Sermon Tone Analysis

Sunday, we talked about choosing what you will stand on… culture, yourself or God.

Most everyone stood up and said they wanted to stand on something more stable.

We learned that our beliefs determine our actions and our character.

So it’s vital that we learn to build our lives on values that last.

Today we begin learning some values from the WOG to base our lives on if we want to live a significant and successful life.

The first value we will look at is responsibility.

Churchill stated

Responsibility is the price of greatness

IOW, if you want to do something great with your life, you have to become a responsible person.

So we are beginning with the value of responsibility.

It’s the foundation of all of this and if we don’t get this one, the rest don’t matter.

We have to take responsibility for our choices.

God gave us the ability to respond to life… to opportunities… problems… relationships… events.

It makes us human.

In the last 40-50 years there has been a decline in accepting responsibility.

No one wants to take responsibility anymore.

They instantly look for someone to blame.

It’s not new because Adam did it, but we have perfected it in the last years.

It’s never our fault.

Politicians blame the other party.

When the Saints lose, we want to blame the refs… or something else instead of the fact that we stunk up the field.

What causes that today?

What’s happened to our society?

Last week we learned that our beliefs determine our behavior and behavior determines what we become and what our society becomes.

So let’s look at three beliefs that are prevalent today that are the opposite of personal responsibility.

The rights mentality… the victim mentality… and the entitlement mentality.

3 Enemies of Personal Responsibility

1.

The rights Mentality

This goes like this.

“I have my rights.”

We are obsessed with rights: criminal rights, victim rights, computer rights, intellectual rights, animal rights, abortion rights, right to die, not to be tested, right not to be vaccinated.

Mental patients used to have the right to mental health treatment but the ACLU sued and got them the right to not be treated so you see them living on the streets and under the bridges.

Our culture has reached the point where the obsession with rights is making it hard for us to think socially… as a society.

In the USA, unlike other countries, we have a Bill of Rights.

Along with the Bill of Rights, we also need a Bill of Rights we need a Bill of Responsibilities.

US News & World Report.

Let me tell you today.

We have a Bill of Responsibility.

10 commandments.

We hear a lot of people talk about rights and we do not hear much about personal responsibility in our culture today… entitlement, but not obligations… myself but not how it impacts others.

People use the argument my body my choice to justify abortions.

Now the people that argued against abortion are using the same argument to justify not getting the vaccine.

2. The Victim Mentality

This goes like this.

It’s not my fault… it’s always someone else's fault.

It’s your spouses fault that you are not happy… it’s your parents fault that you … We want to blame everyone else but ourselves.

You spell blame B-lame so every time you blame someone else, you are being lame.

Someone wrote a book, A Nation of Victims: The decay of American Culture.

An FBi agent embezzles $2000 from the government and then he looses it all in an afternoon of gambling in Atlantic City.

He's fired but he wins reinstatement after a court rules that his affinity for gambling with other people's money is `a handicap' and thus, as a handicap, it is protected under Federal law.

Fired for consistently showing up late at work, a former school district employee sues his former employers arguing that he is the victim of what his lawyer calls Chronic Lateness Syndrome.

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 that I stole the car.")

A man who, by his own admission, has exposed himself between 10,000 and 20,000 times and then, convicted of flashing on more than 30 occasions, is turned down for a job as a park attendant in Dane County, Wisconsin, because of his arrest record.

But he sues on the grounds that he never exposed himself in a park, only in libraries and laundromats.

The Wisconsin employment officials, ever accommodating to the expansion of human rights, agree to make an initial determination of probable cause that the flasher was the victim of "illegal job discrimination"

We have become a nation of victims.

3. The Entitlement Mentality

This one says, “I deserve it.”

The world owes me a living.

Dr Benjamin Spock - leave the little tyrant alone.

So we have a whole generation of people that grew up with no responsibility thinking that society owed them something.

Add to that continued government intervention in our lives where they say, we know what’s best for you and we will take care of you from cradle to grave.

This has all built this mentality where people now say, I have a right not to work and you have to pay me.

Workers in FL sued when the state cut off the enhanced unemployment.

We now have people who blame everyone and everything else for our problems.

This is in contrast to what Paul says.

God says we are to live life with a sense of responsibility because we know the meaning of life.

You know why God put you here.

God placed each one of us here for a purpose.

One of the things we have to deal with is why should we live responsibly?

I. Why should we live responsibly?

1.

Because God is watching

Joke - A man breaks into the house… parrot keeps saying Jesus is watching… he tells the parrot to shut up… then sees a pitbull… Jesus is watching.

God sees everything.

He not only sees everything, but one day we will be accountable for everything.

He will evaluate how we lived our lives with what he gave us.

This Life is a test of responsibility.

That’s why we are going through some of the things we are going through.

It doesn’t matter how long you live, 80 - 90 years, it’s a moment in eternity.

When we die, we will live somewhere for eternity, either in hell or heaven.

What you do with your life and the decisions you make will influence your eternity.

God put us here to Know God personally and to develop character… to be more like Jesus.

God is interested in your character because it’s the only thing that you will take into eternity.

God is evaluating are you responsible?

He also says that we will be rewarded in heaven for the things we do in this life in regards to what we do for Jesus and how we use the gifts and abilities and wealth that he gave us.

Paul

That means we each have to give an account… your mama can’t … no one can but you.

God has seen everything you have ever done and he knows every thought you have ever thought.

When you try to blame someone else or just hide what you did… thinking no one will ever know, God knows.

And he is the only one that REALLY matters.

You can fool me, maybe pastor Kathy, your kids, your boss, but you can’t fool God.

He knows.

2. Because others are affected by my life

We don’t live life in a bubble.

We are not independent, but inter-dependent.

That’s not the prevailing mindset today.

we say things like, “I am not my brother’s keeper” … Frank Sinatra - I did it my way… It’s an I live my life my way and what’s it to you?

The problem with this mentality is it’s wrong.