BE ACCOUNTABLE

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

For we are each responsible for our own conduct.

Galatians 6:5 NLT

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

People like to blame others for their own shortcomings.

Sports players like to look for any number of excuses as to why they failed to make a play in a game. Some will go as far as implicating their own teammates as the cause of their foul up.

Adults always seem to easily deflect culpability for the way they are to their parents. It’s a convenient out to avoid looking in the mirror and see that the real fault is in the person reflected.

And believe it or not, there are some in the world today who accuse God as being responsible for their difficult situation. Perhaps this is the most egregious and sinful application of the blame game.  

Now, before you think I am throwing darts at others as if I am innocent of deflecting credit for a bad circumstance toward someone else, I will confess that I have been as guilty of this as anyone. Here’s my story.

I was married early on in my life, maybe too early, if I’m being honest. My wife and I had a child in short order and I struggled to maintain steady employment to ensure my family was supported. And so I joined the military, thinking it would make things better but hindsight being 20/20, I can see where it made it worse. We ended up in California, a nation away from our families in Pennsylvania, and even though we made it back east two years later, we had another child and continued to struggle with getting our footing as a family.

When we got back to the east coast, I went to a ship and this took me away from home, leaving my wife to take care of everything. I was away a lot in my first year on the ship and we were then scheduled to go on our first deployment, right before I had reached my six year mark in the Navy. Two days before I was to deploy, I found out my wife was having an affair with my next door neighbor and the ship refused to let me behind. By the time I returned home, my wife was living with my neighbor with my two daughters with her. I was alone and next door to my own family.

We went on to divorce over all this and for years, I harbored resentment toward my ex-wife over what had happened. In my view at the time, it was all her fault but it was the easy way out, a way that allowed me to avoid self assessing my job in the relationship as a husband and father.

Three years after this happened, I met my current wife, Grace, and she made it clear that the Lord had to be first in our relationship. I started to go to church and read the Bible again, and it was there that I read these words on my responsibility as a husband:

For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up His life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to Himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault.

In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church.  Ephesians 5:25-29

You know when the Bible says that the scriptures are “alive and active”, “sharper than any double-edged sword” and penetrating “even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow” while judging “the thoughts and attitudes of the heart”?

Well, this came to life in me. The words from Ephesians forced me to face the following question:

Did I truly love my wife as Christ loved the church?

I realized I hadn't even come close and I was ashamed of myself as the word of God convicted me from the inside out. I still hold on to regret today over it all.

You see, the truth of the matter was that I was just as guilty of failing in our marriage as my ex-wife and in my view, I was even more so. I say this because I saw it as my responsibility to be the spiritual leader in my family and I didn’t lead at all. The truth was that my career had become more important to me than my marriage. I had consistently put myself ahead of my family and so it should have been of no surprise that my marriage failed. I had set the stage for it through my failure to be the husband and father I should have been.

Thankfully, the Lord gave me a second chance to be the man I should have been the first time. He brought Grace into my life and then used her to get me back where I needed to be in Him. It was the classic prodigal return story and like the son who came back to his welcoming father, so too did God accept me back to Himself. I’ve never turned back to the person I was since but it all started with accepting personal liability for what I had done.

That’s my story, the tale of how the Lord taught me to be responsible for my own conduct.

If you have your own story, I invite you to comment on this message and share it. For I think we all have had to come to place where we see the Lord remind us that we’re accountable for everything we do whether in thought, word, and deed.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.

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