Rick Warren - Accepting Responsibility—Part One

Hey, everyone, Welcome to Pastor Rick Warren's Daily Hope. Now

we're going to continue our series today called Building My

Life on Values that last, and Rick will press on

and show us how we benefit when we apply the

Biblical principles of trust, self control, balance, respect forgiveness, moral purity, fairness, honesty,

and love to our lives. I don't know about you,

but I am so excited to hear what Rick shares

today with part one of a message called Accepting Responsibility.

If I were to ask you today, what's your greatest ability,

I wonder what some of you would say. You might say,

you know, I'm good at mechanics, I'm good with math.

Some of you might say I'm good at sewing, or

surfing or channel surfing.

But you say, well, I'm good at all of this.

But I want to suggest you this morning that your

greatest ability is responsibility. You say, huh, yeah, your greatest

ability is responsibility. Responsibility is the ability to respond to life.

It's one of the greatest gifts that God has given you.

God created you and made you a human being, and

what makes you a human is the ability to choose

your response to life, and so you can respond in

many different ways to stress, to problems, to crises, to opportunities,

to relationships, and it's all your choice. A couple weeks ago,

we talked about how most of your life is out

of your control. You didn't choose where you were born

or when you were born, in all those different things,

and you don't choose a lot of the circumstances and

events that happened to you. But you do have the

freedom to choose how you react to life. You do

have the freedom to choose how you respond. And because

you have that choice, because you have the freedom to

respond and you are able to respond, you are response able.

You're responsible.

Justice Lewis Brandeis, who was one of the Supreme Court justices,

once said that responsibility is the great developer. It builds

your character, it's what helps you grow. Churchill called it

the price of greatness. If you want to do something

great with your life, you have to become a responsible person.

So today we're beginning a series on ten values on

which you build as pillars of your life, a successful

and a significant life. And we have to start with

personal responsibility, because, folks, this is the foundation, this is

ground zero, this is the bottom line. If you don't

get this one, you may well forget the rest of

the series, because you can't build any of the other

values in your life if you don't personally accept responsibility

for your choices, your character, and your values.

This is what it all starts with.

If I get that point down, then the rest can

be built in a successful and a significant life. Now,

it's very obvious that in the last forty years there's

been a dramatic decline in the acceptance of personal responsibility

in our society. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for anything anymore.

In fact, we want to accuse and excuse. We want

to accuse other people it's all their fault, and we

want to excuse ourselves it's not my fault. And we

live in this blaming and accusing and excusing society where

nobody wants to really own up to anything. Now, what

causes that? What's happened in our society? Well, last week

I said that our beliefs determine our behavior, and our

behavior determines what we.

Become and what our society becomes.

And so we talked about the ideas of individualism and

secularism and relativism and how that has influenced our value system.

There are three values that are very prevalent today, three

beliefs that are the antithesis of personal responsibility. I've written

them there on your outline. We just need to look

at them for a second. The first one is what

I call the rights mentality, the second is the victim mentality,

and the third is the entitlement mentality. Now, the rights

mentality basically goes like this, I have my rights, and

that's all I'm interested in my rights. Would you agree

that today our society is obsessed with personal rights. Listen

to this John Leo, talking in US News and World Report.

Today American politics is a wash in rights talk. We

have criminal rights, computer rights, animal rights, children's rights. We

have victims rights, abortion rights, housing rights, privacy rights, the

right to know the sex of a fetus, the right

to not be tested for AIDS, and the rights to

not inform anybody.

If we have been infected.

Recently, we have acquired the right to die, and according

to some rather imaginative theorist, a damage fetus also has

a right not to be born. He says, our culture

has reached the point where the obsession with individual rights

is making it hard for us to think socially. And

he suggests that along with our bill of rights, that

we really need a bill of responsibilities. And I want

to say, John, we already have one. It's called the

Ten Commandments. That's what it is.

Now.

We hear a lot today about rights, and we don't

hear very much about responsibilities. We hear a lot about entitlements.

We don't hear much about obligations. We hear a lot

about myself, we don't hear much about what it does

to other people. And we certainly hear a whole lot

more about choice than we hear about commitment. So this morning,

I want us to look at this value of why

do I need to be a person of responsibility? Well,

first there's this rights mentality. The second we have called

what I call the victim mentality, And the victim mentality

basically goes like this, none of my problems are my fault.

In fact, they're all your fault, and we blame. And

you've heard me say many times you spell blame, be lame,

and every time you blame somebody else for the unhappiness

in your life, you are being lame. Recently, there have

been a number of books out on this. This one's

called a nation of victims, the decay of American culture,

and listen to this. Here's some examples. An FBI agent

embezzel's two thousand dollars from the government, and then he

loses it all in an afternoon of gambling in Atlantic City.

He's fired, but he wins reinstatement after court rules that

his affinity for gambling with other people's money is quote

a handicap, and thus as a handicap, it is protected

under federal law. There's another fired for consistently showing up

late at work. A former school district employee sues former employers,

arguing that he is the victim of what his lawyer

calls quote chronic lateness syndrome.

I'm a victim.

In Framingham, Massachusetts, a young man steals a car from

a parking lot and is killed while driving it. His

family then sues the proprietor of the parking lot for

failing to take steps to prevent such thefts.

It's your fault. It's your fault that I stole a car.

A man who, by his own admission, has exposed himself

between ten thousand and twenty thousand times and been convicted

of flashing on more than thirty occasions, is turned down

for a job as a park attendant in Dane County,

Wisconsin and because of his arrest record, but he sues

on the grounds that he never exposed himself in a park,

only in libraries and laundromats. Now, the Wisconsin employment officials,

ever accommodating to the expansion of human rights, agreed to

make an initial determination of probable cause that the flasher

was the victim of quote illegal job discrimination.

We are a nation of victims.

None of it's my fault, it's everybody else's fault, and

I have my rights. And then comes the third antithesis

to personal responsibility, and that's what I call the entitlement mentality.

And the entitlement mentality basically says I deserve it. The

world owes me a living. And this is a kind

of a strange combination that came about from a generation

of baby boomers who were all raised seventy six million

of them on the most second most popular book ever sold.

And in that book, it basically says, leave the little

tyrant alone. If he wants to throw jello around the

living room, go ahead. You don't want to harm his creativity,

and so a whole generation grew up not thinking I

am my brother's keeper. They're not even thinking I'm my

own keeper. It's you ought to take care of me.

And you couple that with the rapid expansion of government

intervention in the last forty years, which basically says we'll

take care of you from cradle to grave. And we

have people saying I have a right not to work,

and so therefore you should pay me to not work.

This is produced what Time magazine calls busy bodies and

cry babies. What's happening to the American character? And inside?

It says? A cover article says a nation of finger pointers.

It says twin malformations are cropping up an American character,

a nasty intolerance, and a desire to blame everyone else

for everything else. Now that's the kind of world we

live in. It says, I'm not responsible for anything. It's

not my fault. In start contrast to that, notice what

the Bible says, They're on your outline Ephesians chapter five.

Let's read this aloud together, live life with a sense

of responsibility, not as those who do not know the

meaning of life, but as those who do now circle

sense of responsibility. God says, you are to live your

life with a sense of responsibility. But more important than that,

I want you to notice, he says. The reason, he says,

because you know the meaning of life. And the point

of this verse is this. If you live your life

in a responsible way, it means you probably know the

meaning of life. You figured it out. Why did God

put me here? On the other hand, if you are

living an irresponsible life, it just means one thing, you

don't know the meaning of life.

You don't know your purpose.

You don't know why God puts you on this planet

in the first place. Therefore, the key to living a

more responsible life is to figure out why am I here?

What did God put me on this earth for? So,

the first thing we have to deal with is why

should I live a responsible life?

There are three reasons. You might write these down.

The first reason I need to learn to live a

responsible life is because God is watching me. Because God

is watching me, the Bible says this in the Book

of Hebrews. Nothing in all the world can be hidden

from God. Everything is open before him and to him.

We must explain the way we have lived. He says,

God sees it all, and God is going to judge

us one day and evaluate our lives on how did

we live?

Now, If you don't get anything else that I say.

This morning, get this life is a test of responsibility.

That's why you're going through all this. God puts you on,

He plans you thought you up, puts you on earth,

and He is testing your responsibility. And if you've been

around at saddleback for any length of time, this is

all material. We've gone over this before that whether you

live sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety or one hundred years, that's

just a little millimeter on the yardstick of eternity.

When you die, that's not the end of you.

You're going to live on for eternity one of two places,

Heaven or Hell. And how you do, what you do

with your life and the decisions you make here are

going to influence your return and you will spend far

more time on that side of death and on this side. Now,

what's going on in this fifty to one hundred years

that I live here on Earth. Well, as I've said before,

this is the warm up act for eternity. This is

the dress rehearsal. This is where you get the parts right, folks.

Right now you're in preschool. You're in preschool, and God

is testing your responsibility for what's going to happen later on.

And God puts you on this earth primarily for two reasons.

One to get to know him personally through his son

Jesus Christ, and two to develop character, to become more

like God the way God is in character, to develop

the values and the responsibility behind all of that. And

that's the foundation. If you're not responsible, you can't build

the values. Now, why is God interested in my character?

God couldn't care less about your achievements. What he's interested

in is your character. God couldn't care much less about

your bank account. What he's interested in is your character.

Why. Because it's the only thing you're gonna take with

you when you die.

You're not taking anything else. You didn't come into this

world with anything. I've been there in the birth of

all three of my kids. None of them came in

chomping a cigar, holding the Cadillac or anything else. They

came in totally naked, with nothing. And you know what,

when you die, you're gonna die and leave it all behind.

So everything you have here, all your material possessions are

really just on loan to you for sixty eighty ninety years.

They're not really yours. You just get to use them,

then you pass them on to somebody else. But the

one thing you will take with you is your character.

And God is evaluating are you responsible? And the Bible

says that in eternity that we will be rewarded accordingly

to our responsibility and our relationship to Christ here on earth.

Once you've settled that issue of yes, I know God,

and I know a son Christ, and I am a

follower of him, then the issue becomes what did you

do with what I gave you? God has made an

investment in you when he created you. He gave you talents,

he gave you abilities, he let you live in this

particular time in history. He's given you certain opportunities. These

are all things He's given you, and he expects a

return on his investment. Notice what the Bible says, each

of us will have to give a personal account to God.

That means nobody's going to do it for you. Your

wife can't do it for you, the pastor can't do

it for you. You will give a personal account. And

I want to tell you that one day God is

going to do an audit on you. Not on your finances,

but God's going to do an audit on your life,

and he's going to say, what did you do with

what I gave you? Were you responsible? Did you use

your time, your money, your influence, your mind?

Did you use your.

Relationships, your opportunities, and all of the things that I

gave you.

Did you use them wisely? Or did you just use

them selfishly?

That's reason enough, folks, if there were no other reason

for being responsible. It's the fact that one day I

am going to be accountable to God for how responsible

I lived my life. Daniel Webster once said, I'm the

most important idea I ever thought was when I realized

the day I realized that I am personally and individually

accountable to God for how I lived. Now, notice it

says here God knows everything, nothing is hidden. That means

He's seen everything you've ever done. It's interesting because when

we rationalize our irresponsibility, one of the ways we do

it is nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever know,

so I, you know, I can throw this trash down,

nobody ever knows, so I can steal this stuff nobody

will ever know. So I can read this material or

on and on and on, but God knows, and he's

the only one that really matters. You may be able

to fool everybody in this room, your family, your boss,

and everybody else, but that doesn't matter who you're living.

The responsibility for the responsible life for is God and

he sees it all. So that's the first reason, and

that's enough. But there are two other reasons you need

to live a responsible life. Number two, because others are

affected by my life. Because other people are affected by

my life. You see, none of us lives to ourselves alone.

We are all interdependent. We're not independent, we're not dependent,

but we are interdependent on each other. First, Corinthians tells

us in the Bible people should be concerned about others

and not just about themselves. Now, back in the sixties,

during the kind of the hippie movement, and I lived

up in the Bay Area, and then I lived north

of it too, and there used to be these beautiful

Peter Max psychedelic posters, some of you remember these, And

one of them kind of had a sixties mantra on

it that went kind of like this. It said, I

was not put on this planet to live up to

your expectations, and you were not put on this planet

to live up to my expectations. So let me do

my thing and you do your thing, and if perchance

we happened to meet, that's groovy.

You.

Now we don't say it in such a corny way anymore,

but the attitude is still around and it goes like this.

It's in Billy Joel's songs. I don't care what they say.

This is my life.

Or is that great theologian Sammy Davis Junior said, I

Gotta be me or its theological partner Sinatra, I did

it my way, And the basic idea behind these type

of songs are I live my life the way I

want to, And what's it to you?

Because if it.

Hadn't hurt you, or if you don't know about it,

who cares? It's my life and it really doesn't matter

what I do because it doesn't affect you. The problem

is you're wrong. You're wrong. Every decision you make affects

somebody else, even the secret ones, even the secret ones,

because it changes you, and you then influence other people

by the changes in your life. You may not see

the visible results, but every choice you make influences somebody else,

and every time you're irresponsible, it hurts somebody else.

Because we're all on this same planet.

When somebody in your family has a problem, it's not

their problem, it's the family's problem because it influences everybody

in their family, one kid, whether the kids on drugs

or the dad's under stress. Believe me, it affects everybody

in the family. There is no such thing as a

non affecting decision. You all the time with your life

influence your family, parents, kids, brothers, sisters, moms, dad's, husband's wives.

The choices you make influence your friends. They influence the

people in your neighborhood, They influence friends at church, They

influence society at large in major and minor ways. But

we are all interconnected because we're on this planet together.

I mean, if I were to ask five of you

to say, hey, are four of you volunteer to go

with me after service today, Let's go over to Lake

Mission Viejoll And I've got a rowboat over there, and

we're gonna go out and catch some rays. Well, just

row out in the middle of the lake and just

relax for a while. So I get four of you

to go with me. We got an eight foot boat.

We get over there and I say, okay, now, each

of you, here is your foot and a half space.

Here's your space. Here's your space. Here's your foot and

a half, here's your foot and half. This is my

space over here.

Okay.

So we go out. We row out into the middle

of the lake. We're out there, relaxing, getting a tan.

Twenty minutes into the boat trip, I pull out a

wood drill and start drilling a hole in the bottom

of the boat in my space. You say, what are

you doing, Rick, And I say, I'm drilling a hole.

You say, why what are you doing? You can't do that.

I said, don't worry about it. It's my life. This

is my space.

I'm not drilling it on your You got your own space.

You want to drill a whole, fine, you don't want

to drill a home five. What's good for you is fine,

But what's good for me is fine. And I'm gonna drill.

I want to drill a hole in my space. You say,

you don't understand something.

Rick.

We're all in the same boat, and if the boat

goes down, we're all going down with it. And that's

why it's totally irresponsible to say I can live any

lifestyle I want. It doesn't matter to you. It does

matter to me because it affects me and it affects

other people around. And the Bible teaches we affect other

people by our lives. Now, see, it's interesting that when

we are irresponsible, the two most common excuses rationalizations we

give are number one, nobody will know about it, and

number two, it won't hurt anybody.

And you're wrong on both accounts. You're wrong.

A man can say, oh, I can get away with

this because my wife'll never know. I can do this

and it won't hurt my wife, and kids can say

oh I can do this, it won't hurt my parents,

and employees say, you know, I can do this because

it's a big company. It won't hurt anybody, And you're wrong.

So you need to be responsible because God is watching

and because other people are affected. But there's a third reason,

and this is even a positive point here, and that

is I need to be responsible because God rewards it,

and boy does he reward it. Deuteronomy twenty eight, verse

two says this in the Bible, you will experience all

of God's blessings. If you obey the Lord circle that

word all, God says, you will not believe what I

will pour out on your life. If you will live

responsibly with your time, with your money, with your relationships,

with your every area of your life, I will bless

you in ways you cannot even imagine. One of the

ways that God rewards us when we are responsible is

he gives us greater responsibility. The next verse, Jesus says,

to those who use well what they are given, even

more will be given. And so if you use your influence,

well guess what. You become more influential. And if you

use your possessions, well, guess what. God will provide more

of them. Why should God give you more money when

you're not responsible with the finances you've got right now?

He doesn't have any obligation to help you when you're

living irresponsibly in that area or any other area. But

he says, on the other hand, if you will be responsible,

I will bless your socks off in a way you

can't imagine. Now, if that's the case, how do I

become a more responsible person?

Look on the back of your.

Outline anytime you want to talk about responsibility. There's a

certain book you have to go to in the Bible.

You know, the Bible's made up of sixty six different

books inside, and there's an entire book of the Bible

written about how to live a responsible life. It's called

the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs has thirty one chapters in it.

That means if you read one chapter a day, you'd

read through the book.

Once a month.

I want to challenge you today to read through read

a chapter a day of Proverbs for the rest of

your life. It means you'll go through it about twelve

times a year, and each time you read through it,

read through it in a different translation, and then get

another one, read through another one, then another one, because

you'll get more and more out of it. This is

the book that teaches you how to live. It teaches

you things like how do you build strong relationships. It

talks about how to handle wealth. It talks about how

to build a business. It talks about how to get

along with other people to save your marriage. It talks

about child raising. It talks about what to do when

you fail, what to do when you succeed. It's an

amazing storehouse of God's wisdom and so you have to

go to Proverbs when you look a bit responsible living. Now,

that's interesting to me that in our culture we actually

idolize irresponsible people. You take the most irresponsible people in

the world, and we say, oh, look at them, aren't

they cute. They just you know, thumb their nose to

convention and to the law and everything else.

And they really are.

Oh they're free spirits. They're unique, and they're the ones

who get all these awards and glory and their picture

on magazine covers, and we call them great. Well, God

has another word for irresponsible people. It's a four letter

world word. He calls them a fool. A fool sixty

nine times. The word fool is used in the Book

of Proverbs, and the same guy who wrote Proverbs wrote Ecclesiastes,

the next book, and it's used twenty three times in

that book. Now, when we use the word fool, we

usually mean stupid, dumb, low IQ, uneducated, unsophisticated, naive, not

very smart. But when God uses the word fool, he

says it means irresponsible, irresponsible. He says, you know what,

you can have a low IQ and not be a fool.

You can have little or no education and not be

a fool. But if you are irresponsible, God says, in

light of the meaning of life and why you put

you on earth, you're foolish if you live irresponsibly. So

sixty nine times in the book he says, here's what

a fool does, and on the other hand, he contrast says,

here's what a wise person, a responsible person does. Now

we don't have time to go into all sixty nine

of those today, so let me just give you four

to get started. Four ways to get started on being

a more responsible person. And your homework this week is

to go find the other sixty five and write them down,

because they're all there. Okay, Number one, let's just get

real practical. How can I be a more responsible person?

Number one?

By saving my money? By saving my money, God says,

if you're not saving any of your money for the future,

you are being a fool.

You're being irresponsible.

For instance, the average Japanese citizen saves twenty five percent

of their income in Japan. The average European saves fourteen

to fifteen percent of their income. The average American saves

less than five percent of his or her income. Why,

because we have bought into this instant gratification society that says,

I've got to have it now, buy now, pay later,

live for today, enjoy it all now, and don't worry

about tomorrow. And as a result, the average American puts

thirteen hundred dollars on his credit card for every one

thousand dollars he makes. What's wrong with this picture? I'll

tell you what it is. He's acting like the government. Okay, now,

only the government can get away with that. It's called

deficit spending because they got a little machine in the

back that prints the money. And unless you have one

of those in your garage, you're headed for trouble. You're

headed for trouble. Deficit spending, and so we spend, spend, spend,

and Americans are not saving any thing.

That says that's foolish.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's show. I

don't know if you're like me, but sometimes I feel

like Rick is talking to me at the exact moment

about the exact thing that I need help with. And

now here's Rick to tell you about a resource that

he created to help you in your walk with Jesus.

Did you know that everything you do and every decision

you make is based on your values. Today, so many

people are confused about what they're meant to be and

what they're supposed to do with their lives because they're

looking in the wrong places and they're living by values

that are at odds with God's values. In fact, I

believe living with values is the number one conflict and

cause of stress in our lives today. So what's God's solution. Well,

he wants us to live by his eternal values, the

values that he teaches in the Bible. Now, I have

prepared a new resource that I want to tell you

about today to help you develop and apply God's values

in your life. It's a resource I'm calling Building your

Life on Values that Last. It's a self guided study

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just text the word hope to seven oh three to

oh nine. That's the word hope to seven oh three

to oh nine. Be sure to join us next time

as we look into God's Word for our daily hope.

This program is sponsored by Daily Hope Ministries and your

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