Articles
Making Things Right
None of us is above making mistakes. The Scriptures document the errors of many godly people who faltered and missed the mark. Neither our standing before God nor our self-esteem is based upon being perfect. If we think it is, we are going to be despondent in the first case and totally insecure in the second.
So without excusing our mistakes, perhaps we can say that the true measure of integrity is how we respond to those mistakes when we make them.
God’s counsel here is simple: confession and repentance. The best course of action is to accept responsibility for our errors and vow not to repeat them (James 5:16; I John 1:9; II Cor. 7:10). As one professional golfer said recently, “The more you try to tight-lip things and ignore the fact that you screwed up, the more people are going to glaringly see that you screwed up” (Jim Furyk, Golf Magazine, February 2013). Golfers are notorious for not accepting responsibility for their errors because they fear damaging their fragile psyches by such admissions.
And sometimes we’re afraid of the same thing. We’re afraid we’ll lose credibility by owning up to our mistakes and others will think less of us. But think: Is this the way you normally react when someone else confesses his error? Aren’t we generally moved by such honesty and quick to forgive? Aren’t the confessions of others painful reminders of our own shortcomings?
Instead of taking responsibility for our actions, we often blame others, claim that we have been misunderstood or hide behind a plausible-sounding technicality. And in so doing we often make a bigger mess of things. Ego is our enemy here. It is hard to swallow that we have made an error of judgment or, even worse, that we have acted with base motivations. But we’ll do better by God and our fellow man if we would just come clean.
