WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.240 According to Merriam-Webster, the word integrity is in their top 10 list of the words that people 00:00:09.240 --> 00:00:14.080 most frequently look for on their website, which indicates that there are a whole lot 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:18.740 of people out there who want to know what integrity is, what it means. And as I hear 00:00:18.740 --> 00:00:23.100 a stat like that, it makes me wonder, is that because integrity is in pretty short supply 00:00:23.100 --> 00:00:30.100 these days wherever we look. Having integrity basically means that you are willing to do 00:00:30.100 --> 00:00:36.380 the right thing whether or not there's someone there to witness it. So you're willing to do 00:00:36.380 --> 00:00:42.900 the right thing even if there's nobody there to see you, to praise you, to affirm you for doing it. 00:00:43.320 --> 00:00:49.040 And yet I think there's more to integrity than that. You know, when engineers talk about a building 00:00:49.039 --> 00:00:53.539 having structural integrity, what they mean is that that building is put together correctly. 00:00:53.539 --> 00:00:59.079 All of the parts are aligned properly. And the way that you know if a building has structural 00:00:59.079 --> 00:01:04.719 integrity is if it's load-bearing. If you stress it and it's able to hold together, it doesn't 00:01:04.719 --> 00:01:10.519 come apart. And in some ways that's similar to personal integrity. Personal integrity means 00:01:10.519 --> 00:01:17.519 that we are internally speaking, we are, everything is aligned. Everything is in its place emotionally, 00:01:17.519 --> 00:01:24.579 psychologically, our beliefs, our values, our morals, even our affections, that they're all 00:01:24.579 --> 00:01:30.659 aligned properly. And in a similar way, the way we know whether or not we have that kind of internal 00:01:30.659 --> 00:01:37.539 integrity is if we are load-bearing, so to speak. Under stress, do we come apart? Do we become 00:01:37.539 --> 00:01:43.299 fragmented? Do we become a completely different person? Or do we hold together? And so integrity is 00:01:43.299 --> 00:01:49.459 extremely important. In fact, I think that right now, at this moment in our society, with everything 00:01:49.459 --> 00:01:57.879 going on, I think it, I think I would say that our greatest need as a society is not necessarily to 00:01:57.879 --> 00:02:05.759 have more smart people or more educated people or more wealthy people or more famous people. I think 00:02:05.759 --> 00:02:11.199 we need more men and women who have real, true integrity. And so that's what we're going to be 00:02:11.199 --> 00:02:15.119 talking about this morning. We're going to be looking at Psalm 26, which is one of the Psalms 00:02:15.119 --> 00:02:19.179 that David wrote. It's one of his prayers. And it's all about integrity. And it shows us three 00:02:19.179 --> 00:02:26.699 things about integrity. It shows us the aim of integrity. It shows us the context of integrity, 00:02:26.899 --> 00:02:33.299 the conditions under which integrity grows in our lives. And then lastly, the paradox of integrity. 00:02:33.300 --> 00:02:39.300 So the aim of integrity, the context of integrity, and then the paradox of integrity. Let's pray. 00:02:41.380 --> 00:02:47.520 Lord, we thank you for your word. And we know that as we talk about integrity, we're sort of talking 00:02:47.520 --> 00:02:52.439 about an internal wholeness. And we recognize off the bat that that's something that has to come 00:02:52.439 --> 00:02:57.860 through you, Lord, that you are the God who can take broken pieces and broken parts and put them 00:02:57.860 --> 00:03:02.000 together and make them whole again. And so we pray that as we open your word together, 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:07.800 you would do your work in us and make us whole on the inside so that we might become holy, 00:03:08.259 --> 00:03:12.000 Lord, and pleasing in your sight. We pray this in your son's holy name. Amen. 00:03:13.439 --> 00:03:17.800 So we're talking about integrity. And the first thing that we want to talk about is the aim of 00:03:17.800 --> 00:03:20.860 integrity. Let me read the opening of this song. 00:03:22.360 --> 00:03:27.360 Vindicate me, O Lord, for I've walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the Lord without 00:03:27.360 --> 00:03:33.660 wavering. Prove me, O Lord, and try me. Test my heart and my mind, for your steadfast love is 00:03:33.660 --> 00:03:40.180 before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness. Now, that opening word vindicate could actually 00:03:40.180 --> 00:03:46.560 also be translated judge, as it sometimes is in the Old Testament. So one of the things that we need to 00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:53.860 recognize is that David is essentially saying to God, judge me, Lord. Clear my name. Judge me. 00:03:53.860 --> 00:03:58.500 Vindicate me. Vindicate me. Evaluate me. And we need to recognize the significance of the fact 00:03:58.500 --> 00:04:05.580 that David at this point in history is probably the great king and the greatest king Israel has ever 00:04:05.580 --> 00:04:11.420 known. He's the most important person in their nation, the most powerful person in their nation. 00:04:11.620 --> 00:04:16.980 And in the ancient Near East, oftentimes a nation's king was their God. There was no higher authority, 00:04:17.100 --> 00:04:23.259 nobody above the king or the emperor. And so here's this great King David, and yet he is humbly 00:04:23.259 --> 00:04:31.579 submitting himself to God's scrutiny. He's saying, prove me. Try me. Test my mind and my heart. He's 00:04:31.579 --> 00:04:38.699 saying, don't just test to see whether or not I know your truth and the way I should live, but test my 00:04:38.699 --> 00:04:45.120 heart. See whether or not I actually love your truth and I love your ways. So in every level, David is 00:04:45.120 --> 00:04:52.639 asking God to evaluate him. And the assumption under David's words is that there is an objective 00:04:52.639 --> 00:05:01.120 standard. There is such a thing as God's standard of true and false and right and wrong. There's this 00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:10.959 objective universal standard under which David places himself and his life. And this standard, 00:05:10.959 --> 00:05:17.519 David recognizes, is the kind of aim of his life. It's the measure of his life. When David wonders 00:05:17.519 --> 00:05:22.359 whether or not he's living the way a human being should live, this is the standard that he uses to 00:05:22.359 --> 00:05:29.799 evaluate himself by. And so as we're talking about integrity, if integrity means doing the right thing, 00:05:29.899 --> 00:05:36.019 then we need to know what the right thing is as opposed to the wrong thing. And so what we need if we 00:05:36.019 --> 00:05:41.560 want to have true integrity is we need a standard. We need an objective standard of rightness. You can 00:05:41.560 --> 00:05:47.599 think of it like a plumb line for our lives, something that shows us whether we are living as 00:05:47.599 --> 00:05:54.479 we should an upright life or whether we have become crooked in some way, which is one of the ways that 00:05:54.479 --> 00:06:00.779 we can translate one of the Old Testament words for sin is a kind of bentness or crookedness of the 00:06:00.779 --> 00:06:09.779 heart. So this standard is that which we should be aiming at in life. There's a book written by C.S. 00:06:09.779 --> 00:06:14.779 Lewis called The Abolition of Man, which I highly recommend if you've never read it. And in one 00:06:14.779 --> 00:06:21.339 place in that book, he talks about the fact that before modern times, nearly all religions and all 00:06:21.339 --> 00:06:27.339 philosophical schools, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or Aristotelianism or 00:06:27.339 --> 00:06:33.219 Stoicism or Platonism, that all of these various worldviews and schools of thought, they all assumed 00:06:33.219 --> 00:06:40.199 that there was an underlying natural order to the world. They may differ in some of the details, 00:06:40.319 --> 00:06:46.279 but they all started with the assumption that there is an underlying natural order to the world, 00:06:46.339 --> 00:06:52.620 a kind of warp and woof of reality, a natural grain, like you might see wood grain, that reality itself 00:06:52.620 --> 00:06:59.819 has a kind of grain to it. There's a way that things are meant to work in our world. And so as we think 00:06:59.819 --> 00:07:07.699 about something like truth, the concept of truth, truth is that which most clearly aligns with and 00:07:07.699 --> 00:07:15.500 reflects that reality, the grain of reality, how things work. And so if you believe that, as all of 00:07:15.500 --> 00:07:21.660 these older schools and ways of thinking did, if you believe that, then you can say objectively that 00:07:21.660 --> 00:07:30.960 certain attitudes are really true and others are false, that it is possible to have our affections 00:07:30.960 --> 00:07:37.600 aligned correctly toward reality, to respond emotionally in the correct way to certain things, 00:07:38.120 --> 00:07:44.160 or that we can have a kind of misalignment where we love the wrong things or we hate the wrong things. 00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:53.200 And so the aim of integrity along this way of thinking, the aim of integrity is to align our minds 00:07:53.460 --> 00:07:59.860 and our hearts with that truth, with the truth of reality, to align, to know it and understand it with 00:07:59.860 --> 00:08:05.660 our minds, and then to love it with our hearts. And so this is most certainly what David has in mind, 00:08:05.960 --> 00:08:09.040 what the Bible has in mind when it's talking about integrity. 00:08:09.040 --> 00:08:16.379 And so the thing that we need to realize is, without this objective truth, without this kind of 00:08:16.379 --> 00:08:23.460 objective morality, without that sense of rightness or the kind of order of reality that we want to 00:08:23.460 --> 00:08:31.220 correspond to, without that, true integrity as we see in Scripture is actually impossible, because it has no 00:08:31.220 --> 00:08:42.060 aim. So what happens when a society rejects the idea of universal objective truth and morality as ours has done 00:08:42.060 --> 00:08:53.340 in more recent centuries? Well, without truth, we have no aim. And without an aim, we cannot really and truly have 00:08:53.340 --> 00:09:00.160 integrity as we're talking about here. In such a society that has done away with these things, here's what you see. 00:09:00.159 --> 00:09:09.219 Without objective truth to appeal to, what you see is that the people in power, the people who have political 00:09:09.219 --> 00:09:19.500 power, the media, the elite academics, the social and cultural influencers, these are the people who now get to 00:09:19.500 --> 00:09:28.139 define truth. They get to say what is true and what is false. It becomes a power game. In such a society, if you don't 00:09:28.139 --> 00:09:35.240 have objective morality, what you end up with is a kind of collection of moralities, what you might think of as a 00:09:35.240 --> 00:09:42.419 kind of moral pluralism, which I would use that phrase to describe our society today. And what you see is that 00:09:42.419 --> 00:09:50.360 with all of this kind of plurality of moral codes, whoever shouts the loudest really gets to be the one to 00:09:50.360 --> 00:09:55.159 define right and wrong. Whoever shouts the loudest, whoever does the best job of asserting their morality, 00:09:55.159 --> 00:10:00.819 they're the ones who get to define the terms of right and wrong. And so what we see is a kind of 00:10:00.819 --> 00:10:08.319 mob rule morality. And in such a society where these things are true, where you cannot separate 00:10:08.319 --> 00:10:16.500 truth from spin, and where morality is a kind of ever-changing target that is defined by the mob, 00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:23.059 defined by whoever's shouting the loudest, what you end up with is you end up with leaders who have no 00:10:23.059 --> 00:10:27.519 accountability. Because they're the ones who are defining the terms of the conversation. They're 00:10:27.519 --> 00:10:31.939 the ones who are deciding what is true and what is false, what is right, and what is wrong. So 00:10:31.939 --> 00:10:38.259 leaders who have no accountability. And then you have people who are doing the right thing, 00:10:38.359 --> 00:10:44.039 but not because of integrity. You have people who are doing the right thing either because they want 00:10:44.039 --> 00:10:50.539 to signal their virtue, or that they're doing it out of a kind of grudging conformity. People who 00:10:50.539 --> 00:10:57.419 are simply trying to keep their head down and to say and to do enough of the right thing in the hopes 00:10:57.419 --> 00:11:02.059 that the mob might overlook them, that they might not get called out or lose their job or lose all of 00:11:02.059 --> 00:11:10.439 their credibility in the hopes that they might just be left alone. None of this that we see in our 00:11:10.439 --> 00:11:17.599 society, none of these are the conditions within which real integrity can emerge. They actually all 00:11:17.600 --> 00:11:24.240 work against integrity. They erode integrity. They tell you that in order to sort of play the game the 00:11:24.240 --> 00:11:30.159 way the world works, you can't have integrity. And so the thing is, if we want to walk with integrity, 00:11:30.159 --> 00:11:34.659 as David talks about here, if we want to walk with true integrity, we have to have an aim. 00:11:35.740 --> 00:11:40.340 Our lives have to be aimed at something objective. There has to be an objective standard 00:11:40.340 --> 00:11:48.720 of truth and of morality, a right way to be in the world. And even if you're a great king, 00:11:48.840 --> 00:11:55.220 even if you're a great political leader, even if you are on human terms, the highest level of 00:11:55.220 --> 00:12:00.460 authority, even if you're a great king like David, there has to be a standard above you that you're 00:12:00.460 --> 00:12:06.620 willing to submit yourself to if you want to have integrity. So that's the first thing, the aim of 00:12:06.620 --> 00:12:12.519 integrity. We need an aim. But then we also need to talk about the context of integrity. What are the 00:12:12.519 --> 00:12:18.759 conditions within which integrity can really blossom? And I'll read starting in verse four. 00:12:19.279 --> 00:12:25.519 I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites. I hate the assembly of evildoers, 00:12:25.519 --> 00:12:32.139 and I will not sit with the wicked. And then we'll go to verse 12. My foot stands on level ground 00:12:32.139 --> 00:12:39.919 in the great assembly. I will bless the Lord. So the context of integrity, the conditions that make 00:12:39.919 --> 00:12:47.759 it possible for us to cultivate personal integrity are all found in community. When David says, I don't 00:12:47.759 --> 00:12:53.399 sit with men of falsehood or consort with hypocrites, I want to make it clear. He's not saying that he has 00:12:53.399 --> 00:12:57.220 nothing to do with people like that. He's not saying that he just completely removes himself 00:12:57.220 --> 00:13:02.460 from people like that. Because of course, God has always called his people to love and to serve and 00:13:02.460 --> 00:13:08.639 to associate with all kinds of people, regardless of who they are or what they believe. What David 00:13:08.639 --> 00:13:13.759 means here is he's saying, I don't sit with them. I don't consort with them. And that's a kind of 00:13:13.759 --> 00:13:21.860 biblical way of saying, I don't share their worldview. I don't adopt their beliefs and their values as my 00:13:21.860 --> 00:13:26.820 own. I might be friends with them. I might spend time with them. I might talk to them. I might 00:13:26.820 --> 00:13:31.500 interact with them, but I'm not going to adopt their views on reality. I'm not going to adopt their 00:13:31.500 --> 00:13:38.960 beliefs and values as my own. And instead we see David saying, I want to root myself. I want to stand 00:13:38.960 --> 00:13:46.180 in the great assembly of people who stand on the level ground of God's word and focus their time and 00:13:46.179 --> 00:13:52.179 energy on worship and glorifying the name of the Lord. And so David is saying, I might have all of 00:13:52.179 --> 00:13:58.139 these other relationships, but where I root myself, the community where I really place myself and the 00:13:58.139 --> 00:14:05.579 people that I call my family, that's the great assembly of people who worship the Lord. And this 00:14:05.579 --> 00:14:11.000 is a point that I think that we need to emphasize here, that if you want to be the kind of person who 00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:17.980 has integrity, if you want to cultivate integrity in your own life, you can't do it alone. You need 00:14:17.980 --> 00:14:25.100 people in your life who have the same aim as you, people who are aiming at the same truth and the 00:14:25.100 --> 00:14:31.179 same morality that you are. And you need people who want that for themselves. And you need people who 00:14:31.179 --> 00:14:36.820 also want that for you, where it's understood that that's the point of your friendship and your 00:14:36.820 --> 00:14:43.800 relationship is not only to enjoy one another, but to help one another grow and cultivate this kind of 00:14:43.800 --> 00:14:49.940 integrity. And I say that because, you know, it's really tempting. And I have the same temptation as 00:14:49.940 --> 00:14:56.180 anybody else to surround yourself with, with yes men, to surround yourself with people who will only 00:14:56.180 --> 00:15:02.360 ever affirm you and support you and validate your choices and who will never call you out or push back 00:15:02.360 --> 00:15:06.800 against the things that you're doing in your life. And I think these days in our society, a lot of 00:15:06.799 --> 00:15:11.939 people think that's what it means to be a friend. That if I'm really somebody's friend, I just want 00:15:11.939 --> 00:15:16.039 them to be happy. And whatever that means for them, I'm just here to support them and be a cheerleader. 00:15:16.339 --> 00:15:21.959 And certainly there are some times in any relationship where our role is to support and to be a cheerleader. 00:15:22.079 --> 00:15:29.120 And of course we want people we love to be happy. But if we are people who take something like 00:15:29.120 --> 00:15:34.419 integrity seriously, and we recognize the major challenges that we face in trying to become people 00:15:34.419 --> 00:15:39.399 of integrity, we realize that sometimes we need those who are closest to us to be honest with us, 00:15:39.679 --> 00:15:47.240 to speak truth to us, to challenge us, to push back against us, to help us ensure that we are pursuing 00:15:47.240 --> 00:15:53.459 that aim and that we're not deceiving ourselves. And so we need to surround ourselves with people who 00:15:53.459 --> 00:15:59.579 will point us toward truth, even if it's painful, even if it's offensive, even if we want to close 00:15:59.580 --> 00:16:05.960 our ears and not hear it. We need friends who will speak that kind of truth into our lives anyway. 00:16:06.980 --> 00:16:13.800 Dr. Henry Cloud has written a book called Integrity, which is all about this. And in that book, he 00:16:13.800 --> 00:16:18.800 actually includes an interview. And if you want to see the full interview, you should get the book and 00:16:18.800 --> 00:16:25.580 read it. It's an excellent book. But in that book, he has this interview and he says, he suggests that 00:16:25.580 --> 00:16:30.200 you take this interview and that you go to somebody that you trust and you give them these questions and 00:16:30.200 --> 00:16:34.700 let them read through all the questions. And then he says that you should invite that person to answer 00:16:34.700 --> 00:16:41.700 those questions about you. And he says that you should sit and listen to the answers, not try to 00:16:41.700 --> 00:16:46.680 justify yourself, not try to defend yourself, and that you should also take notes and recognize that 00:16:46.680 --> 00:16:52.640 this is incredibly valuable and rare feedback that you can get from somebody who really knows you. 00:16:52.639 --> 00:16:58.080 And so some of the questions are, so imagine sitting with somebody that you trust, who really 00:16:58.080 --> 00:17:05.000 knows you, and asking them, what's it like to be on the other end of me? How do you feel after 00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:10.759 spending an hour with me or a day with me? What state do I leave you in? Or asking a question like, 00:17:10.859 --> 00:17:17.519 what is my net impact on social settings? When I'm in a group setting and I leave, what is my impact on 00:17:17.519 --> 00:17:26.319 that group? Or what subjects do you think might trigger my defenses? Are there any topics or things 00:17:26.319 --> 00:17:32.079 that I, that you know you can't bring up because I might become defensive? Or what are the things that 00:17:32.079 --> 00:17:39.799 you think I struggle to see about myself? The last one is the best, I think. After you've asked all of 00:17:39.799 --> 00:17:45.000 these other questions, you say, now I want you to give me the last 10% of your answers that you're 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:51.059 holding back. I want you to give it all to me. And I can tell you from personal experience, I've done 00:17:51.059 --> 00:17:58.200 this full interview with people before in my life. And I can tell you it is terrifying. You feel 00:17:58.200 --> 00:18:04.400 completely vulnerable and exposed. It's terrifying, but at the same time, it is incredibly life-giving. 00:18:04.799 --> 00:18:11.640 It's incredibly life-giving. And it helps you ensure that there are no blind spots that are causing you 00:18:11.640 --> 00:18:17.380 to live in a state of self-deception where you're really not able to have that kind of honesty 00:18:17.380 --> 00:18:23.620 and integrity that you're seeking. So that's the context of integrity. Having a community of people 00:18:23.620 --> 00:18:29.140 around you who share your values, who share your aim in life, who want to have integrity themselves, 00:18:29.500 --> 00:18:35.240 and who want you to have integrity. And they'll be true friends toward that end in your life. 00:18:35.240 --> 00:18:40.759 Now, the last thing we want to look at briefly is the paradox of integrity, because there is a kind 00:18:40.759 --> 00:18:46.059 of paradox here as we talk about as Christians, what it means to have integrity. One of the things 00:18:46.059 --> 00:18:53.259 that immediately jumps out when you read Psalm 26 is the fact that David seems to be so utterly sure 00:18:53.259 --> 00:18:57.940 of his own excellence. And the first few times I read through this Psalm, I was struck by that. 00:18:58.059 --> 00:19:03.700 David seems like a kind of self-righteous jerk at first glance. He says, 00:19:03.700 --> 00:19:07.539 I've walked in my integrity and I've trusted in the Lord without wavering. 00:19:08.039 --> 00:19:14.319 And so he says this, and yet we know from scripture that David was anything but perfect, 00:19:14.420 --> 00:19:18.140 right? This is before the internet. This is before you could sort of say or do the wrong thing. And 00:19:18.140 --> 00:19:21.360 all of a sudden it was all over the internet and all over the newspapers and everybody was talking 00:19:21.360 --> 00:19:25.880 about it. Almost nothing was getting written down. So anything that got written down was extremely 00:19:25.880 --> 00:19:31.019 important. And so when the scriptures were first being written down on clay tablets or on pieces of 00:19:31.019 --> 00:19:37.799 papyrus, you know, there was somebody somewhere said, man, we should really write down that horrible 00:19:37.799 --> 00:19:42.920 thing that David did, right? So it was written down for all posterity. Here we are thousands of 00:19:42.920 --> 00:19:47.700 years later. And when you bring up David, people still think about his affair with Bathsheba. People 00:19:47.700 --> 00:19:52.759 still think and talk about the fact that he had his best friend Uriah killed to cover up his affair, 00:19:52.859 --> 00:19:58.859 right? So David's sin is very well known all throughout history. So the question is, 00:19:58.859 --> 00:20:04.859 how do we make sense of David's tone and David's confidence in a Psalm like Psalm 26? And when you 00:20:04.859 --> 00:20:09.659 read the other Psalms and when you read the larger corpus of scripture, you begin to understand how 00:20:09.659 --> 00:20:16.559 to make sense of it. This brings us to the paradox of integrity. Part of having integrity, if you think 00:20:16.559 --> 00:20:22.919 about what we just said, part of integrity means having an aim. There's an objective standard of right 00:20:22.920 --> 00:20:29.860 and wrong of truth and fiction. There's an objective standard of how to live and we aim at that. That's 00:20:29.860 --> 00:20:34.960 part of what it means to have integrity. But the other piece about integrity is that it means we have 00:20:34.960 --> 00:20:39.100 to be totally honest about who we are. That's why we need community, people who are willing to speak 00:20:39.100 --> 00:20:44.460 truth to us. We have to be totally honest about who we are, including our shortcomings. And every single 00:20:44.460 --> 00:20:53.160 one of us, if we're honest, we have to admit that even though we have this aim over here, that because 00:20:53.160 --> 00:21:00.720 of who we really are, we will never fully reach that aim. We will always fall short. And that's the 00:21:00.720 --> 00:21:08.600 paradox of integrity. Integrity means having and living and aiming our lives toward an ideal that we can never 00:21:08.599 --> 00:21:20.779 achieve. Aiming at an ideal that we can never achieve. And as we said, most religions and philosophies in 00:21:20.779 --> 00:21:29.019 history have agreed that there is a basic natural order to the world, a kind of right way to live in the world. But 00:21:29.019 --> 00:21:37.039 when it comes to this hard truth, that human beings will inevitably fail and fall short, most of the religions and 00:21:37.039 --> 00:21:44.319 the philosophies in the world don't really have much to say other than, well, try harder. Or hopefully you 00:21:44.319 --> 00:21:50.839 have enough successes to outweigh the failures in your life. And that's pretty much it. And this is where 00:21:50.839 --> 00:21:58.599 Christianity begins to pull away from all of the rest and begins to emerge as being utterly unique. There's 00:21:58.599 --> 00:22:06.319 nothing like the Christian gospel anywhere else in the world. How does David resolve this paradox? Here's my ideal 00:22:06.319 --> 00:22:12.279 and here's the fact that I'm never going to reach it. How does he deal with his own sin? How can he have 00:22:12.279 --> 00:22:20.119 such confidence coming to the Lord knowing that he's such a sinner in his heart? And you see it right 00:22:20.119 --> 00:22:25.899 here in the very end of the psalm, David says to God in verse 11, but as for me, I shall walk in my 00:22:25.899 --> 00:22:32.559 integrity, just like you said at the beginning of the psalm. But then he adds this, redeem me and be 00:22:32.559 --> 00:22:45.399 gracious to me. Redeem me and show me your grace. Grace means give me what I don't deserve, God. Give me 00:22:45.399 --> 00:22:52.599 what I can't earn from you. Give me that which I could never repay, even if I spent the rest of my life 00:22:52.599 --> 00:23:00.079 trying. Be gracious to me. David's integrity is not based in his own excellence. He knows he'll never 00:23:00.079 --> 00:23:07.199 attain the standard. It's based in the fact that God is a God of grace and mercy. David says, I trust 00:23:07.199 --> 00:23:12.720 fully in your love, your steadfast love. I trust fully in your faithfulness. So just as he says, 00:23:12.799 --> 00:23:17.779 I walk in your integrity, he also says a little bit later in the psalm, I walk in your faithfulness. 00:23:17.839 --> 00:23:23.079 What's he talking about there? Well, there's only one human being who could ever fully live up to 00:23:23.079 --> 00:23:30.799 God's standard, who could ever have that aim in his life and fully meet it, exceed it. In fact, 00:23:30.939 --> 00:23:36.720 there's only one person who ever attained a perfect life of truth and goodness. And that person is Jesus 00:23:36.720 --> 00:23:46.179 Christ. Jesus came in order to redeem people like David, in order to redeem people like you and me. 00:23:46.180 --> 00:23:54.680 Jesus came to live the life that we should have lived, right? To meet that aim, to succeed where 00:23:54.680 --> 00:24:01.940 we fail. And once he had lived the life that we should have lived, fulfilled all that God required 00:24:01.940 --> 00:24:07.460 of his people, Israel, all that God desires for human beings everywhere. Once Jesus has fulfilled 00:24:07.460 --> 00:24:13.640 that, then he gave his life. So he lived the life that we should have lived. And then he gave his life 00:24:13.640 --> 00:24:20.340 and died the death that we deserve to die because we did fall short. But because Jesus did that, 00:24:20.400 --> 00:24:26.900 instead of us, he offers us the opportunity to take his place. So not only is he able and willing 00:24:26.900 --> 00:24:31.520 to atone for, to pay for all of our sin, all the ways that we fall short, past, present, and future, 00:24:31.840 --> 00:24:42.040 but he's also willing to give us his righteousness, his rightness, the inherent value and worth of the 00:24:42.039 --> 00:24:48.599 life that he has lived becomes ours. And so when God redeems a person, he takes their sin away, 00:24:48.859 --> 00:24:55.899 and he also gives to them the righteousness of Christ. It becomes ours. And so for Christians, 00:24:56.899 --> 00:25:03.099 integrity isn't about being perfect. It's not about signaling our virtue. It's not about asserting 00:25:03.099 --> 00:25:10.740 our excellence over other people. It has nothing to do with that. It's about being willing to admit 00:25:10.740 --> 00:25:17.019 that yes, there is a standard that God desires for all of his people because he loves us and because 00:25:17.019 --> 00:25:22.140 he made us to live a certain way in this world, that there is that standard. And yet we can also admit 00:25:22.140 --> 00:25:28.440 boldly that we fall short of that standard. And we can do that because we walk in the love and the truth 00:25:28.440 --> 00:25:35.039 of Jesus Christ. And we trust Jesus to be the one to deal with our sin and to give us the righteousness 00:25:35.039 --> 00:25:41.759 that we don't deserve, didn't earn, and could never repay because he is gracious in his very being. 00:25:42.119 --> 00:25:47.539 And then we trust that as we do that, God will test us and God will try us in heart and mind, 00:25:47.759 --> 00:25:53.839 and God will refine us and God will form us more and more and more into the men and the women that 00:25:53.839 --> 00:25:57.480 God created us to be. Let's pray. 00:25:59.119 --> 00:26:03.720 Lord, we thank you for your word and we thank you for the work that you're doing in us even now. 00:26:03.720 --> 00:26:09.699 And I pray, as Paul prayed, that Lord, you would bring to completion the good work that you have begun 00:26:09.699 --> 00:26:16.399 in us. And I pray that for any here who desire to have integrity, to be men and women of integrity, 00:26:16.539 --> 00:26:20.379 Lord, I pray that that would come not only through our understanding of your word, 00:26:20.380 --> 00:26:24.760 but through the work and the power of the Holy Spirit in us, doing what only you can do. 00:26:25.040 --> 00:26:28.480 We pray this for our good and for your glory. In your Son's name. Amen.