It's Okay to Be Wrong Apr 11th, 2010

I remember years ago, I was having chats with a mate of mine about some deep-philosophical things and he said to me that: he wasn't scared of talking to people about their world-views, because he wasn't in the pursuit of proving the other person wrong, but he was in the pursuit of truth. If he was "proved" wrong on a point, that was okay because it exposed the areas he didn't understand about truth - areas he could work on.

Ravi Zacharias says:

If you sling mud at each other, all you're left with is mud on your face and no ground to stand on

I think my heart has always liked the idea of not being scared to talk things through in a conversation and being proved wrong, but rarely had the guts to do it. Why is that? Why is it scary to be proved wrong?

The obvious answer is pride - we're too proud of ourselves to be proved wrong. I think this is true, but I don't think it's the whole answer.

We all know the saying "Money is power" - we hear it all the time, but I don't believe it. My belief is that knowledge is power. If you have perceived knowledge, you hold all the cards. If you know how to work the system, you can make the rules.

Think politics. It's not politically correct to talk about politics. Why? Because opinions are so closely held, that some people will wave their preferred party's flag regardless of whether they're actually right or not (on any given issue). So, we don't talk about it. Not in any serious manner anyway, because we fear that someone will get on their high-horse or more humble individuals fear that they will offend someone else. Either way, there is this fear that prevents us from just talking about stuff like this and we call it "being considerate".

The same is true in churches. I don't know many Christians that would question the pastor at their church on things biblical. If they're asking the pastor a question, they expect the answer to be the truth: "because he's been to seminary and has more knowledge on this stuff than me."

I'd like to think most pastors wouldn't feel that way and they wouldn't hold up a joker every time someone questioned them about something, but we think they would, because we believe they hold all the cards. It's silly.

Now, I have to be upfront and say that I don't hold the solution to this. I don't have a principal by which we can live that will give us freedom in this area. As I said in "The Principal of the Thing" (http://ejangi.com/blog/the-principal-of-the-thing) I don't think finding principals to live by is a very good way to live anyway.

But, I can say that I've noticed since beginning this journey of relaxing into the love of the Father that I've been completely content in just having a good conversation with someone at all.

I was at a fondu party recently and I was talking to a friend of mine about how I'd stopped going to church. Thinking back over that conversation, I'd have to admit I don't agree with some of what I said. For instance, I told this person that I didn't think I would ever go back to church. I think that's true from my current perspective, but I also know that I want God to be directing those kind of decisions in my life and if he grows an appreciation for church in my heart, then I will probably go back.

I was wrong to make such an assured claim, but ironically I feel a lot less shame for having made it, than I would have previously in life.

Is this person going to hold me to it? No, of course not. Is God judging me for what you could technically say is a lie? No, he's not. How do I know that? Because I know God better than I ever have, not because of my own knowledge, but because of what he's doing in my heart.

One of the interesting things that God has taught me is that head-knowledge means precisely diddly-squat. If you look at the Gospel's Jesus is not at all amused by the Pharisees trying to intellectualise faith and using their "powerful knowledge" to manipulate people. He wasn't even interested in trying to convince them they were wrong by getting into a theological argument about it.

We are all of us going to be wrong at times. None of us are wise enough to have the truth on every subject. My feeling is that if we let God work in our lives we'll learn to be comfortable with being wrong sometimes and we also won't hold people to their claims and make them feel ashamed for not having the whole story all the time.

I can already see that I appreciate every conversation and every person I chat to much more than I ever have. I have no agenda and no judgement to give people and it just gives me such a feeling of freedom!

I still don't think I have this down yet. That friend I talked about at the beginning of this post; I ran into him a week ago and he was quite stern in his belief that I needed to go back to church. I value his opinion a lot and I believe he said those things because he wants, what he believes, is the best for me. But the conversation quickly went from a sharing, to an intellectual tug of war - a sign for me that it wasn't going anywhere.

How do you change a person's heart? It's not through the head. You can't change a person's heart through their head, but you can change a person's head through their heart - Something God knows very well.