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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The Christian who wraps his soul in the objective truth of Scripture shapes his subjective heart for the wiles of war. He takes the divine word deep into his human center, for transformation and joy. He not only searches the Scriptures, but lets the Scriptures search him. He ingests God’s truth both to feed and to condition his soul, subjectively using the objective truth to shape his pliable affections. Slowly, one day at a time, over months and years, this wrapping makes him a vastly different person, far better equipped to both identify truth and embody it.

Given enough time, men and women of principle stand out. After waves of social pressure and the mounting cares of this life, such people are left standing, long after others around them have compromised and toppled.
I’m referring to Christians who don’t play favorites and aren’t partisans of this age. They don’t bend the truth or sweep respectable sins under the rug. Rather, they call Jesus “Lord,” and standing with two feet on his soil, they call “spade” and “evil” to all sides of error and unbelief. Such men and women refuse to cut moral corners, or presume that strategic wrongs can make others right. They shun small compromises and may not stand out at first. But give it time, and their truth and good will be conspicuous (1 Timothy 5:25).
When justice is at stake, such people are not partial to the rich, or the poor. They don’t pick a favorite group, or preferred person, and twist truth and righteousness to fit their darling. Bearing the name of their God, and the Messiah he sent, they judge with impartiality and decide with equity.
And in the spiritual conflict in which we’re engaged, they “stand against the [plural] schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11) that come from every side. They remember that our warfare is spiritual, not “against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12) — and that this war cannot be fought with the weapons of the world.
If such men and women seem to be in short supply in some circles, we might ask, Where do such people come from?
God’s Armor and Ours
“God shows no partiality” is a striking refrain across Scripture, and particularly in the New Testament (Acts 10:34; Romans 2:11; Galatians 2:6; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25). The implication for God’s people is plain and explicit: do nothing from partiality (1 Timothy 5:21). This is James’s memorable teaching about rich and poor who come to worship: “show no partiality” (James 2:1). “If you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:9).
But all this truth and righteousness, precious as it is, remains downstream when we come to “the whole armor of God” — and what Paul lists first. Before we start reaching for God’s armor, we should know whose it is, and who wore it first.
Now, some of Scripture’s most magnificent passages can be lost on us through over-familiarity. Such chapters as Isaiah 53 and 1 Corinthians 13 are deservedly famous — and in that due emphasis and celebration, many of us need to move past our dulling acquaintance with them and see them with fresh eyes, and amazement.
The “armor of God” in Ephesians 6 is one of these stunning flourishes. This is Paul at his best, with dazzling Christian creativity, if we might call it that. In one powerfully rhetorical swath, he both pulls together Old Testament references to armor and presses them into Christian use (perhaps even against a Roman backdrop). This is instructive of the range of usages the apostles can make of the Hebrew Scriptures, not only as simple promise-fulfillment, but also illusions and types and patterns and artistic syntheses crafted to serve the holy designs of the authors and needs of their readers. Here the apostle is both poet and pastor.
Iain Duguid makes a compelling case that
each of the pieces of armor has a rich background in the Old Testament, where they describe God’s armor — the armor that God himself dons to rescue his people. The Old Testament, not the Roman legionary, provided Paul with his inspiration — and if we miss this background, we may misinterpret and misapply the various pieces of the armor.
So, we begin with the first — “the belt of truth,” which strictly speaking isn’t armor, defensive or offensive, but pre-armor or under-armor.
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The World Conquered by the Faithful Christian is a military guide for Christians as to how we ought to “fight the good fight of the faith,” and is filled with practical advice for how we can best honour God in this life, for our good and His glory (1 Timothy 6:12). Therefore, it is a suitable book for any Christian to read.

The World Conquered by the Faithful Christian
Author: Richard Alleine
Publisher: Soli Deo Gloria Publications
Year: 2019
We frequently hear from prosperity gospel teachers how the Christian life ought to be one of victory and success, specifically with regard to our finances, health, and careers. In our efforts to be faithful to Scripture, many Christians — including myself — have tried to run as far away as we can from these false doctrines by seldom speaking of the Christian life as a life of victory. However, what Alleine reveals in this wonderful work is that the Christian life is indeed a life of conquest, yet not in the way we would expect.
Slaying sin, winning souls for Christ, securing the joy that is ours in Christ, and protecting the gospel are tasks to which every Christian is called, as we are all soldiers fighting for the army of the Lord Jesus Christ. For this reason, we must know how we can be equipped, and with what we ought to be equipped if we are to stand victorious in the battle which rages on.

Alleine exposes the snares of the devil

Knowing the strategies and tactics of your opposition is critical in any battle, and it is no exception when we consider the Christian life.
“The devil is a powerful enemy, having under him principalities, powers, and rulers…These enemies annoy the saints and strive to tempt them to sin” (p. 4).
Alleine challenges us to consider whether the great problem with Christians today is that we underestimate our great foe who is Satan. He shows us that if we are well-acquainted with the tactics and methods of the evil one, we will experience victory over him.
According to Alleine, the devil will use the following three strategies to lead us away from Christ:

He will overrate sin in this world, and underrate the glory of the New Creation.

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