinarily difficult. Dependence upon the Holy Spirit is not weakness. It is recognition that Christian obedience requires God’s continuing grace.

A prayer journal can serve this process by giving you a place to bring the offense before God, meditate upon Scripture, confess bitterness where it exists, and pray for grace to obey Christ without pretending the wound is insignificant.

When Forgiveness Feels Impossible

There may be days when the hurt returns. That does not necessarily mean you never forgave.

Forgiveness can involve repeatedly refusing to reclaim the debt you have entrusted to God. The memory may remain. Consequences may remain. Appropriate boundaries may remain. Yet the believer continues surrendering personal vengeance to the Lord, trusting that His judgment is righteous even when the wound still hurts.

This is where forgiveness exposes more than our pain. It can also expose our pride. We easily see the seriousness of another person’s sin while forgetting how completely we ourselves depend upon mercy. The question is not whether the person who hurt us deserves grace. Grace, by definition, is undeserved.

Remembering our own need for mercy changes the way we come before God with another person’s sin in our hands. Instead of praying as though we stand above the offender, we come as forgiven sinners asking God for the grace to forgive. If bitterness, anger, and the desire for vengeance keep returning, “how should I pray” becomes a deeply practical question. Jesus’ Parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector reminds us that faithful prayer begins with humility before God, where we recognize our own need for mercy before concerning ourselves with the sins of another.

Journal Reflection

Bring the person or situation you are struggling to forgive before God.

• What wrong am I being tempted to hold as a permanent debt against this person?
• Have I confused forgiveness with pretending that the wrongdoing did not matter?
• How does my own need for God’s mercy change the way I view this person’s debt?
• Am I trusting God with justice, or am I still trying to hold the offender under my personal judgment?
• What would forgiveness from the heart require of me today?

If writing helps you slow down before Scripture and pray specifically, a best prayer journal can provide a consistent place for biblical reflection without replacing the far more important work of opening God’s Word and bringing your heart honestly before Him.

A Prayer for Grace to Forgive

Father, You have shown me mercy I could never earn and forgiven a debt I could never repay. Keep me from receiving Your grace lightly while withholding mercy from others. Give me wisdom where boundaries are necessary, courage where reconciliation should be pursued, and humility to remember my own dependence upon Christ. Guard my heart from bitterness and vengeance. By Your Spirit, teach me to forgive from the heart and to entrust perfect justice to You. In Christ’s name, amen.

The Mercy We Receive Changes the Mercy We Give

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant does not tell us that sin is insignificant.

It tells us that God’s mercy is immeasurably great.

The Christian who asks how to forgive someone must therefore begin at the foot of divine mercy. We forgive not because every wound has healed, not because every relationship can immediately be restored, and not because justice no longer matters.

We forgive because in Christ we have been forgiven.

The debt another person owes us may be painfully real. But it can never be understood rightly until we have first looked upon the debt God canceled for us.

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