Can You Admit You Are Wrong?

Can You Admit You Are Wrong?

by | Oct 12, 2020 | Christian Thought, Forgiveness, John Tarr

Can You Admit You Are Wrong?

How hard is it for you to admit you are wrong about something? How about admitting that to those close to you, like your wife, children, or people at work, or someone that you may not have seen eye-to-eye with in the past?

Let’s face it, admitting you have been wrong takes a certain amount of humility. Your self-esteem takes a real hit.

Romans 12:3 says “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”

Philippians 2:3-4 “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

I know it has been very hard for me at times in my life to admit I have been wrong, especially with my wife. If I admit I am wrong, my brain shoots back to my childhood where everyone seemed to consider me as not very intelligent.

My teachers in first and second grade and my family thought I was of low IQ (and still does) because of attention deficit (they did not name it that in the 1950’s) but called it retarded.

Everyone was convinced I was retarded.

They sent me to a counselor when I was 7 or 8 years old for help with my cognitive skills. After one session he told my parents that my IQ was not low but that I needed to have my hearing checked.

They did and found my hearing was very bad. I had lost hearing completely in one ear and about 50% in the other. That is why everyone thought I was ignoring them.

I had exceptionally bad earaches as a child and would scream for hours on end because of the pain. Eventually the doctors took out my tonsils which turned out to be the cause of the infection in both ears.

By that time the damage was done, and my hearing would never improve.

The damage was also done in my psyche in my early years of child development.

That mindset has followed me my whole life so when I have had a problem where something did not work or I have to admit that I am wrong about something,  it shoots me back to feeling stupid and retarded.

That feeling has been lurking in the back of my brain all my life and has done damage in many of my past relationships, especially with my wife.

God has been working on this issue with me since I became a Christian, but it is not totally gone. I have become much better with her, but it still raises its ugly head from time to time.

Funny thing is that I have noticed when I do admit I was wrong about something with her, she finds it very hard to forgive me, at least right away.

She also finds it much harder to admit she was wrong about something.

I think many wives are like that. Why is that?

I think it’s because we as husbands have wounded them far more than they have wounded us. I know this is an overgeneralization, but I have observed this play out in many marriages.

My last two questions for us to answer. 

1.) How hard is it for you to admit you are wrong about something?

2.) What is our opinion of ourselves and is it accurate from God’s perspective?

 

I hope you enjoyed this article. We have written many on our relationship to God and Jesus Christ. If you would like to read more go to Two Measures Foolish Blog. 

 

Can You Admit You Are Wrong?

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Inescapable Hope

Inescapable Hope

by | May 7, 2020 | Apologetics, Forgiveness, Justin Tarr

Inescapable Hope

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12.

 

As a sinner myself, I am personally and directly responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion; it is my sin that drove the nails through His hands, and it is my sin that brought God humiliation.

The torment of Christ is something that I deserved to experience for all eternity.

Jesus quoting Psalm 22 gives us a picture of Jesus’s spiritual state in that moment. Similar to how one quotes a movie or song to describe how one is feeling, Jesus quotes Psalm 22.

The Psalm itself describes tremendous suffering of various kinds yet ends with a steadfastness of faith that ensures trust in God. His last words, a quote of Psalm 31:5, He shows that He was unwavering in Hope.

This provides a terrifying form of suffering that the wicked must endure false hope.

If Jesus was not vindicated by the resurrection, then His Hope would have indeed been vain. Nonetheless, as an eternal Being experiencing hope deferred, He experienced spiritual sickness of an eternity of deferred hope.

Inescapable Hope

We all place hope in something.

A person who is not saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, too, has their hope in something. Perhaps it is hope in a better future, better living circumstances, or even the cessation of suffering via death.

Unfortunately, there is only one proper place to place one’s hope: The Incarnate Lord.

All other hopes are vain false hopes, and Hell is to experience an eternity of bitter deferred hope.

Even if someone were to try to abandon all hope as they enter the gates of Hell, they would still hope that the abandonment of hope might somehow produce a better existence, be it through a pseudo-death via eternal transcendental meditation or by holding to a hope of “making the best of it”.

Hope is an intrinsic part of the human experience, and the damned have an eternity of their vain hope burning in their stomachs by the logical necessity of conscious existence. 

Inescapable Hope

Jesus is the only true Hope, and only he can survive experiencing the full brunt of eternal deferred hope.

By Jesus being vindicated, so too was an eternity’s worth of deferred Hope fulfilled.

That is the same Hope that is offered to you and I through the Gospel of Christ.

How sure are you that you are placing your hope in the right thing? 

 

Inescapable Hope

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There is Always Hope and Forgiveness

There is Always Hope and Forgiveness

by | Jan 23, 2020 | Daily Thoughts, Forgiveness

There is Always Hope and Forgiveness

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39 King James Version (KJV)

 

Everything, absolutely anything other than Christ and His love for us can be taken away at any moment on this journey here on earth.

Your soulmate, your spouse, your family, your sanity, your deepest and most enduring friendships, your earthly comforts, your physical security and I could list a million things.

But nothing can separate us from His love, no matter how it appears. He still loves you, is still in charge when He allows loss, difficulties, etc. In fact, He prayed to His Father about our stay in the world with all of its “minefields” of distractions.

Humans live in the world but are not out of the world and so live with all the junk, external and internal.

We live in mortal bodies that age and die and we are still connected to the old man, the flesh and its deathly desires.

We fail on every level…

…suffer consequences of our thoughts, choices, and actions. We battle the temptation to fill the voids in our lives with anything but the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet we are not separated from His love.

His love has won, is winning and will win no matter what it looks like. When we see His face someday down the road, we will see LOVE that never wavered or failed.

The fact that our sin breaks fellowship with His love, well that is a different topic.

His love allows us the freedom to rebel and fail, to resist Him or to seek Him. Even when we treat Him like dirt His love does not fail, and we are not separated for it.

There is always hope and forgiveness, no matter how bad you fail.

You are not separated from LOVE Himself.

 

There is Always Hope and Forgiveness

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Two Measures Foolish: Foolish to God for we sin – Foolish to the world for the cross.

Two Measures Foolish are a Christian Apologetics group of writers that write from a Christian Perspective and Christian World View using the Bible as our core.

We all travel on an individual journey on this planet earth that God has put into motion from the day we were formed in our mothers’ body. We all have deep questions that need to be answered. Why are we here? Is this all there is?

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Descending into Madness Without Forgiveness

Descending into Madness Without Forgiveness

by | Jan 15, 2020 | Forgiveness, John Tarr

Descending into Madness Without Forgiveness

As I was watching a new movie called “The Professor and the Mad Man” with Mell Gibson (Professor James Murry) and Sean Penn (Dr. William Chester Minor). Many emotions came to my mind. This film is very complicated and well done.

It’s a true story about how the first Oxford English Dictionary was created and the unlikely friendship that evolved between a Scottish autodidact and a schizophrenic, PTSD-suffering American civil war veteran.

These two became the most unlikely of friends. Sean Penn plays the part of the mad man, Dr. James Murry, who is in an English prison for the insane in 1879. 

In his mind, he is haunted by some of the ghosts of the past and thinks they are following him and wanting him to pay a price for what he has done. He thinks these ghosts have not forgiven him and do not think God has either.

It eventually made him crazy and irrational. 

(Left) Mell Gibson as Professor James Murry –  (right) Sean Penn as Dr. William Minor

Descending into Madness Without Forgiveness

 

In this haze of PTSD, Dr. Minor teams up with Professor Murry on how to put together this very complicated dictionary and become friends in the process. Working on this project, Dr. Minor’s symptoms are reduced because his mind is being occupied with the work.  

Eventually, he would again descend back into madness because of an unfortunate event in prison. Dr. Minor said something very interesting to Professor Murry when he came to visit him to find out what happened.

“God makes you pay a heavy toll for your past sins.”

How many of us believe deep down inside that God makes us pay a heavy toll for our past behaviors and indiscretions and we need to pay back for what we have done? 

Many of us do not think we are worthy to be forgiven and replay our past over and over trying to make sense out of what we have done. 

Sometimes other people that we have injured do not want to forgive us. It is still too painful for them. They want us to pay a heavy toll. Some people are just so filled with anger that no amount of payback will work to fix the wrong, real or imagined, that has occurred.

We also can be consumed by this fire that burns inside of us because of anger towards someone else. We too can replay the event over and over until we begin to descend into madness. 

How do we overcome this sinful human condition of anger and unforgiveness? This terrible cycle we seem to find ourselves in all too often.

Jesus Christ is the only way.

What amazing God Christians serve! He has made a way out of this madness of unforgiveness and sin. By turning himself into a human and walking among us and eventually dying at our hands. This sinless entity took all of our bad behaviors and evil ways and piled them on His shoulders and took them to the grave forever.

We are now forgiven.

Forgiven completely and not just a little bit. It has to be all or nothing in God’s eyes. Nothing can be left over to haunt us and take us back into the madness of unforgiveness. God does not want that for His children who He loves so much.

“What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?” Psalm 8:4 (NKJV)

Dr. Minor’s madness was rooted in the past. In his mind, he just could not be forgiven because all the people he thought he had harmed were dead and gone so there was no way he could make it up to them. They kept haunting him and driving insane. It was an eye for an eye from the Old Testament and could not be appeased. 

Jesus came with a new message in the New Testament. Judgment was cast aside for a better, sane way of life and relationships. All we have to do is ask the Creator of the universe to come into our lives. Put our pride on hold and tell Him we need help. Become born again into a new life and a new thought process.

Forgiveness allows us to start over again no matter what we have done. It gives us hope to start again and knowing we are not alone. Our mentor becomes God Himself and the Bible the driver’s manual.

This will truly keep us sane.

I think God designed us to be forgiven because we all have done things in our lives to other people great and small. We cannot help it because of the sin nature we were born with. Scripture tells us in:

 Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”

There is also a terrible price to pay if we do not forgive. From God’s word, it says in:

Matt: 6:14-15  “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.”

In other words, if you do not forgive others you are condemning yourself. Now if that is not madness, I do not know what is.

As I write this out, I am searching myself if I have not forgiven others of their transgressions towards me. I do not want God to deal with me in this unforgiving way. After He has given me a way out of the insanity I do not want to go back to that life.

Now that’s a scary thought. I have already asked God to forgive me for thinking that.

 

If you would like to know about this great movie “The Professor and the Madman”

 

Descending into Madness Without Forgiveness

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Two Measures Foolish: Foolish to God for we sin – Foolish to the world for the cross.

Two Measures Foolish are a Christian Apologetics group of writers that write from a Christian Perspective and Christian World View using the Bible as our core.

We all travel on an individual journey on this planet earth that God has put into motion from the day we were formed in our mothers’ body. We all have deep questions that need to be answered. Why are we here? Is this all there is?

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