I hate wearing a mask, yet I've done it during this damned corona crisis. This virus is damnable, hellish. It certainly didn't come from heaven. Yes, I did say, "damn!" Are you surprised? You don't think someone who is a pastor should say that word? Damn and hell are both good Bible words. They're not vulgar, just words. I'll have to admit that if I painfully stumped my toe, I'm not likely to say, "Thank You God!" Some non-spiritual word may come from my mouth. Why am I admitting this? Because, I'm not a hypocrite. I'm honest. What you see is what you get. I'm not a pretender. I know that my integrity preserves me.
Do you know what integrity is? This can be an important idea to understand. A person with integrity is someone without falsehood. They are not pretenders. Possessing integrity, they are blameless, albeit not necessarily sinless. I'll explain why this difference matters.
The opposite of having integrity is to be a hypocrite. If you walked into my space but I didn't like you, yet I heaped praise upon you, I wouldn't mean a word of it. That kind of behavior would make me a hypocrite. It would be better for me to politely say nothing than to be phony.
Hypocrite is an ancient word. It came down to us from the Greek, through Latin, French, and to English. Originally, it referred to an actor in a Greek play. The actor would wear a large mask which portrayed his character. His real face remained concealed. Later the word came to mean a figurative mask. It was used for someone pretending to be better than they actually were in an effort to deceive others or gain advantage. Today, it refers to someone who doesn't measure up to their stated beliefs, ideals, or creed - such as a religious leader who fails morally but denies it, or a politician who says one thing but does another.
Do you know any hypocrites? I would guess that you eventually learned to not trust what they said. With hypocrites, you never know what they truly feel or think. Hypocrites have an unknown agenda. Working with a hypocrite is like living with a chameleon that's constantly changing its color depending on the environment.
I'd rather work with someone who has faults and flaws, who makes mistakes, who stumbles and sins, than work with a pretender who is a hypocrite. Pretenders wear masks when they don't need to. They deceive others. Worse still, they usually deceive themselves. They have believed a lie for so long and reinforced it with so much baloney, that they don't know their own self anymore. This is truly a sad condition. These people don't have God's peace.
Integrity is the quality of being genuine or sincere. A sincere person tells the truth even when it hurts. A person with integrity hates sincerely the cover-up more than the crime. Sincere is an interesting word. It's Latin, "without wax." Flaws in the marble are not concealed by wax.
In the Bible, God told Abraham that His covenant required that he be blameless before God. In other words, walk with integrity. Abraham became a model of faith. He wasn't sinless, but he was true and real. Such a person can have faith in God who justifies the guilty by grace. When God chose young David to become king, the Lord said that he was looking for a man "after his own heart." David's heart was true, undivided. David wasn't perfect, but when he sinned, he repented perfectly.
-- Ron Wood is a writer and minister. Email him at [email protected] or visit www.touchedbygrace.org. The opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 04/29/2020