Dennis Abernathy

Albert Schweitzer once said: “Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment and learn again to exercise his will and his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.” I think Schweitzer is correct. Since God created man, it has been a destructive human characteristic to blame our problems on sources around us, instead of accepting responsibility for our actions, and exercising our ability to choose to do right and refuse to do wrong.

We live in a society where blame-shifting has become an art. It seems that hardly anyone accepts responsibility for their own actions. Criminals blame society for what they do. Drunkards blame society for their drunkenness. Child molesters blame society for their perversions. The sexually immoral blame their unnatural perversions on God because they say He made them the way they are. If we believe what some say, nobody is individually responsible for anything!

God’s Word, however, teaches us that people are responsible for their actions, when it teaches there will be a Judgment Day in which every person will give an account to God for the life he or she has lived. 2 Corinthians 5: 10 says: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” Romans 14: 10-12 says: “For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” and ”each of us shall give account of himself to God.” “Every tongue” will confess, and “every knee” will bow (Phil. 2: 10-11). Ecclesiastes 12: 14 says: “God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

It is certainly true that our surroundings exert an influence upon us, but it is not true that we bear no responsibility for how we react to those influences. Our real need is to focus on our part of the problem of sin wrongdoing and not the other person’s faults, and very importantly, accepting responsibility for our problems and not absolving ourselves from accountability. Think on these things.