christian living on Admitting Mistakes

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

We know mistakes were made.

The acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss.

Help me, I pray, to be someone who tells the truth, even when that truth has to do with my mistakes, my sins. Help me see myself and my actions clearly. Give me the courage to admit when I’ve done wro...

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prin...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin...

Gracious God, sometimes I think that I can figure out all the consequences of my decisions. I can become overly impressed with what I perceive to be my strategic vision and analysis. Forgive me for my...

In a talk about faith and doubt, the Irish Londoner Charlie Mackesy shares a humorous anecdote from a friend. This friend was attending a traditional Anglican worship service with his wife and their y...

A good apology has three parts: 1. I’m sorry 2. It’s my fault 3. What can I do to make it right? But most people forget the third part

We all have blind spots. We all have flaws in our personalities, behavior, or work habits that we can’t see, and they block our performance and growth. But others can see them. If we permit them to gi...

Repentance resulting from self-examination is a lifelong endeavor, occasionally surfacing in the public or private act of confession as an act of “courageous memory” in recalling one’s past.

For the times when we fail to notice others’ needs, we repent. For our apathy for those you’ve entrusted to us, we repent. For the amount of time we spend focused on ourselves, we repent. For fa...

We grow in part by confessing our faults and weaknesses to each other (James 5:16; Eccl. 4:10). If we are always being strong and without needs, we are not growing, and we are setting ourselves up for...

Confession is verbal humiliation.

Humble and self-forgetting we must be always, but diffident and apologetic about the gospel never.

Gracious God, forgive us for when we fail to recognize the destructive power of mental illness. Every day we are surrounded by people with real emotional and mental difficulties that we ignore. We con...

Confess sin instantly.

O Holy God, we know we have fallen short. We turn our backs when we could embrace. We remain silent when we could speak. We speak when we could listen. We judge when we could seek understanding. We cl...

The church is never more in danger than when it sees itself simply as the solution-bearer and forgets that every day it too must say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and allow that confession to w...

Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.

We pause this morning to confess our sin to You. We enter into confession with both gratitude and reluctance. We’re grateful we have a gracious God to whom we can confess, but we’re reluctant that a d...

Loving father, there are times when it feels like we never get it right. We compare ourselves to others and we don’t measure up. It seems like we can never get our act together and live up to the stan...

Loving and gracious God, we admit to You that we have distorted Your Word. Too often we pick and choose which part of Your Word to proclaim. Shying away from Your call to give all who we are, we only ...

The history of repentance is as old as humankind. We each carry the remembrance of wrongdoing in burdensome satchels, hoping that eventually someone will ease them off our back. We each know the feeli...

Holy and merciful God, in your presence we confess our sinfulness, our shortcomings, and our offenses against you. You alone know how often we have sinned in wandering from your ways, in wasting your ...

I have a lot to be humble about.

Gracious God, we confess that we are often dissatisfied with our lives. We recognize the gap that exists between what we are and what we want to be. Lord, like the woman at the well, we know our failu...

Merciful God, if we are honest, we recognize that every fiber of our being is impacted by our imperfections and sins. Even our acts of obedience and faithfulness are overshadowed by our tendencies tow...