In His Name Devotionals
ACCOUNTABILITY OR WHINING?
In His Name Devotionals
ACCOUNTABILITY OR WHINING?
“Yes, I sometimes get drunk, beat my wife, and slap my kids around, but my father used to get drunk and beat me.”
I’m pregnant. He’s gone. I don’t know what to do! This is so unfair!”
“They’re sending me to jail because I got caught with cocaine in my car. Why don’t they go after the people who sold it to me?”
“My wife moved out and told me she never wanted to see me again. I told her the affair was over and that the other woman didn’t mean anything to me. Why can’t she just forgive me and take me back?”
Trash-talk television, celebrity adulteries, drug-busted/still-playing athletes, the abolition of unbending moral codes—all have combined to make us believe we don’t have to be accountable for our poor choices and sinful behaviors. Until we reject this lie and quit whining, the cultural situation we lament will continue to deteriorate. Until we accept responsibility for our lives, we will not change the destructive patterns that are ruining so many of our relationships and causing so much unhappiness.
We choose our actions and reactions. Sometimes we don’t choose our circumstances, but we do choose how to react to them. We never choose our parents, have no control over the genetic hands dealt us, and are frequently confronted with unsolicited temptations. But it is irresponsible to appeal to these things as excuses for behaving as cockroaches rather than human beings made in the image of God.
When we make wrong choices, shouldn’t we be held accountable and allowed to suffer the consequences? This part of our incentive to change? To handle the situation better next time? To get help in understanding and controlling negative impulses?
When people we love mess up, do we abandon them? If someone asks forgiveness do we give it freely? But are we to clean up their mess—excuse their rotten behavior? Should we let them off the hook for the civil or criminal penalties that follow? Above all else, should we listen to their whining? Should we lay the blame on someone else and “fix it” for them?
There is a difference in being loving and supportive to one’s principled taking of responsibility and enabling continued misbehavior. It’s the difference between being genuinely helpful and making a bad problem worse, between fostering character development and encouraging moral ruin.
God calls us to resist and triumph over our weaknesses by His daily supply of grace, not to excuse ourselves for giving in to them by whining.
