Accountability

No cutesy pictures today. No eloquent prose. Just the plain and simple fact that we need accountability. A child is accountable to her mother, as a teenager is accountable to his girlfriend. Laws operate to keep us accountable to each other, so that our society doesn't run a muck with murderers and looters. Even our consciences work to keep us in check, and, in the final analysis, we are accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Why? Wouldn't it be a lot more "fun" if we were to simply do as we please, with little consideration of any such thing as "consequences?" I mean, really; why can't anarchy work? Doesn't decadence and self-satisfaction satiate our otherwise unquenchable desires for appeasement?

It doesn't seem so. Life loses all meaning without accountability. If we truly are to "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," then why don't we simply "eat and drink" until we die? Because these things don't satisfy. A final reckoning, an eventual accounting makes requisite purposeful living.

An eye towards the judgment should spur us on towards purposeful living. But, it's so hard for us to conceive of death and eternity, isn't it, when there seems so much life left to live? That is why God's plan is all the more encouraging, when you consider that "no man is an island," but instead is planted amidst a similar people, on a similar journey.

For the Church, we answer to each other as brothers and sisters. We are to hold each other accountable, that we present ourselves "holy, cleansed by the washing with water through the word, and presented to Him as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless (Ephesians 5:26-27)." I am firmly convinced that our greatest strength as a church is to hold each other accountable, as "iron sharpens iron." Fellowship and friendliness and all that are well and good, but if we are not doing the hard and gritty work of discipleship, then we meet to no avail.

May we allow the natural vehicle for sanctification do its work in our lives, as our brothers and sisters in Christ challenge us to be "accountable before God and men."