Prayer of Forgiveness: What Should I Pray if I Want to be Forgiven?

Prayer is a conversation. Admittedly it’s a different sort of conversation, but at root, it’s us talking to and addressing God while listening for His guidance and promptings. Prayers can take on different forms, and they can focus on any number of subjects. One of those things we can approach God to talk about is a prayer of forgiveness.

Forgiveness shows up a lot in the Bible. Stories center around it, songs and poems crying out for it, wisdom literature focuses on what happens if we live without it, and so on. All the talk about forgiveness highlights a few especially important points:

• Human beings commit a lot of sins – some are intentional, others less so, and there are shades in between
• Our sins, whatever the intention behind them, hurt others, and have the power to break down relationships
• Our relationships, with people or with God only work well when forgiveness is given, and past wounds can be healed

Forgiveness is a vital part of human existence and relationships for as long as human beings remain sinners and we sin against God and one another. Our prayers for forgiveness are directed toward God, but they can be about us asking for forgiveness from other people as well.

What might a prayer of forgiveness look like? Are there some elements that are important to include? We’ll find that here and in other places where the Bible gives us some indications of how to proceed.

Prayers of forgiveness in the Bible

As we pointed out earlier, prayer is a conversation. It doesn’t have to look a certain way or use certain words to be “official.” As Anne Lamott once wrote, prayer can be as simple as groaning the word, “Help.” What might matter in a prayer of forgiveness is the heart behind what you’re saying. There are several prayers of forgiveness that we come across in the Bible, and here is a small sampling of these:

• David’s prayers (Psalm 32, Psalm 38, and Psalm 51)
• The prayer of the lost son (Luke 15)
• The prayer of the tax collector (Luke 18)
• The prayers of Nehemiah and Daniel on behalf of their people (Nehemiah 1 and Daniel 9)
• The prayer Jesus taught his disciples (Matthew 6)

What we find on closer inspection is that there are a few threads in common that run through these different prayers.

How to Pray for Forgiveness from God

Below are a few of these threads that you can reflect on and use when praying a prayer of forgiveness.

An acknowledgment of wrongdoing

One of the first things you see on looking at these various prayers for forgiveness is that there is an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. David, in telling others of how good it feels to be forgiven, says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (Psalm 32:5). We don’t know what the sin was, in this case, but we see David readily acknowledging that he did something wrong.

In another prayer of his, he simply says, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me” as he pleads for God to have mercy on him (Psalm 51:3). In the New Testament, the tax collector in one of Jesus’ parables, “…standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” (Luke 18:13). The tax collector’s prayer is brief, crisp, and heartfelt. He knows that he’s a sinner before the Lord, and he confesses it without fanfare.

Sometimes, we can ask for forgiveness even when we don’t know precisely what we’ve done wrong. In another prayer, we also find that sometimes people pray with humility to be forgiven for things they may have done wrong but aren’t even aware of. Psalm 19 is one such prayer. In it, David asks out loud, “Who can discern their own errors? Forgive me my hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12).

We do some things without knowing it but that doesn’t make us less culpable. In our relationships, we can sometimes unwittingly hurt someone, either through our words or our actions. We may not realize what we did, or how it impacted the other person. A simple acknowledgment in a prayer of forgiveness such as, “I’m not sure what I said or did, but it’s clear that I hurt you. I’m sorry; will you forgive me?” can go a long way.

An awareness of the damage done

In the story Jesus told about the lost son, the son had asked his father to divide up the inheritance and give him his share. We must enter the culture of that time and place to understand the gravity of what he was saying and doing. That was tantamount to saying he wanted his father dead. Not only that, but it would have brought shame upon his father in the community.

That son effectively broke his relationship with his father. After his father complied with his request, he squandered the wealth and became destitute. In a prayer that is driven by desperation and a new appreciation of just how much he had sinned, the son planned to go back to his father and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants” (Luke 15:18-19).

This prayer/confession/plea shows the son admitting just what he had done, particularly to his relationship with his father. His father graciously welcomed him back without even letting him finish his planned entreaty, giving us a glimpse into God’s heart to unequivocally welcome back sinners.

The awareness that change must happen

In some of the prayers for forgiveness that we encounter in the Bible, along with a confession of sin, there is also often a deep awareness that things need to change. In his famous prayer that he uttered after committing adultery (something we’ll return to shortly), David also cried out, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). He knew that his heart had led him astray, and so he needed cleansing and renewal so that he could walk anew.

There’s nothing too big (or too small) to beg forgiveness for

Are there some things that we feel are too big to be forgiven? You may feel like you’ve done something so reprehensible and unbecoming that there is simply no way back, and God won’t welcome you. Daniel prayed a bold prayer for his people, saying, “… we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets…” (Daniel 9:5-6). This was centuries’ worth of disobedience that Daniel was confessing, and we hear later in the same chapter that God heard his prayer.

Coming back to Psalm 51 and David, the occasion for that prayer of confession was that David had committed adultery with another man’s wife, gotten her pregnant, and then he’d connived to have him killed to cover up what he’d done. It was deplorable.

Yet David prayed, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin” (Psalm 51:1-2). His prayer rests on who God is, on the abundance of God’s mercy. No matter what much we have done, God’s love and mercy are bigger than our sins.

Saying (then living out) your prayer of forgiveness

Prayers of forgiveness don’t have to take a specific form. They can be long or short, complicated, or simple. They can be said for small things, but also for colossal failings. We can say them on our own behalf, but also pray them on behalf of others (as Jesus did, when he prayed, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” while he hung on the cross). They must be honest and carry the conviction that what was done was wrong and hurt people or relationships.

If we pray for forgiveness from God about something we did that affected someone, it is also important to not merely leave it at that. Seek their forgiveness, don’t just pray about it if you can approach them.

As Jesus once taught his disciples, “…if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God” (Matthew 5:23-24).

Seeking the forgiveness of a person we’ve wronged allows them to know that we recognize we did something wrong, and we want to restore the relationship. Ultimately, it’s their choice if they want to forgive us, and it should not be held against them if they don’t.

Some things are hard for people to forgive, and they require space and time to come to that decision (if they ever do). If they decide to forgive us, being forgiven doesn’t mean we can do what we did before. It’s an opportunity to start afresh and do things differently.