What kinds of characteristics do you look for in a friend? Who do you like to hang out with? If you were going to spend a lot of time with someone what would you look for? Loyalty? Mutual respect? A good sense of humour? Similar interests? C.S. Lewis says that the difference between friends and lovers is that lovers stand face to face, looking into each others’ eyes, totally enthralled with each other to the exclusion of everything else. Friends, on the other hand, stand shoulder to shoulder and look out into the world together with a similar viewpoint and similar goals.
What does it mean to be a good friend, a good neighbour, someone that people want to be around?
In a way, that’s the question that Ps 15
asks. Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who
may live on your holy hill?
You could translate that as, “Who gets to hang out with you, God? Whose company do you enjoy?” To put it another way, “If God were to have some people over for pizza and a movie, who would he invite?”
Perhaps surprisingly for a lot of us, the person that Ps 15 describes as the kind of person that God approves of isn’t a religious person. Or at least, not what people would usually describe as religious.
The kind of person that God wants as his friend or neighbour is the kind of person that I think we would all like to have as a neighbour, or better yet, that we would all like to be as a neighbour.
[We’re in the middle of a series called “Living From The Inside Out.” We started by looking at our hearts, the centre of our being, and the call in 1 Pet 3:15 to “Honour the Lord Christ as holy in your hearts.” So we talked about “Living With God” and holiness and what that means. Then last week we talked about “Living With Yourself” and our need, each one of us, to cultivate humility, which Rom 12.3 describes as “having an honest assessment of yourself.” If you missed those and you’d like to fill in the gaps in the series, you can download them from the website. The audio, the text and the programme insert are all there. The web address is on the front of the programme.]
This week we’re expanding the circle a little more as we talk about how important “integrity” is to “Living with your Neighbour.” There is a logical order to all this. It’s only once we have submitted ourselves to God and have him at the centre of our lives that we are free to really see who we are. And it’s only once we really know who we are ourselves, and we’re secure in God’s love for us, that we then become free to live lives of integrity in front of the people around us.
But before we go any further we need to clarify something. The first verse of the psalm reads Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? This isn’t intended as some sort of test of membership. The Bible is very clear, in both the Old and New Testaments, that the only way we can approach God is humbly, asking his forgiveness for our sins. The goal of a passage like Psalm 15 is to remind us of the kind of behaviour that God expects of his children, not to set up some kind of checklist to keep people out of the church.
If you’re still wondering about that I recommend you read Luke 18:9-17. Jesus makes it very clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the publican. The Pharisee had a sense of entitlement about him. He had done all these good things and you almost get the sense that he felt God should be thankful for his company. That’s not how it works. Nothing we do can earn us the right to live in God’s presence. It’s only by his grace that that we can come before God.
Having said that, Psalm 15 does describe the kind of person that God wants us to become, because it is the kind of person he is already.
The Bible teaches that a person who is right with God will begin to develop a godly character and will behave in certain ways towards his or her neighbour. There are lots of examples of that. One in the New Testament is 1 John 4.20, If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And the Old Testament says the same thing here in Psalm 15.
Being right with God results in doing right
with others. What does it mean to be someone who walks with God? Ps 15 says it
means being someone …whose walk is blameless and who
does what is righteous,
“Blameless.” What does that mean? Who here would be willing to say that they’re “blameless.” Not me! However, I think that word is actually an unfortunate translation. The New American Standard Bible translates that phrase, “He who walks with integrity,” which is much more true to the root meaning of the Hebrew word, which means “whole, complete, healthy.” It’s the word that’s used to describe healthy animals that are suitable for the temple sacrifices.
Being a person of integrity means that your whole life is one complete unit. You can have healthy relationships because you’re not different people in different places or with different friends.
[A person with integrity is consistent in what he says and what he does. For example, a paper boy with integrity will deliver the paper before 6:00 a.m. every single day. A restaurant with integrity will deliver a good quality meal in a reasonable amount of time for a fair price—every time. A magazine with integrity will publish each issue on time. Having integrity means there is no gap in your life between the way things are and the way things ought to be.]
At the beginning of this series I said that one of our biggest problems is that we try to live from the outside-in instead of living from the inside-out. We allow the expectations of others to decide how we behave. We behave in a particular way in church, but then we go and behave totally differently at work or at home. It’s one of the reasons why some people don’t invite their friends to church, because they know their friends wouldn’t recognise the person they become when they’re around other Christians.
[If you’ve ever gone to a movie studio
you’ll know that they have a bunch of standard sets, like "
This is how some of us organize our lives. We manage to make everything look great on the surface, but the view from behind the scenes reveals a different story. Integrity means that our lives are the same behind the scenes as they are on camera.
The rest of this psalm is a series of examples, both positive and negative, of what it looks like to live a live of integrity. Let’s take some time to unpack with it looks like to be people of integrity, people who live well with our neighbours.
People of integrity do what is right. “…who walks with integrity and who does what is righteous.”
Sometimes I just get frustrated with
religious language. Take this word “righteous” for instance. It sounds big and
heavy and religious but its basic meaning is “what’s right.” To be a person of
integrity means “doing the right thing.” God is absolutely righteous because he
always does what’s right. The problem of course is that “what’s right”
can be a bit of a moving target. When the people of
Like I said “doing the right thing” can be a bit of a moving target. That means that knowing what is expected of us as people of integrity requires that we study God’s word and learn what he’s like. Out of that knowledge we can then make good decisions about what he would have us do in a particular situation.
A person of integrity is someone who speaks the truth from his heart.
Remember we talked about what the heart is two weeks ago. It’s who you are at your core. This is one of the reasons why we’re looking at things in the order we are in this series. In the same way, humility comes before integrity. It’s hard to be truthful with people around you when you’re busy lying to yourself.
And while we’re talking about talking, the
next phrase “and has no slander on his tongue,” sounded pretty straight forward, until I looked in the commentary
and discovered that literally it reads “who has not tripped over his tongue.”
Isn’t that a great picture? In my minds’ eye I can see a cartoon of a guy with
his tongue dropping all the way the ground and tripping him up. You know, like
Odie in the
In one sense it could just mean that you shouldn’t talk too much. But the person who “has not tripped over his tongue” is also someone who speaks the truth. They don’t have to think about what they’re going to say next, or spin it like politicians and others do. As a friend once said, “The great thing about telling the truth is that you never have to remember what it was you said.” On the other hand, when someone is lying they often stumble over what they’re saying. They’re making it up as they go along and they trip over their tongues in the process.
We talked about doing what’s right but in verse 3 we see that a person of integrity is also someone who does his neighbor no wrong. You know, doctors swear to “first do no harm,” and that’s a great rule to have in our relationships with others. Even if we can’t actively do them any good in a given situation, God calls us to do no harm.
And part of doing no harm is to casts no slur on [your] fellowman, or as one translation puts it, “not take up a reproach against a friend.” The idea is that you don’t pick up or pass along stories about other people.
Have you noticed how much of this passage
is about what we say? Religious people don’t usually indulge in obvious, public
wrong-doing. You’re unlikely to find church folk out at night stabbing people
in the parking lot. But we can be awfully good at verbally stabbing people in
the back. James says, “… the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes
great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.”
(James 3:3)
Wouldn’t you like your neighbour to be a person like this? Someone who is consistent, who does what’s
right and doesn’t pass along gossip? Jesus said to treat others as you would
like to be treated.
The psalmist even gives us some advice
about how to become this kind of person. He says that a person of integrity despises a vile man but honors those who fear the Lord.
At first sight this sounds harsh. Aren’t we
supposed to love everybody? How can God ask us to despise some people and
honour others? It gets clearer when we realise that “despise” doesn’t
necessarily mean that you hate someone or something. It basically means that
you don’t ascribe much worth to it. In Genesis 25:34 it says that Esau
despised his birthright. It doesn’t mean that he hated it, it means that he
didn’t value it.
Despite what some preachers say, God does not expect us to have nothing to do with people who have rejected God’s ways. Paul makes that clear in 1 Cor 5:10, where he says that to do that we would have to leave the world. What the psalm is saying is, if you want to be a person of integrity, don’t put a lot of value in the words or actions of people who don’t honour God. Don’t use them as role models. As a good friend of mine would say, “consider the source.”
If you want to be a great soccer player you might model yourself after David Beckham. If you want to be a great golfer you might use Tiger Woods as your model. Even if your wife, your husband, your brothers or sisters or certain co-workers may not be great role models of people who honour God, you can still surround yourself with people who do. I surround myself with people like John Stott, Chris Wright, Bill Hybels, A.W. Tozer, Brother Lawrence, the Apostle Paul and Jesus Christ. (By the way, some of these people are too dead or too busy to give me an appointment, but their writings, and sometimes audio and videotapes, allow me to associate with them.)
If your role models are Seinfeld, or Frazier, (who is described on a billboard as a “preening gas-bag”), or any one of hundreds of celebrities, you will find it difficult to move toward integrity. What you read and who you model yourself on will determine who you become. Find role models who will help you become a person of integrity.
A person of integrity is someone who keeps their oath even when it hurts,
This has been something of a life verse for
me. This is the kind of person I want to be known as, someone who keeps his
word, even when it turns out bad for me.
Finally, a person of integrity is someone
who is open-handed, who lends their money without
usury and does not accept a bribe against the innocent.
Jesus said that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. You see, it all comes back to the heart. If you’re open-handed with your money, then it’s less likely to have a hold on your heart, and you’re more likely to be able to help your neighbour when they need help.
This psalm belongs to what’s called the
“wisdom tradition” in the Old Testament. It has a lot in common with the books
of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes which are full of practical wisdom for living well.
And, as often happens in those books, when you get to end of a piece of
instruction there’s a promise. In this case that, He (or she) who does
these things will never be shaken.
This is so different from “The Secret,” and similar philosophies that are popular right now. They which tell you that to be successful in life you have to focus on what you want and believe that you’re going to get it, and “The Universe” will drop it in your lap. (There’s a guy teaching this “Law of Attraction” at the Convention Centre at the end of the month. And it’ll only cost you $89 for a couple of hours! It’s clear how he’s attracting good to himself.)
Scripture has a different point of view. If you want to be successful in life, if you want to be someone who “will never be shaken” then make it your aim to be a person of integrity. Ask God to help you speak and do what is right and true. Don’t badmouth others, don’t take offence. Pick your role models wisely, keep your word, be generous with your time and with your money.
Wouldn’t you love to have someone like that as your neighbour?
Wouldn’t you love to be that someone?
It’s possible, if you make Christ the centre of your life (that’s holiness) and begin to have a true opinion of yourself (that’s humility) you can be free to walk with integrity.
This is the way to live well with your neighbour.
This is the way to not be shaken.