Psalms 32: 5 I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord ; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah. KJV
There is a common quote which says: "hurting people hurt others". Have you heard that before? That's an incontrovertible universal truism . When you see hurting people, they transfer agression, pains and frustrations on others. They find it hard to love people neither do they accept love. Not knowing how to give and receive love is a big problem. People in this category always ruin relationships because they tend to treat others based on their negative feelings. At one point or the other, we have had hurtful experiences that touched every fibre of our being but God doesn't want us to dwell on our hurts.
There are several ways we hurt ourselves as believers. One of the several ways people hurt themselves is when the fail to forgive themselves. There is so much teaching on forgiving others but only a few talk about self forgiveness. As they say, " you cannot give what you don't have". If you haven't forgiven yourself for your gaffes, it would be hard to forgive others when they wrong you. Perfectionists always struggle with self forgiveness because they set high standards for themselves but when they fail to achieve their personal standard. They take it out on themselves wondering why they made mistake. One of the ways to know if you love yourself is when you forgive yourself.
The more you dwell on your mistakes, you will be hurting yourself. As you hurt yourself, you'll surely hurt others. The thoughts of your personal failure shouldn't overwhelm you to the point where you cannot receive God's forgiveness. When God forgives, he forgets( Heb8:12). If truly God forgets pardoned sins, why are you hurting yourself by not forgiving yourself? Why are you dwelling on what God has forgotten? The enemy always try to remind us about our imperfections. If we reason with him, we would not forgive ourselves and he'll defeat us. Stop hurting, please forgive yourself.
Father, i receive the grace to forgive myself in Jesus name