View in Browser | Subscribe to CT | Give

August 19, 2026

Hello, fellow wayfarers … How to forgive someone when reconciliation is unlikely … Why I’m excited to teach the prophet Jeremiah this year … What Andrew Peterson told me about endurance without burnout … A Desert Island Bookshelf from an Alabama accountant … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

How to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry

Someone once came up to me, almost shaking in fear over one of Jesus’ Beatitudes. The one that troubled her was "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" (Matt. 5:7, ESV throughout). Her problem was that she had once experienced what she considered betrayal from a friend—and that friend seemed not the least bit sorry. The woman said she wanted to forgive, but she had tried and tried and couldn’t. She couldn’t will away the hurt she still felt. What was she supposed to do?

Forgiveness, of course, can mean many things. Some people use it as a synonym for reconciliation: Whatever breached the relationship is considered a thing of the past. And many times that’s exactly what forgiveness entails. But that’s not what I mean here. Some people use forgiveness to mean a lack of accountability, and that’s not what I mean either. What I mean here is the grace it would take for this woman to be free of the power her friend still held over her. In her case, as with many others, I don’t detect a desire for revenge. People consumed with vengeance usually are not those grappling with how to forgive.

Sometimes the problem is that a person confuses forgiveness with a feeling he or she associates with forgiveness. We may assume forgiveness happens in one dramatic act—and afterward we see the forgiven person just as we would if the hurt had never happened. Sometimes that’s the case. But often forgiveness is a choice we repeat over and over. Even then, it is not necessarily a warm feeling. The most forgiving people I know often pray something along the lines of "Lord, I’m remembering again what they did to me, and I am feeling angry. Help me."

As countless philosophers have taught us over the centuries, our most dangerous moral problems often come not from valuing some vice but from having a misordered value for some virtue. People who grapple with forgiveness often do this not because they are bloodthirsty or want to see the other person harmed. Rather, they are trying to uphold something good and right: justice.

That impulse is good and right in and of itself. In fact, one of the charges against unfaithful Old Testament Israel is that it concluded, "The way of the Lord is not just" (Ezek. 18:25). After Cain’s murder of Abel, God told Cain, "The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground" (Gen. 4:10). At the very end of the Bible, the souls of the martyrs in heaven cry out, "How long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" (Rev. 6:10).

Neither cry for justice is pictured as the least bit sinful. As a matter of fact, a central question resolved in the apostle Paul’s writings on the Cross is the moral quandary of how God can be just if he forgives sin (Rom. 3:21–26). Your desire for justice is not wrong.

The problem comes with the way we want to experience that justice—and that is usually because our time frame is by definition short-term, meaning the span of our trackable lives. Even when we do see someone who hurt us get some comeuppance, it will still leave us empty, because no amount of justice seems to rise to our level of hurt. Again, the impulse is normal—but normal things can make us stumble into something else.

Ernst Jünger wrote in the middle of last century that bitterness and resentment don’t really settle in because of a sense of having been hurt. Rather, he wrote, they come from a sense of an ongoing debt we are owed—perpetual suspense that the hurt will be rectified personally and the wrong undone. And because that almost never happens—indeed, almost never can happen—the person who was hurt often seeks redress in some other way. Sometimes that’s just internal rumination that governs the person’s life. Sometimes, without the person even noticing it, that’s choosing a scapegoat on whom to pour out anger and disappointment.

To be free, though, you have to know the difference between what you lost and who you are. You can genuinely mourn what was lost and still realize that freedom will ultimately mean being defined by something other than what you lost. That’s hard to do. Peter told Jesus, in what reads like almost-palpable frustration, "We have left everything and followed you" (Mark 10:28). If you believe you are nothing beyond what can be seized—a church home, for instance, or a tribe—then whoever controls those conditions controls you completely.

Another obstacle to forgiveness is the desire for some sense of narrative closure. You might not think the hurt will be redressed, but you want it to make sense in the story of your life. Again, that’s not wrong in and of itself.

In the Book of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers attacked him and trafficked him into slavery. They encountered him years later after he had become a ruler over Egypt, running a famine food-storage program that ultimately saved their lives as they sought relief from potential starvation. After the death of their father, Jacob, the brothers quite legitimately worried that Joseph would take his revenge. They even workshopped some rather manipulative talking points, saying the father had told them on his deathbed to ask Joseph to forgive them.

Joseph famously said, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today" (Gen. 50:20). Few Bible verses are as abused by unmooring them from context as this one. If the brothers had said, Look how this has all turned out for good! that would have been morally repugnant self-justification. Joseph—the one harmed—is the one who said this, and he never classified what they did as anything but evil. He did not justify their means by the end. He simply acknowledged that he trusted God and that he was not clamoring for vengeance for what was past.

The problem, though, is that it is very rare to find that kind of retroactive meaning. To forgive, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invisible and incomprehensible to you. That doesn’t minimize what was done, but it dethrones it from its power as the central story of your life. Sometimes you get the apology you’ve always wanted to hear, but often you don’t. People move on with their lives as though they’ve forgotten what they did. Sometimes they even die without acknowledging it. That means not that the story ended unresolved but rather that you can’t see to the end.

Yet another obstacle to forgiveness can be a sense of powerlessness. Again, if you define power as the ability to undo what was done wrong, you will never get it. At the same time, if you try to just "move on," you will never overcome the loss. But you can redirect that longing for power.

Frederick Buechner wrote years ago about a man who told him, "You have had a good deal of pain in your life, and you have been a good steward of it." Stewardship is power too. Even when you can’t undo what’s been done against you, you can prevent those same things from happening to others—or you can be the consoling presence you needed but never had. If nothing else, you can resolve to do your best never to hurt anyone else the way you were hurt. The most forgiving people I’ve known are not those who deny the pain, nor those who are defined wholly by it, but those who steward it—as a kind of monastic vow to pay attention to others with similar stories.

A final obstacle is another kind of powerlessness, this time over the forgiveness itself. Panicked frustration that we are not immediately sanctified rarely produces that sanctification. Rather, it pushes us to its opposite. The prophet Jeremiah said that the people’s conclusion over their pull to idolatry—"It is hopeless" (Jer. 2:25)—is what drew them closer to it. You don’t need to go that way.

The recognition of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to forgive is itself an essential first step to forgiveness. Just because you stumble back into bitterness or resentment does not mean your initial forgiveness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongoing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.

God is more forgiving than we are. He doesn’t view our forgiveness as a feat to please him. He is a Father who wants the best for us. He knows forgiveness is hard for us. It is not hard for him.

So when you find forgiveness difficult, pray as the man with Jesus once did about his unbelief (Mark 9:24):

I forgive; help my unforgiveness.

Why Jeremiah Is the Man for This Moment

American Christians love ornamental, out-of-context Bible verses. Maybe the most famous of these is in Jeremiah: "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jer. 29:11).

Several years ago, I wrote this about Jeremiah 29:11 at The Gospel Coalition:

The Book of Jeremiah is all about God disrupting his people’s plans and upending his people’s dreams. This verse comes in the context of a shocking message from the prophet. Those "left behind" in Jerusalem—anchored around the temple and the throne—assume their relative fortune is a sign that God is for them, while those carted off in captivity to Babylon are seen to be under God’s curse. It’s not just those in Jerusalem who are tempted to think this way; those in Babylon are tempted to think it, too. Israel’s God seems distant to them, and they seem as though they’ve been raptured away from the promises to Abraham. Jeremiah says, though, that God’s judgment will fall on Jerusalem, and that God’s purposes will spring to life through the exiles.

This isn’t actually good news for any of the hearers. The Jerusalem establishment chafes at this message, and finds prophets who will say that peace is just around the corner. For the exiles, the message isn’t a cheery one either, at least in the short-term. In Jeremiah’s letter to them, they’re told their return from exile won’t happen anytime in their generation, so they should create new lives in Babylon.

So does that mean that this verse is a message of hope for you? Yes, but only if you go the long way around and don’t take a shortcut. I wrote this:

Through Jeremiah, God is telling the exiles that their scattering isn’t accidental. God has plans for them, plans that include even what seems chaotic and random. Moreover, these plans mean the exile isn’t permanent. That isn’t because of their faithfulness but because of God’s promise to Abraham—a promise that was itself looking forward to Abraham’s son, the Lord Jesus (Rom. 4). And indeed, the exiles didn’t stay scattered. God restored them to their home. Why? He brought them home because through them "according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever" (Rom. 9:5).

And God tells us that since we are in Christ, we are strangers and exiles in this time between the times (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 2:11). We suffer, we bleed, we die—and through all that we are tempted to think that this means God has abandoned us. We conclude we are "as sheep to be slaughtered" (Rom. 8:36). Not so, the gospel word tells us.

In May, I wrapped up my series on the Book of Hebrews and took a summer hiatus, but now I am back to teaching the Bible each week at my church. This year, the series is "Fire and Reign: The Gospel of Christ in the Book of Jeremiah"—and I could not be happier. That’s because I get to spend a year talking about hope—real hope.

The "hope" of Jeremiah 29:11 wall hangings is usually the same sort of dismissive reassurance you get from an acquaintance when the doctors find a bad diagnosis: "Oh, I’m sure it will be fine."

Hope is a very different thing. Real hope first requires what feels like taking hope away—a groaning at the wreckage of the world (Rom. 8:23). It first feels like confusion and chaos before it gives way to the realization that God is working all things for good. "Now hope that is seen is not hope," the apostle Paul wrote. "For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience" (vv. 24–25).

That’s what Jeremiah did. He confronted catastrophe head-on. He gave vent to the fire in his bones, warning of a day no one wanted to acknowledge—a day in which everything stable would be set on fire. And then he looked past that to what comes after—a God whose mercies are new every morning. I can’t wait to spend a year in that.

Andrew Peterson and I Talk About Endurance Without Burnout

I realized this summer that most listeners have never heard several episodes of my podcast because they predated the current iteration of The Russell Moore Show. Some of them included some of my favorite guests. This is one of those episodes.

When I was president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, we had a lunch at our offices in Nashville every couple months for pastors, business and community leaders, and others, usually special guests. In 2016, I had my friend singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson join us. We talked about all kinds of things—how to create in times that feel dry, how to get through tough times without burnout, what Andrew has learned about marriage, and of course Frederick Buechner.

Remember this was in front of a live audience having a meal together, so you’ll hear shifting in seats, coughing, and Coke Zero cans opening. If that sort of thing distracts you, just ignore it. If it relaxes you, just consider this an ASMR session. Either way, I think you’ll find a lot of ideas here that will keep you pondering for a while.

You can listen to it here.