The Missing Piece: Why Most Christians Struggle to Forgive and How to Fix the Foundation

Most people who struggle to forgive aren't ignoring God's command — they're missing the foundation that makes forgiveness possible.

In this episode, Pastor Marc Little exposes the crucial missing piece that keeps countless believers stuck in bitterness, guilt, and repeated failure: a disordered understanding of love. When you don't love God first — and don't see yourself the way He sees you — forgiveness becomes an impossible burden instead of a natural response.

You'll discover:

• The biblical architecture of love and why Jesus says all law hinges on just two commandments
• Why self-love is not selfishness — it is a divine foundation for forgiving others
• How unmet foundational needs become the dangerous roots of bitterness and unforgiveness
• Why forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation — and how to release others without sacrificing your safety or peace
• Practical steps to rebuild your inner landscape so forgiveness flows from genuine grace

Drawing from Scripture and insights from Christian thinkers including R.C. Sproul and Augustine, Pastor Marc reveals why forgiveness teachings fail when they skip the foundation — and how to build the internal architecture that makes walking free from offense actually possible.

If you are tired of trying harder in your own strength, this episode will change the way you approach forgiveness forever.

The Marc Little Show — Faith, Law, and the Culture War. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone stuck in unforgiveness. 📩 Ministry inquiries: reception@vinemediaholdings.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to the Mark Little Show. I want to start with an observation, not a scripture, not a doctrine. Just something I've noticed after years of sitting with people in some of the hardest moments of their lives. Most people who cannot forgive are not ignorant of the command. They know it. They've heard the sermons. They can cite the parable of the unforgiving servant. They know Jesus said. Forgive. Seventy times seven. They know all of it. And they still can't do it. So what's the problem? Is it willpower? Are they stubborn? Is it that the wound is simply too deep? The offender too unrepentant? Maybe the damage is too real. Sometimes, yes, those are the answers. But I want to suggest something that may surprise you. I think the reason most forgiveness teaching fails to actually move people is not that it gives them the wrong destination. It's that it skips the preparation. It gives you the command. Without giving you the foundation, the command is actually built on. There is a piece missing. And today we're going to find it. This is the Mark Little Show. I am Mark Little. I'm your host. I'm a pastor. I'm a lawyer. And a political commentator. And we'll be right back. I'm a pastor, I'm a lawyer, and a political commentator. This episode today is called The Missing Peace. And if you've ever tried to forgive someone and found yourself stuck, not because you didn't want to obey, but because something inside you simply would not move. I believe what we cover today will explain exactly why. And more than that, I believe it will give you a way forward. So let's get into it. Jesus was asked in Matthew 22, which commandment was the greatest in the law? He had been tested on this before. The Pharisees were always looking for a way to corner him, to get him to say something they could use against him. And instead of evading the question, he answered it in a way that reorganized everything. Matthew 22, beginning in verse 37, going on down to verse 40, I'm in the NIV today. Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. He said, Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. All the law and the prophets. Every commandment you've ever been given, every moral obligation, every act of obedience Jesus has ever asked of you hangs on these two. That includes the command to forgive. So if forgiveness hangs on these two commandments, and the first commandment is to love God, well then we have to start there. Not with the offense, and not with the offender, not even with the command to forgive. We start with the vertical relationship. We start with God. Now, here's something worth sitting with. John writes in 1 John chapter 4, verse 19. It says there, we love because he first loved us. That's not a sentimental statement, it's a theological one. Our capacity to love, including our capacity to obey the command to forgive, it comes from somewhere. It comes from having received something. One of my favorite, R.C. Sproul, he made a point in his teaching on the love of God. I've never forgotten it. He said there, the Christian life, it's not a performance staged for God's approval. Yeah, process that. Rather, it's a response to what God has already done. You don't love God in order to earn his love. You love God because his love has already reached you. And that love is what makes you capable of loving it all. That matters enormously, this discussion. Because if your obedience, including forgiving someone who hurt you, is not rooted in a genuine, friar love for God, then what are you producing? Then what you are producing is not forgiveness, it's compliance. And compliance runs out. Compliance runs out the moment the wound gets deep enough, or the offense gets repeated enough, or the person you're trying to forgive shows no remorse whatsoever. Forgiveness that flows from a genuine love for God has a different source. It doesn't depend on the other person's response. It doesn't depend on fairness. It doesn't depend on your emotional state on any given day. It depends on the character of the God you love and the command he's given you.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

And that is a foundation that doesn't move.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

D.A. Carson, in his commentary on Matthew, he points out that the two commandments Jesus cites here are not a reduction of the law. Be careful. There are its architecture. They're what the law is built on. Love God first. Everything else follows from that. Which means if forgiveness is something you're trying to accomplish, before you settled the first commandment, before the love of God is genuinely the governing reality of your life, you're trying to build a house without a foundation. That's the first piece. Love God. Establish the vertical. Let that love be real enough and settled enough that it's the source you draw from when everything else is hard. Now let's talk about the second commandment. And this is where it gets complicated. And if I'm being honest, this is where most forgiveness teaching, I think, just skips ahead. And that skip is exactly the problem. Jesus says the second commandment is this love your neighbor as yourself. Most people hear that and they immediately focus on the neighbor, as they should. That's where the command lands. But I want to stop on the two words that tend to go unexamined. As yourself. Jesus is not prescribing self-love here as a new spiritual discipline. No, he's not. He's assuming it. He's assuming it, it already exists. He's using it as the baseline, the measure, the reference point, how you treat someone else. The implication, of course, is that a normal functioning human being already possesses some natural orientation of care towards themselves. Your own hunger, your own pain, your own well-being. These things they matter to you instinctively. Jesus takes that as a given. And he says, Now, apply that same instinct to your neighbor. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a question that almost nobody asks when they're teaching on forgiveness. What happens when that baseline is broken? What happens when the self-love Jesus is assuming as the starting point is actually absent? Or what about it's distorted or buried under so much shame and self-contempt that it can't function as a measure of anything. Somebody knows what I'm talking about. I've watched this play out more times than I care to count. And what I've seen is that a person who doesn't rightly have an ordered sense of their own worth before God will approach forgiveness in one of two ways. Either they withhold it as a form of self-protection, holding on to the offense because it's the only evidence they have that they mattered enough to be offended. They can feel it, and it makes them feel something, to feel that they've been mistreated. It's a psychosis there, but it's true. Or they offer performance, they say the words, they go through the motions, but nothing actually moves inside of them, because there's no real self to extend anything from. Neither of those is forgiveness. And no amount of teaching on the command is going to fix it. Because the problem is not information. The problem is a broken foundation. There's a misreading of this that I want to head off directly. When I say that loving yourself is part of the foundation for forgiveness, I'm not saying that you forgive others because you love yourself. That would make forgiveness a transaction, something you do in order to get something for yourself. And I've heard that version of this teaching, and it's not what the scripture is saying. The sequence matters. Love God first, love yourself rightly, meaning see yourself the way God sees you, as someone made in his image, redeemed at enormous cost, and declared not guilty by the only judge whose verdict matters. Then from that place, obey the command to forgive. Not because forgiving someone benefits you, though it will, not because you are protecting your own peace, though that will follow. But because you love God and you're reflecting his character by obeying his command. Spruel is helpful here too. Spruel argued that genuine obedience is never ultimately self-interested. Genuine obedience flows from a love of God that has transformed what you actually want. A person who genuinely loves God and genuinely understands their standing before Him will want to obey. Not because obedience earns anything, but because obedience is the natural expression of a heart that has been changed. The self-love in view is not the engine of forgiveness, it's the condition that makes the command make sense. There's a difference. So what does rightly ordered self-love actually look like? Augustine, he wrestled with this. His argument, stripped down, is that love is not wrong in itself. It becomes disordered when it's directed at the wrong things, or in the wrong proportions, or in the wrong sequence. A rightly ordered person loves God first, themselves in light of God's love for them and their neighbor as an extension of both. That's critical. That's the sequence Jesus is giving us in Matthew 22. And it's the sequence this episode is built on. The scripture gives us the basis for that self-love with extraordinary clarity. Go on over to Genesis 1 and 27. It says there, you were made in the image of God. That's not a motivational statement. That's an ontological one. It describes what you are at the level of your very being. You carry the imprint of God's nature by design. That's not something you earned. It's something you are given. Psalm 139, verse 14, it says there, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that fully well. David is not flattering himself here. That is what rightly ordered self-love looks like. Not pride, not self-congratulation, but agreement with the creator about the value of his creation. And for the believer, there's even more. Romans chapter 8, verse 1, one of my favorite passages, it says, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not reduced condemnation, not manageable condemnation, none. And then 2 Corinthians 5, verse 17, it says, There, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone. The new is here. You're not your worst moment. You're not the accumulation of your failures. You're what God says you are. And if the judge of the universe, your creator, has rendered his verdict, well, the spiritually healthy response is not to keep appealing it, it's to accept it and walk in it. That's the person who can forgive. Not because they're naturally more gracious, not because the wound hurt them less, but because they're standing on solid enough ground that they don't need to be, they don't need to hold on to the offense in order to feel like they matter. We'll be right back. This is The Mark Little Show. The episode today is called The Missing Peace. We've done some heavy lifting in the first two segments of our show. We established that the command to forgive, well, that's not the starting point. It's the destination. And we laid the two foundations that make that destination reachable. Love God genuinely as the governing reality of your life. And love yourself the way God loves you, with your identity grounded in what He has said about you, not what your failures have told you about yourself. Now, here's where this all comes together. Because if those two things are actually in place, not as ideas you've heard, but as truths you're standing on, then the command to forgive stops becoming a wall. It starts making sense. Let me show you why. In an earlier episode, The Call to Forgive Others, we went deep on the command structure of forgiveness. We looked at Mark 11, verse 25, the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18. And then what Ephesians 4, verse 32, actually requires of a believer. If you've not heard that episode, I encourage you to dial yourself back and take a listen. What we covered there is the what of forgiveness. What we're covering today is the why, underneath the what. But let's read the text again, because it reads differently now with the foundation that we just laid. Mark 11, 25, it says, and when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins. In that verse, is what theologians call a purpose clause. It describes what follows from forgiving. It's not a transaction. It is not Jesus saying that your forgiveness of another person purchases God's forgiveness of you. That's not what it says. Grace does not work that way. Spruel addressed this directly in his legionnaire teaching on this passage. He said the conditional structure of Mark 11, 25 is diagnostic, not commercial. It reveals the condition of your heart. A person who has genuinely understood and received the grace of God will not be comfortable harboring an unforgiving spirit. The two things are incompatible. Not because forgiving others earns anything, but because refusing to forgive others reveals that something in the understanding of grace has not yet taken root. Now watch how the two foundations we just established change the way this lands. If you love God genuinely, not as a performance, but as a governing reality, then you care about your relationship with Him. You care about the condition of your prayer life. You care about whether anything is standing between you and access to the Father. Jesus has told you that an unforgiving spirit is exactly that kind of obstruction. Person who loves God and understands this will want to remove that obstruction, not for their own comfort, but because they love God and they want nothing between them. And if you love yourself rightly, if you understand your worth before God, if you have accepted his verdict over your own condemnation, if you know you're a new creation, and not the Some of your worst moments, then you also understand that carrying an unforgiving spirit is a form of self-harm. Not in a therapeutic sense either, in a spiritually precise sense. Let's go to Hebrews 12 and 15. It says there, see to it that no one falls short of the grace of God, and that no bitter root rose up to cause trouble and defiles many.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

A bitter root.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

That's not metaphorical language, feeling bad. That's the language of contamination. I want you to sit with what that actually looks like. Because I've watched it happen. Unforgiveness doesn't stay in the room where the offense occurred. It travels. It shows up in how you interpret the next person who disappoints you. You're faster to assume the worst. It shows up in your marriage, in your parenting, in how you read a room. It defiles your capacity for joy because something below the surface is always pulling against it. It warps your ability to trust God. Because you've taken his place as the one who keeps the record. The writer of Hebrews is not being dramatic here. He's describing something the soul carries, the way a body carries an untreated infection. Quietly at first, and then everywhere. A person who genuinely loves themselves, and the ordered, God-rounded sense, does not want to carry that. Not because forgiveness is easy, but because they know what the alternative actually costs. John Stott, in his commentary on Ephesians, he makes an observation about Ephesians chapter 4, verse 32, that I think is among the clearest statements on this subject I've ever read. The verse says, Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Stopp points out that the model and the motivation are the same thing. God forgave you. That's both why you forgive and how you forgive. You forgive because you've been forgiven. And you forgive in the same manner. Not because it was deserved, not because it was earned, not because the other person has met your conditions. You forgive because that's what grace looks like. What is working in a person that believes God. Now let me speak to the hardest version of this. I've been pastoring long enough to know that someone listening right now is not dealing with a garden variety of fence. No, they're dealing with something real, something that costs them significantly, something deep, something that hurts, something you can't forget. The person who hurt them may be unrepentant and they may see them daily. They may still be in a position of influence over you. There may be no possibility of reconciliation. And frankly, reconciliation may not even be safe. And here is what I want to say to you, if you're that person, directly. Forgiveness is not reconciliation. We established that in an earlier episode, and it bears repeating right now. Forgiveness is a transaction between you and God. You release the offense. You cancel the debt in your own heart. You refuse to let the injury define your posture toward the future. Reconciliation is a separate question entirely, and it requires repentance from the other person. You can't manufacture that. You're not responsible for it. What you're responsible for is the condition of your own heart. And the two foundations we've built, which are love God, love yourself rightly, are exactly what make it possible to forgive someone who doesn't deserve it, has not asked for it, and may never acknowledge what they did. Not because you're pretending it didn't happen, but because you're too settled in who God says you are, to let someone else's sin become the governing reality of your life. Colossians 3.13 says, bear with each other and forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. That's the standard. I will not pretend that is a small thing to ask. It's an enormous thing, but it's not an impossible thing. Not when the two foundations are in place. Not when you're drawing from the right source. So let me bring this together plainly because the sequence matters. And I want you to leave with it clean. I've repeated it already. Most forgiveness teaching gives you the command and asks you to comply. And compliance is not enough. Compliance, it runs out. People know that from experience. They've tried it, and it is not hell. What Jesus is actually describing in Matthew 22, and what this whole structure of the New Testament assumes, is a person who has first settled the vertical relationship. Love God. Not as a doctrine you affirm, but as a governing reality in your life. A love that has its source in what he has already done for you, which is what John 4 19 is telling us. We love because he first loved us. That is the engine. From that love flows a rightly ordered understanding of yourself. Not pride, not self-congratulation, but an honest agreement with God about your own worth, that you are made in his image, redeemed at the cost of his son, declared not guilty by a verdict that is not up for appeal. That understanding is not selfishness, it's the second commandment, rightly received. And from both of those foundations, the command to forgive is no longer a mountain you're trying to climb in your own strength. It becomes a natural expression of a person who loves God, knows her own worth, and refuses someone else's offense, occupy the ground that belongs to God. That is the missing piece. It was not more information about the command, it was the internal architecture underneath it. Love God, love yourself the way he loves you, then obey. If you've been stuck in unforgiveness, not because you didn't want to obey, but because something inside you wouldn't move, go back. Check the foundation, not the command, the foundation. Because the command was never the problem. It was always meant to rest on something. And now you know what that something is. You've always had access to it. The question is whether you will now stand on it. This is the Mark Little Show. You just heard the missing piece. Go back, reinsert it, get your foundation right. Love yourself according to what God says about you. And then you'll be on your way to forgiving properly.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

God bless you. Amen.