Not my Responsibility: Your PROBLEMS

I sat dumbfounded at the realization.

After decades of trying my hardest, it hit me upside the head like a ghetto momma when her kid talks back. I finally understood that I'd been doing it all wrong. I had tried my hardest over and over, yet failed repeatedly.

And those failures had piled up in me, causing an emotional wreck.

For decades, I held responsibility for other people's lives. My burden for other people's conflicts, issues, and pains had led me down a pathway that didn't give me the freedom and self-assurance in Christ I thought it would…or had been led to believe was necessary. Instead, that burden I carried gave me nothing but stress, anxiety, self-doubt, and frustration.

Simply put, I carried a heavy responsibility to fix other people's problems.

A lot of us, especially Christians, place a massive load on our shoulders to carry the weight of our friends, family, neighbors, and strangers. When conflict arises in their life, we take it upon ourselves to do our best to not only provide the solution but enact it.

When the results we desire don't happen, we then take on the responsibility of the fallout. We take it personally. We feel we failed our friends, our loved ones, and even God.

The truth is, other people's loads are not our responsibility to solve. And while that may sound callous and backward (or even un-christlike), it's vital to believe as truth.

The Rich Young Ruler - Christ Shows "Not My Responsibility"

In Scripture, a rich young ruler comes to Christ asking how he might be saved. Christ asks him whether he's followed the law, to which the rich young ruler adamantly suggests that he has followed the law successfully. But Christ throws a wrench in the young ruler's spokes when He tells him the next step.

Christ says, "If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

We might expect the man to exclaim, "Alright! Sounds good!" We might hope that he would suddenly run around the countryside yelling at the top of his lungs, "You get a car! You get a car! Everyone gets a car!"

However, it didn't happen that way. Scripture says the rich young ruler went away sad.

Stop there for a moment.

What would you do if you gave a truth like that to someone and they went away sad? Would you chase after them? Would you hound them that they need to know the truth of Christ? Would you love bomb them constantly hoping they'd change their mind?

Or would you do what Christ did and let him walk away sad, turn to your disciples, and use it to teach them an important lesson?

I've always found it fascinating that Christ didn't chase after the rich young ruler because we as modern Christians typically place the responsibility of a person's salvation on our own shoulders. We believe that whether the person accepts or rejects is our due load and that we must pressure them to join us.

And while that moment in Scripture helped clarify what the Lord transformed in me, it wasn't the genesis of my life-changing perspective shift.

Inner Healing and "Not My Responsibility"

Not too long ago, I sat for an inner healing session to deal with some stuff that had bubbled up from the abyss in my heart and mind. Walking down the pathway of what I thought was the issue allowed the Lord to show me what was actually going on.

He brought me to a memory of elementary school, in which I was running back and forth between two divided friend groups. I was friends with both groups and some typical school yard spat had occurred between two particular friends. In my infinite 7 year old wisdom, I decided that no better negotiator existed on the planet than me.

In the memory brought to the surface by the Lord, I was running back and forth, carrying messages between the two groups, somehow feeling responsible for negotiating a reconciliation between them.

I had taken on the responsibility of their healing and reconciliation. However, my attempts obviously failed in the face of elementary kid pride. The emotions of failure and unresolved burden quickly set in.

When I discussed this with the Lord, He told me that it wasn't my responsibility and that I had carried a load that had weighed me down for so long that it had bent my personality. He told me that their reconciliation was not my load to carry.

The Lord showed me: that due to my desire to see other people heal and reconcile, I took on the responsibility of trying to manufacture that healing. I chose to put myself in the middle and carry the burden of the healing that many of them didn't want. When I failed (as expected), I never released myself from the burden of a problem that wasn't mine to begin with. Instead, I carried it as a failure. I learned to carry other people's problems, even when it wasn't asked of me.

It led to anxiety, stress, and even depression over situations I had no control over.

Their Responsibility. Not Yours.

Too many times, I've witnessed conflicts or problems between people coming from people, which I then somehow took on the issues personally. This weighed me down with a sense of always failing and that I must not have enough anointing, wisdom, power, or whatever else you want to call it.

I lacked the effectiveness I thought was required of me.

But the truth is that people who do not want to be helped will reject your attempts and may even become aggressive towards you. (Pride has a way of attacking the helping hand.)

People will make bad choices, get defensive, and enjoy living in bitterness and resentment. They live like a pig in mud or a dog returning to its vomit. And frankly, no matter how many times you wrestle the pig or dog, they'll get what they want and you'll end up covered in gross results.

Over and over again, we witness Christ care for people and hold compassion, but He never forced His help on anyone else. In fact, He often times threw up a few well-placed moments of resistance to see whether a person legitimately wanted help from Him.

Not only that, but He outright used confusing tactics to show people's true motives. Remember the whole "feeding of the five thousand" situation? Christ took a couple fish and a couple loaves of bread and fed five thousand people in a powerful miracle.

In John 6, After that miracle, Christ is teaching in a synagogue and tells the people that unless they eat of His flesh and drink of His blood, they can have no part of Him.

Of course, if someone said that to you, you'd most likely decide that was your stop to get off the train. And many people did. Many of His disciples left Him because all of a sudden the things He was saying were too tough to bear.

But notice that once again He did not chase after them. He didn't place responsibility on His own shoulders to engineer their faith. And while many rejected Him over His statements, Peter thrived by saying that he had nowhere else to go. He proclaimed that Christ had the words of truth.

Beware of Jumping to Conclusions

It would be easy to decide that what I'm saying amounts to, "Don't care about other people!" But you'd be missing the point. We are called to love others, be willing to carry our fellow Christian's burdens and persevere with our neighbors.

That calling to carry other people's burdens is righteous when people humbly reach out looking for help. After all, Christ doesn't turn anyone away who comes to Him...but the question is whether a person is actually coming to Him or not.

We must always be ready to provide love, forgiveness, patience, and understanding to those who come to us and ask for our help. However, we often insert ourselves into other people's issues when they neither asked for it or believe they need our help. Then, we turn around and decide that their rejection of us was because we did something wrong or failed them.

We watch people fall into a pit and believe we somehow should have been leading them. We look at people who are throwing themselves headlong into strife and confrontation and somehow decide that we must police the issue.

When Christ gave the Pharisees a lecture, Matthew 15 says, "Then the disciples came and said to Him, 'Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?' 13 But He answered and said, 'Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. 14 Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.'"

Leading the blind is not your duty. Not every plant (person) was planted by the Lord, and therefore we should not heap scorn on ourselves when we can't seem to get the plant that is not His to grow right.

Likewise, the Old Testament also has something to say about avoiding sticking our nose where it doesn't belong. Proverbs 26:17 says, "Like one who takes a dog by the ears, So is one who passes by and meddles with strife not belonging to him."

Look, I'm not saying, "Therefore don't help anybody who is in need." What I am saying is that we too often take on a duty and responsibility for other people's lives that is not ours to carry. We interject ourselves and then wonder why we get bit or fail. We somehow mistakenly believe that we can manipulate the situation and bring about reconciliation to those who don't show any signs of wanting it. In fact, it's tantamount to telling ourselves, "They want it, they just haven't realized it yet."

That thinking caused a lot of pain and frustration in my life.

The Positive Results of "Not My Responsibility"

So what happens when you release yourself from that responsibility?

I find myself lighter. My stress and anxiety over social conflict and problems in other people's lives have gone down. I carry a clearer discernment on what I should get involved with and what I should avoid.

The best part? I'm more open to helping those who genuinely want my help. I feel patient and relaxed when providing for others. Most importantly, my resolve to not take responsibility for other people's decisions or consequences has allowed me to provide and give as needed while not assigning failure or success to my charge.

We all are responsible for our decisions and consequences. No one else is. This means that when we refuse to take responsibility for other human beings, we can be free to love them while retaining our identity in Christ. We aren't controlled by their decisions, hoping that they'll make the right one so we can feel justified in what they've done. Instead, we honor their agency and independence by acknowledging their right to make a choice when we don't force ourselves to meddle in the affairs of others.

Meanwhile, we should all the more carry compassion and reach out in love to those who need it and ask of us.

This doesn't erase the need to show compassion to the needy. It doesn't stop us from fulfilling the mandate of evangelizing. It doesn't even mean we don't bless those who aren't expecting it. What it does do is it removes us from the responsibility of inserting ourselves into the affairs of others or attempting to force something upon them they show no interest in receiving.

When we stand before Christ, we will not be judged by what others did with what we gave them. We will only be judged for what we did with what Christ gave us.

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