Importance of Taking Responsibility. Crossing the Rubicon. The Actual Benefit of Diet vs. Drugs.

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The Importance of Taking Responsibility

“The Bible shows many examples of people refusing to take responsibility for their actions. Must Christians take responsibility for their actions?

Taking responsibility is the willingness to give an account for your actions—to willingly bear the burden of what you have, or have not, done. It is being willing to answer for your conduct and obligations.

However, human nature can lead us to refuse to take responsibility for our actions. In fact, when we’re confronted with our mistakes, we’ll often play the blame game and attempt to deflect our responsibility onto someone else.  

Are there examples of this in the Bible?

Examples of refusing to take responsibility

Here are three examples of individuals who deflected responsibility for their errors onto others:

Aaron

When ancient Israel left Egypt, God led the people to Mount Sinai, where they would receive His laws. Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments from God Himself. Because Moses was away for so long, the people got weary.

They asked Aaron to make “gods that shall go before us.” Unfortunately, Aaron obliged and made a golden calf for them to worship. He even declared a “feast to the LORD” in honor of the idol (Exodus 32:1-6).

When Moses finally came down and confronted his brother, Aaron refused to take responsibility. Instead, he blamed the people: “You know the people, that they are set on evil” (verse 22). Aaron downplayed his own involvement in the situation, saying, “I cast [the gold] into the fire, and this calf came out” (verse 24).

King Saul

Though Saul had the appearance of a king, he lacked the character to reign righteously. For example, before going into battle with the Philistines, Saul was instructed to wait for Samuel to come and offer sacrifices to God (1 Samuel 10:8).

But instead of waiting for the prophet, Saul got impatient and hastily performed the sacrifices himself. When confronted by Samuel, Saul offered a litany of excuses for why he did it his way instead of God’s way (1 Samuel 13:8-11).

A similar thing happened when Saul was instructed to completely destroy the Amalekites, yet refused to do it (1 Samuel 15:3, 8-9). Saul again blamed the people instead of taking responsibility for his failure (verse 15).

Pontius Pilate

Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judaea during Jesus’ arrest and trial. At the trial, Pilate desired to release Jesus because he knew Jesus was innocent. However, he relented to the demands of the mob to crucify Jesus. To deny any responsibility for executing an innocent Man, he washed his hands of guilt and placed the responsibility on the people (Matthew 27:22-25; Acts 3:13).

Blaming God

People often see God as being harsh, distant and disconnected from their lives. When things don’t go their way, it’s common for people to blame God.

When we fall short, we are to take responsibility, repent and make changes. Consider the following examples from the Bible:

• After being confronted for eating the forbidden fruit, Adam found a way to blame God for his sin: “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12).
• After killing his brother, Cain complained that God’s punishment was too harsh (Genesis 4:13).
• When they went into captivity for their sins, the ancient Israelites complained that God was unfair and that their punishment was unjustified (Ezekiel 18:25).
• Job’s wife blamed God for the calamity that fell on them and even tried to convince her husband to curse God (Job 2:9).

For more insight on this, read “Who Is to Blame?”

Christians must take responsibility

God expects Christians to be responsible and self-governing. God has given us His laws, which set boundaries on how we are to conduct ourselves. When we fall short, we are to take responsibility, repent and make changes.

A major part of the repentance process is confessing our sins to God, which essentially means we are taking responsibility for our sins before the God of the universe. To learn more about the importance of confessing our sins, read “What Does It Mean to Confess Your Sins?”

God expects us to take responsibility for our actions—instead of refusing to take responsibility and blaming God (or others) for our mistakes—and He aids those who do (Proverbs 28:13). Every human being will have to give an account for his or her life and actions

(Galatians 6:4-5; Hebrews 4:13).

A responsible person is one who is accountable, can be counted on, is trustworthy, upholds his or her word, and is reliable. Responsible people will even make sacrifices for the good of others.

A responsible person is what a spouse looks for, what a family needs, and what makes a strong society and nation.”  From:  https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/blog/the-importance-of-taking-responsibility/?

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Crossing the Rubicon

“Culturally our society has started "crossing the Rubicon." As Christians we must separate ourselves before the point of no return.

Transcript of YouTube: https://youtu.be/T3roKe8sfPM

[Steve Myers] “By law, no Roman general could lead his troops into Rome. 49 AD, Julius Caesar led his 13th Legion across the Rubicon River into Italy. Now, there was no going back. There was no turning around and it generated civil war for years until he finally became absolute ruler.

That idea of crossing the Rubicon is reaching the point of no return. There is no going back. It's become known for that very thought, point of no return.

And when you think about it, have we as a society crossed the Rubicon? Have we reached the point of no return? When you look at the values of the culture around us, there is a war that's going on and it is a war that is tearing us apart. And it's more than just political. It is relentless. It's all around us. And whether it's on the radio, when we listen to music or whether it's the news or whether it's any aspect of what we watch or listen, it is something that is bombarding us everywhere with values most oftentimes that are not godly.

Have we reached the point of no return? I mean, there's been a dramatic realignment of what is important to our society today, and we're caught in the middle as God's people.

I can't help but think of a passage that's back in the book of Lamentations. I don't often turn to the book of Lamentations, but in Lamentations 2:14, we find a warning to ancient Judah. They had ignored God and they had done it for so long. In this book of Lamentation, it really points to the fact that they had reached the point of no return. And, of course, there's connections for us today. And in 2:14, it says, "Your profits have seen you false and deceptive visions. They've not uncovered your iniquity to bring you back your captives, but have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions."

Yeah, our society talks a lot about how great this wonderful new perspective is, new values, new ways of doing things, but those are false prophecies. And what's happened to our world is we have reached the point of no return. And so, we as God's people have to make sure we separate ourselves. We can't fall captive to this world's values. And what's happened to Judah is just a type of what's prophesied to happen as we draw nearer to the time of the return of Christ.

So, it's a reminder. It's not too late for us. We don't have to cross the river. It's not the point of no return for us. Just make sure we don't ourselves to be caught into the values and the ways of thinking of this world. Don't get distracted. Don't allow that to happen. So, guard your heart, be on guard, and don't fall captive to those troops that have crossed the Rubicon.”  From: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-daily/crossing-the-rubicon

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The Actual Benefit of Diet vs. Drugs

“The medical profession oversells the benefits of drugs for chronic disease since so few patients would apparently take them if doctors divulged the truth.”

Transcript of YouTube: https://youtu.be/P0y-lO2YpuQ

“One of the reasons people may undervalue diet and lifestyle changes is an overconfidence in the ability of pills and procedures to prevent disease. For example, people tend to wildly overestimate the power of things, like mammograms and colonoscopies, to prevent deaths from breast and bowel cancer, or the power of drugs, like Fosamax, to prevent hip fractures, or the power of cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent fatal heart attacks. Patients believe statin drugs, like Lipitor, are about a hundred times more effective than they actually are in preventing heart attacks.

Most people wouldn’t take multiple blood pressure medications if they knew the truth, which raises a dilemma for doctors. Most patients want to be told the truth.  They want to be told what the chances are that the drugs will actually benefit them, but there is this tension between the patient’s right to know and the likely reduction in patients’ willingness to take the drug if they were so informed. If taking a cholesterol-lowering drug would reduce your risk of getting a heart attack over the next five years by 100%, then, of course, everyone would take it. Even if there were a 50% chance of benefiting, most would still want to take the drugs. But if the chance of benefit is just a few percent, hardly anyone would be willing to take the drugs every day for the rest of their lives. And that’s the actual benefit.

For most people the chance of benefit is normally less than 5% over five years for cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood-thinning drugs. It’s no wonder that doctors seldom share these figures with patients. So, even high risk patients have less than a 5% chance of benefit; whereas, patients don’t want to take drugs unless they have at least a 1 in 5 chance—even those who just had a heart attack. The study therefore suggests that informing patients of the percentage chance of benefit from preventive drug strategies will substantially reduce the uptake of such drugs. They recognize that for the individual, this is unlikely to be detrimental; after all there’s a 95% chance it won’t do anything for them, but for the population at large, it would make a difference; so, doctors and drug companies tend to oversell the benefits by conveniently not mentioning how tiny they actually are, knowing that most patients wouldn’t take them if doctors divulged the truth. To practice non-lifestyle medicine is to practice deceptive medicine.

The best cholesterol-lowering statin drugs can do here is an absolute risk reduction of 3.1% over six years. A whole foods plant-based diet has been shown to work twenty times better–an absolute risk reduction of 60% after less than four years. Overall, 99.4% of patients who stuck with the diet avoided major cardiac events, such as death from heart attack.

So, when we have to decide whether we want to go diet versus drugs, it’s not a choice between eating healthy to prevent a heart attack, or taking a pill to prevent a heart attack, because in 97% of cases the pills don’t do anything —we’re risking side effects for nothing, whereas if we treat the underlying root cause of the disease, by eating this healthy cholesterol-free diet, we may even reverse the progression of the disease.

Stop eating an artery-clogging diet and our bodies can start dissolving that plaque away, opening up arteries, in some cases, without drugs and without surgery. This wasn’t an Ornish study; so, no exercise requirement, no meditation, no stress management, no yoga; just a healthy whole food plant-based diet may work twenty times better than drugs to combat our #1 killer. Now, that’s something doctors may want to tell their patients.” From: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/The-Actual-Benefit-of-Diet-vs-Drugs/

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.

Most drugs have side effects which cause having to take another drug!

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