This week’s message, “How to Forgive When You’ve Been Hurt,” explores Genesis 45:1–15 and invites us to discover what forgiveness really means—and what it doesn’t mean.
Through the story of Joseph and his brothers, we discover four important truths: forgiveness is not forgetting, forgiveness is not condoning what happened, forgiveness does not always require restoring a relationship, and holding onto the past can keep us captive. Forgiveness is hard work. But for followers of Jesus, it is also at the heart of the gospel. We forgive not because the hurt didn’t matter, but because in Christ, God has forgiven us.
If you’re carrying an old resentment, wound, or relationship you can’t seem to release, this message offers practical and biblical encouragement for taking a step toward healing and freedom.
📖 Scripture: Genesis 45:1–15; Ephesians 4:32
🎙️ Message: “How to Forgive When You’ve Been Hurt”
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Reflection Questions
- What hurt or resentment do you find yourself rehearsing rather than releasing?
- How does knowing that forgiveness is not the same as forgetting or condoning change your understanding of forgiveness?
- Is there a relationship where forgiveness is needed but healthy boundaries are still appropriate?
- What might you be holding onto by insisting on being the judge of someone who hurt you?
- How does remembering God’s forgiveness of you change the way you approach someone who has wronged you?
FULL TRANSCRIPT
A Conference I Almost Didn’t Attend
So last week I was not here, because I was at a conference that ended up being not at all what I thought it was. It was far, far better.
I thought I was going on kind of a men’s fitness retreat, because it’s through a group I’ve been part of for about six years called Fit Father Project — an online health group for out-of-shape guys like me. They have an event I’d wanted to go to for a long time. I hadn’t originally planned on going, but a few things aligned, and it felt like: if I’m ever going to go, it needs to be now.
When I got there, I discovered it was really a conference. First off, it wasn’t just men — it was men and women, and not a small group either, about 170 of us. They had thought leaders from around the country speaking on holistic health and longevity.
One speaker I got to hear — we might even want to invite him here sometime — is a Presbyterian elder who spoke on thriving in your 90s. He’s a spitfire of a man, 90 years old, has written and published five books, and didn’t start writing until he was 82 or 83. Vibrant soul. At one point we were all talking about things we look forward to, and he stood up and said, “I’m looking forward to the fact that this is going to be the best decade of my life.” I thought, I want to be you when I grow up.
Dr. Jamil and the Gift of Forgiveness
Among all the fantastic speakers, one really stood out — Dr. Jamil Sayegh. You knew he was going to be good, because he was the only speaker other than the event’s host who got two time slots, one of them a couple of hours long.
Dr. Jamil is a kind, loving man with a humble spirit. I think it’s because, in his twenties, he became the caregiver for his father for three years. His dad had dementia or Alzheimer’s, and progressively became a different person day by day. Dr. Jamil realized he’d been living in the hope that his father would get better — and that in doing so, he wasn’t valuing the dad who was right there in front of him, who was just as valuable and precious and good as he’d always been. That experience reshaped his heart into something deeply humble and loving. He’s known for his hugs — a gentle, generous spirit.
His second keynote was on forgiveness. Because, folks, when we carry resentment, when we carry pain, when we carry hurt, it wrecks our minds, it wrecks our bodies, it wrecks our spirits. An unforgiving spirit is devastating to our health, across the board.
I had been working toward a different sermon idea this week — and I often say the worst thing a preacher can have is a good idea, because we think we already know what we want to preach. I was headed down that road, and it just didn’t sit right, until I realized: the Old Testament passage for today is this incredible story of forgiveness, and I had just spent a week at the feet of someone masterful in understanding forgiveness. So I want to share some of what Dr. Jamil shared with us, because I think it shows up all through this story of Joseph.
He offered four principles of forgiveness. All four show up in this story:
- Forgiveness is not forgetting.
- Forgiveness is not condoning.
- Forgiveness doesn’t require allowing someone back into your life.
- Our attachment to the past only hurts us.
I have my own, more pedestrian way of putting that last one: you can let people live rent-free in your mind. When you hold on to someone who hurt you in the past, they’ve often already moved on — or they don’t even know they hurt you — and you’re the one still paying the rent.
Joseph’s Story, in Brief
If you don’t recall the story, it’s a long one, but here are the highlights. Joseph was one of many brothers and was clearly favored by his father, who gave him an elaborate coat — a coat of many colors, or in some translations a coat with long sleeves, meaning he didn’t have to work. It was a sign of favor, and his brothers resented him for it. Joseph didn’t help matters: he had dreams that symbolically foretold he would one day rule over his brothers, and he went ahead and told them about it. Not his brightest moment.
One day, out away from the house, some of his brothers plotted to kill him. One brother intervened, and instead they threw him into a pit, took his coat, and smeared it with animal blood to convince their father he’d been killed. Then a caravan passed by, and rather than leave him to die, they sold him into slavery.
What followed looked, on the surface, like Joseph going from the frying pan into the fire again and again — pit, slave caravan, prison. But underneath it, God was redeeming each setback, progressively moving Joseph toward a position of great power in Egypt, arriving right as a famine struck the region. That’s where today’s passage picks up: Joseph’s brothers, desperate from famine, come to Egypt for help — not recognizing that the powerful official in front of them is the younger brother they discarded years before.
Principle One: Forgiveness Is Not Forgetting
We cannot forget, and it’s probably not healthy to pretend we have. When someone has harmed us, or we’ve harmed someone else, we can’t change the story of what happened. We can change how we carry it years later, but denying it, pushing it down, pushing it aside — that’s like setting a time bomb. It goes off when you least expect it and least want it to.
Joseph didn’t forget. He recognized his brothers immediately, and he was cautious about bringing them back into his life. We’ll come back to that.
Principle Two: Forgiveness Is Not Condoning
Sometimes we think forgiving someone means saying what they did was all right. In our humanness, most of us want our pound of flesh — to be justified when we’ve been wronged. So it’s hard to accept that forgiving doesn’t mean excusing.
Joseph didn’t excuse anything. He told his brothers plainly: “What you intended for harm, God used for good.” He doesn’t pretend their intentions were anything other than what they were — they meant to hurt him. He forgives them, but he doesn’t condone what they did; he names it clearly as wrong.
What Joseph does is leave judgment in the hands of the only one positioned to judge. He relinquishes his claim to a pound of flesh because that’s not his role. We can’t call evil good, or dismiss it — and if we’ve grown up around abuse, we may be especially tempted to excuse someone else’s wrongdoing, or even take the blame for it ourselves. That’s not healthy, and it’s not what Scripture calls us to. We live under the mercy of someone who could judge us but instead forgave us — and that’s the posture we’re meant to live out of.
Principle Three: Forgiveness Doesn’t Require Letting Someone Back In
In this story, Joseph does bring his brothers back in — he embraces them, provides for them, relocates them to good land in a time of want. But notice how careful he is getting there. He watches them. He tests them, to see whether their hearts have actually changed. He doesn’t rush to “all’s well that ends well.”
It is completely acceptable to set boundaries with someone who has harmed you. That doesn’t make you less forgiving. Jesus himself lays out a process in the Gospels: go to the person privately; if that doesn’t work, bring others in; try to reconcile as a community. And if the person still won’t respond, Jesus says you’re free to no longer be in relationship with them. Jesus calls us to forgive — not to be doormats.
Where exactly that line falls is hard to say. Jesus also tells us to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven. I’ll admit I probably give up on reconciliation faster than I should — and my guess is a lot of you are like me in that.
Principle Four: Living Rent-Free in Our Minds
When we won’t forgive someone, it’s like living in a prison with an open door — we just refuse to walk out. There’s a payoff to staying angry, to feeling justified, and sometimes we are in the right; there are people who do heinous things, and hurting people hurt people. But as long as we let them live in our heads, they hold us captive.
Forgiveness is partly about relationship — ideally we’d all reconcile every situation and go home singing kumbaya. It doesn’t always work that way. But we still need to forgive for our own healing. If we’re struggling to let go of resentment, that struggle points to a wound in us that still needs God’s healing. We need to ask God for that healing so we can step out of the prison.
Forgiven, So We Forgive
As much as I love those four principles, I want to layer one more piece on top. Paul wrote to the Ephesians: be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Those four principles are good, sound, and would make us healthier people if we lived by them. But as believers we have a higher calling to forgive — because we’ve been forgiven. There’s only one who stands in a position to condemn, and that’s Christ Jesus, who came and died for us. We’re not entitled to hold the forgiveness we’ve received over anyone else’s head.
Dr. Jamil said something I’m still wrestling with, intellectually more than in my heart: “No one deserves my judgment. They do deserve my love.” My first reaction was, I can think of a few people who deserve some judgment. But the key word is my. People may deserve judgment — but who am I to be the one who administers it? Because I’ve received forgiveness, others deserve my love too — not because of anything they’ve done, but because of what I’ve received. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s ugly, even when it’s painful — that’s when we surrender ourselves to Christ and try to live the way Christ lived toward us.
An Ancient Practice: Ho’oponopono
Dr. Jamil also shared with us an old Hawaiian practice called ho’oponopono, which means “to set things right.” It’s an ancient ceremony for forgiveness. We took time to sit quietly and, in our minds, picture a stage — bringing people onto it, one by one, with whom we needed reconciliation.
You might picture a friend who hurt you deeply. In your mind’s eye, you first pour God’s love and light over that person and over yourself. Then you stand before them and say what needs to be said. Then you say, “I forgive you.” And here’s the real turn: “Can you forgive me?” — because we often don’t realize how we contributed to a situation, or how harboring hatred and resentment shaped us too. So even if we weren’t at fault, we bring humility: “Forgive me for the hatred and anger I let myself carry toward you.” “I forgive you. Can you forgive me? Thank you. I love you.” Then you move to the next person — acquaintances, family members, your children — and, hardest of all, yourself.
Sometimes the biggest work is forgiving ourselves — especially once you start seeing how old pain shaped your own behavior. Giving yourself grace to say, that was horrible, that was terrible, and then forgiving yourself for how you carried it and reacted to it, so you can move forward.
It’s not easy work, folks. Forgiveness is hard, hard work. But it is the absolute heart of the gospel — if we don’t get this right as believers, the gospel crumbles beneath our feet.
The Comprehensive Exam
This is sort of like one of those things schools have at the end of the year — a comprehensive exam. You have all the little tests along the way, but then there’s the big one at the end.
When I first went off to school, to an engineering school in Rolla — now Missouri S&T, though it’s been a school in search of a last name; it was Missouri School of Mines, then University of Missouri-Rolla — there was a class for electrical engineers that was known as the washout class. It had a comprehensive exam where you could ace every test, every paper, all year long, but if you got a D on that final comprehensive exam, you got a D for the class.
In a way, forgiveness is the comprehensive exam. You can nail all the other things, but at the end of the day, if we can’t nail forgiveness, we haven’t really understood grace. We haven’t embodied grace. Because if we’re not able to give it, we’re still just trying to understand it.
An Invitation
So I want to invite you — challenge is a hard word, I’ll say invite — to do the hard work of forgiveness. We’ll take some time in our prayer time this morning to actually do that work. Be as honest with yourself as you possibly can, because the things we hide in the little corners sneak out to get us later. We can’t hide things under the rug. We have to face them — but face them with Christ by our side. That’s the beauty of it. You’re not alone. Christ is by your side when you do the hard work of forgiveness.
Praise be to God — we have a God who forgives us, a God who loves us, a God who did the hardest work that’s ever been done to forgive people, by giving himself. Praise be to God for that love. Let us embody it.