Welcome to this Daily PBJ devotional. Read Genesis 16, Nehemiah 5, and Matthew 11 today. This devotional is about Genesis 16. Now Abram's wife Sarai had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. So Sarai said to Abram, Look now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Please go to my maidservant. Perhaps I can build a family by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after he had lived in Canaan for ten years, his wife Sarai took her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar, and gave her to Abram to be his wife. And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived. But when Hagar realized that she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be upon you. I delivered my servant into your arms, and ever since she saw that she was pregnant, she has treated me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me. Here, said Abram, your servant is in your hands. Do whatever you want with her. Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she fled from her. Now the angel of the Lord found Hagar by a spring of water in the desert, the spring along the road to shore. Hagar, servant of Sarai, she said, where have you come from, and where are you going? I am running away from my mistress Sarai, she replied. So the angel of the Lord told her, Return to your mistress, and submit to her authority. Then the angel added, I will greatly multiply your offspring, so that they will be too numerous to count. The angel of the Lord proceeded, Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son, and you shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your cry of affliction. He will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand against him. He will live in hostility toward all his brothers. So Hagar gave this name to the Lord who had spoken to her. You are the God who sees me, for she said, Here I have seen the one who sees me. Therefore the well was called Bir Laharoi. It is located between Kedesh and Bered. and Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had born. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to him. This is God's word. Who is responsible for your life? Why did you make the decisions that you've made? From the fall of humanity in Genesis 3 until Judgment Day, people have blamed other people for decisions that turned out badly. This means sinful decisions, of course, but also decisions that were reckless, unwise, or that just didn't turn out well. We humans have a strong tendency to deflect blame from ourselves by blaming others, and we see that tendency here in Genesis 16. Yesterday in Genesis 15, God repeated the promise to Abram that Abram would physically father a great nation. Here in chapter 16, Abram's wife Sarai came up with a plan to make it happen. The text of this chapter tells us three times that this was Sarai's plan. Notice, verse 2 says, and these are all from the NIV, but verse 2 says, she said to Abram, sleep with my slave. In verse 3, scripture says, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to Abram to be his wife. And verse 5 says, I put my slave in your arms. And that was Sarai, of course, speaking. So what was Abram's role in this? Verse 2 says, Abram agreed to what Sarai said, and verse 4 says he slept with Hagar. The plan succeeded in creating an heir because she conceived according to verse 4b. The unexpected side effect of the plan, however, was that the master-slave relationship between Sarai and Hagar was disrupted. Verse 4c and d says, When she saw that she was pregnant, she, that is, Hagar, began to despise her mistress, who is, of course, Sarai. And this is the point at which Sarai began to blame Abraham. She took some responsibility when she said, I put my slave into your arms, in verse 5c. But before she said that, she also said, You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering, in verse 5b, according to the NIV's translation. Then after she admitted her role, she said again, may the Lord judge between you and me in verse 5f. So clearly, Sarai is trying to deflect blame here. Now the implication of these statements is that Abraham was ultimately responsible because he should not have agreed to Sarai's plan. And she's right in a sense. He should not have agreed to the plan. Abram is guilty for going along with a plan that took a shortcut to achieving God's promise. But God did not instruct Abram or Sarai to follow this plan, nor did the plan require any great amount of faith to see God's promise fulfilled. Instead of continuing to wait for God and keep His word, Sarai came up with her own way, and Abram expressed no concern or refusal to cooperate. His passivity in this situation continued. When Sarai complained about how Hagar was acting, Abram said, Your slave is in your hands. Do with her whatever you think best. That's the words of verse 6 in the NIV. Abram was wrong to agree to the plan first, without consulting God, and he was wrong to withdraw from the situation once it became a problem. The angel of the Lord told Hagar, go back to your mistress and submit to her. But those words should have come out of Abram's mouth. He should have addressed the problem, taking responsibility for his part in it, and calling both Sarai and Hagar to repent and do what was right. But Sarai has to answer for this situation, too. It was her idea, after all. Despite her attempt to downplay her role when she said, I put my slave in your arms, she was still responsible for this happening. So let's go back to the questions I posed at the beginning of this devotional. Who is responsible for your life? Why did you make the decisions that you made? The answer is, you are responsible for your life, and you made the decisions that you made for your own reasons. Now God is gracious to us. He forgives our sins when we change our minds about them. And He sometimes even withholds or minimizes the consequences for our sins and unwise decisions when we repent. What He doesn't do, however, is absolve us of responsibility. In fact, Proverbs 3.3d and 1 Peter 5.5 and James 4.6 all say this. They all say, He shows favor to the humble. The forgiveness you want from God and the road back to righteousness runs through the town of repentance and confession. When we step up and admit what we did wrong, we are ready to receive God's forgiving grace. When we blame others, however, and minimize our role, problems go unsolved and unresolved. There are always other factors that lead us to do what is wrong or to make decisions that maybe aren't morally wrong but are unwise. Often, other people are one or more of those factors that cause us to make bad decisions. But until we accept responsibility for what we decided and what we did, the situation will get worse, not better. Are you in a bad situation that you've tried to blame on others? Humble yourself, own up to your role, and do the right thing now. God will meet you there with forgiveness based on the blood of Christ, and he'll give you grace to deal with the situation in the best possible way. And if you found this devotional helpful, consider signing up to receive them in your email every day. Go to dailypbj.com slash subscribe and enter your email address in the box, and every day, for free, you'll receive an email from me with the links to the video, audio, and a transcript of these devotionals, as well as links to the scripture passages to read for that day. And that may help you be in God's word every single day and develop a daily Bible reading habit so that you can walk with God. 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