The Plumbline

Be sincere in your love for others. Hate everything that is evil and hold tight to everything that is good. Love each other as brothers and sisters and honor others more than you do yourself. (Romans 12:9-10) God desires a way of living that is "outside" or beyond our selfishness - the tendency we had before we said "yes" to Christ which kept us totally self-directed in our focus. Be sincere in your love for others. Sincerity is the idea of being free of hypocrisy. If you have ever caught yourself saying one thing, but thinking another, you might be dealing with this thing called hypocrisy - the tendency to be ingenuine or unreal. Neither of these traits are what God wants for us in relationships - first with him, then with others. He strives for us to be genuine or real. We are to be genuine in our love for each other, by hating evil, holding tight to what is good, treating one another as brothers and sisters, and giving honor to each other more than we focus on s...

In conversation today, you might hear words such as accountability and responsibility.  Newscasters speculate about who will be held accountable for certain actions.  Others postulate about what responsibility some aspect of society had for the actions of another.  Yet so many times, there is very little reference to the actions of one being called into account simply on their own merit.  We see shooters destroy innocent lives - then blame the lack of gun control as the "responsible" party.  When "breaking down" the influencing factors in the shooter's life, we gravitate toward what the parents did or didn't do, who should have recognized the mental health issues apparent in the shooter's life, etc.  We rarely gravitate to the place of saying this man or woman was totally accountable for their own actions.  Why?  Society today seems to want to "share" accountability and responsibility for the actions of individuals - not because they want to ...