Integrity Is Based On Faith, Hope and Love

1 Cor 13:13 – And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Gal 5:6 – The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Integrity means being “wholly” God’s.  The problem is that we are normally partially “ours” and partially “God’s”.  That causes a lack of integrity in us.

When we don’t trust God to provide for everything we need in His timing and His way, we will take matters into our own hands and act in ways that show that we are not “wholly” His.  We act out of fear, afraid that we won’t get what we need or want, and anything that is not of faith is sin.

Hope is based on the foundation of Faith – you can’t hope for what you don’t believe exists, or don’t believe can ever be yours. If we have no faith, we will become hopeless, and stay where we our – stop progressing in God. We will not listen for Him or to Him, and we will not walk according to the Spirit. We will act according to our flesh. We will not be “wholly” His.

Without faith, we cannot love others. Love means giving sacrificially of ourselves to meet the needs of others as God directs us. If we are consumed with “getting” for ourselves, we cannot “give” of ourselves.  If we cannot love in all situations, we cannot act as God acts in every situation.  God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves as well as love God. The world will know that we are disciples by our love for one another.  When we cannot love, we do not have integrity.

Our lack of faith (and fear of not getting what we need) causes us to re-act to our situations instead of act as God always calls us to act. We have a split personality that serves God when things go our way and serves ourselves when things don’t go our way.

The answer is to take every thought captive and ask ourselves if that thought shows that we trust God completely with everything and everyone in our life. If not, we need to counter that thought with a word that expresses faith. We need to correct ourselves when we are tempted to walk in doubt and fear by speaking faith to ourselves. We need to have integrity at all costs, because being “wholly” His is the most important thing we can do and be.