Integrity - Keeping Your Word

2,200 years ago, the people living in China had a problem. There were fierce barbarian tribes living along the northern border of their kingdom. From time to time, these barbarians would raid them, plunder their goods, and carry off their women and children.

So the people of China decided to take some steps to provide for their own security. They decided to build a stone wall along the border to keep the barbarians out.

It took them 200 years to build it. They made it anywhere from 15 to 39 ft. high. In some places, it was up to 32 ft. thick. It had a 13 foot wide road running along the top of it. But the really amazing thing about this wall was it’s length: It was 6,200 miles long! And it’s still there today, 2,200 years later.

The Great Wall of China is the greatest feat of engineering and building in history. It is the only man made structure visible from outer space.

Back in 200 B.C., when it was completed, the Great Wall was the ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative. It was too high to climb over, too thick to break down, and too long to go around. So the Chinese people rested behind their massive wall certain that they would be secure for centuries.

Except that in the first 100 years of the Wall’s existence, China was invaded by the barbarians not once, not twice, but three times.

What went wrong? Was the wall a failure? Not really. Not once did the barbarians climb over it, break through it, or go around it. No, they got past the wall because of human nature.

In that wall were several gates. Each was guarded by soldiers of the Emperor. The barbarians simply bribed the gatekeeper, and then they marched right through the gate.

The fatal flaw in the Chinese defence strategy was that they poured all of their resources into building the Wall but they forgot to build integrity into the gatekeepers.

Today we want to discover what Jesus had to say about integrity. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had done much like the Chinese had done. They had built a great wall, too. They built a “fence around the Law”—a great wall of legal interpretation, hoping to keep righteousness in and unrighteousness out. But they failed because of human nature.

That’s why Jesus came. He came to deal with this matter of integrity on the heart level.

It’s easy for people to pretend that they’re telling the truth when they’re not. Have you ever had a car salesman look sincerely into your eyes and say “Now I’m going to be real honest with you”? Kind of makes you want to say “Well does that mean you’ve been lying to me up to this point?”

People haven’t changed much in 2,000 years. The people in Jesus’ day were a lot like they are today - they were prone to be dishonest, they broke their word, they didn’t trust one another very easily. So the Pharisees—the students of the Law—tried to establish a system that would tell you whether or not a man was telling the truth.

Did he swear an oath about it? If so, what kind of oath was it? What did he swear by; what were his exact words? They tried to reduce this whole matter of integrity down to swearing oaths.

They created complex rules to determine which oaths were binding and which were not. For example any oath involving the name of God was supposed to be absolutely binding. If a man made a promise, and he swore by God that he was going to carry out his promise, then he had to do it. He could be held legally liable if he didn’t honor that promise.

But there were other oaths that were not so binding. For example, if a man swore by the city of Jerusalem, that was not binding.

You could swear by your own head that something was true. Or you could swear by your ancestors. You could swear by the Temple, or by the gold on the Temple. You could swear by the altar or by the sacrifices on the altar. And under the Pharisees’ complicated legal system, all those oaths had varying degrees of credibility.

The swearing of oaths became very commonplace in Jesus’ day. People used them to try to convince each other that they were telling the truth. But the tragic thing was that, for all this oath-swearing, people were being as dishonest as ever.

For example, you could go into the market place in Jerusalem to buy a basket of dates. The date-seller might swear on the tomb of his great grandmother that his dates were the freshest available - just picked yesterday. So you’d buy them. And you’d get home and find out that they were stale. But you couldn’t go after him legally, because the oath he had sworn wasn’t a legally binding oath.

People in that day made a great show of being honest—just as they do today. But underneath that appearance of honesty and sincerity, there was still a basic lack of integrity.

That’s why Jesus said what he did in Matthew 5:34 “All this oath-swearing has got to stop. Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

Jesus said if you’re going to be a person who is hungering and thirsting after God’s righteousness, you are going to be a person whose word is his bond. None of this evasive swearing of oaths. No more pretending to tell the “truth” while you’ve got your fingers crossed behind your back. A disciple of Jesus Christ has to be a person of absolute integrity and honesty.

So how does this apply to us today?

1. Financial Integrity

There is no more painful process by which we are required to tell the truth than when we pay our income taxes. The whole process runs on the honor system. But the IRS is finding that because fewer and fewer people are telling the truth about their actual income, they are having to get more and more aggressive about auditing and enforcing violations of the tax code.

Now the question that faces you when you sit down to fill out your 1040 form is this: “Am I going to tell the truth?” There is a place at the bottom of the form where you put your signature. It says that by putting your signature on that line, you are swearing that you have accurately represented the truth about your finances to the U.S. government.

Now there are a lot of ways to fudge the truth on your income taxes. Millions of people do it. For example, you can fail to declare certain sources of income, knowing that there is very little chance that the IRS is ever going to get around to finding you out.

But what about God? Doesn’t God know what your real income is? Hasn’t He already audited you, even as you’ve filled out that form?

I have a college-aged friend who has worked for several years as a nanny over in New York. She takes care of the daughter of a high-level executive who works on Wall Street. In addition to getting her room and board, the use of a nice car, and a regular weekly paycheck, my friend was able to attend college during the day. It seemed like an ideal set-up.

Except for one thing: her employer was paying her “off the books”. And she never declared that income to the IRS. She never paid income tax.

Recently, she told me that the Lord had really convicted her of this, and so she decided to make it right. She felt that the Lord was calling her to go to Bible College, but He wanted her to deal with this matter of integrity first.

So she contacted the IRS, and she found out what she owed for all those years she hadn’t paid taxes. To her shock, it came to approximately $10,000, with all the penalties and interest.

Now many people would say “What a dumb thing to do. Why tell the IRS? It’s not like she was making millions—she was only making a measly $250 a week as a nanny. Why not just start paying income tax now, and let the past stay in the past?”

But my friend felt that, in order to be clean in her conscience before the Lord, in order to be a person of integrity, she needed to pay off that debt to the government.

And you know something? The Lord is going to honor her for that. I don’t know how He will, but I know that He will. No price is too great to pay in order to have a conscience that is clean before God.

How about this area of financial integrity? Do you have any debts you haven’t paid? Are you hanging onto money that isn’t rightfully yours?

A woman came to me one day in tears and confessed that she had run up a debt of $22,000 on her credit cards and there was no way she could pay it back. Her finances were such a mess that she actually hated to see payday roll around. She asked me if I thought it was right for a Christian to declare bankruptcy.

And I said, “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that a Christian should just walk away from a debt and leave his creditors holding the bag. If you want to be a person of true integrity, you need to work out a plan for paying off that debt. It will probably take years, but you’ll gain 3 things in the process…

1. You’ll learn financial discipline

2. You’ll have a conscience that is clear

3. You’ll have the blessing of God on your life because you’re doing the right thing

So that’s what she decided to do. She made herself accountable to another woman in the church for her finances. The two of them met together regularly to work out a plan. And she is now paying off that debt.

Financial integrity starts in the little things. He who is faithful in little will be trusted with much.

A minister preached a sermon on honesty one Sunday. The next day, he got on a bus. He paid his fare, and the bus driver gave him his change. When the minister sat down, he counted his change and found that the bus driver had given him $2 extra.

So he made his way back up to the front of the bus and said to the bus driver “Excuse me sir, I think you might have made a mistake. You gave me too much change.”

The bus driver smiled and said “No sir, Reverend, that was no mistake. You see, I visited your church last Sunday and I heard you preach that sermon about honesty. And I thought I’d just give you a little test to see if you practice what you preach.”

I wonder if God has any little tests for us in the area of integrity this week?

2. Integrity in keeping our commitments

When we say that we are going to do something, do we do it? Do we keep our promises?

When you tell somebody that you’re going to pray for them, do you pray for them? When you tell somebody that you’re going to help them, do you show up to help them?

When you promise your kids that you’re going to take them to the ballgame, do you take them to the ballgame?

Can people count on you? Or do people gradually learn that you’re a big talker, but you don’t always follow through on your promises.

Little things are the building blocks of credibility and integrity. Take punctuality, for example. Can people depend on you to show up when you’re supposed to—at work, at school, at church? If you have an appointment at 2:00, do you show up at 2:00?

When we lived in Denver, we attended a Conservative Baptist Church there. And I found out pretty early on that the pastor of that church had a real problem with punctuality. He would make a lunch appointment with me for 12:00 and then he’d waltz in at 12:30.

Now once or twice is forgivable, but when this becomes a pattern, you know he’s got a problem. And we found out that this was a sort of standing joke in the church. We’d see him come roaring into the parking lot on Sunday morning, with a coffee cup in one hand, late again for Sunday School. Everyone in the church knew that he was like this. You could never count on him to show up on time for anything.

A year after we moved from Denver, we heard that this pastor had left his wife and run off with another woman. Was I surprised? Not really. He couldn’t keep his commitments in little things, and it turned out that he couldn’t keep his commitments in big things either.

When you stand before the Lord on your wedding day, and promise to be faithful to your marriage partner, how is anybody going to know if you can be counted on to honor that promise unless you’ve built up a track record of dependability and integrity in the little promises you make every day?

3. Integrity in our witness

Are we committed to telling the truth about Christianity? You say, “What do you mean ‘telling the truth about Christianity’? I thought that Christianity was the truth.”

What I mean is this: Sometimes we misrepresent to the world what Christianity is, what it means to be a Christian, and how we feel personally about being a Christian.

The word integrity means whole, or one. It comes from the Latin word “integer”, which we use in mathematics to describe a whole number. When you are a person of integrity, it means that you are undivided. It means that you are the same person at work, or at home, as you are at church. You’re not living a double life. You are the same person before God and other people in all those areas.

Many times we stand in church and sing hymns like “Amazing Grace” and then go home and show anything but God’s grace in the way that we treat our spouse, our children, our neighbors. Is that integrity?

When it comes to Christianity, it’s easy to talk the talk. But do we walk the walk?

Another issue is this: “How do we use the truth in our witness?”

I’m afraid that Christians have a terrible tendency to use false claims to support Christianity, and the trustworthiness of the Bible.

For example, there is a creationist science text book being used in many Christian schools across the country that claims that the solar system must be very young because when the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they found very little lunar dust there.

But this “fact” cited by Christians in support of a particular creationist viewpoint simply isn’t true. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they found that the lunar dust was several feet thick. They have the drill cores in Houston to prove it.

Or take history for example. Many Christians resent the way that secular historians and educators have distorted American history, virtually eliminating all references to the role of Christianity in the early life of this country.

But many well-meaning Christians have gone to the opposite extreme. They have virtually rewritten American history with a totally Christian bias. And in so doing, they have misrepresented the truth.

We have got to be committed to telling the truth in our witness. We have got to check our facts. All truth is God’s truth, and we have nothing to fear from it. There is no truth out there which is going to destroy the credibility of God’s Word or the claims of Christianity.

I want you to know that I am committed to telling you the truth in my preaching. I check every fact I give you, every statistic. Because I do not want to sully the Gospel by supporting it with lies, no matter how plausible, no matter how entertaining, no matter how advantageous it would seem to be to our cause.

We have got to be people of integrity in our finances, in our commitments, and in our witness.

Psalm 15 says “Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbor no wrong and casts no slur on his fellow man, who despises a vile man but honors those who fear the Lord, who keeps his oath even when it hurts…”

Jesus Christ wants us to be people whose Yes is Yes and whose No is No: People who can be counted on, people who can be trusted, people whose word cannot be bought by money, by fame, or by power. The Lord knows just how much the world needs people like that. The question I leave with you this morning is “Will you be one of them?”