What's your Excuse? one of my daily devotionals...

What’s Your Excuse?by Rick Warren

The lazy person is full of excuses, saying, “If I go outside, I might meet a lion in the street and be killed!” Proverbs 22:13 (NLT)

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It’s rare to find people today who are willing to take complete responsibility for their actions. In the victimization that’s present in our culture, our problems are always someone else’s fault.
You can blame whoever you want – the government, your parents, the school you went to, television, your boss, or the rest of society. There’s no need for you to feel bad; anywhere you look there are people to blame.

Sometimes our excuses are quite humorous. Consider these actual statements given to insurance companies by people involved in car accidents:

· “In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole!”

· “Coming home, I drove into the wrong driveway and hit a tree I don’t have.”

· “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.”

· “I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.”

· “I was on the way to the doctor’s office with rear-end trouble when my universal joint gave way, causing me to having an accident.”

· “I had been driving my car for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.”

· “The telephone poll was approaching fast. I attempted to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end.”

· “The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him!”

Silly? Yes. But so are some of the excuses we offer, instead of taking responsibility for our mistakes, failures, and sins.

The Bible says, “The lazy person is full of excuses” (Proverbs 22:13 NLT). Ben Franklin once observed, “The person who is good at excuse-making is seldom good at anything else.”

© 2008 Purpose Driven Life. All rights reserved. Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., one of America's largest and best-known churches. In addition, Rick is author of the New York Times bestseller The Purpose Driven Life and The Purpose Driven Church, which was named one of the 100 Christian books that changed the 20th Century. He is also founder of Pastors.com, a global Internet community for ministers. Pastor Jon Walker is a writer for
www.GraceCreates.com.
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