Being a person of integrity.  It’s simple but it’s hard.

When we think of what it means to be a person of integrity, most of us think of it as being honest and morally upright.  Doing the “right thing.”  But if you look the word up in the dictionary, you will find a second definition that I think really gets to the heart of it:  the state of being whole or undivided.

As we strive to be people of integrity, to be people who bear the name of Jesus, we strive to be undivided in our loyalties.

In the book of James, we are told that when we face trials and temptations – that’s not if, but when - we should ask God for wisdom.  “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.  That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.” (James 1:6-8)

Who, or what, has your first loyalty?  What do you look to for your security?  Are you relying on your career, your money, or your status?

And here’s a hard one to ask:  who are you living for?  As a wife and mother, as one who is devoted to my family, this is a struggle for me.  This world tells us that our family should be our number one priority above all else, and our human hearts pull us in that direction.

But here’s what I have come to realize.  Making Jesus number one in my life is the very best thing I can do for my family.  It makes me the best person I can be for them.  There is immense freedom that comes from knowing that.

Being undivided in our loyalties to Jesus is the only way to abundant life in this world.  None of us do this perfectly, but we need to continue working in this direction.  If your loyalties are divided, and you look to other things as your security and your purpose, the hard truth is that you can lose any of those things in this life.  And when that happens, what will you do?  What foundation will you stand upon?

Our foundation needs to be upon the rock of Christ that will not change or shift beneath our feet.  Not the sand that can slip away from us so easily.  Timothy Keller has said that we all have our houses partly on rock and partly on sand.  And when suffering comes, and the sand goes away, we need to work to shift our houses over onto more of the rock through prayer, the study of God’s word, and worship and fellowship with others.  We shift our houses over and think we are more solidly on rock, until suffering comes again, and we discover our houses are still relying partly upon sand and we shift our houses yet again.  And over our lifetimes, we put more and more of our houses onto the rock.  We are never completely there, but we make progress.

Lord Jesus, you are the rock upon which I stand.  I put my life into your hands.  Amen.