As we imperfectly love, instruct, and discipline our children, our heavenly Father perfectly loves, instructs, and disciplines us. God uses motherhood to fulfill His mission in us: to sanctify us and conform us to Christ’s image. We fulfill the mission of God as mothers as we glorify Him. When we serve our families, we are serving the Lord Jesus Christ (Col. 3:24). Even before our efforts bear any other fruit, our obedience brings glory to God. This truth can bring encouragement when our parenting efforts feel futile. 

When I was a teenager, my best friend and I loved to discuss parenting. We analyzed the parenting differences we saw in families around us and tried to connect the dots between parents’ actions and the children’s success. Sometimes the outcomes within a family varied widely, and we wanted to understand why. It’s no wonder that we both went on to be psychology majors in college.

Now that I’m parenting three teenagers, I sometimes fall into a similar results-based mentality. Most of my adult life has been focused on raising children, and I hope my efforts will bear fruit as my children enter adulthood. It’s tempting to think that my children’s worldly success or biblical faithfulness determines whether I fulfilled the mission of God as their mother. But I also know that only God is sovereign over my children’s hearts and lives. They are the Lord’s vessels, not mine (Isa. 64:8). I need a shift in my thinking about God’s mission for motherhood.
Long before the fruit of our labor is revealed, our motherhood fulfills the mission of God when we glorify Him by humbly and obediently laying down our lives for our children. In our daily tasks of instructing, disciplining, and caring for our children, God gives us opportunities to pass along the truth of His Word to the next generation. He uses our work as mothers to conform us to the image of His Son and to increase our dependence on Him. And He is glorified when we obey His call to serve our families sacrificially.
Motherhood Affects Our Children
When my firstborn child was just a toddler, a friend made a casual comment that shaped the way I talked with my kids from that point on. She told me how her own mother constantly pointed her grandchildren to the Lord by connecting everything back to Him. Instead of saying, “Look at the beautiful flowers,” she would say, “Look at the beautiful flowers God made and how He’s given us the gift of their beauty.” Her words were a constant reminder of a Creator who cares for us.
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There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it.  The latter was a major component of the Fall.  Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins.  A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17).  More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.

And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006.  To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.  Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic.  This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job.  To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership.  In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility.  In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job.  In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader.  Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility. 
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility.  And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority.  This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task.  To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement.  Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job?  The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures.  It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete.  But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”. 
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it?  To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility.  In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility.  In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it.  But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained.  The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done.  Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate.  Therefore, they both share responsibility.  So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities.  We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence.  We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions.  In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over.  Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders.  This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job.  When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers. 
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents.  In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence.  At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable.  Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions.  But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable.  Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well.  To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole).  Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for. 
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years.  Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well.  This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility. 
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Celebrating the incarnation of our Lord is a good and right thing to do, whether as individuals or as churches. The commercial and cultural celebrations are permissible observances for individual Christians, but they represent an unwarranted intrusion when they are introduced into the ministry and services of the local congregation. They are purely secular (and even pagan) events, appropriately enjoyed for the common grace that they embody. But they are nowhere authorized by Christ or His apostles for inclusion in the leitourgia of the church.

I had to work my way through both college and grad school. Over the years I held a variety of jobs. I worked in a woodshop and a metal fabrication plant. I was a lifeguard at a community swimming pool. For several years I worked in warehouses. I ran a stitching machine in a bindery and a Heidelberg GTO printing press in a printing shop. For a short time I worked as a bicycle mechanic. On different occasions I worked jobs in sales. There was a brief stint as a telemarketer (until I figured out what that really meant) and a summer on the floor of an appliance store. One of the more profitable jobs was selling toys in a department store.
My employment in the toy department began in July. From the first day it was clear that we were planning for Christmas. Almost all of the department’s income would come from Christmas sales. By July we were already putting stock on the shelves for the holidays, and the manager had already worked out his pricing strategy.
He was sure that we could not compete for volume with the discount stores. Their pricing was so low that they would drive us out of business. So he deliberately priced his stock high—very high. People would come by, look at our toys, and walk right out the door, sometimes with a snide remark about how overpriced we were. I could barely make my draw in sales every week. I seriously wondered whether the manager knew what he was doing.
He did. Our sales continued to sag into November, which is when the discount stores ran out of the more popular toys. People would walk through our department, shake their heads at our prices, then walk away muttering about finding a lower price somewhere. But they couldn’t, because nobody else had the toys at any price.
Thanksgiving weekend is when panic struck the shopping public. I can remember standing behind a cash register for ten hours straight, servicing a long line of people who were now ready to pay our prices. They were not happy about it. Some of them accused us of inflating our prices at the last moment. But we hadn’t—the prices were right where they had been since July.
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