Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Hello and welcome to Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope with Rick Warren. We are so glad you’re here with us today. We’re going to continue our series called The Keys to a Blessed Life. In these messages, Rick walks through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and shows us how to live a truly hopeful and purpose-filled life. Today, we begin part one of God Blesses a Heart of Integrity.

Rick Warren: Our culture is absolutely obsessed with appearance—how you look. We're all about image. If you’re beautiful, then you’re considered bright and you’re considered the best, which leaves most of us not in the brightest and best. Now, you could be sexy like me, but the Bible says God couldn’t care less how you look. God is not into appearance. God couldn’t care less about your achievements, your accomplishments, or your acquisitions.

God isn’t interested in how educated you are or how wealthy you are. God doesn’t care about how popular or how famous you are. What God cares about is not your image, but he cares about your health, your heart, and what's inside you—the real you. The Bible says in the book of 1 Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."

So today, we come to the sixth of Jesus’ eight beatitudes of ways to be blessed. In Matthew chapter 5, verse 8, talking about heart, it says this: "God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God." Now, what in the world does that mean? God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God. First, what does it mean they will see God?

This verse says the people whose hearts are pure, they're the ones who get up close to God. They get to experience the presence of God. They get to feel the power of God. They get to know the purpose of God for their life. They get to live in the peace of God. They experience the pardon of God. These are the people who really have it. He says, "God blesses those who are pure in heart." They're the ones that God says, "This guy, he’s my friend. This woman, she’s my friend."

So what does it mean to be pure in heart? That's not a term we use in today’s language. We don’t talk about saying, "Oh, she’s got a pure heart." The word for pure in heart today is the word integrity. Integrity. The Bible uses the word integrity a lot, but it actually even uses the word blameless more. Now, what does it mean to have integrity? Because if God says, "I bless those who have integrity," what does it mean to have integrity?

Well, it doesn't mean sinless, and it doesn't mean perfect, and it doesn't mean you don’t make any mistakes. If you have to be sinless to have integrity, nobody’s got integrity because we all blow it. It doesn't mean perfect because if you have to be perfect and never do anything wrong to have integrity, then none of us will ever have integrity. It doesn't mean you never make any mistakes. If that were true, none of us would ever have integrity.

So it's not talking about being perfect or sinless. What does it mean to be pure in heart? Let me explain something to you. God is more interested in the direction of your heart than he is in the sins you commit. He’s more interested in your attitude even than your actions. He’s more interested in why you do what you do than what you do.

In the Bible, there are many examples of people who did the right thing for the wrong motivation, and God says it doesn't count. It doesn't count at all. On the other hand, the Bible tells us about a number of leaders, different kings of Israel, who actually didn’t always do the right thing and actually did some sin, and yet God said they were okay. They were okay. They didn’t remove all of the idols that were in the thing, but they were good kings.

So God is actually more interested in your heart, the direction of your heart, than he is in your actual sins and what you do and don’t do. So what is integrity? The Bible says that Noah had integrity. The Bible says that Abraham had integrity, that David had integrity, that Moses had integrity, that Paul had integrity. Yet none of these guys were perfect.

Let's just take David as an example. God says about King David, "There is a man who has a heart like mine. He’s a man after my own heart." You read that and you go, "What? This is the guy who committed adultery and murdered the girl’s husband." One time he pretended he was mentally insane to get out of a thing. He did all kinds of weird things. He was not perfect in any sense, and yet God says, "That guy over there, yeah, he’s really messed up, but he’s got a heart like mine."

I want you to have a heart like God’s. I want to have a heart like God’s. I want us to be people of integrity. Three words that define what it means to be a man of integrity, what it means to be a woman of integrity. The first meaning of integrity is wholeness—wholeness. It means your life isn’t divided up into compartments. It’s not divided into segments. You don’t have your life all divided up in little categories. Your life is one large whole.

We get the word integrity from the word integer. You remember in math, an integer is a whole number. It’s not a fraction. It’s not a part of a number. It’s not a decimal. It’s a whole number. Integer means whole, and integrity means your life is a whole. We get the word integration from the word integer or integrity. Integration is the opposite of segregation.

Segregation means you divide things up or divide people up into different categories. Integration means no, we’re all part of the same family. We don’t think the same, look the same, smell the same, act the same, don’t have the same background, don’t have the same skin color, but we are all in the same family. We are integrated. That's part of integrity. When you segregate your life, you don’t have integrity.

It’s like this: a lot of people think of their life like a pie, and the different things in their life are the different parts of the pie. They say, "This slice of the pie is my career, that's my work life. And then this slice of the pie, this is church, this is my spiritual life. And then this is my family life, that's a slice. And then over here, this is my social life, my sports life. And then here is my sex life, that's a part of my pie. And then over here is my secret life, my compulsions, my addictions, the things that nobody else knows about, my secret life. And then over here, this is like my friendship life."

If you segment your life like that, you lack integrity because it’s the exact opposite of your life being a whole. Integrity is not the parts of the pie; it’s the filling in the whole pie. It means you’re exactly the same with everybody you talk to, no matter which part of your life you’re dealing with. You don’t change. You don’t wear a mask. You don’t pretend.

And that's the second word I want you to write down. Integrity means authenticity. Authenticity. It means you keep it real. It means you’re the real deal. You’re not a fake. You’re not a phony. You’re not blowing people off with some scam. You’re not faking it till you make it. You’re not pretending. You’re not copying anybody else. You’re not trying to be somebody you’re not. You are exactly who you appear to be.

And if you have integrity, you act the same no matter where you are. That is, I act the same way with my grandkids as I do with you as I would with the Prime Minister of England. What you see is what you get, warts and all. It’s not like I’m trying to be one way here and one way there and one way here. No, you’re just who you are, for good or for bad.

Thousands of years ago, during the great Greek culture when Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and Euripides and Aristophanes and all these guys were writing these plays, these classic plays like Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey, they used to have in Greek plays multiple roles by one actor. A guy would come from backstage out into the forum to play a part, and he would hold up a mask and he’d wear a mask and he would say certain things and play that role.

Then he’d walk backstage, get another mask, come back out, and he’d play another role wearing another mask. Then he’d walk backstage, change it, get another mask, and come back out. In Greek plays, one guy could have multiple roles and many masks. He was called in Greek the hupokritos. We get the word hypocrite from it.

What does it mean to be a hypocrite? It means you’re not the same with everybody. It means you talk one way with this group and you talk another way with this group. You use this kind of language over there, that kind of language over there, and you’re actually wearing masks. That is the exact opposite of integrity. You lack authenticity. You’re not the same with everybody. Integrity means you don’t pretend to be something you’re not.

So it's wholeness, it’s authenticity. The third thing that integrity is, write this down, is it means unmixed motivation. It means you do the right thing, but you do it for the right reason. Unmixed motivation. It means you’re sincere. It means you’re straightforward. It means you are pure in heart. Pure in heart means you don’t have a mixed motive.

In other words, you’re doing it for the right reason. You can pray to talk to God, or you can pray to impress other people. One has integrity and one doesn't. Integrity is what you are when nobody else is looking. Integrity is what you are in the dark. Integrity is what you really think, act, and do when nobody else will ever find out. That's the real you. Integrity.

You see, we’re more interested in image, but God’s interested in integrity. We’re interested in reputation. God is interested in character. Reputation is what everybody thinks you are. Integrity is what you really are. Reputation is what you are in public. Integrity is what you are when you’re all alone with God and it’s just you and God. And God says, "God blesses those who have integrity, they get to be the friends of God."

Now, what does God say about this? Look at this verse up here on the screen. Proverbs chapter 3: "The Lord hates people with twisted hearts." What's a twisted heart? A perverse heart, a perverted heart, a deceitful heart, a demeaning heart, a fake, a phony heart. It’s not the real you. "The Lord hates people with twisted hearts, but he delights in those who have integrity." I want God to delight in you.

So what we’re going to do this weekend is two things. First, I want us to look at some of the benefits of being a man of integrity or a woman of integrity. Tom is going to come and share in just a minute two or three benefits. There are many, many benefits in scripture. We just don’t have time to cover them all, so we’ll only look at three of the promises that God says, "If you live with integrity, then this is what's going to happen in your life." And then I’m going to come back and we’re going to look at a little checklist on how to get started and how even this week you could start working on becoming a woman of integrity or a man of integrity. So let’s have Tom come and talk about some of the blessings that happen when I get this quality in my life.

Tom Holladay: One of the great blessings that comes when we have integrity is the blessing of personal confidence. You just live with a different kind of confidence because you’re not trying to be a phony all the time. You’re not trying to make sure that you’re putting the right front with the right person all the time. So you’re able to have a different kind of confidence. When you have integrity, you become the kind of person that other people like to be around because you know who you are, you know where you’re going, you’re even able to be upfront about your faults. You don’t have to be a phony.

There’s just something about that kind of confidence that not only is it attractive in others, it’s relaxing and strengthening in our own lives. I’ve always loved this picture Proverbs 10:9 of the kind of confidence that integrity brings. It says here, "People with integrity have a firm footing, but those who follow crooked paths will slip and fall." So when I have integrity, I’m standing on solid ground.

But when I don’t have integrity, it’s like back east in a snowstorm, the path is all icy and you’re trying with all your might not to fall, and every bit of energy is making sure you don’t slip and fall. That's what it feels like not to have integrity. You’re putting too much energy into making sure that you put the right false front, when you could just be honest, just be yourself.

I’ll never forget talking to a business guy years ago and I asked him, "What's the number one thing that changed in your life now that you’ve become a follower of Jesus?" He’d just started following Jesus a few months before. And he said, "The number one thing that's changed," he said it right away, "is the way I answer the phone. I used to answer the phone and I would tell a different lie to everybody in my business, and I’d have to look at their name and realize, what lie did I tell this guy? And before I answered the phone, know what lie was in my mind. But now I can just answer because I tell them the truth. I can just answer and not even have to look at the name." That's what integrity does for you. It gives you this different kind of confidence.

The Bible says in Proverbs 11:3, let’s read this one together: "The integrity of the honest keeps them on track." So integrity shows you the right way to go; it also shows you what to do next. Sometimes you start to wander through life, you’re not sure what to do next. Maybe in a transition, maybe one of your kids is going off to college, maybe you just changed jobs. What do you do next? Well, the Bible says that when you have purity of heart, when you have integrity, you see God better.

When you see God, you know what to do next because God has a purpose, God has a plan for your life. Integrity helps you to see God’s plan and purpose for your life better. That's one of the things that gives you a greater confidence to live with. One of the great blessings of integrity.

A second blessing of integrity is a lasting legacy. You get this lasting legacy. In fact, if you think about your life, your greatest legacy is in your integrity because it’s a legacy that will last from generation to generation to generation. Everything else that we do, it gets lost. The money that you earn in the end, it’s going to get divided amongst your kids if you have any money left, and it’s going to get spent.

The work that you do, it’s going to be given to somebody else and then you’re going to be forgotten. All the trophies that you’ve earned, it’s going to be thrown in the trash someday and taken to the dump. Isn’t this encouraging about our lives? But the integrity that you have, the character that you have, it’s going to be translated into the lives of the people that are around you and then into the lives of the next generation and the next generation. It is a lasting legacy.

Next verse in your outline, Proverbs 20:7, is especially encouraging for parents. It says, "A righteous person lives on the basis of his integrity. Blessed are his children after he is gone." It’s the blessing, moms and dads, of the character that you’ve given. I know there’s no such thing as a perfect parent here, but you’ve made some good choices, and in those good choices, you’re passing them on.

And you might think, "Not me. I haven't made any good choices. I messed up on this one. I did not show integrity in my relationships and because of that, I guess I don’t get this blessing." Well, I just want to say to you, the story’s not over. You can still have integrity in your life. And sometimes the greatest integrity you show is in a time when it seems like there’s no blessings.

A lot of us know the story of Job. If you’re brand new in church, you might even know that story. The guy who lost it all. And he decided to have integrity even though he lost it all. He didn't know why he lost it, but he decided, "I’m going to have integrity through this." In the next verse in your outline, Job 8:5-7, one of his friends gives him this advice: "If you pray to God and seek the favor of the Almighty, if you’re pure and you live with complete integrity, God will rise up and restore your happy home. And though you started with little, you will end with much."

And that is exactly what happened. Job decided to have integrity even through a difficult time, and because of that, in the end, he was doubly blessed. He was blessed even more in the end. Some of you, you’ve gone through a tough time, there may be even a loss of integrity, and because of a loss, you start to think, "What does it matter? I already messed up, so I might as well just keep messing up, because what does it matter now?"

But I just want to say to you, the story’s not over. And the truth of the matter is, your greatest integrity might be what you do after a loss of integrity. You can still respond with integrity then. And somebody’s watching. And you know what? They’re going to have a loss of integrity someday in their life, and you can show them even now what to do. You can still leave a lasting legacy. It’s never too late. The story’s not over. It's one of the blessings of integrity—a lasting legacy, a personal confidence.

And then there’s this third blessing amidst all the others that we’re looking at today, and that is the blessing of rewards in eternity. Now, this in one sense is the greatest blessing because it’s the one that lasts forever—the rewards that we get in eternity. Look what the Bible says about this in Matthew 25:21. God will say someday, "Well done. You are a good and trusted servant. Because you were faithful with small things, I will now put you in charge of much greater things. So come and share your master’s happiness."

Now, would you circle for me two words in that verse? Would you circle the words "small things"? That's where the rewards are. We think that the rewards, the real integrity, is in the big moments of life. It’s easy to have integrity—easier—because you know everybody’s watching. You can build yourself up for it. But it’s in the small moments that you show real integrity.

As Rick said earlier, integrity is who you are when no one’s watching, no one’s noticing. So what kind of integrity do I have in the small things of life? Now, when it comes to integrity in the small things, when no one else was watching, we can all list areas we’ve failed there. No one would want all of the small choices we made in our lives this last week even put up on the screen, because there’d be some things we did not want people to see. It’s easy to make a list of your sins and failures in the small things.

But let’s put those, let’s take those and put them on the forgiven in Christ side of the ledger, because he forgives those things. But I want to remind you—and this verse reminds us—there is another side of the ledger, and that is when you choose to have faith, when you choose to have integrity in the small things. That is on the rewarded side of the ledger.

Every small word of encouragement you give this next week, it is rewarded eternally. Every small act of kindness that you give toward someone else, rewarded in eternity. Every time you reject a temptation, rewarded in eternity. Every time you pray a small prayer of faith, just a quick prayer of faith in a moment, that is rewarded in eternity. That's the power of integrity. That's the difference that integrity makes, not just here, but forever. That's the blessing of integrity.

Now, it’s tough in the small things because in the small things, it’s just easy to get our perspective off, to get our perspective on the wrong thing. I told some of you this story a while back, but it’s worth saying again because it just fits so well here. A while back, I was at Home Depot getting some sod for my backyard. I had a dead area and I counted it out and I thought I needed about 22 pieces of sod. So I went down and I bought it and I said, "Where do I get it?" And they said, "Oh, it’s out in front. You just load it yourself."

So I backed my car up and I start loading this sod in, counting one, two, three, four, five. About halfway through, I think, "I might need 24 pieces. I don’t know if I’m getting enough." But I didn’t want to go back in and pay them again and have to come back out, so I start looking around thinking, "Who’s going to notice if I take two extra pieces while I’m doing this?" I mean, no one’s going to notice.

And then I looked down and thought, "There’s just going to be a few pieces left. They’re going to die out here in the sun anyway. I mean, it’s not going to hurt anybody if I take a couple of extra pieces." Counting them in, and then all of a sudden the perspective hit me and I just started laughing out loud in the parking lot. I thought, the integrity issue I’m facing here is God or sod. Which one of those am I going to choose in this moment? Am I going to give up my integrity for a square of dirt? Is that what I’m going to do?

And really, in one way, it’s all dirt. It’s all dirt in this world compared to the integrity of the choice that you make for eternity. And when you make these small choices for eternity, it changes not only your life now, but also your life forever.

Rick Warren: Now, if you’re talking about what Tom just talked about, I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in these benefits. I’m interested in personal stability. I’m interested in leaving a legacy, and I’m interested in rewards for eternity. God says all three of these are wrapped up in having integrity.

Guest (Male): What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There’s something I always take away from his message. Here’s Rick to tell you how you can help support this ministry.

Rick Warren: Jesus told his disciples that they should live their lives according to five specific purposes. He said you've got to love God with all your heart—that's worship—and love your neighbor as yourself—that's ministry. That's called the Great Commandment. And then Jesus said go make disciples—that's evangelism—baptize them into the family of God—that's fellowship, a sign of fellowship—and then he said teach them to obey everything I've taught you—that's discipleship. And we call that the Great Commission.

We believe at Daily Hope that a great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will produce a great Christian, a great church, a great company, a great community. You know, I started Daily Hope so I could spread the good news about Jesus, not just across America but all around the world. And we want people to know that God's word is filled with hope and truth.

The power that we need to follow him every day is available to every single one of us. You know as well as I do that the word of God changes lives. It's alive, it's active, and it breathes new life and new love into all of our lives. So wherever you listen to this, whether you listen on the website, whether you listen on a radio station, or whether you listen through a podcast, you're a part of the Daily Hope family. And I need your help. We could not do this without your support. We are 100% listener-funded.

Would you continue to pray for this broadcast and would you continue to support us? And write to me. Let me hear from you. I absolutely love reading the stories that are sent to me. So write me, pray for me, and support this ministry. And God will bless it, and God will bless you. And we'll get to heaven and we'll thank God for all the people going to be in heaven because you cared.

Guest (Male): You know, when you give a gift to Daily Hope, you're helping share the hope of Jesus with people everywhere. And during the month of June, your gift will be doubled by the $50,000 matching grant. Go to PastorRick.com or text the word HOPE to 70309. Again, that’s PastorRick.com or just text the word HOPE to 70309. We hope you'll join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope and your generous financial support.