The Power of being Wrong

Being wrong and ignorant of it is one thing. We have all been there in relation to Jesus.
Being wrong, knowing it, and being willful in it is another thing altogether.

Why, when we know we are wrong, do we continue in it?

Too invested in the outcome.

If you already have an attitude of the ends justify the means, then being wrong in a thing that still gets you to where you want to go is acceptable.

Too much momentum.

It’s hard to stop running down a hill once you get going, even of it is the wrong hill. Once you have invested time and effort into a thing, to turn around is hard and embarrassing.

Pride.

It’s easier to continue to assert you are right than admit you are wrong. When you have articulated a position, defended it, put your career on the line over it, and now find it to be wrong, pride can lead you to double down and try to bluff or bluster your way forward.

Cutting off your nose to spite your face.

A mixture of pride and willfulness, where you know you are wrong, but by continuing in it you can harm others. This is true when continuing in the wrong helps you to keep others out of the game or spotlight.

What to do about this.

Nothing if you are unwilling to admit the wrong or give it up.
But what if you want to give up the wrong thing or the wrong idea or position, but there is no reverse gear?
Or what if the wrong that you find yourself in is merely the fruit of a deep wrong, a deeper presupposition that needs to be attended to first?

It is very hard to make the conscious changes to reverse out a whole belief structure, a whole way of existing, and to now make a conscious new path. We have a lot of encouragement to do it, though. When Saul met Jesus on the way to Damascus, he changed. When Peter had the vision of the sheet with all the unclean animals on it, he changed.
Think about Luther King, a Catholic priest for many years, established in the Church, a keeper of the faith, but the weight of the unbiblical became too heavy, and he nailed his theses to the doors of the church. A small crack in that door split the Church asunder.
We are called to a gospel and a kingdom that will keep changing us throughout our whole lives; if you have had the idea that there is a level of capacity you can get to in your faith that no longer requires learning or change, then you have missed a core idea of the gospel, continued renewal throughout your whole life. It is very easy to be connected to ideas and philosophies in our churches and our careers that we have allowed them to become more important than Jesus calling us, or we may have mistaken them as Jesus calling us.

The whole gospel can be focused down to the simple idea of, He is risen. Everything else becomes secondary to this. If the reality that Jesus rose from the dead is eclipsed but other ideas, then your foundation becomes rotten; it is not upon the cornerstone. Caring for the poor and caring for the neglected is fundamental to the gospel, but if it is not built on the resurrected Jesus, then any good we do is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

When you are aligned with ideas that have been fruitful in the past, have those ideas now been captured for a different agenda? It is hard to reverse out of a good that seems still good but is creating some undesirable outcomes.

What hill will you die on?

The world is competing with our faith. Sometimes in competition and sometimes in harmony. Unlike people of faith in the past, the hills we might die on do not lead to our death, but they require obedience to Jesus more than man.

Courage costs.