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1.  Introduction

In this 6 weeks, we’ve been studying character, what it means to have biblical or godly character.  The first week we looked at what is character and why study it?  We saw looked at lists of virtues or qualities and characteristics that make up a life of character.  It is a life of excellence. We study character because want to grow in our relationship with God, be more like God and follow him, we do so for the sake of Christ. Last week and this week, we’re looking at overarching ideas/qualities/themes necessary for having and developing godly character.  Last week we looked at wisdom, and how it’s more than just knowledge, but it’s knowing and doing.  We must have the actions as well as the knowledge.  Godly wisdom is in how you use the knowledge you have. This week, we’re going to look at two more overarching characteristics of godly character: integrity and love.  We’re going to dig into integrity and briefly sum up with love.

 2.  INTEGRITY

What is integrity?  What do you think of when you hear the word “integrity”? Ashley and I want to expose you to differences in worldly and biblical character.  Let’s start with how the world views integrity.

2.1  Dictionary Meaning of the Word Integrity

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines integrity as

1. firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values (syn. incorruptibility).(These definitions will have parts of the truth in them, because we recognize that God gives gifts to believers and nonbelievers.  But the dictionary is written by man and not God, so it has man’s values put into them and not necessarily God’s.)  In this first part of the definition, I object to just holding to moral values—as if we make up our own.  Only truly biblical values are what we as Christians are to seek.  If it had said adherence to biblical values, then I would agree.  It is God who defines our values and not society.
2. an unimpaired condition (syn. soundness)
3. the quality or state of being complete or undivided. We’ll see that the biblical definition is very similar when it speaks of wholeness, being a complete person of character who is well-rounded and undivided in loyalties, affections, words, and deeds.  A synonym of integrity is honesty. We’ll see that biblical integrity is about much more than just honesty, though.  It’s a lifestyle that at is core is completely honest because it completely seeks to serve and follow God alone.

2.2 Wikipedia Meaning of the Word Integrity

Wikipedia said:  “Integrity is the concept of consistency of actions.”  It regards internal consistency as a virtue, meaning there is truthfulness in actions as well as words.  Wikipedia sees integrity as the opposite of hypocrisy, where there would not be internal consistency .

2.3 The Meaning of the Word Integrity in the Bible (Examples of Integrity)

The Bible Now, how does the bible view integrity?  First, the Hebrew word often translated integrity speaks to an integrity of mind.  It speaks of actions that are pure and honest and which encompass the heart. This is not just whether someone is honest or not, but whether their motives are pure too.  Second, the Hebrew word speaks to completeness or soundness.  This refers to the heart and mind—to knowing and doing—to being a person whose whole position in life is to follow the Lord completely.  Third, it can mean innocence (or blamelessness), being sound or wholesome.  This meaning of the word is used frequently in the book of Job to refer to his actions.  He was commended for his integrity of his ways, especially in his devotion to God.  In Job, his soundness has to do with being complete, morally innocent, and having integrity.   There’s a very close connection with the word “integrity” and the word “blameless” in the bible, where blamelessness means innocence before God.

2.3.1  Integrity Meaning in 1 Kings 9:1-5.

(Read 1 Kings 9:1-5.)

I had you read this story so that you could see an example where God himself speaks of having integrity.  He appeared to Solomon after he had built and dedicated the new temple where God would dwell.  God makes an oath (in v. 3) that he will always be in the temple—his eyes and his heart will be there for all time.  Then he promises Solomon in verse 4 saying,

“if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever.”

So God promises that if Solomon walks in the way of his father David, with integrity of heart—or completeness, wholeness, soundness, and blamelessness—then God promises that the royal line of David will continue forever.  This passage speaks of David having this integrity of heart and God seeks it also from Solomon. Notice also that part of this integrity is service to God in heart and in actions.  Solomon is to do as well as feel.  He’s to keep God’s commandments and rules, not out of obligation or fear, but out of a heart of integrity, one that is whole in its devotion to God.  Solomon cannot have divided loyalties.

So then what is this integrity that God commends in David?  1 Chron 29:10-20 lays the back story for this comment here in 1 Kings 9:4.  In 1 Chron, David is dying.  He’s amassed great wealth from his military campaigns, but God won’t let him build the temple because he’s shed blood through his conquests.  God wants Solomon to build the temple because he reigns during a time of peace. So David prays to God, he praises him and worships him; he thanks him for all his successes and acknowledges that all his wealth (which will fund the temple) came directly from God and so to God it will return.  David says to God,

““I know, my God, that you test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness.  In the uprightness/integrity of my heart I have freely offered all these things” He then prays that God will grant Solomon “a whole heart that he may keep your commandments.”

David asks God to look at his David’s heart, to test it and see that David has had pleasure in his uprightness, pleasure in his integrity.  Out of his integrity of heart then, he acts by giving sacrifices and the building of the temple to God.  The integrity is total.  This is character that goes beyond just honesty.  David offered sacrifices and all his conquest money freely to God out of love and devotion for God. David is an example of integrity from the Bible.

Let’s look now at the other passages I had you read in preparation: Psalms 25 and 26.  These are Psalms written by David.  These will help us better understand some qualities of what it means to have integrity; these are more examples of integrity.

2.3.2 Integrity Meaning in Psalm 25

(Read Psalm 25.)

In verse 21, David says

“May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you, [Lord].”

There are three main points I want to draw out from this psalm about what integrity is.  I’m also going to give practical applications along the way as we go through these and the rest of our scripture tonight.

First, in verses 4 and 5, David prays to God to make him to know your ways, teach me your paths, he says, lead me in your truth and teach me.  Again in verses 8 and 9, David says God instructs sinners in the way, he leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble his way.  These are qualities that we can pray for and ask God for in order to help us develop integrity.  We pray for God to lead us.  We also pray for humility.  We must be teachable, be willing to learn, and we must ask to learn—this is something that you and I can both do—ask God to teach us.

Second, in verses 7, 11, and 18, David three times asks for forgiveness.  Verse 7: “remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions;” verse 11: “pardon my guilt, for it is great;” verse 18: “forgive all my sins.” Repentance is a key part of learning character and developing integrity.  We must repent where we think or act in ways that don’t demonstrate integrity, where we don’t seek God’s way or we do it out of obligation alone, where our actions don’t match up to our words and where we fail to be consistent.  This is another thing we can do and pray for: to see where we need repentance and to ask forgiveness for it.

Third, in verses 20 and 21, David prays “Oh, guard my soul, and deliver me! Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.  May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.” We must take our refuge in God, even in our weakness and brokenness, when we fall short of loving him as we should, for he guards our souls and delivers us.  This is third thing we see that we too can do.  We must hide ourselves in God’s own integrity.  So we pray that we will make God our refuge.

2.3.3  Integrity Meaning in Psalm 26

Your version might read “blameless” where others read “integrity,” but remember earlier I said that the two words are often closely related and their meanings can be intertwined, just as in the examples about Job. 

In verses 1 and 11, the word integrity is used.  The Hebrew dictionary says this use here is taking on the sense of “completeness or fullness,” and also “integrity of mind” which links this psalm with the previous one.  David says he has walked in his integrity, he has walked his life in completeness or fullness.  Some translations say “I have led a blameless life.”  Notice here that David says he has walked in his integrity—walking is a way of life.  It’s not that he had integrity in one situation or even several, but that his life was characteristic of one of integrity.  The word can be used to describe his way of life.   See also that walking implies a path or journey.  So we should be on this journey of ever learning to live lives that have more and more integrity.  We have to continue to pray for God to lead us and guide us.  We’re not on the road alone.  God has left his Holy Spirit as a helper, and we can make Psalm 25 (the previous psalm) a prayer of our own that God will lead us and guide us and that we will accept his help (with humility).

In verse 1, David also says, “I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.”  I think a lot of our integrity issues and problems come when we waver in our trust of God.  Some of us have what’s called “fear of man” (rather than “fear of God”) or we’re people-pleasers.  We think that if we don’t do a certain thing that other people are doing or act like other people are acting, then we won’t get the affirmation we crave.  We think we must do these things for them, because we don’t recognize that God is there for us.  But this isn’t what God wants.  He wants us to trust in him, even when it costs us things.  We might think we have to play by company rules or society’s rules.  But God wants us to trust him, even when we know we may be making unpopular choices around our friends or coworkers—like not gossiping or asking others not to talk about someone.

2.3.3.1 An example of integrity in our daily lives:

I was in a class last week, and there’s this girl in our class who, a couple months ago, had a really busy time with work.  She wasn’t able to make it to our class and so she got really far behind.  Since then, she’s been coming to class, but you can tell that she’s really disengaged and has given up.  Last week, she wasn’t participating at all and was looking at things on her iPhone during class.  She got up to go to the restroom at one point and on her way out the door, she turned to me and said, “Don’t talk about me when I leave.”  I thought it was a strange request and said that we never do.  But the moment the door closed, the other students started talking about her.  They were questioning why she was still coming and paying for the classes if she wasn’t going to even participate.  It took me a moment to realize what we were doing, and I spoke up and said that she specifically asked me not to talk about her.  They were surprised that she had asked me that.  The sad thing was that I’m not sure I would have immediately noticed we were doing it if she hadn’t said something.  Once I said that, we all quickly got back to our lesson.

I give this as an example of recognizing when these situations occur and then making the hard choice to speak up.  This is where you and I can grow in our integrity—this is where it actually plays out in the details of our lives.   There must be a completeness or wholeness to our lives and actions.  Most nonbelievers know how a Christian should act, and they know when we aren’t acting God’s way.  My fellow students know I’m in ministry, and if I had let us talk about this other student, they would know that there was a disconnect in my words and actions.

Back to Psalm 26, in verse 2, David asks God to prove him, try him, to test his heart and mind to see how he has lived in integrity.  We need to ask God to show us where we have fallen short.  In Maxwell’s book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, he sets forth some good questions we can ask ourselves about our lives in order to examine our character:  Ask yourself whether your words and actions match—all the time…  When you say you’ll finish an assignment, do you always follow through?  I’ve added some as well: If you’re single and a friend asks you to do something, with her, do you follow through on your plans or do you cancel often or reschedule because something better comes up?  If you’re married and you tell your spouse you’ll do something or go somewhere with him, do you do it?  Can people trust your word?  Ask yourself these questions and then just like we saw in Psalm 25, repent and ask forgiveness where you haven’t shown integrity.

Then in verse 4, he says “I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites.”  Now “hypocrite” is a word that’s based on a Greek theatrical word that means “actor” or “to play a part”—the essential identity of hypocrites is that they pretend to be something they are not. Think about this, what’s the difference between a person of integrity and a person considered a hypocrite?  How do they relate?  What if a person of integrity hangs out with known hypocrites?

In Matthew 7:6, Jesus denounces the Pharisees as hypocrites.  He says they “honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”  These were the religious leaders of the day.  And Jesus is railing on them.  They perform all the functions of being a good religious leader.  Let’s say today this would be someone we would call a “good Christian.”  But their hearts were far from God.  They weren’t living whole or complete lives where their words and actions met.  They weren’t living with consistency.  David says he doesn’t even consort with hypocrites.  He knows it will pull him away from God and reduce his credibility.

2.3.3.2 Another Example of Having Integrity:

I want to look at an example of a person of “character.”  We’ll discuss this example in our discussion groups.  The psychological dictionary of Character Strengths and Virtues (a secular book) writes about Ann Landers.  (you may know her advice column that ran for years in newspapers).  The book lists her as a woman of character, known for perspective and wisdom, based on her column and the advice she dispensed.  I want us to think about her story from the viewpoint of Integrity though.  Ann Landers had a twin sister, known as “Dear Abby,” they both wrote advice columns.  But they had a life-long breach and didn’t speak.  And then her marriage of 36 years failed.  Can we say she had integrity if she was teaching one thing to her readers but not living it out in her most important relationships? So keep this story in mind in your groups.

2.4.  What does true integrity of mind and heart look like?

We’ve looked at David and how God said he had integrity of heart.  They both prayed that Solomon too would have this integrity of heart.  Based on this, Solomon was promised that he would never lack an heir on the royal throne.  The Bible repeatedly tells us that Jesus himself is the ultimate heir and king of Israel and God’s kingdom.  Jesus is known as David’s heir and a king in the order of David and descended from David. 

Jesus comes and lives a life of ultimate integrity.  The Bible states that Jesus committed no sin (1 Pet 2:22, Heb 4:15), that Pilate in sentencing him said he found “no basis for a charge against this man” and that he had “done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:4, 41).  Jesus himself asks, “Which of you convicts me of sin?” (John 8:46).  Jesus’ life demonstrated integrity.  No one could bring a charge about his devotion to God or any inconsistency of actions. He lives a life that shows us the type of character we can hope and pray for.  Jesus came to make us whole again: to restore our hearts and minds. 

As we saw in Romans 6, we have this now, we have died and been resurrected with Christ, so we have integrity now.  It is possible for us, but because we are not completely restored yet (Jesus has not returned), we don’t have it in fullness.  So we must pray for it, and live it out, and fail and repent, and keep praying and keep growing.  It’s a path, a journey, a way of life, and we must ask God to guide us, to be our refuge.

3.  LOVE

The second overarching aspect of character that we’re looking at is: LOVE. I’m only going to summarize this, because we’ve taught on it a lot and will continue to teach on it. We’ve looked at wisdom, integrity, and now love.  So why did we include love as an overarching virtue or quality of having “character”?  It’s important, because we can’t have character without love.  We can’t be wise and we can’t live lives of integrity.  Love is a fundamental tenets of Christianity.

How we interact with God and others defines our character as well.

3.1 Love of God

We must “love the Lord God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.” Jesus says in Matt, Mark, and Luke that this is “the greatest and foremost commandment.” We know this commandment and we try to live it out, but we must remember to pray for God’s Holy Spirit to help us.  We must live lives of wisdom and integrity of mind that first and foremost are out of love to God.  It’s not just to a moral code or list of rules from the Bible to follow.  We want to have character because we want to learn to love God better.  And the more we love him with our whole being, the more our lives will evidence this character.

3.2 Love of others

Jesus follows up by saying “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This is the second commandment Jesus lists and says these two sum up what biblical love is.  Jesus says the whole of the law and the prophets rest on these two—he’s saying the entire Old Testament and story of God rests on these two commandments.  Have you really stopped to ask what it means to love God with all your heart—every ounce you have, every minute of the day.  Our lives would look a lot different if we were able to even grasp the depths of this…  Have you asked what it means to love your neighbor as yourself?  Think of all the things you do for yourself…all the ways you make life better for yourself or treat yourself to something…Would you do this for your neighbor too?…  a lot of times we blow past this and think…they need to get their life in order first, I can’t be helping everyone, or I work hard so I can treat myself to nice things, and they need to work hard too if they want nice things…BUT God challenges us to change.  These statements aren’t meant to be trite, but radical.  Love for God and others should be the basis for all our motivations.

3.3 An Example of Love in the Bible

Turn to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 and 13. 

* I highly recommend you listen to Ashley’s lesson on 1 Cor 12 and 13 ( See blog on 2 Corinthians 13 ).  It goes into this passage in much more depth, and it’s really good.  If you’ve already heard it, relisten to it.

Verse 13 acknowledges that our faith, our hope in Jesus Christ and our love will all abide, “but the greatest of these is love.” Love requires knowing and doing.  So love is the greatest (and a lot of times the hardest).  Paul also lists here in verses 4-8 some ways we can see the outworkings of this kind of love.  These are ways we can know if our love for God and others is genuine.  As we grow in our love, we will grow in our patience, kindness, compassion, endurance. 

When I looked at the yellow sheet Ashley gave last week of qualities of character, I decided to mark the ones that I was weak in and need to grow in.  I decided to think about them as I relate to my husband.  I didn’t get too far before I had highlighted “goodness, self-control, godliness, kindness, love, compassion, humility, gentleness, patience.”  I looked and realized I was still weak in this areas.  These are areas I want to grow in.  These are areas I’ve prayed for God to increase in my life.  I know that when I’m weak in my relationships with others (like my husband) in these areas, it means I’m weak in my love for God.  Always when we see struggles in our relationships, we have to recognize that this is a struggle and weak spot in our relationship first and foremost with God! If I’m not good to or humble with my husband, how can I claim to be good to or humble with God?  We must grow in our love for God, then we will grow in our love for others (it can’t go the other way).

3.4  How do we learn to love God better then?

We must look at Jesus’ life and see that God is ultimate love in Jesus Christ.  Jesus shows us what it means to love God—he submitted to his father’s will, he followed his father’s plan—knowing it would lead to a gruesome death on the cross, but he did it out of love, for God, and for sinners. John 15:9 says “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” Jesus shows what it means to love others better than himself.  The next few verses in John 15 (verses 12-13) says,“love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.” Jesus went to the cross to show us what this love is.  It’s this love from God that motivates us to love God back and to love others.  It’s this love of God that motivates us to develop character.  To grow in wisdom, in integrity, and in love.

4. Conclusion

In Conclusion, tonight we learn that Jesus’ own integrity of heart and his love for us both show us and help us understand what it means to have godly character and how to live out godly character.

Questions for Discussion & Application

• We saw that God considered David’s life to be “upright” and that he had “integrity of heart.”  How do we reconcile this with the fact that David also committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed?  What about David’s life allows God to consider him as having integrity?
• In the Ann Landers story, can we say she had integrity if she was teaching one thing to her readers but not living it out in her most important relationships?  Can she still be considered a woman of character (as this secular book portrays her)?
• What are practical ways that we can learn to grow in integrity and love?  List examples where you have fallen short and can now grow in character from understanding where you went wrong.

Next lesson on Character by Keeley