New Year's Resolutions and Responsibility...

We tend to begin a new year with a new and fresh slate and with new and fresh hope, don’t we? We tend to begin a new year with a renewed sense of hope and with renewed desires and dreams. And we tend to begin a new year with a renewed set of goals.  And as a culture, we often will sit down and make a list of what we are going to do differently in the New Year in order to accomplish those goals. We even have a name for that list, don’t we? We call that list our New Year’s Resolutions.

Just to give you some perspective, here are the top five resolutions that Americans are making this year. The top five, in reverse order were, to stop procrastinating, to quit drinking, to exercise more, to quit smoking, to diet and lose weight. As you think of the resolutions that you have made, are any of these resolutions reflected on your list?

Now here is a question for us to wrestle with: what do all of these resolutions have in common? What are these resolutions designed to deal with? What is the issue that surrounds all of these resolutions? Isn’t the common theme that runs through this list of resolutions the issue of responsibility? I mean, all of these resolutions are designed to deal with a behavior that is irresponsible and is hurting us physically, emotionally, or relationally, aren’t they?

If you made some New Year’s resolutions this year, take a minute to think about those resolutions, and then ask yourself this question: Isn’t the goal of those resolutions to be more responsible? In most cases, we tend to make New Year’s resolutions to deal with our irresponsibility with the goal that we would be more responsible.

But here is the thing: when you think of New Year’s resolutions, do you remember the New Year’s resolutions that you made last year? And if you do remember those resolutions that you made last year, how successful were you in keeping them? Now, here is the really hard question to ask: for all of the New Year’s resolutions that you failed to keep, how bad do you feel about failing to keep them?

Do you feel bad, or do you find yourself justifying your inability to keep those resolutions and rationalizing that it is o.k. to continue to behave in an irresponsible way? Do you find yourself wrestling with the tension of responsibility? Do you find yourself desiring to escape responsibility and instead allow others to wrestle with that tension?

You see, what is true of us as an individual is true of us as a culture. As a culture, I believe that we are at a crossroads. As a culture, I believe that we have been steadily moving away from the concept of personal responsibility. As a culture, we are often marked by the desire to live irresponsibly and then allow others to be responsible for our irresponsibility.

So do we have a moral obligation to be responsible? Or is it o.k. to be irresponsible and allow others, whether it is the government, family, or other individuals to be responsible for our irresponsibility? Are we accountable for the level of our responsibility in life? And who are we to be responsible for and accountable to when it comes to the idea of responsibility?

At the church where I serve, we are going to spend the next four weeks in a sermon series entitled responsibility. During these four weeks, we are going to spend our time together asking and answering these questions. And our hope and our prayer is that the answers to these questions would resonate in our heads, in our hearts, and through our hands in a way that results in us embracing what the Bible has to say when it comes to the question of responsibility.

This week, as we launch into these next four weeks, I would like for us to spend our time together answering the question “were we created to be responsible? Were we created to take responsibility for our lives?” 

Tomorrow we will answer those questions…