What is a biblical & practical fail-safe method for forgiving others that cause me repeated pain?
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What do I do when I feel pain repeatedly caused by someone I trust and have developed a closeness with? What is the practical machination for forgiveness?
My own experience of this is that I feel grief because of someone's attitude to me, not so much a sense of injustice about the action.
If a complete stranger steals from me, I feel more grief about their despising of my person than any outrage I feel about the crime.
If someone close to me wrongs me, repeatedly, it may be a matter of conscience. They may think they are doing the right thing, but they are not and the wrongness of the action is grieving in itself.
In all these cases and in many more variations, I find it essential that I, myself, need to be in a condition, personally, of felt forgiveness with God regarding my own sins. Else, I shall have an unforgiving spirit to others.
Jesus commented to the Pharisee, Luke 7:47, that the weeping woman loved much because much was forgiven her. And it is my experience that my forgiveness to others comes out of the love that Christ has shown to me : it does not come out of my own human nature.
Forgiving others, like any spiritual activity, comes from the Holy Spirit himself, Galatians 5:22. Such activities do not arise from one's first nature (that born of Adam).
Then if I truly feel, in the words of the apostle Paul, that 'the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me', Galatians 2:20, then such is the effect of that, that I feel no irksomeness to others, no matter how they treat me.
Of course, the above does not hold true with the 'gospel' that I hear propagated so much in modern times : that Christ, supposedly, suffered for the sins of everybody in the world (and for nobody in particular) such that it is up to the individual to 'make good' the sacrifice on their own behalf.
Paul knew that the Son of God loved him, personally, and had died for his actual, individual sins, particularly. Paul was assured of this.
Nor does the above hold good if one is of a legal spirit, intensely concerned with one's own legal works, constantly failing and constantly in a bad mood because of it, or else full of legal proud at how holy one is : then I don't think the above operates in such a climate.
It certainly never did with myself when I was (in my former years) of a legal spirit, without personal assurance.
The fruits of the Spirit, of which forgiveness to others is one, come only if one walks in the Spirit. And the rule of the Spirit is that life is in Christ Jesus.
The life, the life of holiness, is not in ourselves. The life is in Christ Jesus.
For the rule of the Spirit (of life in Christ Jesus) hath made me free from the rule of sin (and death).
[Romans 8:2 KJV, but with 'law' rendered as 'rule' and with added brackets.]
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