Straight Thinking 030368 Christian Responsibility
Straight Thinking
030368
CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY
Sunday. How much responsibility do we have? That depends on how much responsibility God has given us. He holds us responsible for what we can know. We do well not to take firm views on how he will handle the heathen who’ve never heard of him. But we that have Bibles in our homes cannot claim ignorance of our God-given responsibility, which includes making known to the unreached the fullness of the Bible’s sacred contents. (Read Ezekiel 3:18-21.)
Monday. A demoniac that Jesus had delivered from the terrors of demon-possession wanted to continue in the presence of his Savior, but Jesus told him to go back to his house and friends and tell them what great things the Lord had done for him. God gives each of us the task of making our circumstance our mission field. (Read Luke 8:38-38).
Tuesday. How much responsibility do we have? That depends on how much we have accepted, because God can give as much as we can take. But accepting responsibility is a matter of eternal importance and a skill of some difficulty. We should take enough but not too much. In the Judgment, God will compare the task we could have taken with the one we took, and the one we took with how well we fulfilled it. (Read James 3:1.)
Wednesday. At Christ’s command, the Gadarene demoniac went back to face the people that knew him as he was the day before. What an encouragement to overcome our self-conscious fear! Though he had never “preached” before, the man took up the challenge of this incredible ministry. What an example of acceptance! (Read Mark 5:1-5, 20)
Thursday. How much responsibility we have depends on how much we have performed. Teachers do not grade us by the difficulty of their assignments or by whether we agree to do them. They grade us by what we do and how well we do them. Christian responsibility can be a difficult subject; let’s not flunk it. (Read 1 Peter 1:17.)
Friday. The demoniac did what Jesus sent him to do. Throughout the territory east of the Sea of Galilee, he became a walking, talking testimony to God’s power. The effect of his efforts became evident when Jesus returned to a warm welcome in the Decapolis instead of a cold rejection. (Read Luke 8:35-37, 40.)
Saturday. God has given us significant responsibilities; we do not want to be like some that may not even accept them—or like others who may accept one after another but seldom perform anything to completion. We become encouraging examples of responsibility when what God gives us, what we accept, and what we perform are one and the same. (Read 2 Timothy 4:7-8.)
Virgil Warren, Straight, March 3, 1968, p13 christir.org