“The Courage to Forgive”

“The Courage to Forgive”

Matthew 18:21–35 & Romans 12:9-19

Rev. Mark Bartsch

Kobe Union Church

15 February 2026

One of the traps Christians often fall into is what I call the “Nice Guy” trap. This shows up most often around the topic of forgiveness. To be clear, I want you to be kind. (I want to be a kind person) I want you to be a nice guy. Many of us know the Christian song from the 70s: “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That is a fundamental truth. Kindness matters. We will attract more people to Christ through kindness than by being harsh. We do better by listening more than we speak and by following the command: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). 

John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (that Jesus)… full of grace and truth”. Jesus is not 50% grace and 50% justice—He was 100% of both. Scripture says, Not grace instead of truth, and not truth without grace—both, fully and perfectly aligned in the savior. 

When it comes to forgiveness, especially when we are hurt, some believers choose being “nice” (Grace) over being “honest” (Truth) with the people who hurt them. People need honesty as much as they need kindness. If we are never honest about the pain caused, how will anyone learn or grow? 

We see Jesus on the cross, in agony, praying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Without meaning to, we turn that into a message that says, “Just take it. Don’t complain. Forgive them even though we do not want to.”  We assume that following Jesus means forgiving quickly, staying quiet, and not making a fuss—especially when someone asks for forgiveness.

We often force the words before we have allowed the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts. As a result, many believers feel pressure to forgive the moment someone asks. Others feel guilty when they cannot forgive right away. They think something is wrong with them—that if they were better Christians, this wouldn't be so hard. But that is not true.

Yes, Jesus forgave us from the cross. Yes, we are called to forgive—because carrying unforgiveness will crush us over time. I have seen it. It is a weight God never intended us to carry. But that does not mean we are supposed to offer shallow, polite forgiveness before we have dealt honestly with the wound. And many of us have been wounded.

Believe it or not, part of forgiveness is teaching that harmful behavior should not be repeated. When God forgives us, He is also calling us to repentance and change. There is never true repentance without change. 

We see this clearly with Zacchaeus. When Jesus welcomed him, Zacchaeus responded by changing his life. He repaid those he had cheated and stopped his dishonest ways. He didn't just say he was sorry; he took action. “Today salvation has come to this house,” Jesus said of him in Luke 19:9. Forgiveness did not excuse the behavior—it transformed it.

Saying the words is not the same as true forgiveness, just as saying the words does not make someone a Christian if the heart is not changed. “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). See it is not just the words and the belief that saves us. A true confession is never just lip service; it comes from the heart.

Too often, we treat forgiveness like good manners—saying “it’s okay” when it clearly is not okay. Real forgiveness does not ignore the wound or pretend nothing happened. Grace does not mean denial. Forgiveness is honest, difficult work. It takes time, and it takes courage—not the courage to look spiritual, but the courage to tell the truth about what actually hurt us.

Sometimes the most faithful thing we can say is: “I am not ready to forgive you. What you did hurt me deeply, and I am still dealing with it. I am asking the Lord for the strength to get to the point to forgive you, but I can’t right now. Please pray for me as I work through this.” That is honesty and when the Holy Spirit does move that person can forgive fully.

Our human instinct is to blame the other person. We replay what they did, list their failures, and explain why our anger is justified. And sometimes our anger is justified. But Jesus does not let us begin there. He says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). 

Jesus is not denying that the speck exists. Or that it needs to come out. Specks in the eye hurt. You have specks so do I. And I am grateful for brothers in Christ who have come along side me to help me remove this painful thing from my life. But before healing can happen, He insists that we deal with what is inside us. We must face the bitterness and the desire for payback that we have been nurturing. Forgiveness that happens only with the mouth but not the heart is not forgiveness; it is denial. And denial does not lead to freedom. To forgive, we must be honest—honest about how much we want to hold on to the anger, and honest about how much we want the other person to pay.

My understanding of forgiveness was shaped by my relationship with my older brother. When we were young, we were close. But our paths separated. My brother struggled academically and got involved with drugs in junior high school. When he could not pay his debts, the people selling drugs to him came after me. Being beaten up and having my paper route money stolen was not unusual. That is where my anger began.

In high school, he ran away from home. I watched what that did to my parents—the stress, the fear, and the constant tears. For me, a “good” family gathering became a gathering where he was not there. I told myself my anger was justified. I called it a “boundary.” 

God worked in many areas of my life, but this was the one place I would not let Him touch. I believed that letting go of my anger meant saying that what he did to me and my family did not matter. I carried it like a stone in my pocket—small enough to ignore at times, heavy enough that I always knew it was there.

Then God called me to seminary. Studying Scripture while holding dislike and disgust for your own brother is a deeply uncomfortable experience. During that time, God made one thing clear: it was time to let go. The words that stayed with me were from Jesus: “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined” (Luke 5:37). My old anger could not hold the new thing God was doing in my life. And this is a struggle with a lot of us. We want God to do a new thing in our lives, in our churches, in our homes but we do not want to change the color of the carpets or the way we do things our old wineskins.

In Matthew 18, Jesus tells a parable about a servant who owed a king ten thousand talents—an impossible amount of money. The servant begged for mercy, and the king, moved by compassion, canceled the entire debt. But that same servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii—a small amount—and began to choke him, demanding payment.

When the king found out, he was furious. He said, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” (Matthew 18:33). This is the core of the Christian struggle with forgiveness. We are often the servant who has been forgiven a debt we could never pay, yet we spend our lives trying to collect "pennies" from the people who have wronged us. We want God’s grace, but we want strict justice for everyone else.

Some of you have been carrying that stone of resentment for so long we forgot what it feels like to walk without it. You have adjusted your steps, guarded your heart, and told yourself, “This is just how it is.” But that is not the life Jesus died to give you.

The enemy loves unforgiveness because it keeps us chained to the past. Every time we replay the hurt, every time we rehearse the offense, we are still letting that moment control us. But Christ did not just die to forgive our sins; He died to set captives free. And sometimes the captive is not the person who hurt us—it is us.

Forgiveness is not saying the pain didn’t matter. It is saying the pain will not be my master. It is choosing to trust that God is a better Judge than I am. When we release the debt, we are not letting evil win—we are placing justice back where it belongs, into the hands of a holy and righteous God. “Do not avenge yourselves,” Paul writes, “but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19).

This is where courage comes in. Forgiveness requires the courage to give God what is God’s. It is the courage to step down from the seat of judge and jury. It is admitting that carrying the verdict has been crushing us, and trusting that God sees more clearly, judges more rightly, and loves more perfectly than we ever could.

Notice Paul doesn’t say, “Wait until you feel like it.” He says, “Let it go.” Forgiveness is hard because it is an act of obedience before it is an act of emotion. If you wait until you feel ready, you may wait forever. Forgiveness is a decision to stop the cycle, trusting that peace will come later.

That is real courage. Not pretending nothing happened. Not smiling through clenched teeth. But bringing the wound into the light and saying, “Lord, this still hurts—but I trust You more than I trust my anger.”

And here is the mystery: when we open our hands to release the debt, God fills those same hands with His peace. The space once occupied by bitterness becomes room for grace. The energy once spent on resentment becomes strength for love. The miracle of forgiveness is not that the past changes, but that we do.

When we refuse to forgive, we are quietly saying that Christ’s sacrifice was enough for us, but not enough for the person who hurt us. We place ourselves above the King. But when we forgive, we acknowledge the truth—that we all stand in need of the same mercy, and that justice belongs to God alone.

So today, don’t ask, “Do they deserve it?” They probably don’t. You didn’t deserve your forgiveness either. Instead, ask, “Do I want to be free?”

Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. It only destroys the vessel it is stored in. Letting go is not saying the other person was right. It is saying you refuse to be their prisoner anymore. It is trusting that God’s conviction—those “burning coals”—will do the work that only God can do, while you walk away into the light.

Forgiveness is not just a gift we give to others; it is a gift we finally allow God to give to us. It is the end of the “nice Christian” performance and the beginning of real, honest, Christ-shaped strength. It is the ability to look at a wound and say, “This happened. It was wrong. But it no longer owns me.”

As you leave today, think about that stone in your pocket. Think about the name attached to it. Is it worth the weight? Is it worth the limp? Or are you ready to trust that the God who forgave you everything is capable of handling the person who hurt you?

Discussion Questions

1. Where do you see the difference between being “nice” and being truly honest in forgiveness?Why do you think honesty can feel harder—or riskier—than simply being polite?

2. Romans 12:19 says, “Do not avenge yourselves… but leave room for the wrath of God.”What does it look like in real life to “leave room for God” instead of holding on to anger or the desire for payback?

3. Is there a “stone in your pocket” you’ve been carrying—an old hurt or resentment?What might freedom look like if you trusted God with that situation instead of carrying it yourself?