Do I Have to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry?
Yes.
I know. You were probably hoping for a loophole.
Maybe they never apologized. Maybe they don’t think they did anything wrong. Maybe they know exactly what they did and would happily do it again. Surely forgiveness can wait until they at least manage to squeeze out an “I’m sorry.”
Nope.
Christians are commanded to forgive, and Scripture does not give us permission to carry bitterness around until the person who hurt us completes the appropriate paperwork.
But before somebody reads that and decides I just told you to invite your abusive ex over for dinner, we need to establish what forgiveness actually means.
Because forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. It is not the same thing as trust. It does not erase consequences, require you to pretend nothing happened, or automatically give someone access to your life again.
So yes, you have to forgive them.
No, that does not mean what some of you think it means.
Christians Forgive Because We Were Forgiven
Paul’s command is painfully straightforward: “forgiving each other, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). He tells the Colossians essentially the same thing: if one Christian has a complaint against another, they are to forgive “as the Lord has forgiven you” (Colossians 3:13).
That makes Christian forgiveness fundamentally different from deciding whether somebody deserves it.
They don’t.
Neither did you.
The gospel does not begin with a bunch of basically decent people presenting God with sufficiently sincere apologies until He reluctantly agrees to overlook a few mistakes. We were sinners reconciled to God through Christ. Christians therefore forgive from the position of people who know what it means to have an enormous debt forgiven.
Jesus makes that point rather aggressively in Matthew 18.
Peter asks Him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (Matthew 18:21).
Peter probably thought seven sounded generous.
Jesus responds with “seventy-seven times” and then tells the parable of a servant whose king forgives an enormous debt. The freshly forgiven servant immediately finds another servant who owes him a comparatively tiny amount, grabs him, and demands payment. When the man cannot pay, he has him thrown into prison.
The king is not impressed.
The point isn’t that Christians need a forgiveness spreadsheet and can finally start holding grudges once somebody reaches number seventy-eight. Jesus is exposing the absurdity of receiving extraordinary mercy from God while refusing mercy to others.
That doesn’t make what somebody did to you insignificant. It puts what you do with it in the context of what Christ has done for you.
But What About “If He Repents”?
And here comes the verse somebody was already typing into the comments.
Jesus says:
“If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3).
There it is.
If he repents.
Case closed, right? No repentance, no forgiveness. Congratulations, we can all go home and maintain our grudges biblically.
Not quite.
Luke 17 really does connect repentance with forgiveness, and we shouldn’t pretend the word if isn’t sitting there. When the offending brother repents, the Christian is obligated to forgive him. Jesus continues by saying that even if the person sins repeatedly and repeatedly returns saying, “I repent,” the response is still forgiveness (Luke 17:4). Repentance is therefore enormously important when we are talking about restoration between people.
But Luke 17 does not establish the opposite proposition: until somebody repents, you are free to hate them.
Scripture explicitly commands Christians to put away bitterness, wrath, anger, and malice (Ephesians 4:31). Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). Paul tells us not to repay evil for evil and not to avenge ourselves, but to leave vengeance to God (Romans 12:17–21).
Whatever distinction we make between forgiveness before repentance and restored forgiveness after repentance, the unrepentant person does not get to become your biblical excuse for bitterness.
Jesus demonstrates that posture Himself. While being crucified, He prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Stephen, while being murdered, cries out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).
Neither scene involves the offenders first lining up to apologize.
That does not mean everyone involved was automatically reconciled to God apart from repentance and faith. It demonstrates the posture of the person being wronged: no personal vengeance, no desire to see the offender destroyed simply to satisfy the victim, and a genuine desire for mercy.
Whatever terminology we use for that posture before repentance occurs, the Christian cannot withhold mercy, nurture vengeance, or cling to bitterness while waiting for an apology.
Forgiveness Is Not Reconciliation
This is where bad Christian advice has hurt people.
Someone does something genuinely destructive, and the injured person is told, “You have to forgive them.”
Correct.
Then somebody quietly smuggles several additional commands into the sentence:
Trust them again. Restore the relationship. Stop talking about what happened. Remove the consequences. Give them access to you. Act like everything is fine.
No.
Those things are not synonyms for forgiveness.
Forgiveness can involve something you do before God without the offender’s cooperation. Reconciliation cannot.
I can relinquish my personal claim to vengeance without your participation. I can refuse to cultivate hatred toward you. I can pray for you. I can genuinely desire your repentance and good. I can entrust justice to God instead of spending my life mentally prosecuting your case.
Reconciliation requires something from both people.
If you stole from me, forgiveness does not mean I immediately hand you my wallet. If you repeatedly lied to me, forgiveness does not require me to believe the next thing you say. If you abused someone, forgiveness does not magically make you safe. If you refuse to repent, there may be no restored relationship at all.
Even Jesus’ teaching on church discipline recognizes this. Matthew 18:15–17 provides escalating steps precisely because sin can fracture fellowship, and an unrepentant person may ultimately be treated as outside that fellowship.
Apparently “forgive everybody” and “pretend nothing happened” are not the same command.
Trust Is Earned Differently Than Forgiveness Is Given
This distinction matters because forgiveness and trust answer different questions.
Forgiveness asks whether I will continue demanding personal payment for what you did to me.
Trust asks whether it is wise to place myself in your hands again.
Those are not remotely the same question.
Forgiveness may be extended while trust remains completely destroyed. Trust can sometimes be rebuilt, but rebuilding it ordinarily requires repentance, honesty, changed behavior, and time.
And sometimes the wise amount of future trust is none.
Romans 12 tells Christians, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18).
I love how realistic that sentence is.
If possible.
Paul apparently knew some people.
Peace is something Christians pursue. But Scripture does not pretend that every broken relationship can be repaired simply because one person decides to relinquish bitterness and vengeance.
You are responsible for what depends on you.
You are not responsible for manufacturing somebody else’s repentance.
Forgiveness Doesn’t Make Evil Good
Forgiveness also does not require you to rewrite history.
If somebody sinned against you, forgiveness does not require calling the sin a misunderstanding. You do not honor Christ by pretending evil was less evil than it actually was.
In fact, forgiveness only makes sense when there is something real to forgive.
You cannot forgive a debt while simultaneously insisting there was never a debt.
Biblical forgiveness looks directly at wrongdoing without allowing that wrongdoing to dictate your response forever. It says: What you did was wrong. It hurt me. There may be consequences. Our relationship may never be what it was. But I will not spend the rest of my life demanding that you suffer enough to satisfy me.
That last part is difficult.
Sometimes very difficult.
Which is why “just forgive them” can be spectacularly useless advice.
Forgiveness can be a decision that has to be lived out repeatedly because emotions do not disappear the moment you make it. Memories return. Anger returns. The desire to replay the offense returns. Forgiving someone does not require pretending those things never happen.
It means that when they do, you continue refusing to make personal vengeance your answer.
What If They Never Say Sorry?
Then they never say sorry.
You may never get the apology you deserve. They may never admit what they did. They may tell everybody that you were actually the problem. They may live the rest of their life completely convinced that they were right.
Your obedience to Christ cannot depend upon their willingness to obey Him.
That is one of the reasons this matters so much. The person who hurt you does not get to determine what kind of person you become afterward.
Paul writes, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Romans 12:19).
Notice that refusing vengeance does not require believing justice doesn’t matter.
It requires recognizing that you are not God.
You can forgive while pursuing appropriate justice. You can forgive while reporting a crime. You can forgive while maintaining boundaries. You can forgive while ending a destructive relationship. You can forgive while telling the truth about what happened.
What you cannot do is nurture hatred, feed bitterness, fantasize about revenge, and then baptize it all with:
I’m waiting for an apology.
If You’re Struggling to Forgive
This is the part where the jokes stop.
Some offenses are easy to write about when they are hypothetical and excruciating to forgive when they have actually happened to you.
If someone deeply wounded you, the command to forgive is not God pretending the wound does not matter. Christianity does not ask you to call evil good or pain imaginary. The cross itself tells us that sin is serious enough that forgiveness is costly.
And forgiveness does not necessarily happen emotionally all at once.
You may decide before God that you release your personal vengeance and then wake up tomorrow angry again. That does not necessarily mean yesterday’s forgiveness was fake. It may simply mean you are wounded, and healing takes time.
Bring that anger to God. Pray honestly. Refuse revenge again. Ask God to change your heart. Seek wise counsel when you need it. Maintain whatever boundaries are necessary. If reconciliation becomes possible because genuine repentance and change occur, wonderful.
If it never does, the other person’s refusal to repent still does not give you permission to live in bitterness.
The person who hurt you does not have to participate in your obedience to Christ.
So, do you have to forgive someone who isn’t sorry?
Yes.
You don’t have to trust them. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen. You don’t have to remove appropriate consequences. You don’t have to reconcile with someone who remains committed to harming you.
But you cannot make their refusal to repent your permission to hate them.
Turns out the giant red YES wasn’t clickbait after all.