Thursday,
January 30, 2020
Who may worship in your sanctuary, Lord? Who may enter your presence on your holy hill? Those who lead blameless lives and do what is right, speaking the truth from sincere hearts. Those who refuse to gossip or harm their neighbors or speak evil of their friends. Those who despise flagrant sinners, and honor the faithful followers of the Lord, and keep their promises even when it hurts. Those who lend money without charging interest, and who cannot be bribed to lie about the innocent. Such people will stand firm forever. Psalm 15:1-5
From this Psalm there is a wealth
to be learned about integrity. And God
makes it abundantly clear integrity is required to be accepted by your
Creator. What’s at stake is whether God
will hear a single word you speak, or approve a single movement, word, or thought
from you. The tipping point is
integrity.
The word integrity
means integrated, defined as the quality of being honest and having
strong moral principles; moral uprightness.[3] It’s a simple concept, matching your behavior
with Godly principles. Old sayings abound
about being a person of integrity:
· Say
what you mean; mean what you say
· Actions
speak louder than words
· The
distance between truth and deception can be a fine line, about as wide as the
Grand Canyon.
OK that last one’s not old; I just
made it up now. But you get the drift of
how integrity is an easy thing to understand.
It’s just easier understood than undertaken. That’s a matter proven by a little phrase
David throws in the mix at the end of verse 4 about people who …keep
their promises even
when it hurts.
It’s a fact that sometimes telling
a lie is just easier than telling the truth.
A Sunday School teacher was holding forth with her 4th
graders and wanted to make a point about lying.
She asked, somebody tell me, what’s a lie? Nobody spoke-up, so she turned to the one
little girl who was her star pupil. Margaret,
do you know what a lie is? Margaret
thought for a moment, wanting to please her teacher and wanting her answer to
be Bible-sounding, so she said, a lie is an abomination before the Lord,
and sometimes a very present help in time of trouble.
I think Margaret may have opened
the can of worms for us. The hardest
thing to do sometimes (even though it is always the simplest thing) is to tell
the truth. Telling lies is easier in the
short run, but the complications down the road can, and in fact always are,
blistering! A lie will have to be
supported with another one, and another…until you’ve got Watergate syndrome…so
many lies to cover the previous ones nobody (including the liar) even remotely
remembers what the truth was in the first place.
And, of a matter of course, you
have the pain of a pile of lies. When
truth takes a vacation, people get hurt.
Relationships deteriorate under the strain of broken trust. People who were counting on other people have
the rug pulled out from underneath them because a lie made it easier for
somebody to shirk their responsibility, to hold up their end of a bargain.
Lies are easy and complex; truth
is simple but sometimes hurts. That is
explained in two simple verses. The first
is Jesus speaking to deceptive religious leaders:
For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44
The second is Jesus speaking to his
disciple who wanted to know:
Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. John 14:6
For
You Today
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