Have We Been Getting Forgiveness Wrong?

What Jesus Actually Taught and Why It Changes Everything

I have to be honest with you.

When I came across TC Cannon's True Comfort Podcast and her series on biblical forgiveness featuring theologian and author Pastor Chris Bronze and Pastor Matt Ferguson, I had one of those moments where I just had to sit with it. You know that feeling when something you believed for a long time gets gently but firmly turned upside down? That happened to me.

I'm a licensed counselor. I've been for almost 30 years sitting across from hundreds of women carrying wounds so deep they could barely speak them out loud. Abuse. Betrayal. Abandonment. In that chair, in that space, forgiveness comes up. Every. Single. Time.

So when I tell you that what TC and these pastors are saying matters, I mean it from both my professional and my sister-in-Christ seat.

The Teaching Most of Us Received

If I asked you right now to define forgiveness, what would you say?

If you’re like most Christians I know, you’d say something like: "Forgiveness is something I do for myself. It is letting go of the bitterness. It is releasing the other person so I can be free. It does not mean what they did was okay. It just means I am not going to let it hold me anymore."

Sound familiar? I've said versions of that, and I've even taught versions of that.

TC Cannon calls this therapeutic forgiveness, and she doesn't use that as a compliment. She traces it back to the influence of modern psychology and postmodern culture seeping into the church, particularly through an author named Lewis B. Smedes, who, in the mid-20th century, openly described his therapeutic view of forgiveness as a new revelation about something Jesus had already taught plainly.

The therapeutic model isn’t evil. Nobody promoting it carried bad intentions. TC herself believed it, taught it, and wrote about it. But good intentions don't make something biblical. And that is where this conversation is important.

What the Bible Actually Says

Pastor Chris Bronze puts it simply, “We are to forgive others as God forgives us.” 

Simple enough, right?  I've heard preachers preach this, I've read in my Bible...

Ephesians 4:32. Colossians 3:13. We forgive as God in Christ forgave us. That means God's model of forgiveness is our template. So now, the question is, how does God forgive?

If you’ve read your Bible cover to cover, you already know the answer, even if you haven't yet connected it to this topic. God does not forgive unrepentant sin.

Think about it. The entire sacrificial system in the Old Testament is God's loving provision for his people to repent and be reconciled to him. Every prophet who ever walked this earth essentially carried the same message: "Repent! Return to the Lord!" John the Baptist came saying the same thing. Jesus himself, at the very start of his ministry in Mark 1:15, said: "Repent and believe the good news." Peter stood up after Pentecost and said, "Repent."

Repentance is not a footnote. God wove it through the entirety of Scripture. Pause here. I'm going to say it again.  Repentance is a theme woven throughout the stories of the whole Bible. Therefore, if God's forgiveness is always connected to repentance, and we are to forgive others as God forgives us, then shouldn't our forgiveness be connected to repentance, too? If so, what does that look like in our own lives?

Jesus tells us in detail.

Matthew 18:15 Through 35: The Teaching We Keep Reading Wrong

Matthew 18:15-35 contains Jesus' longest, most explicit teaching on interpersonal forgiveness. As a counselor, I love that he gave us a clear, step-by-step process. He wasn't vague in providing us with this instruction.

Before we walk through this passage, it helps to understand a common literary pattern used in the Bible. Ancient writers often used specific structures to communicate meaning and emphasis. Scholars study these patterns to better understand what the author intended to highlight. Once you become aware of these techniques, you begin to see deeper connections and themes within the biblical text.

One of these techniques is called inclusio. An inclusio is sometimes described as bracketing because a passage begins and ends with a similar idea or phrase. This structure frames the entire section and signals that everything within those “bookends” belongs to a single, cohesive thought or theme.

For example, Matthew 18 begins with the idea of dealing with sin between believers: “If your brother sins against you…” and it ends with a strong warning about forgiveness: “…so also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

These opening and closing statements frame the entire chapter and reveal the central theme: how believers are to handle sin, humility, and forgiveness within the family of God.

Everything between those two statements is one unified lesson. You cannot pull Peter's question about 70x7 out of this passage and use it as a standalone teaching. It must stay in its context. All of it together. Once you read it that way, so much clicks into place.

Steps:

Step 1: Go to your brother alone.

"If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother."

The goal sits right there in the text: you have gained your brother. Relationship restored. Jesus presents this as the ideal and achievable outcome, starting with a conversation grounded in truth. You go. You name what happened. You give your brother the opportunity to see himself clearly and repent.

Jesus does NOT say: "Go talk to him, and whether he listens or not, forgive him in your heart and move on." That instruction does not appear anywhere in the text. We have been reading it in.

Step 2: Bring witnesses.

When private confrontation fails, Jesus does not say to forgive the person internally and move on. He says to bring one or two others along. Their presence establishes truth and adds the loving weight of community to the call for repentance. The goal stays the same. Still pursuing restoration.

Step 3: Tell it to the church.

The whole community of faith now surrounds this person, not to shame them, but to say: "We love you too much to leave you here."

And if he still refuses?

This is the verse most of us skip right over: "Let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." Break fellowship.

Jesus, the same Jesus who told us to love our enemies, says that when someone refuses to repent after all of that, you remove them from the covenant community. He does NOT say: "Forgive them anyway in your heart." He says the relationship stays broken until repentance comes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured it well: "There is nothing crueler than the love that just consigns another one to his sin."

Therapeutic forgiveness dismantles the very mechanism Jesus designed to pursue restoration. When a victim already "forgave internally," the offender has zero incentive to repent. Without meaning to, we became enablers and dressed it up as grace.

What About Peter's Question?

"Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?"

Reading it in context, immediately following Jesus' description of pursuing a repentant brother, Peter asks a natural follow-up: "What if he repents and does it again? Is there a limit?"

In Jewish culture at the time, people considered forgiving someone three times extraordinarily gracious. Peter stretches that to seven. Jesus says no, there is no ceiling. Every time your brother genuinely repents, you forgive him.

Luke 17:3 through 4 states the condition without any ambiguity:

"If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times saying 'I repent,' you must forgive him."

If he repents. Right there. Plain as day.

Luke wrote both his gospel and the book of Acts. Matthew wrote his gospel. Both authors, within their own writings, include passages that make repentance the condition of forgiveness. Pastor Matt Ferguson makes a compelling argument: you do not read another author's silence on repentance as evidence that the condition is eliminated. You let the same author's explicit statements define it.

But What About Jesus on the Cross?

This is usually where people push back, and it’s a completely fair question. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Jesus didn’t say "I forgive you." He asked his Father to forgive them, should they repent. He did not pronounce forgiveness over unrepentant people. He interceded. He prayed. He loved his enemies in the most powerful way possible, by asking God to open the door of forgiveness to them.

He did directly forgive someone on the cross: the thief who, in that moment, acknowledged who Jesus was and confessed his own guilt. That thief repented. Jesus responded immediately: "Today you will be with me in paradise."

The other thief? Silence.

What Jesus showed us on the cross was this: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, trust the Father with ultimate justice, and intercede for those who wound you. God always calls us to that. But that’s not the same thing as pronouncing forgiveness over the unrepentant.

What This Means in the Counseling Room

I want to speak directly to those who have been deeply hurt. Maybe you survived abuse. Maybe someone in the church betrayed you. You may carry wounds that people told you to just forgive and move on from.

You have not failed spiritually because you haven’t forgiven someone who never said they were sorry.

Jesus doesn’t require that of you. Scripture places the moral weight on the offender to repent, not on the victim to unilaterally release them.

What God does require of you is what TC calls preforgiveness work:

• You surrender your desire for personal vengeance to God.

• You pray for your offender, even when it costs you something.

• You refuse to let bitterness take root in your heart.

• You keep your heart in a posture of willingness so that when repentance comes, you are ready.

This isn’t the same as forgiveness. But it’s holy work. It’s hard work. And God sees every bit of it.

Think about the prodigal son's father. He doesn’t model unconditional forgiveness. He models radical readiness. He watches the horizon. He stays prepared. The moment he sees his son returning, he runs. That readiness, that posture of the heart, is what God calls us to. And it is beautiful. And it is enough until repentance comes.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individual

From both my counseling seat and my faith seat, I want to name three specific ways that teaching therapeutic forgiveness as the biblical standard does real damage.

It burdens the already broken.

We pile false guilt onto people who have already lost so much. They suffered wounds, received no repentance, and now they carry spiritual failure on top of everything else. That’s not the yoke of Christ. His yoke is easy. His burden is light.

It enables unrepentant people.

I have watched this unfold in the counseling room more times than I can count. An abuser stays in his pattern because real consequences never arrive. The church says "forgive and move on," and the cycle continues. We think we extend grace, but we’ve actually enabled harm.

It strips our witness of its gospel power.

TC said something that stopped me cold: when we forgive unilaterally, without repentance, we model something completely unlike the gospel. The gospel requires repentance. Jesus died so repentance could open the door to forgiveness. When we bypass repentance in our personal relationships, we preach, without meaning to, a gospel that does not need the cross.

This Isn't New. This Is a Return.

Nothing that TC Cannon and these pastors teach is radical. They didn’t invent a new theology. They read Matthew 18 from verse 15 through verse 35. They took Luke 17:3-4 at face value.

The early church understood this. Ancient Jewish culture understood this. Secular psychological frameworks, dressed up in Christian language, shifted the definition somewhere along the way. That shift cost us something real.

The remedy is simple, even if the work is not: Read the text - all of it. Let Jesus say what he said.

Then trust that what he designed, this costly, two-party process of repentance and forgiveness, is not only more biblical than what we have been practicing. It’s more healing, just, and loving. It reflects the gospel more truthfully than anything the therapeutic model could ever offer.

Biblical forgiveness is a living parable of the gospel. It requires truth, repentance, and grace. Just like salvation does.

God designed it that way. He knew exactly what he was doing. Trust it.

Inspired by TC Cannon's True Comfort Podcast and her conversations with Pastors Chris Bronze and Matt Ferguson

To go deeper on this topic, I highly recommend TC Cannon's True Comfort Podcast and Pastor Chris Bronze's book Unpacking Forgiveness. Both resources are theologically grounded and full of genuine compassion for people who are hurting.

Jane Perkins, LCPC, Christian Biblical Counselor | Anchored Woman - Christian Life Coach