I’m a child of the 90s who grew up going to a Christian church, so I have extensive knowledge about an obscure show called VeggieTales. If you aren’t an evangelical millennial and have never heard of this show, the concept is this: Vegetables teach Christian morality to children. Kinda weird? Yes. But did it kind of work and create some iconic songs?! Also, yes.

I remember an early episode entitled, “God wants me to forgive them?” To summarize: When the Grapes of Wrath come into town (har, har), they meet a young asparagus and start calling him rude names like Bean Boy. (How dare they!) He is understandably angry, but his wise asparagus father counsels him to forgive the grapes. The young asparagus confronts the grapes, they repent, and all is forgiven . . . but mere seconds later, the grapes jump right back in to making fun of him! (Rude!) The young asparagus thinks that surely he won’t have to forgive them again, but the dad teaches him that God wants us to forgive over and over. And over and over. End scene.

This episode is simplistic and cheesy, a situation that most can’t relate to when we contemplate forgiveness because real-life situations are not straightforward like a goofy kid’s show. Still, there are plenty of scenarios in our lives that leave us asking the same question as that young asparagus—God wants me to forgive them?

I recently read the book Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller with this exact question on my mind. The moldy corners of my soul were hoping Keller would give me a way out of being forgiving all the time to all sorts of people—thankfully, he did NOT give me that. Instead, Keller’s book illuminated the depth of God’s forgiveness and how knowing how big God’s love is changes everything.

My problem when I was feeling unforgiving was that I was forgetting how costly our salvation was to God. Forgiveness is expensive, even to the omnipotent Creator! God’s sense of justice could not just cheaply wipe our slates clean when the human race fell into sin in Genesis 3. A cosmic debt needed a colossal payment. Therefore, God sent his most extravagant thing—his only child, his perfect Son—to a broken, violet world. Here Jesus endured emotional, spiritual, and physical pain that we can never fathom to be a substitute for our sinful selves. God laid our infinite debt on his favorite person for us.

Jesus was immortal and didn’t have to suffer the cruelty of death, but he took on that horror for us. He was the only one who could satisfy God’s demands for a perfect life and death, and Jesus did it! Now when God looks at us, he sees Jesus’ hard-won perfection, not our great debt of past mistakes and sins. As it says in Psalm 103: 11,12, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”

When we recognize the price that Jesus paid for us, it makes us spiritually wealthy. We get to go to heaven on Jesus’ dime—in light of that, what do we lack?!

The good news of the gospel makes us spiritual trillionaires. A trillionaire doesn’t care if they lose $5, right? In the same way, when someone sins against us, it has a cost—forgiveness, even on earth, is never cheap—but we can pay it when we remember the huge sticker price God paid for us. As Keller says, “When you forgive somebody, you’re not saying, ‘All my anger is gone.’ What you’re saying when you forgive is, ‘I’m now going to treat you the way God treated me. I remember your sins no more.’”

The only way that we can forgive people who hurt us is to remember what God did for us. Once we know that—REALLY know that—there’s no limit to what we will forgive.

Because, yes, God wants us to forgive them, whomever that is for you, over and over. And over again.

“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).