Taking Responsibility For Your Life – Embracing Your Response Ability
I’m one of those weird people that carries a notebook to church and actually reads stuff I wrote down weeks later. These are some of my notes. They may seem a little scattered or unorganized, but that’s okay.
They’re notes. I took ‘em for me and I’m sharing ‘em with you.
Here’s some stuff from Andy Stanley’s Taking Responsibility For Your Life, Part 4: Embracing Your Response Ability
Verses
At some point, every child in every culture in every country will say “That’s not fair” to which all parents will respond “life’s not fair.” We know it isn’t, but we want it to be fair. The thing is, many of us are only concerned about fairness when we get the short end of the stick. We rarely think about it otherwise. The reason is because we’re actually kinda saying that life isn’t even. Of course, it’s impossible for it to be so.
The unfairness of life quickly becomes an excuse for irresponsibility. “I got the short end of the stick, so why bother trying? So what? After all, life’s not fair. You don’t have to worry about it because you came out okay.”
Ben Franklin once said that “he that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else.” When we begin to make excuses because life isn’t fair, we get into a spiral that begins to affect not only us but those around us. Even those that have more than use can end up being responsible – they have more with which to be irresponsible.
This is a very big, broad question: Are you taking responsibility for what life – or God, for those of us that believe in Him – has offered you? None of this is new. Jesus talked about all of this in one of His parables.
In Matthew 25, He gives the Parable of the Talents. The thing to note about this parable is that it’s not about talents as we may think of them – things that we’re skilled in, gifts that are unique to each of us – instead, it’s about money. At this period in history, a talent of gold was equal to roughly 20 years of day labor. At the end of the parable, God doesn’t fix the unevenness – He talks about how to leverage it.
Everything is fair to someone. So what’s the point? Everyone gets an uneven amount of opportunity. We all have the responsibility and we will have to give an account for what we did with this opportunity. We need to figure out how to leverage it to its maximum potential. We are we going to do with what we have? We don’t look at others and make excuses.
We should absolutely learn to refuse excusing ourselves for what we don’t have and learn to leverage what we do have for something bigger than what we are. No good stories have ever come from people that’ve focused solely on themselves.
We’ve all been given uneven, unfair amounts of time but to be a responsible means that we are to use the opportunities given to us. When we embrace what we’ve been given, we begin to get serious about taking responsibility for our lives, really.
I’m really enjoying this responsibility series. I just wrote a paragraph in my post for today about my view on taking responsibility for everything… and the very next thing I know, I’m over here reading some of the same thing. Our thoughts collide.
Also, I love the point that no good stories come from those who focus on themselves. Reminds me of a certain book about living life like a story. Nice.
-Marshall Jones Jr.
Awesome coincidence. I’m definitely gonna have to check out your stuff.
I thought the whole series was awesome. I really dug what Andy had to say – or, rather, how he relayed what Jesus had to say – about it all.