Bible verses for forgiving someone, when you do not want to yet
Seventeen verses for the week it happened, for the forgiveness that keeps coming back, and for the person who is never going to apologise. With a short prayer to write for each.
Forgiveness is the instruction most people can recite and fewest can carry out to order. You know the line about seventy times seven. You have probably said the words, meant them while you said them, and then found the whole thing waiting for you at two in the morning with the heat still in it. That is what forgiving an actual person is like.
The verses below are quoted word for word from the World English Bible and grouped by where you are rather than by book. Read what they ask and what they do not. Almost none asks you to decide the offence was small, or to feel differently by the weekend. Several are blunt that something is owed, and that the collecting of it goes to somebody else.
Forgiving someone is not the same as staying within reach of them. Scripture tells you not to repay evil; it does not tell you to remain where it is still being done. If someone is still hurting you or your children, tell a person who can act on it, rather than praying harder about your own attitude. Read the group that matches this week.
The week it happened, when you want them to know what they did
The first stretch is not really about forgiveness. It is about the fact that something happened, it was not fair, and nobody has said so out loud. Most of what you pray that week is a case: the account of what they did, assembled well, rehearsed in the shower, never delivered.
These verses do not tell you to calm down. One concedes the anger outright and limits it by time rather than temperature. The verse about vengeance gets read as an instruction to stop caring whether justice happens, and says closer to the opposite: the debt is real, and someone other than you is collecting it.
“Be angry, and don’t sin.” Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath,
Ephesians 4:26 · WEB
The quotation marks are there because Paul is quoting a psalm. Be angry stands in the same breath as the limit on it, and the limit is sundown.
Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men.
Romans 12:17 · WEB
Repay no one evil for evil is the whole instruction, and it says nothing about how you feel while not repaying. The second half turns you outward, toward what is honourable.
Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”
Romans 12:19 · WEB
Give place to God's wrath assumes there is wrath to give place to. You are not asked to decide it did not matter, only to stop being the one who settles it.
The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger. It is his glory to overlook an offense.
Proverbs 19:11 · WEB
Overlook an offense is called his glory, which is a large word for something that looks from outside like letting it slide. Slow to anger is filed under discretion rather than niceness.
not rendering evil for evil or insult for insult; but instead blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing.
1 Peter 3:9 · WEB
Insult for insult is named specifically, which makes this one of the few verses that applies directly to a group chat. Blessing is the alternative offered, and it is a thing you do rather than feel.
Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn, and you won’t be condemned. Set free, and you will be set free.
Luke 6:37 · WEB
Three instructions and three consequences in matching pairs. Set free is the one people skip, and it is listed as though it were the same size of task as the other two.
A prayer to write
What they did was wrong and I am tired of carrying the case for it. I am not pretending it was small. I am handing the collecting of it to you, because I cannot settle this and get on with my life at the same time.
When you have forgiven it and it keeps coming back
This is the part nobody warns you about. You forgive it properly, on a day you could name, and six weeks later their name comes up and the whole thing arrives intact. Most people read that as evidence the forgiveness did not take, and start again from the beginning.
Peter's question here is a counting question, and the number he gets back is too large to keep count of, which is the answer. Read the one about bitterness slowly as well. It describes a root, which is a slow thing, and says the damage does not stay with the person who has it.
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I don’t tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven.
Matthew 18:21-22 · WEB
Peter offers seven, which was generous by the standards of the argument he was in. Seventy times seven is not a higher ceiling but the end of ceilings: a tally that long is one you stop keeping.
Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father, who is in heaven, may also forgive you your transgressions.
Mark 11:25 · WEB
Whenever you stand praying attaches forgiving to something you already do regularly, rather than to one decision made once. If you have anything against anyone is as wide as it sounds.
looking carefully lest there be any man who falls short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you and many be defiled by it,
Hebrews 12:15 · WEB
A root of bitterness springing up, and then many be defiled by it. The warning is less about your own peace of mind than about what leaks out of it into other people.
Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you.
Ephesians 4:31-32 · WEB
The first verse is a list of things to put down, the second a list of things to pick up, and they were written as one sentence. Tender hearted is the hardest item on either list.
bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, if any man has a complaint against any; even as Christ forgave you, so you also do.
Colossians 3:13 · WEB
Bearing with one another sits right next to forgiving, which concedes that some of this is endurance and not resolution. If any man has a complaint against any takes the complaint to be legitimate.
A prayer to write
I forgave this and it came back this week with everything still attached to it. Do not let it root in me. Give me whatever tender heartedness is, because I cannot manufacture it, and let me forgive it again today without starting the count from the beginning.
When they have not changed, and may not
The hardest version is the one where nothing is going to be put right. No apology is coming. They may not know what they did, or know and disagree, or be dead. Forgiveness then is one-sided, which feels less like generosity than like being left with the bill.
These are what Jesus said and did from exactly that position, with no cooperation from anyone involved. Notice that the last one puts a limit on what is yours to manage. As much as it is up to you is a smaller territory than most people try to hold.
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.
Luke 23:34 · WEB
Said while it was still being done to him, and the sentence after it shows that they carried on doing it. The reason he gives is ignorance, which is not the same as innocence.
But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you,
Matthew 5:44 · WEB
Four instructions, every one an action rather than a feeling: love, bless, do good, pray. Praying for someone is the one you can begin tonight without any involvement from them.
“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
Matthew 6:14 · WEB
A conditional, and an uncomfortable one, which is why it tends to be read quickly. It puts your forgiving and God's in one sentence rather than making either the price of the other.
If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men.
Romans 12:18 · WEB
If it is possible, and as much as it is up to you. Two limits in one short verse, which together grant that peace with some people is not achievable from your side alone.
A prayer to write
No apology is coming and I have stopped waiting for one. Let me stop requiring it. I am praying for them, badly and without warmth, because that is what you asked for and not a feeling. Show me which part of this is mine.
Write the date you forgave it, and what came back
Forgiveness is almost impossible to measure from the inside, which is why so many people conclude they have not managed it. The feeling is not a gauge. It returns on the anniversary, or when their name appears on a screen, and every return reads as proof the whole thing failed. What you need is a record of what you decided and when.
Prayed keeps that record. Write the prayer in your own words, including the name if the name is the point, and the app matches verses like the ones on this page to what you wrote. Each prayer comes back at three days, a week, a month and a year. The month and the year do the real work here: they hand back the sentence you wrote while the anger was fresh, dated, so you can see from outside how much of it you are still carrying. Nothing you write leaves your phone, and writing is free.
Start tonight with one sentence and the date: what they did, and what you are handing over. Write it again the next time it comes back, which it will. Two dated entries read side by side in a year will tell you more about the distance covered than any amount of checking how you feel this evening.
Write the prayer. Prayed finds the verses.
Prayed is a private prayer journal for iPhone. Write what you're praying for and it matches three verses from the same Bible quoted above, on your phone, then brings the prayer back to you at three days, a week, a month and a year so you see what came of it. No account, no server. Writing is free forever.
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