Verse explainer

What does Matthew 6:14 really mean?

Forgiving others doesn't earn God's forgiveness — it marks the kind of person who is ready to receive it.

KJV

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

BSB

For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

The plain meaning

This verse immediately follows the Lord's Prayer (vv. 9–13), where Jesus taught his disciples to ask God to "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" (v. 12). He then singles out that one petition for reinforcement — not because forgiveness is the only thing that matters, but because he knew the pull toward resentment and revenge was strong. The logic isn't a transaction: your forgiving others is not the payment that purchases God's pardon. Rather, a person who clings to grievances and refuses to release others has not understood what it means to be forgiven themselves. Verse 15 seals the point: "if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." The two moves — receiving mercy and extending it — are inseparable in the kind of life Jesus is describing.

The common misreading

"You have to forgive people or God won't forgive you" — forgiveness is how you earn pardon. This verse gets read as a works-based bargain: perform forgiveness toward others, and God will perform forgiveness toward you. That reading turns grace into a contract and makes human effort the trigger for divine mercy. But that is not what the surrounding context supports. The whole Lord's Prayer (vv. 9–13) is addressed to people who already call God "our Father" — it assumes a relationship of grace, not a negotiation from outside it. Gill, Henry, and Barnes all agree: the procuring cause of forgiveness is not your act of pardoning someone else — it is the grace and mercy of God. What Jesus is identifying is a diagnostic: a person who has genuinely grasped how much they have been forgiven finds the grip of resentment loosened. A person who refuses to release others thereby reveals they have not understood — or received — that mercy. The refusal is the symptom, not the cause. Jesus is not building a merit system; he is describing the shape of a transformed heart, and warning that the untransformed heart has reason to fear.

What the commentators say

John Gill18th c. · PD

Gill is careful to distinguish causes: the forgiveness of others is not the procuring cause of God's forgiveness (that is the blood of Christ), nor the moving cause (that is God's free grace). Rather, a forgiving spirit enters into the character of the person to whom God is pleased to make a comfortable discovery of his pardoning grace. Those disposed and assisted by grace to forgive — fully, freely, from the heart — may expect that gracious manifestation from him.

Matthew Henryearly 18th c. · PD

Henry reads this as a necessary mark of the sincere penitent. He who truly feels the weight of his own sin against God finds it impossible to retain a bitter, unforgiving spirit toward a fellow sinner. The condition is not arbitrary: it exposes whether the prayer for forgiveness was genuine at all. Those who will not forgive show they have not tasted the mercy they claim to want.

Albert BarnesBarnes' Notes · PD

Barnes stresses that Christ is not teaching that human forgiveness merits divine forgiveness, but that a forgiving temper is evidence of a heart changed by grace. God forgives freely, but he has appointed that those who harbor hatred and refuse to pardon injuries give no evidence that they have received the gospel spirit — and so have no ground to expect his mercy.

The word behind it

παραπτώματα paraptōmata

"Trespasses" — literally a falling beside or stepping alongside the path; a lapse, a false step, an offense. The word implies real moral failure, not trivial slights. Choosing this word rather than "sins" (hamartiai) keeps the focus on concrete offenses one person commits against another — exactly the kind of wound that tempts the offended party to withhold forgiveness. Understanding the weight of the word makes Jesus's call more demanding, not less.

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