The value of Integrity

I want to share with you this morning, something that’s beginning to be a core value in a lot of companies. The word integrity is what is being passed around in many companies as a core value for the companies. And I thought to myself, it would be good for us to look at the word integrity and see what it would mean for us.

Before I do that, I want to tell you a true story. It’s about a gangster from the 1920’s, his name was Al Capone. One of his lawyers, Easy Eddie, was one of the most effective lawyers in the country. Although the US government spent a fortune trying to put Al Capone in jail, Easy Eddie, as he was known, always found a way to keep him out. Capone rewarded Eddie with a huge salary, luxuries, political power, everything. He had a house, a huge place in Chicago. But Eddie and his wife had a son and Eddie loved his son dearly, and as all fathers would, he tried to teach his son the difference between right and wrong, and provide a good education for him, a good life, money, wonderful holidays, good clothes and every comfort. But there was one thing that Eddie couldn’t give his son and that was a good name. The son’s friends knew the truth about his father. That his father was keeping a criminal free to keep stealing, killing and corrupting society. Eddie, it is said, wrestled with this decision. As he saw his son growing up, he wanted to do what was right with his son. He knew he had to come to a decision of whether he was doing the right or wrong thing. Finally, knowing that the consequences would be very serious, he made the difficult choice of turning himself in to the police. Thanks to his testimony in court, Al Capone was finally imprisoned. The story ends, in a way, sadly for Eddie. He was shot to death on a dark street of Chicago. But here is the enduring legacy. His beloved son went on to become a hero in WW2, in part, because of the example of his father’s character. Today, the international airport of Chicago is called the O’Hare Airport and it’s in honor of Butch O’Hare, who’s the son of Easy Eddie. If you think about it, it was such a difficult decision for Easy Eddie - to live his life as he lived it, and yet he found that it was corrupting the life of his son. And that the legacy that he was leaving his son was a bad legacy, a tainted legacy. So he changed all of that and allowed his son to grow and mature into the kind of person that he needed to be.


That’s what integrity is. Integrity is being able to have a sense of wholeness. Let me just look at some definitions of integrity. It’s said that integrity is the quality or condition of being whole or undivided. Completeness! Integrity comes from the word integer, which means, whole or complete. Here’s the interesting thing – the opposite of integrity is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not being who you are – it is wearing different masks.

Another definition – McCartney says integrity in its simplest terms is just keeping promises. A person of integrity is one who, when he or she says something, can be trusted. When he or she gives their word, you can count on it. And integrity is being the same in our hearts, in our minds, in our actions. In other words, there is continuity about integrity, there’s completeness. Its not a segregated life, it’s not a life that we live at home, at work, at community in different ways. It’s a life that is lived together. Everything that you are at work, you are at home. Everything that you are at home, you are in the community. That is a definition of integrity.

Now as we look at integrity, we realize that integrity is sometimes hard to manage within a particular situation or circumstance. Often, to be honest, to be open with people, is difficult in a corporate environment. But the good news is that God is the one who is of integrity. Integrity is rooted and grounded in the nature of God and the standards that God has given to us through His Word, through the Bible. The standards of integrity don’t change, because God’s nature does not change. So there is no different standard that we have. We don’t have one standard of integrity in the office and another one somewhere else. It’s the same. It’s the one continuum that we have in terms of integrity. So we can rely on God to help us to live lives of integrity.

Now as I thought about this, I thought about how Jesus modeled integrity for us. We read in Mark’s gospel. “The people came to him and said ‘Teacher, we know you are a man of integrity. You’re not swayed by men because you pay no attention to who they are, but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.’” Sometimes that’s what moves us, isn’t it? We live our lives according to other people and what they would think of us. But really, to be a person of integrity is to choose between right and wrong and to stay with what is right, regardless of the consequences.

Now as we lead a life of integrity, is there something that God gives to us as we allow God to work in our lives and establish ourselves as men and women of integrity? Can we expect something from God? I want to give you very quickly 4 things that I believe God will lead us into.

1. Integrity establishes our leadership. I know there are many of you on this line who are leading. You’re leaders in the company. People look up to you. And the Bible says that when you’re a person of integrity then God is able to work in you and through you and touch all the people who work under you or are peer people for you, and is able to establish your leadership. As leaders, that is what we want to have. We want to have people who’ll be able to look up to us, people who trust our leadership, people who know that we know where we’re going and are able to take people there.

2. Integrity guides. Again Proverbs 11:3 says “the integrity of the honest keeps them on track but the deviousness of crooks brings them to ruin.” That’s what we need as men and women of integrity – always to be kept on the track that we have to walk on. But if we get devious like people who are crooks, then it brings us to ruin.

3. Integrity guards us. Again the Bible says, “Godliness, allowing God to come into our lives and work through us, guards the path of the blameless. And that’s what a person of integrity is. One who is blameless. People can look at this person and say, ‘you won’t find anything wrong with him. When he says something, he does it. And what he does is right. There is no grey area where he is concerned. But the evil are misled by sin. So if we allow Godliness into our lives, then it guards our path.

4. Finally integrity grants us security. The Bible says people with integrity walk safely but those who follow crooked paths will slip and fall. I had a friend who lives in Singapore right now, but was in India for almost 28 years, serving the corporate world. He was Managing Director of Van Miller when they came into India. I remember talking to him over the years. He would go to his accountant and say ‘here’s what I earn. This is all the money that comes in. You pay all the taxes and whatever is left, put it in my bank.’ His accountants would tell him that there are different ways how one could not pay this tax and he would say: “listen, when I go to bed at night I put my head on my pillow and I sleep like a baby.” That’s what a man or a woman of integrity has, that’s the legacy that we have. That we’re able to walk in safety, we’re able to walk with a clear conscience.

So, 4 things integrity establishes in us: leadership, integrity guides us, integrity guards us and integrity grants us security.

I want to close by just saying this: in the Bible there’s a passage where Jesus says “2 men built their houses. One built it on stone and when the waves came, that is when difficult troubles came (and all of us go through difficult times in our lives, when there is sickness or there’s adversity or even when there’s a recession when we take pay cuts or may not have a job for too long or the security of a job) when these kind of adversities come, the person who has built his house on the rock is able to withstand all these troubles. But then Jesus says there’s another type of person who built a house on the sand and when all of these adversities came, the house fell. The difference, Jesus says, is that those of you who hear these words of min and listen to them will be like one who has built his house on the rock

My prayer, my hope this morning for each one of you is that today you will make a conscious decision and say I never looked at integrity as a whole, I always compartmentalized it. But today I’m going to make it the whole of my life. Then maybe as you ask God through this day, God will show you areas that you need to clear up in terms of being men or women of integrity, I pray that, as you choose to live lives of integrity, that not only will you be blessed by God, but that your families and your children will have a wonderful legacy that you have created.