Accepting Our Father’s Forgiveness – A Path to Unconditional Love

A talk given during a Urantia Book readers' retreat held in Florida in March 2026

To be forgiven is such a basic human need. We all make mistakes and missteps, and we all crave to be forgiven. I marvel that the gifts we crave the most to be given to us are often the hardest gifts for us to give to others. Everyone wants to receive love, acceptance, inclusion, patience, and forgiveness, but it seems it is not so easy to give these gifts to others. 

It does seem easy to forgive our children, but it seems to be harder to forgive other people, even people we really love like spouses, parents, siblings, relatives, and friends. We can forgive our children from regular, even serious transgressions, but it’s harder to forgive others for these same issues. 

Why is it easy to forgive our child, but not as easy to forgive others? 

Normal loving parents don’t decide to love their children; they just naturally love them. Parental love is instinctive, even primal. When our children hurt us, love is always there underneath the pain, it is foundational. (God’s love for us is exactly like that.) Therefore, in the case of parental love, love comes before judgment.

On the other hand, we are likely to evaluate, interpret, protect, and assess first before we let ourselves fall in love with others. So, if we need to forgive them, judgment often comes before love. So, forgiveness has to fight its way through judgment. When love is foundational, when it comes first before judgment, our forgiveness flows more easily. When judgment comes first before love, it’s not so easy. Could this be one of the reasons why Jesus recommends that we “judge not”?

The revelation states this about God’s parental love: “Divine righteousness is not dominated by strict retributive justice; God as a father transcends God as a judge.” (2:6.6)

How might we learn to let our love come before our judgment? It might be easier if we understand why it can be hard to forgive.

Our children are literally a part of us. The boundary between parent and child is thin. Their pain feels like our pain. Their mistakes feel more like growing pains and not so much like attacks. Their wellbeing is paramount to us, so we can easily be more generous with forgiveness when it comes to them. In our relationships with others, the ego draws a much harder line. When we feel harmed by someone we can end up thinking: “That person hurt me.” “They are separate from me.” “They are the problem.”

Forgiving our children doesn’t necessarily require rebuilding our worldview, but forgiving others often does. This is because when someone betrays or hurts us, it shakes our sense of security, safety, trust, dignity, and value. Forgiveness is harder when the stakes seem higher. 

We see innocence in our children, even when they’re wrong. We see their vulnerability, their confusion, their immaturity, and their good intentions. We see these things because we look for them. We have been told that God blots out our transgressions for his own sake, and that he will not remember our sins. When you are a parent, that makes sense. And it makes sense for God, because God is EVERYONE’S parent. On the other hand, when we are hurt by a friend, it’s easier to assume they “should have known better” or that they meant harm to us. Forgiveness can be much harder when we assign malice to the act that needs to be forgiven.

To forgive someone’s transgression against us can leave us feeling like we’re exposing ourselves to more harm, or denying the harm already done and erasing the consequences. This can make forgiveness seem dangerous, and again, that makes the stakes high.

Therefore, forgiveness requires us to soften our boundaries, and that’s the hardest spiritual work there is. This is why Jesus asks us to love one another as he loves us. We should understand that he, like God, loves us, with parental love. This is why accepting our Father’s forgiveness is the path to unconditional love. The way one forgives their children (instinctively, without hesitation) can actually become a template for the kind of forgiveness Jesus asks from all of us.

If we understand parental love, we already have the capacity. We are already living this in the parent/child relationship, which we know is a vital and universally required experience. Even so, our work isn’t learning something new, it’s expanding something we can already do effortlessly and without fear. Forgiveness is a faith act!

Forgiveness of others becomes possible when you begin to see them with even a fraction of the tenderness we naturally feel for our children, when you begin to see them through God’s eyes. And that shift, that softening, is the smallest bridge we’ll ever cross. 

Please consider this wonderful and intriguing statement from The Urantia Book. 

“By opening the human end of the channel of the God-man communication, mortals make immediately available the ever-flowing stream of divine ministry to the creatures of the worlds. When man hears God's spirit speak within the human heart, inherent in such an experience is the fact that God simultaneously hears that man's prayer. Even the forgiveness of sin operates in this same unerring fashion. The Father in heaven has forgiven you even before you have thought to ask him, but such forgiveness is not available in your personal religious experience until such a time as you forgive your fellow men. God's forgiveness in fact is not conditioned upon your forgiving your fellows, but in experience it is exactly so conditioned. And this fact of the synchrony of divine and human forgiveness was thus recognized and linked together in the prayer which Jesus taught the apostles.” (146:2.4). 

“Forgive us everyone our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

When we open “the human end of the channel” it is the same inner shift we feel when we forgive our child. The Urantia Book is describing something profoundly simple: God is always communicating, always forgiving, always loving, but we only experience that when we open our hearts to this sublime fact. Our hearts open when we allow ourselves to contemplate the imperfect nature of our fellows, when we give them the benefit of the doubt, when we allow ourselves to feel tenderness, compassion, understanding, and the refusal to define anyone by their foolishness or mistakes. That is the “human end of the channel.”

Divine forgiveness is constant, but we can’t feel it while holding on to grievances. Our grievances block the flow. The passage shows us that God imposes no conditions on forgiveness. If there is a condition, it’s one that we have imposed by holding a grievance. We have blocked it by putting our heart in a defensive posture, and a defended heart is a closed door, it can’t truly receive love and forgiveness, not even when they are divine. 

Our own soft-heartedness is the opening doorway to feeling God’s forgiveness. Not because God ever withholds it from us, but because we block it by being closed. God’s forgiveness is constant, but our experience of it is blocked whenever our hearts are closed by sorrow, grievance, confusion, or disbelief in human goodness.

As you consider this revelatory statement, imagine that love and forgiveness truly go hand in hand: 

“All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows. Love is dynamic. It can never be captured; it is alive, free, thrilling, and always moving. Man can never take the love of the Father and imprison it within his heart. The Father's love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man's personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows.” (117:6.10) 

When we forgive others we are tuning our inner ear to God’s voice. We enter a state of alignment. When we forgive, we shift into the same frequency as the divine. Our inner world becomes quiet enough, soft enough, open enough for the Adjuster’s voice to be heard. Therefore, forgiveness is not a moral achievement, it’s perceptual alignment.

The synchrony between divine and human forgiveness is a mirror for our own longings. That desire is the Spirit within us trying to open the channel. That longing is the Adjuster’s work. We forgive of our own volition, we experience what it feels like to forgive, and in turn feel God’s forgiveness. It is by softening that we feel God’s softness. It is by accepting that we feel God’s acceptance. It’s not transactional, it’s experiential. We’re not earning God’s forgiveness, we’re matching it.

When we forgive, our heart opens and we feel forgiven. When we hold a grievance, our heart closes, we feel alone. This is not divine punishment, its human psychology illuminated by divine truth.

Have you ever been so hurt by someone that you refused to forgive them, only to have them die? Suddenly you are unable to extend your forgiveness to them. Isn’t it amazing how when it is no longer possible to forgive them in this life, you find that your grievance wasn’t so very important after all?

It takes just a “little step” of willingness to forgive. That tiny shift in will is the greatest accomplishment in the entire divine plan, and it’s something we are privileged to do. 

[The following is from] A Course in Miracles: Text, Chapter 17, Section II — “The Forgiven World”

1. Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you? In no fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely. Nothing you see here, sleeping or waking, comes near to such loveliness. And nothing will you value like unto this, nor hold so dear. Nothing that you remember that made your heart sing with joy has ever brought you even a little part of the happiness this sight will bring you. For you will see the Son of God. You will behold the beauty the Holy Spirit loves to look upon, and which He thanks the Father for. He was created to see this for you, until you learned to see it for yourself. And all His teaching leads to seeing it and giving thanks with Him.

1. All this beauty will rise to bless your sight as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally transforms vision and lets you see the real world reaching quietly and gently across chaos, removing all illusions that had twisted your perception and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God’s perfection.

I read something online recently that really resonates with what I’ve learned about forgiveness. It first appeared as a piece published at centerpointhealingservices.com.

“I’ve learned not to hold people hostage to who they used to be. We all carry versions of ourselves that no longer fit—the mistakes we made, the things we didn’t know, the pain we caused when we didn’t yet understand our own.

“I’ve seen how easily someone can be reduced to their worst moment, how quickly a past version becomes the only version others choose to remember. But the truth is, people outgrow their old skin. They stumble, they learn, and if life allows, they try to do better. We all have chapters we wish we could rewrite. That doesn’t mean we haven’t earned the right to start a new one.

“I’ve watched friends become softer, more patient. I’ve seen people who once lived in chaos become anchors for others. Growth isn’t always loud or dramatic—it’s often quiet, steady, unglamorous. But it’s real. And when we dismiss someone for who they were, we miss out on who they’ve worked so hard to become.

“No one should be permanently defined by a version of themselves they’ve already outgrown. We’re all in motion, figuring things out, trying again. And if we can give that grace to ourselves, we should be willing to offer it to others too.”

Forgiveness literally changes perception. When we truly forgive someone, we don’t just decide to see them differently, we actually gain the capacity to see the beauty in them that was invisible before. It’s not sentimental beauty or moral beauty, it’s spiritual radiance that was always there, but it was obscured by our grievances. Forgiveness is like cleaning our lens. We are not beautifying the world; we are removing that which keeps us from seeing its beauty. When we forgive, we don’t change the world, we change the way we see it.

Forgiveness reveals a hidden beauty in everything. It creates a state where our mind is so unburdened, so unarmored, so undefended, that even a blade of grass feels like a revelation. This is not naïveté, it’s genuine clarity. It’s what happens when nothing in our perception is being filtered through fear, resentment, or past injury.

When our hearts open with forgiveness, suddenly the world feels alive, intimate, and luminous. We no longer see ourselves as separate from God.

Forgiveness asks us to take off our amour but that can feel dangerous in a world where people can and really do hurt us. Losing the amour can make us feel weak and vulnerable. 

But God lives in us and forgiveness is the act of giving God more internal space. It’s a space where nothing is hidden, nothing is condemned, nothing is feared, and nothing is held against anyone. This is the unconditional space that God dwells in. 

Surely, forgiveness isn’t easy in this world of darkness and sin. It’s hard because our pain wants to be acknowledged before it can be released. Forgiveness cannot be about bypassing the pain or pretending it didn’t hurt. Our wounded hearts need to be seen, heard, acknowledged, validated, and held. When this happens, we may soften enough to let go of the pain, but when we try to shortcut the healing process by jumping to the end without tending to the wound, forgiveness can become very hard indeed.

We can also confuse forgiveness with reconciliation, but forgiving someone does not necessarily mean we can readily trust again, or that we should pretend that nothing happened. Forgiveness is an inner act, but reconciliation is an outer choice. They are not the same.

True forgiveness requires a shift in identity, where we stop identifying as wounded, betrayed, or wronged, and instead identify as one who cannot truly be harmed and one who shares the same spiritual standing as every other person, even the person who harmed us. This happens because we have learned to see the other person through God’s eyes. That shift is enormous, it is nothing less than the liberation of the soul.

In closing, I ask you to contemplate this amazing teaching from The Urantia Book. I have come to call it Jesus’ Affirmation of Faith. It is what he said to Ganid when the boy asked him if he would ever really defend himself. 

“I have absolute confidence in my heavenly Father's overcare; I am consecrated to doing the will of my Father in heaven. I do not believe that real harm can befall me; I do not believe that my lifework can really be jeopardized by anything my enemies might wish to visit upon me, and surely we have no violence to fear from our friends. I am absolutely assured that the entire universe is friendly to me—this all-powerful truth I insist on believing with a wholehearted trust in spite of all appearances to the contrary." (133:1.4)

In the end, the key to forgiving this world and to unconditional love is having that kind of faith and assurance that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever truly harm us. 

This talk was delivered at a retreat described below by Trudi Cooper. The top picture is a group photo from the retreat.

An Opening of Hearts

Thirty brave souls, under the enlightened guidance of Jorgey and Paul Krupa, spent three glorious days, from March 20 to 22, beneath the ancient live oaks at Dayspring Conference Center in Parrish, Florida, journeying through the powerful topic of “forgiveness”. 

Together we explored the importance of forgiving ourselves and others. We learned that by putting down the pain and burden of judgement, our hearts and minds became more available to the invasion of spirit consciousness and connection. Through vulnerability and sharing our pain, we opened our hearts to empathy and compassion, and learned to love each other more deeply.

Presenters were Jorgey and Paul Krupa on “Self-forgiveness,” Eric and Trudi Cooper on “Setting Down the Burden and Pain of Guilt,” and Paula Thompson (left) on “Accepting Our Father’s Forgiveness ~ A Path to Unconditional Love”.

Participants left the retreat with enlightened hearts and fond memories of new and renewed friendships.

Financial support for this event was provided by The Urantia Book Fellowship.