Is Self-Forgiveness Biblical?

A little SIDEBAR from my upcoming book, "I Just Can't Have You In My Life Right Now"

A lot of people talk about self-forgiveness, including well-known pastors and Christian celebrities. A pastor once led me, in prayer, to forgive myself for usurping God’s position when I’d quietly stepped into the role of my son’s “savior.” I felt better afterward. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But I’ve come to believe that self-forgiveness, as most of us mean it, isn’t actually in the Bible.

Here’s what I mean. When we’re so devastated by our own failures and the harm we’ve caused that we say, “I just can’t forgive myself,” and then eventually arrive at a place where we can—when that becomes the moment we finally let it go—I think we’ve quietly made ourselves the final authority on whether the debt is paid. And I don’t think that’s ours to decide.

Jesus didn’t die so that our sins would be forgivable, pending our own approval. He died, and the debt was paid. Past, present, future, all of it. His final words from the cross weren’t “this is forgivable” or “you’ll get there eventually.” They were “It is finished.”

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

It. Is. Finished.

Neil T. Anderson, in his widely used discipleship workbook The Steps to Freedom in Christ, puts it this way: “If God forgives you, you can forgive yourself.”^[1] I understand the intent behind that. But what it can sound like, underneath the surface, is this: it isn’t finished until I say it’s finished. It’s all on me. It’s always been all on me. Thanks for dying on the cross, Jesus, but it wasn’t quite enough. It’s not finished until I say so.”

That’s the trap I don’t want you to fall into as you read the rest of this book. If you’ve hurt your child—through harshness, through absence, through your own unhealed wounds—you don’t need to add “forgive myself” to your list of spiritual chores. You need to receive what’s already been done. Confess it. Let it be finished, because it already is.

A different way of seeing it

I want to be fair here, because plenty of thoughtful believers, Anderson included, land somewhere different than I do, and I want to represent their perspective honestly.

The argument goes like this: God’s forgiveness is the only forgiveness that matters, and it’s already complete. First John 1:9 promises that when we confess, He forgives and purifies us completely. Romans 8:1 says there’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Psalm 103:12 says our sins have been removed as far as the east is from the west. None of that is in question.

But, this view holds, there’s still a human step that has to happen after that: actually believing it. Paul talks about his own past, he persecuted the church before his conversion, without appearing to live under ongoing shame for it (Philippians 3:13–14). Second Corinthians 7:10 talks about a “godly sorrow” that leads somewhere good and “leaves no regret,” as opposed to a worldly sorrow that just festers. In this view, “forgiving yourself” isn’t adding anything to the cross. It’s just the word people use for finally believing what the cross already accomplished, choosing to stop punishing yourself for something God stopped punishing you for a long time ago.

I still think the phrase itself is dangerous, because it’s so easy to slide from “believing I’m forgiven” into “deciding I’m forgiven,” and those are not the same thing. But I’ll admit this much: if the end result is the same, you stop carrying a debt that was never yours to keep carrying, then maybe the disagreement is more about language than about truth. Call it what you want. Confession. Receiving grace. Believing the gospel. Just don’t let yourself get stuck waiting for a feeling of self-forgiveness that may never come, when what’s already been finished doesn’t need your signature.

^[1] Neil T. Anderson, The Steps to Freedom in Christ, rev. ed. (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2017), under “Step Three: Bitterness versus Forgiveness.”