A MESSAGE FROM THE HEART
Integrity (Matt 5:33-37)
By: Curtis Baker
Recently I took my oldest son to watch the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball in Lubbock. At six years old, this was his first official introduction to the game, and since the Globetrotters do not play basketball in the traditional sense, this was probably not the best way to introduce him to the sport. The reason I say that is because I unleashed a little monster in my son that night. At Christmas my wife and I had bought him a little basketball goal to hang over his closet door. We have had many fun hours playing on that together, but the Globetrotters adventure changed all that. Now my son was not content to play a game of horse with his dad, he wanted to do trick dunks like the globetrotters did. Not understanding that the rim of his closet goal could not hold the weight of his 35 pound body, I soon found the rim pointing straight at the ground.
It was an innocent mistake. He merely wanted to do what he saw them do. So my wife and I agreed to buy him another one, with the provision that this time he could not hang on the rim like the Globetrotters. This worked for a few days, but soon enough I came home from work and found the goal bent in the same southward position. When I called him into his room to explain what had happened, he promptly told me that his three year old brother was the cause. Seeing that the goal is approximately 6’2″ off the ground, and his brothers stands just slightly over two feet, this didn’t seem like a viable explanation. I gave him several chances to own up to what had happened, but each time he changed his story, hoping he could find one that would keep him out of the trouble he obviously was in.
The truth is, this has become a increasing problem over the last number of months. My son is at the age that when thinks he is going to get into trouble for something he has done, he quickly tries to find a scapegoat–usually by blaming his smaller and less vocal brother. On a number of occasions I have told him the importance of always telling the truth, even when the results may cause him trouble. I’ve tried to explain that if he doesn’t tell me the truth consistently, daddy will never know when he is or is not being honest. Slowly he is getting the point, but it is taking a while. For many of us, we never do quite learn that lesson.
The issue of honesty and integrity is Jesus’ next subject for discussion in the Sermon on the Mount. Having now addressed the thorny issues of anger, lust, and hard heartedness in marriage, he now turns to something which is deeply personal to all of us. Nothing is more central to our character than our integrity.
In this teaching, Jesus follows the same “you’ve heard it said, but I say to you” pattern that he has employed in the previous three. The old understanding of righteousness assumed that once you made an oath, you were not to break that oath for any reason. I think we could all agree this is an important rule. But like the previous teachings, Jesus takes it one step further…he tells his followers not to take oaths at all! A good question to ask at this point is what Jesus means with this teaching? Does he in fact forbid all Christian people from taking oaths? What about taking oaths in court? Next week I will explain why that is not the case, but for now it is important to see the main thrust of the teaching. This is about integrity. If you reflect for a moment on why oaths are needed in the first place, this becomes more obvious. The only reason we have oaths is that we assume that a person may not tell the truth. The oath is a way of trying to reassure others that a person is indeed being honest. What Jesus is getting at in this teaching is that his disciples must be people of such deep integrity and honesty, nobody will need an oath from them. Their yes will simply be taken as yes, and their no as a no. Anything else, Jesus says, is from the evil one. We will reflect more on this next week.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message from the Heart radio program Saturday mornings at 8:30 on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com)
By: Curtis Baker (curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
