You're Responsible for Results
Accept Responsibility
Here we are at a men’s pre-conference, and I believe that every man learns what it is to be a man from his dad. It is my dad who taught me what it was to be a man. He taught me by his daily example. He worked hard, and he came home happy. He read us books. He faithfully corrected and disciplined us. He also faithfully crafted intentional times to sit with me and teach me what it was to be a man. When I was fourteen, when I was sixteen, when I was eighteen. I have actually still got the booklets. He gave them to me. Each of those times we sat at Buca di Beppo in Maple Grove. The marinara stains are still all over these.
He told me the same thing each time. He said, “I want you to have a vision of manhood, a code of conduct, a transcendent cause.” Then, from a book by Robert Lewis entitled Raising a Modern-Day Knight, he taught me four principles that still constantly run through my head about what it means to be a man. Men reject passivity, accept responsibility, lead courageously, and expect the greater reward.
So when I had a chance to speak to a group of men at this conference, I knew I wanted to talk about one of those four principles of manhood. I want to talk about the second one today. What does it mean to accept responsibility?
I am going to ask and answer four questions. First, what are we responsible for as men under God? Second, in what sense are we responsible for it? Third, how are we tempted to avoid that responsibility, to duck out from under it? And finally, how do we take responsibility today?
First, what are we responsible for? God gives all men three responsibilities. They are all laid out in Genesis 2, as he creates Adam. Let me read that passage. See if you hear them.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
It is from this passage, and from others, that my dad taught me, again anchored by Robert Lewis in the same book, that God entrusts every man with three responsibilities: a will to obey, a work to do, and a woman to love. Let’s talk about each of those as we answer the question, what has God made us responsible for?
A Will to Obey
First, a will to obey. In verses 16 and 17 of Genesis 2, God gives Adam his will and expects Adam to obey it. He gives him a boundary, a command. You may eat of all the trees in the garden, but not this one. That is what my will is, God says. Adam was God’s creature, and so he owed God obedience. That is a crucial part of what it means to be a creature in the first place. We are not made for ourselves, to do our own thing. We are creatures, created in the image of our Creator, responsible to do what he wants us to do, not what we feel like doing. We do not exist for ourselves. Our responsibility is to bow and obey what our Creator has told us.
Of course, Adam did not obey God’s will. But Christ showed us the way to obey God’s will. He perfectly obeyed his Father’s will while he lived on earth. He even stood in the garden, contemplating his death, and could say to his Father, “Not my will, but yours, be done.” He understood that he had a responsibility to obey his Father’s will. He is our example to follow. If you have believed in Jesus, you are not your own. You were bought with a price.
So this first responsibility that God lays on every man is all-encompassing. It is the responsibility to do what God says, because he is God and we are men. It is our job to follow God’s instructions, which of course will include God’s instructions about what else we are responsible for.
A Work to Do
Let’s turn to the second responsibility God gave Adam, and us. He gave Adam a will to obey, and a work to do. Verse 15 says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” God gave Adam the job of working and keeping the garden. He was given dominion by God. He was given a command to work.
Far from being a necessary evil, work is actually our purpose. We present our bodies to God as living sacrifices. Our work is our spiritual act of worship. Of course our work does not include only our career, but it certainly does not exclude our 9-to-5.
Again, our Lord Jesus was an example to us in this. While he was on earth, he labored in preaching and teaching. He traveled, he taught, he prayed, and he prepared his disciples so that when he was gone they could take up his mantle and do the same thing as the apostles. Then Jesus ascended on high to the right hand of the Father, and he has stayed busy there, interceding for us, his children, watching over us, working through us by his Holy Spirit.
We too have been given a work to do. You will remember that Paul commands us to work as unto the Lord, which means we have been given the responsibility to work as unto God, to be excellent craftsmen, carpenters, managers, plumbers, lawyers, engineers. Everything else there is to be is an opportunity to take dominion for God. It is a work given to us by God, so that we take dominion of what he has given us. We take our garden and we make it grow and flourish. We do it on a small scale when you keep your job site clean. We do it on a large scale when we take advantage of opportunities to advance our career. We do it with the property God gives us when we keep the grass mowed, the cars running, and the gutters clean. Every square inch God gives you is a square inch to take dominion of for God, and to make it run the way he commands. To make it submit to his will. That is our God-given responsibility. A will to obey, and a work to do.
A Woman to Love
And then, finally, a woman to love. Verse 18 says that the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” God gave Adam this woman to love. As Paul would later describe in Ephesians, it was Adam’s job to make Eve flourish. He was to nourish and cherish her, so that she, like the garden, would be a flourishing place. The Song of Solomon shows us that our wives are gardens for us to make flourish. Adam was not only supposed to make the garden fruitful and multiply. He himself was supposed to be fruitful and multiply with his helper.
Of course, Adam miserably failed to love his wife. He was even willing to see her die rather than step in and stop her from eating the fruit. But again, our Lord Jesus is our example. Jesus has loved and been faithful to his bride to the bitter end, and beyond. So we too have the responsibility to love our wives, or to prepare ourselves to love our future wives and the children they give us. God gives us the responsibility to make our households a well-watered garden by washing them with the water of the word.
There is a song I have been listening to for a lot of years that I think captures this calling. It is called “Planting Trees,” by Andrew Peterson, off the album Counting Stars. In that song Peterson describes raising children as planting seeds. Here is how the last verse goes. He is describing his wife.
She rises up as morning breaks.
She moves among these rooms alone before we wake,
and her heart is so full it overflows.
She waters us with love, and the children grow.
So many years from now, long after we are gone,
these trees will spread their branches out and bless the dawn.
These trees will spread their branches out and bless someone.
Being given the responsibility by God to love our wives means making a wife and a household that someone could sing that about.
So that is our responsibility, given to us by God. A will to obey, a work to do, and a woman to love.
Responsible for Results
Next question. In what sense are we responsible before God for these things? Three biblical principles, taken together, show us in what sense we are responsible.
You Reap What You Sow
The first is from Galatians 6, which tells us that God is not mocked. You reap what you sow. Your present actions plant seeds, and you will reap those seeds. No farmer plants wheat and harvests soybeans. In the same way, if you sow to the flesh, you will not reap the fruit of the Spirit. Whatever fruit you are eating now, in the present, is fruit you planted in the past. If you are late on a work project, it is normally because you were not so diligent last week, or last month. There is no way around this. We are always reaping what we have sown.
Known by Their Fruit
The second principle is from Matthew 7. You will recognize them by their fruits. “Healthy trees bear healthy fruit. Diseased trees bear diseased fruit.” How do you tell the difference between a healthy tree and a diseased tree? The fruit. The meaningful measure of the health of a tree is its fruit. In the same way, the meaningful measure of the health of your life is its fruit. If your kids are complainers and your wife is bitter, that fruit is telling you something about yourself. It is growing in your garden. The fruit of your labor will reveal what you really are. And so, of course, you are responsible for it.
Dominion over His Works
The third principle: God has given us dominion. Psalm 8 echoes Genesis when it says, “You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.” God has given you dominion over the works of some of his hands. And if you have dominion over it, then it is yours to answer for. Remember the parable of the talents. Whatever your master has entrusted to you, that is yours to take and then to increase, to turn a profit on for your master. God has made you the king of a little slice of his kingdom. The state of your little slice is on you, because he has given you dominion and made you the king.
These three truths come together and force us to reckon with the fact that, whether we have known it or not, we are responsible for results, not effort. We are responsible for results, not effort.
Since you reap what you sow, you are responsible for results in the sense that you plant the seeds you will harvest later. Since trees are known by their fruits, the fruit of your life shows who you really are. You are responsible for the results in the sense that they show your character. From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and you do everything you do. And since God has given you dominion, you are responsible to fix whatever he has given you and make it flourish. He has entrusted you with the works of some of his hands, and so you are responsible for them.
That means you and I are not merely responsible to try our hardest and then leave the rest up to God and throw our hands in the air. We are responsible for results. And when we fall short, we ask God for forgiveness.
In the parable of the talents, the master does not call his servants to come and give an account of their efforts with the investment. “Master, I tried really, really hard with the talents you gave me. I worked sixty hours a week at them.” That is not the question the master is asking, is it? “I gave you five talents. How many did you turn them into?”
This is crucial for us to get. At the end of the day, we are not responsible merely to try to manage our households well. We are responsible to manage them well. We are not merely responsible to try to raise our children in the discipline of the Lord. We are responsible to do so. Trying is not the point. Doing is. We are responsible for results, not effort.
If this sounds radical or crazy, I want to show you that you already believe it. You already know it intuitively. Here is my example.
Imagine you are on vacation with your children and your wife, looking through some interesting souvenir town. Your wife wants to walk around in one of those stores that smell nice and sell fancy kitchenware. So there you and your son are, waiting for her to finish looking so that you can go over to the bait store, and your son is excited. You remind him, “Son, stay calm. There are breakable things in here. Please be careful.” And your young son obeys. He is looking with his eyes instead of with his hands. Then your wife calls you over to inspect a new mixing bowl she might want. As you walk over, your son accidentally knocks over the display of porcelain teacups. They shatter all over the floor.
What are you going to say as the store owner comes bustling out from behind her counter? “Ma’am, we tried really hard not to break anything. I reminded my son, and he actually did a good job overall of being self-controlled. So I think that about takes care of it, right?”
Of course not. The level of effort is unimportant. Stores even enshrine this themselves with a slogan: you break it, you buy it. The level of effort you put into not breaking it is not what matters. The result matters. If you break it, you buy it. You are responsible for those results.
Notice that in the example, you are responsible for them even if it is not your fault. You did not break the teacups. Your son broke the teacups. And in this case it was not even the result of sin. It was an honest mistake. But being at fault and being responsible are different things. It is not the dad’s fault the teacups broke. It is the son’s fault. But Dad is responsible for his son, and so he will be pulling out his wallet to buy some broken teacups.
Being responsible for results does not mean that you are directly to blame for every bad thing that happens. It does mean that every bad thing that happens in your dominion is yours to own. Joe Rigney applies this very well in his book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. He says, “You are responsible for your household’s sins even if you are not personally to blame for them.” You see that distinction between responsibility and blame.
So if your household is full of complaining, you are responsible, as the man leading a house that is full of complaining, even if you are not the one primarily doing the complaining. This distinction between blame, or fault, and responsibility is how what Dustin just told you and what I am telling you can fit together.
Perhaps you are seeing an apparent paradox. Dustin is telling you what you can and cannot control. You cannot control other people. You cannot control their will. That is absolutely true. You cannot control their will, and that means that when others sin, it is not your fault that they sinned. But some of those people are your responsibility. So when they sin, you are responsible to get in there and clean it up with them, to show them a better way, and to clean up the mess right alongside them. If your house is full of sin and deceit and discontent, it is your house that is full of sin, and so it is your responsibility to clean it up with those involved, and to clean it up God’s way, which is the biblical process for change Dustin was just showing you.
The point is this. None of us gets to point at bad results in life and tell God, “Hey, I tried my hardest.” That is not an option on the table. Business owners, imagine talking with a salesman who blows up at a customer and yells at them over the phone, and the salesman says, “I tried my hardest not to get angry.” Well, your effort is not the point. You yelled at somebody over the phone. The result is what you are responsible for, no matter how hard you were trying.
We are responsible for results, not effort.
How We Duck Responsibility
Now let me walk through quite a few ways that we, as men, are tempted to duck this responsibility God has given us: a will to obey, a work to do, and a woman to love, and responsibility for the results in that sphere. We have lots of ways we are tempted to duck that responsibility.
Misunderstanding Delegation
The first is by misunderstanding delegation. If you delegate a job to someone else and they do not do it, you do not get to start by blaming them. It is your job to choose the right person to do the job, to explain clearly what they need to do, to check in and make sure it is done, to teach them how to do it properly, and to make sure they have the resources they need to succeed. Delegating does not remove any responsibility. When you delegate, you are entrusting something you are responsible for to somebody else, so that they will do it the way you would want it done.
Let me give you a concrete example that affects all the fathers in this room. If you delegate much of the homeschooling, or the selecting of a Christian school and the interaction with it, to your wife, it is still your job to ensure that your children are educated in the Lord. If she picks unwisely, or she teaches wrongly, that is on you. It is your job to make sure she has everything she needs to carry out the mission of educating children in the Lord, and then to check in on her and make sure it is happening. Having delegated it removes none of your responsibility before God. You are entrusting your responsibility to someone else when you delegate.
A Fake Trade at Home
Another way we are tempted to duck responsibility is to convince ourselves, when we look at bad results in our career, at lackluster work, that the lackluster work is the result of a trade-off, that we are prioritizing home. What is often happening is that a man without much ambition, drive, or intentionality is trying to duck the responsibility to have ambition, drive, and intentionality at work and at home. So he plays it off as a trade-off. “I chose home instead of work.” But if you go and inspect the home, what is really going on is that he has been lazy and unintentional in two places, at work and at home.
If your house is just as full of projects as it was five years ago, and your wife still is not sure what the family is up to, and your kids are still characterized by misbehavior, you did not choose home instead of work. You did not make a real trade-off in your efforts. You were lazy at work and lazy at home. Telling yourself that it is a trade-off is just a way to rationalize.
Hiding at Work
Another way we can try to duck responsibility is by hiding at work. This is the inverse. In general, I think our society suffers more from a lack of ambition than from workaholism. But of course it is possible to have two problems at once, and some of us will have this one. It is easy to want to hide at work. I think that is because work is simple. You put more time in, you get more out. There is often a clear incentive structure, so that when you try harder, things get better, you get recognized, and that feels good. That is not always true at home. Sometimes you put in more time and try harder, and things get worse for a little while. It is not such a clear in-and-out formula. So men are tempted to duck their responsibility at home, because it feels so good to put points on the board at work. But God gave us a work to do and a woman to love. We do not get to choose between the two. Both are our responsibility before God.
The Tortured Genius
Another way I think we as men are often tempted to duck our responsibility is by declaring ourselves tortured geniuses. This is really just a convoluted way of pointing the finger at others and deceiving yourself into thinking you are more talented than you really are. I am pulling this term from a book I enjoyed called Extreme Ownership, by a Navy SEAL named Jocko Willink. In that book he says this about someone with tortured-genius syndrome:
No matter how obvious his failing, or how valid the criticism, a tortured genius accepts zero responsibility for mistakes, makes excuses, and blames everyone else for their failings and those of their team. In their mind, the rest of the world just cannot see or appreciate the genius in what they are doing.
You and I are thinking like tortured geniuses when we think, “My business would be doing ten figures, but my sales guy just will not do what I am telling him to do. My kids should be wise and mature, but they just will not rise to the challenge with me. I am leading my family to be a happy, loving place, but I just cannot get my wife to do it with me.” When we are suffering as tortured geniuses, we are thinking we are Michelangelo and our family is such tough marble that not even we can make a masterpiece out of them.
But the painful truth, again from Extreme Ownership, is that the only meaningful measure of a leader is how his team is doing. That is just the biblical principle that you will know a tree by its fruit. In his book, Jocko tells a story about a military training group doing boat races. Each crew has a leader, and one boat keeps losing over and over and over. The leader of that boat crew gets upset. He thinks he has just been stuck with a bunch of chumps who cannot row very hard. Then the people in charge of the training swap the leaders of the first boat and the last boat, so that the leader of the last boat is now leading the team that has been winning over and over, and the leader who had been winning is now leading the team that had been losing. Give it a race or two, and that first boat has come to last place with the same leader, and the boat that had been coming in last has moved to the front of the line.
The lesson he pulls from it is this. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. If we apply this to our households, it means there are no bad families, only bad fathers.
If you keep thinking that the problem is them, them, them, you are not owning responsibility. You are not taking responsibility for those God has given you. You are complaining. “Well, I mean, they are just too difficult. Not even a genius like me can figure out what to do with somebody this hard.” At the end of the day, thinking like a tortured genius is just another way to shift the blame to God and say, “It is the woman you gave me.”
Let Go and Let God
Another way we often try to duck responsibility is by letting go and letting God. We spiritualize abdication. This is really just a rejection of responsibility. God says, “Here are five talents to invest.” If we let go and let God, we say, “I cannot control which business ventures will turn out, so I am just going to guess, and let go and let God.” Of course that is ridiculous. It is also true that we cannot control everything about our work, or our marriage, or our children. But we are still responsible for them. Letting go is not an option, because God has made us the primary way he plans to work in our families. We are the primary way his law will permeate every inch of their hearts. We are the primary way they will learn to love self-control and the way of wisdom. We are the means God plans to use to change our families.
Your good works are God’s works. God is working in us, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
For reasons I do not entirely understand, it has been a particular problem among Baptists to let go and let God with our children. It is true that you cannot reach into your child’s heart and make him believe. It is also true that you are an instrument appointed by God to plant the seed of his word in your child’s heart, water it with care, and bring it up to be a little sprout, then a sapling, then a full-grown tree. Just as the gardener does not get to let go and let God with his garden, you and I do not get to let go and let God with our wife, or our children, or anything God has given us. We are the means he plans to use to take dominion everywhere he has given us.
Big Things, Little Things
A final way we are often tempted to duck responsibility is by being faithful in big things and ignoring the little things. It is common. At work, a man like this will constantly have a messy inbox and be late getting back to you, but somehow will always pull the big presentation together on time. At home, this man is all in on the family vacation, but he cannot take time to teach his kids how to ride a bike. He gives extravagant anniversary gifts, but never seems to ask his wife how her day was, and then listen to her.
Of course this way of thinking, faithful in the big things and ignoring the little, is backwards from the way the Bible teaches us to think. Jesus tells us to be faithful in the little things, so that one day we would be trusted with the big things. What this thinking really is, is pretending that we are responsible to ourselves instead of to God. “I am going to take care of the stuff I think is important, and I am going to leave the stuff I do not think is that important.” It assumes that we are not responsible to God for all of it. We ignore our little duties and console ourselves by saying that the big stuff is taken care of.
Those are quite a few ways we are tempted to duck responsibility for results, and to settle for effort. A quick review.
- We are tempted to duck responsibility by delegating and acting as though that removes our responsibility.
- By convincing ourselves that we have made a trade, to spend extra time and intentionality at home instead of at work, when really we have been lazy in both places.
- By hiding at work and putting points on the board there, to the exclusion of focusing on our homes.
- By being tortured geniuses who think the problem is our family or our coworkers, and that not even a genius like us can make progress with people like this.
- By letting go and letting God, and acting as though we are not actually responsible in the first place, as though we are not the means God has appointed to accomplish his will in those places.
- And finally, by being faithful in big things and ignoring the little things.
Take Responsibility Today
Last question. How do we take responsibility today?
You and I have been given three responsibilities by God. A will to obey, a work to do, and a woman to love. We have covered that we are not merely responsible to try our hardest. We are responsible for results, because we reap what we sow, a tree is known by its fruit, and God has given us dominion over the works of some of his hands.
Here is where we will end. Three steps to take responsibility today. Repent of your sin. Receive dominion gratefully. And run your course with joy.
Repent of Your Sin
First, repent of your sin. Taking responsibility today starts by taking responsibility for your sin today. Owning it. Confessing it. Turning away from it. Especially rejecting the sin of rejecting responsibility. We need to look that sin square in the face and see how cowardly and unlike Christ it is to try to duck our responsibilities.
This sounds simple, and it is. It is not complicated. It is only hard because humbling yourself is hard. All we need to do is pray. “God, I blew it. I have tried to duck the responsibilities you have given me, and it is my fault. Please forgive me.” And then go to your wife or your kids. “Honey, I have often ignored my responsibility by pretending it was not mine when I delegated it to you. That is my fault. Please forgive me.” It is simple to repent of your sin. It is just hard to be humble. So start with repentance.
Receive Dominion Gratefully
Second, receive dominion gratefully. Yes, it is the higher, harder, more painful calling to take responsibility for results. It is also a grand honor. So do not lose sight of what a gift it is that God would make you a prince under the Prince of Peace, a king under the King of kings. We need to receive the dominion he has given us gratefully, and understand that dominion, that responsibility, is not a curse. It is a blessing.
So we can go home and pray tonight. “Thank you for making me a ruler of this house, a ruler at this job, a ruler of this property, the head of this wife, the father of these children. Thank you for this dominion.”
Run Your Course with Joy
And then finally, run your course with joy. Again, in Rigney’s book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, he says, “It is not enough to take initiative and responsibility for oneself and for others. A godly man runs his course with joy.” Our duty is to smile and laugh and have a grand time while we rule.
So tonight we can practice. We can smile and eat and drink and dance, and rule ourselves in our little kingdom with a smile that reflects the happy smile of our Father in heaven, with a countenance that demonstrates that the joy of the Lord is our strength.
If it has been too long since you have read Narnia, let me remind you what King Lune teaches about being a king who rules with joy.
This is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there is hunger in the land, to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.
Be a king in your household like that. Jesus loves you. God has redeemed you. The Spirit lives inside you. And he has gifted you now a whole weekend to learn God’s way, and to increase in wisdom in how you accept the responsibility to lead in your household. So we can take responsibility today by repenting of our sin, receiving dominion, and running our course with joy.
Amen.
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for the dominion you have given us. By your Spirit, would you please convict us of sin, so that we can repent of it and turn away from it, and then run our course with the joy you make available to us by your Spirit. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.