The gospel of the freedom to be wrong

God wants us to be family. That is how I understand the purpose of Jesus’ cross and resurrection and the Holy Spirit’s mission to make us holy. I don’t believe that God is allergic to sin. I don’t believe that God has a “glory” he is obligated to worry about which is somehow at odds with his desire to bring every human being as deeply into his arms as we will allow. God’s glory is his family. I don’t believe that we need to be saved from God’s perfectionism or God’s wrath. What we need to be saved from is our sin, and most specifically our tendency to justify sin, which imprisons us and warps our ability to perceive reality correctly. It is this self-justification which makes us hate God and experience his intimate love as the wrathful torture of hell. The great gift that forms the foundation of Christian life is the freedom to be wrong, which we gain through accepting the mercy of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. Without that freedom, no matter what prayer we’ve prayed or how perfectly our actions conform to the teachings of scripture, we remain unsaved.

This is the gospel I’ve come to understand. This is what I believe the apostle Paul was so emphatic about in his New Testament letters where he develops the crucially important doctrine of justification by faith expressed most succinctly in Ephesians 2:8-10. I think that many of my fellow evangelical Christians have had their salvation undermined because of a misunderstanding of the problem that is solved by Jesus’ cross. The problem is not that we fail to be perfect, and God is infinitely angry about that, so he wants to torture us forever but will settle for torturing his son on the cross instead if we can prove to him that we “believe” in Jesus. The problem is that we think that we’re supposed to be always right, and we either believe that we are or resent the expectation; this makes us suck at being a merciful and loving family to each other, which would make eternity together with God a greater hell than the most awful family reunion in human history without his intervention through Christ.

God does want us to be perfect, but not in the way we think. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:43-48 how to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It’s not flawless execution of rule-following for the sake of rule-following. It’s not a perfect articulation of all the fine points of Christian doctrine. These things are only relevant insofar as they make us people who can “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.” Mercy is the goal of all Christian holiness; it is the perfect divine disposition toward which the Holy Spirit shapes our hearts if we allow. This isn’t to say that my sins don’t matter. They matter immensely, because they make me unmerciful. To be merciful requires having a pure heart that worships only God.

If I’m compromised by sin, such as an addiction to alcohol or pornography or hate radio, then my distracted heart will be unable to respond unilaterally to the world’s sin with God’s love. We gain the ability to love others in the unilateral, merciful way that God loves us by loving God and receiving God’s love for us. When we worship something as god that isn’t God, then it sabotages the pure exchange of God’s love that takes place when we worship God. What seals us in love-destroying idolatry is when we’re defensive and shameful about it, resisting God’s attempts to liberate us from it, i.e. when we lack the freedom to be wrong. If we have gained the freedom to be wrong from trusting that all of our shameful secrets can be crucified on Jesus’ cross, then the Holy Spirit will guide us on the journey called sanctification which chisels away smaller and smaller idols from our heart that were completely imperceptible to us when we thought we were supposed to be always right.

I am a little wary of Christians who are hypervigilant about sin, especially when they talk all the time about God’s anger against sin. Though it’s true that I cannot know the heart of people who talk this way, it sounds like they are trying very hard to be right, which makes me think they lack the freedom to be wrong. People are liberated from their sin in environments where they feel safe being wrong. I have trouble understanding how that happens in contexts of hypervigilant sin management where everyone is walking around on eggshells. My greatest liberation from sin has occurred not when I am beaten into submission and humiliation by someone who proves what a hypocritical idiot I am, but when I am melted from the delusion of my self-justification by seeing and loving the goodness of God.

I do think that confession and accountability are immensely important tools if the problem of sin is understood properly. The problem is not that I’m supposed to be perfect and God is really angry because I’m not. The problem is that I continue to lack the freedom to be wrong, and God is really sad because I still don’t trust him. Even though Jesus died for my sins, I continue to be in denial about addictions and idols that I have, which occupy the space in my heart that God wants to fill with mercy. Confession is practice in embracing the freedom of being wrong and letting God’s armies of love advance into the occupied territories of my heart that remain under self-justification. It’s most powerful when it’s spoken aloud to another person, which is why James 5:16 says to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”

To say that we have the freedom to be wrong is not the same thing as saying it’s okay that we’re wrong, depending on what we mean by that. If I trivialize the wrongness of my sin, that means I remain under the death-grip of self-justification and enslaved to the need to be right. So a healthy confession environment needs to involve forgiveness and repentance rather than a blithe reassurance that the confessed sin isn’t a big deal. To tell people who confess sin that their sin is no big deal means that you’re denying them the freedom to be wrong by telling them that they’re still right and they’re supposed to continue pretending to be right. So when someone says they’re sorry to you, don’t say “No big deal,” which trivializes their apology. Say “I really appreciate your apology,” which gives their apology dignity. This is the distinction between a gospel of “tolerance” and Jesus’ gospel of the freedom to be wrong. The freedom to be wrong through which God’s mercy makes us into a humble and merciful family for each other is completely different than declaring that there is no standard of right and wrong which would be a horrible foundation for any family to have.

One thing the Catholics do right that we Protestants need to adopt is to incorporate penitential practices with confession. Part of the freedom to be wrong is gaining the ability to actually mourn and hate our sins. This is something that has to be learned. Part of how I learn it is through my knees, literally. I kneel on the marble floor at the Catholic basilica in Washington, DC when I go there each Monday morning. I have bad knees, so it hurts. But when I kneel and say, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” over and over again, somehow my tears become my food, as it says in Psalm 42:3. I realize it sounds bizarre and masochistic, but the mourning of sin results in an unspeakable sweetness in which you taste the goodness of God. I gain a deeper hunger for my heart to be emptied of all things except for God’s mercy.

Again it’s important to understand that we can “mourn” our sins for the wrong reason if we’re doing so in order to be theologically correct. It completely defeats the purpose if we put on a public pageant of grandiose humility talking about our incredible wickedness so that everyone will see how right we are to admit that we’re wrong. We can easily reduce our confession to a public relations gesture, like the mea culpa of the politician who pauses for a few seconds before going right on with his talking points. The point is not to admit that we’re wrong when we’re forced to do so in order to get back to being completely right. The point is to own our permanent wrongness and God’s permanent rightness, which may seem demoralizing but is actually incredibly liberating.

We will always remain redeemed sinners, justified solely on the basis of Jesus’ cross. No matter how liberated from sin we become, we will always be wrong. Because part of the amazing freedom of being wrong is to call everything that we do right a gracious gift from God, something for which we are as thankful and surprised as everybody else. I don’t need to be right because Jesus declares me right in spite of everything wrong about me, unilaterally, unconditionally, and permanently. Trusting that truth is heaven; rejecting it is hell. What remains for me to do is to practice being wrong, hopefully in smaller and more intricate ways as the Holy Spirit gives me deeper insight, so that I can be more perfectly merciful in conformity with the nature of the God who is saving me.