Before Reconciliation: The Posture of Forgiveness

There is a confusion that potentially does a great deal of damage to Christian discipleship. It is the assumption that forgiveness and reconciliation are the same thing—that if reconciliation has not happened, forgiveness has not been extended.

This misunderstanding can have paralysing consequences. A person who has been wronged might be hindered from extending appropriate forgiveness because he is waiting for the offender to take the first step. The offended party might be quietly consumed by bitterness as she waits for the offender to take initiative.

The biblical teaching on forgiveness cuts to the heart of this. Christian forgiveness imitates Jesus, who prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), without the soldiers having acknowledged wrongdoing. It imitates Stephen, who similarly asked God to forgive those who were stoning him (Acts 7:60). Forgiveness always hopes for reconciliation, but it understands its responsibility even in the absence of reconciliation.

There is a posture of forgiveness that must precede the act of reconciliation, and the two must not be conflated. When someone sins against us, the gospel calls us to adopt an internal orientation—willingness to forgive, openness to reconciliation, and, above all, refusal to harbour bitterness. This posture does not wait for the other person to acknowledge what they have done. It does not depend on an apology. It is something we hold in our own hearts before anything has been said or resolved between the parties involved.

This posture is not passive. It is an active, deliberate, and potentially costly choice. It means that, when the person’s name comes up in conversation, we are not reaching for a weapon. It means that when we see them across a room, our first instinct is not to turn away. It means that the narrative we rehearse in our minds about what happened is not one of grievance and score-keeping, but one of openness to whatever God might do next.

Reconciliation, by contrast, cannot be unilateral. It requires something from the other party—namely, an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a genuine turning from it. Until that happens, full reconciliation may not be possible. But the absence of reconciliation does not mean the absence of forgiveness. The posture can and must be held, even when the other person has not yet moved.

The practical importance of this distinction is enormous. Without it, we find ourselves in one of two equally unhealthy places. Either we tell ourselves we have forgiven when we have not—because reconciliation has happened outwardly while bitterness still simmers beneath—or we tell ourselves we cannot forgive because the other person has not yet repented, and we use their unresponsiveness as a reason to hold on to resentment.

The posture of forgiveness dismantles both errors. It calls us to something real and internal that does not depend on external circumstances. It asks us to be genuinely free from bitterness—not merely to say the words, not merely to behave politely, but to have done the interior, often long and difficult work, of releasing the grievance to God.

This is precisely where the Psalms become such an indispensable resource. The psalmists do not pretend that being sinned against is painless. They bring their raw and honest feelings to God—the anger, the sense of injustice, the temptation toward bitterness—and they wrestle with him there. That is the right place to address these things. Not by suppressing them, not by venting them onto the person who has wronged us, but by bringing them before God in prayer until the posture of forgiveness becomes genuine and not merely performed.

The reason Christians are called to this posture is not simply because it is psychologically healthy, though it is. It is because this is how God has dealt with us. Ephesians 4:32 instructs us to forgive one another just as God, in Christ, has forgiven us. The phrase “just as” is not decorative. It means our forgiveness should bear a resemblance to God’s.

And God’s forgiveness, when we consider it carefully, illuminates exactly this distinction. God does not extend blanket forgiveness to all people regardless of their response. He forgives those who come to him in repentance and faith. Those who die outside of Christ face judgement. But in his disposition toward the world, in his longing for reconciliation, in sending his Son, in the ongoing offer of the gospel, God holds, toward every sinner, a posture of readiness to forgive. The door is always open. The welcome is always prepared. All that is required is that the prodigal come home.

That is the model we are called to imitate. Not forgiveness that pretends the wrong did not happen, and not premature reconciliation that skips over the need for repentance, but genuine, sustained, costly openness—a heart that is ready, whenever the other person turns, to receive them.

There is a reason the New Testament portrays forgiveness not as a burden but as liberation. When we hold on to bitterness, we are the ones who suffer. The grievance becomes a kind of prison, and we are its primary occupant. The person who wronged us may be entirely unaware of the cell in which we are sitting.

The posture of forgiveness is, therefore, not only an act of obedience. It is, in some ways, an act of self-preservation. It is choosing freedom over captivity, choosing to entrust the matter to God rather than to carry it ourselves. It is saying, in effect, that the wrong done to us does not get to define or control us, because we have placed it in hands far more capable than our own.

This is what forgiveness asks of us—not a naïve forgetting, not a pretence that nothing happened, but a heart that has been so shaped by the gospel that it is already inclined toward mercy before wrongdoing is confessed.

That is the posture of forgiveness. And it begins not with the other person, but with you.