Page Suggestions: Bible Facts

You've Got To Be Wrong In Order To Get Right

After almost thirty years of dealing with people on a spiritual, psychological, and pastoral level, I have come to a firm conclusion and a significant observation: until you freely admit your errors you'll never grow. While this observation is a relatively obvious one, it is amazing to me how many devices people use to keep from admitting that they are wrong about much of anything.

In our fallenness we love to blame others; we love to blame circumstances; we love to use emotional or physical intimidation to keep "blame away from us." Most of all the really good escape artists love to challenge the one who observes their errors and do the old "180 degrees trick" which plays out that there really is nothing wrong except your judgmental attitude!

Logic is obviously against all of this psychological ju-jitsu on one irrefutable level: unless one is born perfect, everything he does is "wrong" until he learns to do it right by trial and error. So why is this obvious reality so tough for most people to admit? I think it's pretty clear: Pride and "having to be right" is the flip-side of our gnawing awareness of how fragile and insecure we really are. Put another way, fear and insecurity's defense is the swaggering offense of pride and "rightness."

Biblically, this fear, this slavishness, comes from our basic consciousness of our being unable to truly measure up to any ultimate standards, let alone God's. Christ's answer to our slavish fears is for us to admit to our fallen reality and let Him clothe us with His perfection. Unfortunately, while I know all Christians believe this, my experience is that all too many of us still don't live there. Instead of living in conviction of sin, we live under the condemnation which comes from erroneously having to defend the entirety of our being, when really most error is really only dealing with one aspect of ourselves. I call this ubiquitous error, taking the part for the whole.

So what if you're wrong? How can we get it right until we eagerly seek to find someone to show us how, by pointing out the imperfection of what we're doing now, how to do it right? What fools we are until we admit to this reality and begin to practice lifting the level of our play by freely admitting that it needs to be lifted.

What is painful to me as a believer about all of this is that Jesus called His children to become disciples and make disciples.

"Discipleship" is a dirty word in much of the Christian community today, and it should be obvious why: because you've got to be wrong before you can grow and too many of us believers hate to admit to this, especially many of the leaders. The world doesn't need more of the, "I'm always right spirit" as unbelievers are quick to tell us. Someday Christ's kids will see how often we're wrong and then we'll have a revival, and because we're wrong we'll get a whole lot righter and that's the bottom line.