The freedom in being blissfully wrong

Photo by Andrej Lišakov on Unsplash

Losers are deeply unpopular in the present age. You only need to spend 15 minutes in a schoolyard to find out that children hate being called a loser. That is the power of the world, and a compelling social psychology, which bears heavily on every single person.

Nobody likes to lose. Everyone wants to succeed, and, even though we are told that most successful people failed thousands of times, nobody really wants to fail even once.

And if winning and losing are two polarisations of life,
so are right and wrong.

Nobody wants to be wrong. Everyone pretends that they are right. And everyone is trying to convince everyone else that they themselves are right, and the other person is wrong. It is social chaos.

But the Kingdom of God operates differently.

Few people go near this power
because they see power
through the world’s eyes.

The Kingdom of God operates
as an Upside-Down Kingdom.

The Kingdom’s power is wisdom;
a wisdom that is foolishness to the world.

The statements that follow decree that there is a power in the Kingdom that most Christians don’t even understand, let alone apply. There are few that practice them with rigorous consistency. Here is a list of personalised statements that describe the maturest of faith believer in Christ:

·        I don’t have to be right to be free.

·        I don’t need to be right to feel safe.

·        I can feel safe and feel wrong at the same time.

·        I don’t have to convince you that I’m right.

·        I don’t want you to think I’m unreasonable, but if you do that’s okay.

·        You are free to think anything of me that you want.

·        You don’t have to like me or what I say or do.

·        I will still believe, that in time, I can make a friend of you, if I continue to treat you with grace.

·        I will understand it if you can’t see from my point of view. I hope you never feel I’m manipulating you.

·        Even when I think you’re wrong, I want to treat you with the same respect as if you were right, even as I respectfully disagree with you. I will not war with you.

·        I cannot be threatened, and I threaten nobody.

·        I will not fight with you, and you can’t fight with me. Believe me, there’s power in that.

All these statements speak to humility enough that subjugates the pride that would ordinarily insist on feeling the injustice that causes us to rail against anyone who would call us wrong.

With all the postulating around churches about doctrine and hermeneutics and one side versus another, we quickly lose sight of the fact that most of this is unimportant. What Christ called us to is to live a different life; a life of service to humanity for the glorification of God.

Once we reconcile the fact that glorifying God is really the only purpose of our lives, we stop insisting on being right all the time, and start loving people even when they’re obnoxious.

When we see life this way,
the transforming of our hearts
via the renewing of our minds
is apparent, with no effort added.

We do not need to prosper in this world
to know that we are prospering in eternal life.

We do not need to be right in order to feel justified. Knowing that God knows our hearts are right is more than enough. It really doesn’t matter what other people think. We are freed to simply love them.

Our hearts are right when we can accept being wrong.
In this is the essence of being teachable.

What safety we offer people with this Kingdom-perspective that seeks no gain for ourselves.

And, of course, we will get being wrong right some of the time, but not all the time.

This article could also have been called ‘the only true fruit of Christian maturity — losing to win.’