If we want to see God come in power, we need to take responsibility. It’s not that God can’t come if we “flunk out” on the responsibility side of things, but taking responsibility for ourselves and our experiences gives us the tools that we need to be able to handle the power of God in our lives.
I’m not asking anyone to take on the load of guilt for every unfortunate event that happened in your life. That’s not the type of responsibility I’m thinking of. Shame and guilt are keys to the kingdom of darkness, not to the kingdom of God. Nor am I asking you to take responsibility for others’ choices and decisions – it’s before their own Master that they will stand or fall (Romans 14:4).
What I am talking about is taking responsibility for ourselves and for our own actions, especially in our everyday lives. Others will do things. Others will hurt us, steal from us, blame us, and make our lives more difficult. I’ve been there. But even in these situations, we can still take responsibility for our own actions, thoughts, and responses. (“Well, she forced me to…” isn’t a valid excuse – things happened before and after that brought you to react the way you did.)
Sometimes I wonder if we ask God what to do in a situation not so much so that we can follow His will, but rather so that when things go wrong, we don’t have to take responsibility for either the consequences or for our own actions as we were following the voice of the Lord. It’s a safe thing (if birthed in insecurity) to say, “Well, God told me to do it, so it doesn’t really matter how it hurt or helped people. I was following God.”
Other times, we feel like we can mitigate against shame and failure by refusing to take responsibility in the first place. After all, it can’t possibly be our fault if we never had any responsibility or authority to start with.
And finally, sometimes I believe we feel like we remove ourselves from having to take responsibility by pointing fingers. “If I shout loud enough that such-and-such is a sin, then I no longer have the responsibility to help him or her stop sinning.” The trouble is that there is never an excuse not to love a person the way God loves them, no matter how many judgments you’ve made against them.
Taking responsibility is about being secure enough in the love of God to admit that we did or didn’t do something well. It’s apologizing if it’s needed, it’s making right things that you can (given the situation), and refusing to take on the victim mentality of, “everyone else is at fault for why I failed.”
And so, at its heart, taking responsibility begins with our relationship with Christ. If we know God as a good Father, if we know how He sees us, if we have a vibrant relationship with Him – then we’ll be able to love the way He first loved us (1 John 4:19) and to have the heart capacity to take responsibility for our own actions and responsibilities in this world.
