The Cost of Forgiveness

Good morning, church. Before we get started today, I want to ask you a question, and I want you to be honest with yourselves. Don’t raise your hand. Don’t look at anyone. Just sit with the question for a second.

Is there someone in your life right now that you have not forgiven? Someone whose name, when it comes up in conversation, makes your jaw tighten just a little? Someone you’ve maybe told yourself you’ve forgiven, but if they walked through that door right now, your stomach would drop?

Yeah. I can see some of you shifting in your seats. That’s okay. I shifted in mine when I was writing this sermon, because this one is for me too.

We’re in week eleven of our Genesis series, and we’ve walked a long road to get here. We’ve seen creation, fall, promise, betrayal, famine, and exile. And today we arrive at what I think is the emotional climax of the entire book — the moment Joseph stands face to face with the brothers who destroyed his life, and he has to decide what to do about it.

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to Genesis chapter 50. We’re going to start in verse 15.

Now, let me set the scene. Jacob has just died. Joseph’s father — the one person who was the bridge between Joseph and his brothers — is gone. And the brothers are terrified. Because without their father, they think the only thing standing between them and revenge has been removed. Listen to what they say.

Genesis 50, verses 15 through 21. "When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, ‘What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?’ So they sent word to Joseph, saying, ‘Your father left these instructions before he died: This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly. Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father.’ When their message came to him, Joseph wept. His brothers then came and threw themselves down before him. ‘We are your slaves,’ they said. But Joseph said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.’ And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them."

This is the Word of the Lord. Let’s pray.

Father, open our ears. Open our hearts. Give us courage for what your Word demands of us this morning. Amen.

I want to start by being really honest about something. Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful words in the Christian vocabulary, and it is also one of the most abused.

We throw it around like confetti. Someone hurts us, and well-meaning friends say, “You just need to forgive them.” As if it’s a light switch. As if you can just flip it and suddenly the wound doesn’t ache anymore. As if saying the words makes the damage disappear. And when we can’t do that — when we can’t just get over it — we feel like failures. Like we’re bad Christians.

Think about what Joseph’s brothers did to him. This was not a small offense. They didn’t just hurt his feelings. They didn’t just say something unkind at Thanksgiving dinner. They threw him into a pit. They debated killing him. And then they decided it was more profitable to sell him as a slave to a passing caravan. He was seventeen years old.

Seventeen. Some of you have seventeen-year-olds. Imagine your child ripped from your home, sold like livestock, carried to a foreign country where they know no one, speak the language poorly, and have no rights. And then imagine the people who did it were your other children.

That is the weight of what Joseph is being asked to forgive. Not a minor slight. Not a misunderstanding. A life-altering, decades-long trauma inflicted by the people who were supposed to love him most.

And here’s what I want you to see — the text tells us Joseph wept. Verse 17: “When their message came to him, Joseph wept.” Why? Because this was not easy. Because forgiveness cost Joseph something. It cost him the right to be angry. It cost him the satisfaction of justice. It cost him the narrative he’d built about himself as the victim.

And I think it’s worth noting — scholars debate whether the brothers were even telling the truth about Jacob’s deathbed instructions. Some commentators believe they fabricated that message out of fear. Which means Joseph may have been weeping not just because forgiveness is hard, but because even in this moment, his brothers are still manipulating him. Still lying. Still trying to manage him instead of being honest with him.

And he forgives them anyway. Let that sink in.

Lewis Smedes, the late theologian, wrote something that has never left me. He said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” That’s the paradox of unforgiveness. We think we’re punishing the other person by holding onto it. But they’re out there living their lives. We’re the ones carrying the weight.

I’ve sat with people in my office — good people, faithful people — who are being eaten alive by bitterness. And the person they’re bitter toward doesn’t even know it. Hasn’t thought about it in years. The unforgiveness is a prison, and the person who wronged you is not the one locked inside. You are.

But let me say this carefully: acknowledging that unforgiveness hurts us does not mean we forgive for selfish reasons. We don’t forgive just because it’s good for our mental health, like some kind of spiritual self-care hack. We forgive because we have been forgiven. That’s the engine.

Jesus puts it bluntly in Matthew 18. Peter comes to him and asks, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother? Up to seven times?” And Peter probably thought he was being generous. The rabbis of his day taught three times was sufficient. Peter doubled it and added one. And Jesus says, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Which is his way of saying: stop counting.

Stop keeping the ledger. Forgiveness is not a transaction with a limit. It is a posture. It is a way of moving through the world that says, “I refuse to let what was done to me define what I become.”

Now, I know some of you are sitting there thinking, “Pastor Michael, you don’t know what they did to me.” And you’re right. I don’t. But God does. And He’s not asking you to pretend it didn’t happen. He’s asking you to release it into His hands.

That’s the distinction. Forgiveness does not mean reconciliation. Forgiveness does not mean trust. Forgiveness does not mean you go back to the relationship as if nothing happened. Sometimes the wisest, healthiest, most godly thing you can do is forgive someone from a distance. But the releasing — the letting go of the right to retaliate, the surrendering of the fantasy of payback — that is non-negotiable for the follower of Jesus.

So let’s look at what Joseph actually does, because I think his response is one of the most theologically rich statements in the entire Old Testament.

Second, he reframes the narrative. “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” This is not Joseph saying the evil was actually good. It wasn’t. What his brothers did was wicked. What Joseph is saying is that God is a better author than evil is a destroyer. That God can take the worst chapter in your story and fold it into a plot so redemptive that the very thing meant to break you becomes the thing that saves others.

Do you hear that? I need you to hear that. Because some of you have been through things that should have ended you. Abuse. Betrayal. Loss that doesn’t make sense. And you’ve been asking, “Where was God in that?” And the answer Joseph gives is: He was writing a bigger story than you could see from inside the pit.

That’s not a platitude. That’s theology. Joseph isn’t speaking from the pit. He’s speaking from the palace, looking back. He has the perspective of distance. And even with that perspective, he doesn’t explain away the pain. He holds two truths at the same time: what they did was evil, and what God did with it was good. Both are true. Both matter.

Third — and this is the part that wrecks me — Joseph provides for them. Verse 21: “I will provide for you and your children.” He doesn’t just stop punishing them. He actively blesses them. He takes responsibility for the wellbeing of the very people who ruined his youth.

That’s not natural. That is supernatural. That is the work of a God who has been shaping Joseph’s character through twenty years of slavery and prison and loneliness and faithfulness in the dark.

Let me ask you something. Could you do that? Could you look at the person who wrecked your marriage, or betrayed your trust, or wounded your child, or stole your career — could you look at them and say, “I’m going to take care of you”? That is the cost of forgiveness. It costs you everything natural in you, and it requires everything supernatural in God.

But there’s something else in Joseph’s response that I don’t want us to miss. He asks a question: “Am I in the place of God?” That question is the hinge. It’s the key that unlocks forgiveness. Because what Joseph is really saying is: “Vengeance doesn’t belong to me. Justice is not my job. I am not God, and when I try to be, I become something worse than what was done to me.”

Paul picks up this exact thread in Romans 12. He writes, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” And then Paul adds something stunning: “On the contrary: if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.”

There it is. The Joseph pattern in New Testament language. Name the evil. Release the vengeance. Bless the offender. Not because they deserve it. They don’t. But because you have been transformed by a God who did the same thing for you.

I read a story this week about a woman named Corrie ten Boom. Some of you know her. She survived a Nazi concentration camp where her sister Betsie died. After the war, she traveled the world preaching about forgiveness. And one night, after a talk in Munich, a man approached her. She recognized him immediately. He had been one of the guards at Ravensbrück. He stuck out his hand and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that God forgives all our sins?”

And Corrie described the moment as feeling like her arm was made of lead. She couldn’t lift it. She prayed silently, “Jesus, I cannot forgive this man. Give me your forgiveness.” And she said that when she finally reached out and took his hand, she felt a warmth travel from her shoulder down her arm and into their clasped hands. And she said, “I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Colossians 3:13 puts it this way: “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That last phrase is the standard. Not “forgive as you’re able.” Not “forgive when it feels right.” Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Freely. Completely. At great cost.

And that brings us to the cross. Because we cannot talk about forgiveness without talking about the cross. Everything we’ve seen in Joseph is a shadow. A beautiful, profound shadow, but a shadow. The substance is Jesus.

Think about it. Joseph was betrayed by his brothers. Jesus was betrayed by one of His closest friends. Joseph was sold for twenty pieces of silver. Jesus was sold for thirty. Joseph was thrown into a pit. Jesus was laid in a tomb. Joseph rose to power and used that power to save the very people who harmed him. Jesus rose from the dead and used His resurrection to offer salvation to the very people who crucified Him.

The parallels are staggering. And they’re intentional. The whole story of Joseph is pointing forward to a greater Joseph — one who would not merely forgive from a position of political power but would forgive from a cross. While dying. While bleeding. While being mocked by the very people He came to save.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” That’s Luke 23:34. Those words were spoken not from a throne in Egypt but from a Roman instrument of execution. That’s the model. That’s what forgiveness looks like at its ultimate expression. It is self-giving love in the face of unrepentant cruelty.

And here’s the thing that keeps me up at night. The people Jesus forgave from the cross — some of them never asked for it. Some of them never repented. Some of them walked away that afternoon and never thought about it again. And He forgave them anyway.

That means forgiveness is not contingent on the other person’s response. It’s not a contract. It’s a gift — one the recipient may never even unwrap. But you give it anyway, because forgiveness is ultimately not about them. It’s about who you are becoming in the hands of God.

I know this is hard. I’m not standing up here pretending it isn’t. I have had to forgive people who never apologized. I have had to release debts that will never be repaid. And every single time, it has felt like dying. Because it is. It’s a small death. It’s the death of your right to hold someone accountable on your own terms. But on the other side of that death is resurrection. Every single time.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who himself was executed by the Nazis, wrote: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.” Forgiveness is costly grace. It is not free. Someone always pays. The question is whether you’ll keep making the other person pay, or whether you’ll let the cross absorb the debt.

Joseph chose to absorb it. Jesus chose to absorb it. And this morning, God is asking you: will you choose to absorb it?

Not to pretend it didn’t happen. Not to minimize your pain. Not to trust blindly again. But to open your hands and say, “I release this debt. I release this person. I trust you, God, with the justice I cannot execute and the healing I cannot manufacture.”

That is the cost of forgiveness. And it is worth every penny. Because what you get in return is freedom. Not freedom from the memory, but freedom from the chains. Not freedom from the scar, but freedom from the infection. The wound may leave a mark, but it no longer controls you.

So here’s what I want to ask you to do this week. And I want you to take this seriously, because I believe God brought you here today for a reason.

First, name it. Write down the name of the person you need to forgive. Write down what they did. Be specific. Don’t sanitize it. God already knows. He can handle your honesty. Part of the reason forgiveness feels impossible is because we’ve never actually defined the debt. You can’t release what you haven’t acknowledged.

Second, grieve it. Give yourself permission to feel the weight of what was done to you. Forgiveness is not the denial of pain. It is the decision to no longer let that pain have the final word. But you have to feel it first. Joseph wept. The text says he wept. If the second most powerful man in Egypt can weep over a wound decades old, you can weep over yours.

Third, release it. And this is the hard one. This is where you say, either in prayer or on paper or out loud in the car on the way home, “I forgive [name] for [what they did]. I release this debt. I am no longer their judge. God, this is yours now.”

And listen — you may have to do that every day for a year. Forgiveness is not always a moment. Sometimes it’s a marathon. Sometimes you release it on Monday and pick it back up on Tuesday and have to release it again on Wednesday. That is not failure. That is faithfulness. You keep laying it down until it stays down.

Fourth, bless. Find some way — even if it’s just in prayer — to bless the person who hurt you. Pray for their wellbeing. Pray for their family. Pray that God would do in their life what He’s doing in yours. This is the Joseph move. This is the Jesus move. It is the most counterintuitive and powerful thing you will ever do.

I am not asking you to do this in your own strength. I know you can’t. I can’t either. But remember what Corrie ten Boom discovered — when she could not lift her arm, she asked Jesus for His forgiveness. And it flowed through her. You are the conduit. He is the source.

If you are in this room today and you are carrying a grudge that has been eating you alive — whether it’s been three weeks or thirty years — I want you to know: today can be the day. Not the day you forget. Not the day you pretend it’s okay. But the day you set the prisoner free. And discover that the prisoner was you.

Church, I’m going to ask the worship team to come up. And I’m going to invite you into a moment of silence. No music yet. Just quiet. I want you to sit with the name and the face and the wound. And I want you to bring it to God.

And if you need to weep, weep. If you need to clench your fists and then slowly open them, do that. This is holy ground, and there is no judgment here.

Let’s pray. Father, you know the names we’re holding in our hearts right now. You know the wounds. You know the debts that feel unpayable. We bring them to you, not because we are strong enough to forgive, but because you are. Do in us what we cannot do ourselves. Let your forgiveness flow through us today. In the name of Jesus, who forgave us everything. Amen.