“This morning I desire to be a better man and to take the rightful place that God has ordained for me.”
What does integrity look like? Integrity means absence from corruption.
It is integrity that prevents you from entering into a shady business deal.
It is integrity that says we will choose to express our sexuality only within the confines of our marriage.
It is integrity that makes us do the right thing instead of just the easy thing.
Integrity is one of the fruits of goodness. Our conception of goodness in character are all derived from our experience of character in men. Human life is our only field of observation, and it is a field in which ideas of good and evil in character inevitably grow up.
From whence comes goodness? Our doctrine of God is first of all a doctrine of character, and the character is perfect goodness. It declares that God is completely and absolutely Good.
Why do we make mention of God’s goodness in dealing with integrity? Because if we are to become what we are not, we need to know and to be acquainted with the unlimited resource of the one whose character is above reproach. The goodness of God stands as the law of righteousness for men even long before men have learned how much that law must claim.
Yeshua is the first to hold with perfect understanding and unbroken joy that God is altogether good. His testimony is to the effect that God is perfectly worthy of the simplest and most comprehensive confidence; and His will is worthy to be chosen and done by every soul.
For Yeshua, this affirmation was undisturbed by the evil of the world. He knew the evil of the world of men, but it did not darken for him the heaven of his Father. If his own will, as in Gethsemane, needed to bow to that of his Father, still his Father’s will was good in his sight.
We cannot be perfectly good in character, motive and vision if we are divorced from the one who exhorted us to: “be perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect.”
By divorced I mean we have no inclination of seeking Him so as to be enriched by His gifts, with one end goal:
That we may be better men.
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