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FROM PASTOR'S DESK 2021 Pastor's Desk

May you not fail in your responsibilities | Pst. J.O. Lawal

Date: September 19, 2021 | Series: From Pastor’s Desk | Number: Vol. 10, No. 21

Beloved: grace, mercy, and peace be abundantly yours from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. I am delighted to welcome you to this new week and pray that you will not fail in any of the responsibilities God has entrusted to you in life, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now, why is this prayer important for you and me? First, it is important because only God can open our eyes to see those things that are truly our responsibilities and also strengthen us to do them. Why do people act irresponsibly? For the most part, they act irresponsibly either because they do not know their responsibilities at all or because they lack the capability to fulfill them.

So, if we don’t want to fail in handling any of our responsibilities, we must make it our business to regularly pray to God to open our eyes to recognize everything we are responsible for in life. Also, we must continually pray to Him to equip us with everything we need to fully discharge our responsibilities to Him, to ourselves, to our families, to the church of God, and to our world, in accordance with every day’s need. Otherwise, there is no guarantee that we will not fail Him woefully in all or many areas of our lives.

Another reason this prayer is important is that God is only going to reward us for the responsibilities He has entrusted to us and not for those He has not entrusted to us. For example, though there may have been many children misbehaving in Israel in the days of Eli the Priest, God did not hold him responsible for the misbehavior of all of them. On the contrary, He only held him responsible for the misbehavior of His own children. (Cf. 1Sam 2&3)

In like manner, in the parable that the Lord told of a man that gave his servants money to work with, the man did not at all hold any of those servants responsible for sums of money that he did not give them. Instead, he only held them responsible for what he gave them. That is why he did not bother to find out what the servant that did nothing with the money he had given him was doing all the time he was away. Anything else he was doing, whether good or bad, during that period, was not his concern. His concern was for him to work and be profitable with the money he had given him. And since he was unprofitable with it, there was no reward for him – all he got was punishment. (Cf. Matt 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-29)

So, in rewarding us for whatever we do in this life, God’s primary focus will be on how we handle those things that are our responsibilities and not how we handle those things that are not our responsibilities. And if all those things we take seriously or are profitable in are those things that He has not entrusted to us as our responsibilities, He won’t be praising or exalting us because of them, regardless of how much we put into them. That, then, would mean that we have merely wasted ourselves on them. My prayer is that the Lord will always keep us from wasting ourselves on irrelevancies and non-essentials instead of devoting ourselves to learning what our responsibilities really are and carrying them out. Amen.

Do have a fabulous week.

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