Integrity

Integrity: Don’t leave home without it!

Integrity means being the same person no matter where you are or who you are with. Integrity is really hard to maintain in this modern world. This is because we live our lives in unrelated bits. The people we work with don’t live in our neighbourhood. The people in our neighbourhood may not be the people we go to church with. The people we go to church with are not the people who are our teammates at the local sporting club.

Nobody knows the other parts of our lives.

It is quite possible for you to be a good Christian at church and a ruthless business man and a domineering parent, and a swearing, drinking footballer. And nobody would be any the wiser! They would each think they are seeing the real you.

So who are you really? Christians should have some resistance to this modern problem of adapting your personality to different situations and groups of people.

My own research when I did my Masters says that this is only partly true. Many of us not only anxiously conceal our faith when we are at work or in non-Church social groups, but we actually don’t even think Christianly in those settings! It’s not intentional, it’s just that it doesn’t occur to us bring Jesus and his teachings into those settings. That means that we literally are a different person when we are in a different setting!

This is not integrity. But we need to be the same person all the way through, all the time. We need integrity to be whole and strong and free of secret sins.

Joseph in our Genesis 37 and 39 stories was just such a man; a man of integrity. That’s what makes his story so compelling. No matter what life dished up to him whether in prison or in power, he was always a person that lived by God’s standards in his life. And God blessed him whether he was in slavery or the Pharaoh’s right hand man.

Joseph as a young teenager was honest and loved his family even though his father, Jacob, stupidly favoured him over his 10 other brothers and caused them to hate him.

Joseph was sold into slavery and when he was bought by an Egyptian businessman he didn’t despair at his lost life but worked with integrity and honesty trusting God would never leave him. And he was right. Even when the businessman’s bored wife turned out to be a ‘cougar’ he refused to do such a thing to God who was with him.

“With me in charge,” he told her, “my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. 9 No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” Gen 39:8-9

Many people think that when bad things happen to them that God has let them down, and so they feel as though they should return the favour. Joseph had the correct attitude though- ‘the world is an unfair place made up of sinners, so even if bad things happen to me God will always stick by me and so I will always stick by him.’

Potiphar’s wife falsely accused him and he wasted away in prison for a while but even there he maintained his integrity and cared for his fellow inmates and was entrusted with responsibility in the prison work crews.

To be the same person ‘all the way through’ no matter what setting you find yourself in and no matter what people say or do to you; now that is integrity. That is really having the character of Jesus Christ.

May you be like Him; a person of integrity.

Graeme