“The one who plants and the one who waters work as a team with the same purpose. Yet they will be rewarded individually, according to their own hard work.”

Accountability is a hard principle to establish and an even harder principle to ensure. It has been my experience through the years of working in business that many people (I won’t say most, but it sometimes feels that way) do not want to be held accountable for both the success and the failure of something. There’s usually not much problem on the wanting to be accountable for the success, it’s the other side that they avoid. But, the fact is, it can’t go both ways. Well, it can, but no one is happy in that place. For people to be held accountable and rewarded as such, they have to be willing to share in the acceptance of failure and more so, their own failures in the outcome. Failure is an amazing spectacle to watch. Everyone runs away from a failure like school boys fleeing the broken window from a baseball. No one wants the personal blame. But like those same school boys if the ball goes straight and over the fence, landing in the area called a home run, the batter will proudly strut across all four bases. In business, we need to fill our companies with people who want to take accountability and who don’t run and hide when the ball breaks the window. It is those who can stand up, learn from, and move forward with new information and experience who will be the leaders of the future.

Paul works with his team in Corinth to help them understand how to work together to do God’s work. He teaches them accountability in 1 Corinthians 3:8. He explains that while we all are working together to plant and water, that in the end we will be judged individually, according to our own “hard work”. What is so great about our God is that we are accepted into His Kingdom not by our works, but by our faith, but Paul makes a point here as well for us. We are not saved by committee. We don’t walk into Heaven as a team. We come to Jesus personally and we do so on our own faith and our own decision. Yes, we are held accountable individually on this decision. From there, God allows us to water, plant and be watered and grown, but again only as much as we personally will allow. Today, let’s stand up for accountability and take some on our own growth in Christ. Let’s not let the team around us either pull us down or artificially prop us up. Let’s be accountable for our own walk with Christ and make that walk deeper and stronger, starting today.

Reference: 1 Corinthians 3:8 (New Living Testament)