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Recently I gave a series of messages about “spiritual disciplines.” In one of the messages I urged upon the congregation what I called the discipline of accountability. In this writing I would like simply to give an overview of this discipline as I understand it. By “accountability” I really mean the notion of answerability. We as Christians are not on a solo mission. We have been saved to be a part of a new people – a “body” which itself is accountable to and answerable to God and to one another for the sake of God’s glory. I would like to look at three areas where I believe we are to be answerable to our brethren. First of all we are to be answerable to one another as regards our holiness of life - our persistence or perseverance in faith and repentance. Sin effecting one person is not only bad for that person but it effects the body too. When the foot is infected the whole body suffers. When the eye is not functioning the whole body is in the dark. Holiness of life is not meant to be achieved as a private project. Sin is too deceitful and we are too prone to delusion or self deception. Humility and a desire for a holiness of life which pleases God demands that to some degree our lives be transparent, and that others be allowed to know us in our area of weakness. This is how the writer of Hebrews puts it: See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first (Hebrews 3:12-14). One day Jesus will return. Will I be ready? Will I be found waiting? Or will I be asleep at the wheel? Will I be in darkness such that this day will surprise me like a thief? In order that we remain in the light and living for Him when he returns, Paul exhorts us to …encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing (1 Thessalonians 5:11). And, in the same vein, the writer to the Hebrews tells us: Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:23-25). My holiness is your business in Christ. We, together, are Christ’s bride. We, together, are Christ’s body. We, together, bear witness to God before the world. We are in other words in this together as Christians. I need you to help me put on Christ and put off sin.. I need you to tell me when I am in error or in need of change. Even more, I need you to help me change. I need you to help me to check my wrong tendencies. I need you to encourage my right ones. I need you to help me build the right boundaries in my life to keep sin at bay. I need you to help me learn how to control myself and my impulses and wrong tendencies. The second (and related) way in which we should pursue living in accountability and answerability has to do with our need as believers to “bear one another’s burdens.” I cannot bear your burden – your pain, your struggle, your temptations – if I do not know what that burden is. And you cannot help bear my burden if you don’t know what my burden is. I am responsible before God to bear your burden. I am responsible to be used of God to restore you to God and to others when you sin. And you are responsible to do the same for me. But if we are not open and answerable to each other, if we all bear our sins and temptations alone, how can others bear our burden? How can they walk in obedience to this needful command? I do not believe that we are each required to reveal the entirety of our life burden to every Christian brother or sister. But there needs to be individual brethren with whom we share our lives – and to whom we confess our sins. And there should not be just one person in the body to whom all the various saints confess. This mutual burden bearing is part of our one-anotherness. In order for the body to be the body I must place myself in humble submission before others, even with respect to my own sins, in order that God may use my brothers to restore me. Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:1-2.) Third, the discipline of accountability is important when it comes to life decisions. We need accountability in life decisions for three reasons. First, it is very important that we make decisions which reflect and are in the context of a total life direction in wise and godly harmony with God’s clearly revealed will. Most of God’s will for us is as clear as a bell and we need each other in order that we persevere in walking in that revealed will. Isn’t it amazing how easily we think we perceive “God’s leading” or the “still small voice” of guidance at the same time that we may be not living according to what God has clearly revealed to us in His Word. We look for signs; we try to interpret Providence; or we base a decision on a certain feeling we may have. All the while we may be negligent of God’s clearly revealed will. This negligence, in turn, impacts our ability to see and understand our own decisions wisely. And so we need our brethren to help us approach any decision with true godly wisdom. Second, we are easily inclined to blindness about ourselves, particularly when we’re excited about something. Christian humility requires that we be willing to seek the counsel of others who certainly see things about us we can’t or won’t see about ourselves. As the proverb says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” This process of mutually seeking counsel and advice is, I believe, part of that process of submitting ourselves one to another in Christ. Our Christian friends help us to think clearly and to look ahead and examine the plusses and minuses about alternatives we face. Their experience in knowing us and witnessing our propensities helps to put checks on our impulses. They may see if we are pursuing a matter out of wrong or headstrong or self aggrandizing motives. When we are excited – angry or impatient or under the lure of desire -- we don’t think well. Our brothers and sisters know our inclinations and may discern or notice way sin which we may be unwisely judging a matter through the lens of our excitement or impulses. They can see our imbalances. They help us avoid that process of becoming “more like ourselves” as we grow older whereby we simply become hardened in our temperament and less able to put on the fullness of Christ. Sometimes we need our brothers and sisters to help us to wait upon the Lord, to encourage us in patience and patient endurance. Often we have not gotten all that we need to get out of a situation in terms of growth, and we need others to help us see that and bear with a matter patiently until we have grown all we can from it. We need our brothers and sisters! Third, we as Christians are no longer free to see our lives as individual paths toward self fulfillment and self actualization in independence of the body of Christ and its needs or its affirmations of our callings. Again, we have absorbed from our culture a profound proneness towards an independence of mind and spirit. This independence of spirit is part of us. but it is not part of the biblical view of the people of God. And so we move in and out of cities, churches, jobs, schools, and neighborhoods as if no one else is impacted, as if all that matters is whether it seems to good to us at the moment. But we are called to love others and to serve them, and we cannot do that when we pack up and move on to the newest job opportunity or newest church or newest neighborhood or newest city or newest school without thought of whom we are leaving behind, without consideration as to whether we have fulfilled our callings and responsibilities where we are. Our Christian brothers and sisters help us to see these things more clearly. They help to put a check on our impulses. They help to call us to faithfulness to our callings. With their help we are to see our lives significantly as “not our own,” and now, having been made a part of the body of Christ and the people of God, we pursue the kingdom of God with them in mutual accountability as a corporate people, as those who pray, “Our Father… So, in these three areas I call us to grow in the discipline of accountability. It is not easy. It runs counter to the spirit of the age. But it is the way of Christ for us. And so I urge you now to develop this discipline in your life. You will be glad you did. |
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