Answers · Marriage & Family
How do I forgive someone in my own family?
Colossians places forgiveness where the quarrels actually are — inside the household of faith, among people who know each other's faults. "If any man have a quarrel against any" is not a hypothetical; it is family life described honestly, and the measure attached to the command is Christ's forgiveness of us.
"Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye."
— Colossians 3:13 (KJV)
The Lord makes the stakes plain in the prayer he taught. Our asking to be forgiven is bound to our forgiving; he states it both ways, as promise and as warning, so that no one can mistake a nursed resentment for a small thing:
"For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
— Matthew 6:14–15 (KJV)
Joseph is Scripture's worked example of forgiving inside a family. Sold by his own brothers and imprisoned on a false charge, he stood at the end with every advantage over the men who had wronged him — and what he said to them looked past their deed to God's hand in it:
"But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive."
— Genesis 50:20 (KJV)
Notice what Joseph does not do: he does not call the evil good. "Ye thought evil against me" — the wrong is named as wrong, and forgiven anyway, because he had come to see God's purpose running through it. That is the pattern the teaching below takes up: forgiveness that tells the truth about the hurt and still releases it.