Unlimited Grace

Bryan Chapell: We are bringing the reality of our Savior into our lives when we say, "I will live for him, even when it is tough." And the reason to do that is not just because we are adorning the name of our Savior with our integrity; at the very same moment, we begin to recognize that God is preserving our good by work done in integrity.

Chris Sobak: So glad you joined us for today's Unlimited Grace, the audio broadcast ministry of pastor and author Bryan Chapell. In today's episode, Pastor Bryan shares a lesson from Psalm 25 focused on integrity. Since we bear on us the name of Christ, the nature of our work and nature of our God should match. When we live and work with integrity, we are reflecting the character of our Savior.

You can find this lesson and many others when you visit unlimitedgrace.com. And while you're there, check out the new daily devotional podcast called Daily Grace. Pastor Bryan will guide you through a devotion each day to help focus your attention on God's grace as you study his word. Watch and listen to each episode when you visit unlimitedgrace.com today. Let's hear now from Dr. Bryan Chapell as he shares the lesson, "Integrity."

Bryan Chapell: "You call this clean? This is not quality work." That performance review was given by the guard over Kenneth Bae, my former student and the long-held prisoner in North Korea for whom this church has faithfully prayed. Kenneth Bae's crime was to go into North Korea, not with Bibles, not organizing evangelistic crusades, but simply to take believers with him to pray for the North Koreans around them. His mistake was to make note of that on his computer, so that when his hotel room was searched in his absence, his prayer designs were made known to the government. And for that reason, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for crimes against the state.

In his soon-to-be-released book, "Not Forgotten," he writes of that experience in a retraining camp of hard labor. Once the guard said, "This is not quality work. Do it again." Kenneth replied, "Okay." The guard spun around on his boots. "How are you to address me, Prisoner 103?" Bae said, "Yes, teacher sir," because in the retraining camp, guards were to be called teachers. "Did I give you permission to speak, 103?" "Excuse me, teacher. May I speak?" "Stand up when you speak to me, 103."

Struggling to his feet, because his task had been to scour a rain-muddied floor with a scrubbing brush on his knees despite his diabetes and circulation problem, he struggled to his feet. "Excuse me, teacher. May I speak?" "Yes, you may speak, 103." "Teacher, I will scrub the floor again." And after that experience and many similar, Kenneth Bae writes, "I never argued or tried to defend myself. I knew my words would never convince. Instead, I tried very hard to do my work well and with a right attitude. I believed that if I could show my guards a difference in the way that I worked, their hearts could soften to the gospel."

Almost 10 years before that moment, Kenneth Bae had entered into his journal this prayer: "Lord, if you want to use me as a bridge connecting North Korea to the outside world and to your word, use me." But he would never have thought, never even have desired, that such use would be to direct world attention upon him because of his unfair confinement in a hard labor camp for 15 years in North Korea. And yet, that was the Lord's place. And he says, "If this is where I am to work, then I will seek to work in a way that honors my Lord."

It was very simply the testimony of integrity. Of by work, actions, as well as words, demonstrating the nature of his Savior. And you have to ask why. What difference does it make to live with integrity before a watching world? Because we're not all in hard labor camps, though some of you think you are. But whether or not you are on the assembly line, in construction work, in an office, at school, on a farm, in a nursing home, or nursing a baby, God has called you to demonstrate who you are in him. To bear on yourself the name "Christ," Christian.

After all, what does it mean to live with integrity? Why would that make a difference? To consider that, we have to define what integrity is. If you just take it commonly in the words of the world, it means to speak and to act honestly. And that's getting at it. I mean, it somewhat reflects Psalm 15:4. A blameless person is one who swears to his own hurt and changes not. That he's true to his word, even if the circumstances change, even if there's an unexpected cost. That person is trustworthy under pressure. That his words and actions are true and are staying true despite the pressure.

All that is appropriate, but it doesn't quite go where the full Christian definition is. The Psalmist helps us with that in verse 8. We are simply told in again, Psalm 25 and verse 8, "Good and upright is the Lord." That's his nature. That's how he is identified. He is good and upright. And then the challenge that the Psalmist puts before us is in the prayer of verse 21: "May integrity and uprightness preserve me." Lord, is what you are? Will it be characteristic of me? You're upright. May I also be upright and trust that that's what's going to preserve me? Because ultimately, it's putting my well-being into your hands. I'm wanting to make sure that your nature and my work match.

Chris Sobak: You're listening to Unlimited Grace, the audio broadcast ministry of pastor and author Bryan Chapell. This is Chris Sobak, executive director of Unlimited Grace Media. I hope you have been enjoying this encouraging message from Pastor Bryan. If this program has been a blessing to you, I want to share with you a new way in which you can receive daily encouragement from Dr. Chapell.

We've recently launched a daily devotional podcast entitled Daily Grace. If you've already signed up to receive daily devotions by email, this podcast is a great companion piece. You can watch and listen to Pastor Bryan share these devotions daily when you visit unlimitedgrace.com. You can also find this podcast on all major podcast platforms or watch it on YouTube. This is just another way that we want to serve you with Christ-centered content and help focus your attention on the grace of God that pervades all of scripture. Let us know what you think of this new podcast. We're always encouraged to hear from you. And now, more from Bryan Chapell on today's Unlimited Grace.

Bryan Chapell: We live with integrity before the watching world because we want the watching world to know the name of our Savior by our own testimony. But of course, the watching world is not all who benefits by a testimony of integrity. Our own hearts know our God better by our integrity. Verse 4: "Make me know your paths, O Lord. Teach me your paths." Verse 5: "Lead me in your truth and teach me." Verse 20: "O guard my soul and deliver me." There is this profound understanding that when we are living in a consistent way before the Lord, he becomes real even to us.

This is not a mystery. To worship in the beauty of the worship service we've had already today, to feel close to God, to feel the reality in this place, to be a worshiper on Sunday, and then to be an atheist on Monday—even you feel the separation. Is he real? To have the schizophrenic faith? "I'm okay with God here, but over there it doesn't seem like he's real or alive." And I prove that because I don't live for him. That schizophrenia drives our own hearts away from God. And what God is doing by our testimony, by our integrity, is making himself real in our own hearts and lives.

When I was in college, I had the privilege of working every summer for the same road construction company. I was a dispatcher. And after I'd done that a few summers, I got to have a fairly good relationship with my boss. And one day he said, "Bryan, you're doing a great job. So listen, for the next couple of days, I have a cabin down in Mississippi. If you want to go, why don't you just go down to my cabin in Mississippi? You can fish at night, and in the daytime, why don't you paint the cabin for me? And I'll keep you on the payroll."

Let me think about this. I fish, you pay me. You bet. By that evening, I was at the cabin and got a call from my father. "Bryan, what are you doing?" "Well dad, I got this great opportunity. You know, if I paint this cabin in the daytime, I can fish at night and I'm not losing any money." And my dad said, "Well, that's what your mother told me you were doing. Bryan, what are you doing receiving company pay for private work?" Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. I didn't want to think of it that way.

And I said to my father, "Dad, I can't go back to my boss and tell him that he's asking me to do something unethical. I mean, you know I need this job so that I can pay for tuition and stay in college." My father said, "I know that you need a job to do what you think you should do in life. But I know what you need for life, and this is not it." So I left that night and I went into my boss the next day and told him that I could not do what he had asked of me.

It was tense. But he did not fire me. And I recognize that perhaps the reason I am standing before you now is because I did not lose that job and was able to continue in college and studies further beyond that. And maybe it's because of that preservation. But even more than that, I recognized in that moment I could trust my God. That when he called me to hard things, even if I did not want to face them, my God was calling me to an ethical standard beyond which I even wanted to live for the sake of him. I praise my God for the father who made me stick to my faith. But I would confess to you, it was hard. It was really hard.

For that reason, I want to say to you, listen, our testimony is not just to the watching world; it's to our own hearts. That we are bringing the reality of our Savior into our lives when we say, "I will live for him, even when it is tough." And the reason to do that is not just because we are adorning the name of our Savior with our integrity; at the very same moment, we begin to recognize that God is preserving our good by work done in integrity.

Verse 21 is pretty clear. "Guard my soul and deliver me." Why? "May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you." If you tell the average person in business or industry that integrity is good, there's a ready agreement. Well sure it is. Honesty is good for business. And we recognize that. It preserves a reputation. People are willing to do business with you when they think they can trust you. Makes perfect sense. I teased in the first service that Kathy and I are considering buying an appliance from a particular company here in town, and the reason is because we like the commercial of the guy who talks about stuff. He just seems honest. And he probably will at least get us to look at his business because he seems honest.

We recognize integrity can be good for business. But if that pragmatic is what is driving us, it is insufficient for biblical integrity. Because the reality is, when the Psalmist is saying, "My integrity preserves me, I have to wait for you," it's this notion of it may not just be in the immediate that I'm going to see the result. That there's going to be some obvious consequence of my acting with integrity. I have to wait for the Lord. If he's going to have to unfold this in the midst of troubles, enemies, and affliction, which are also in the Psalm, then this can be really tough to live with integrity.

And we may actually determine that if it's a question of what's good for business, then integrity may not always be best for business. Between 2009 and 2016, Volkswagen, the largest car dealer in the world by sales, produced 11 million cars with software designed to deceive the pollution test equipment. The environmental controls were so much avoided that the pollutants provided by Volkswagen cars were 40 times the allowable for the regulations. And all the time that Volkswagen was producing these cars with 40 times the pollutants that were allowed, they were advertising themselves as the most green and environmentally conscious of the major car dealers.

Why? There've been two major explanations offered in the business literature. One is that executives at the very top of the company, with the complicity by the way of hundreds if not thousands of workers, simply did the math. The German economy required that Volkswagen do well. If Volkswagen did not do well, the impact upon the German economy would have been worse than the default of the Greek loans, which put the German economy in danger. And if the German economy were somehow to stumble, then perhaps the entire world economy would stumble as a consequence. Your life and my life be affected. And somebody at some point at a high level may have made a decision: "Good business says we better cheat for a while."

There's been another explanation offered. The explanation that a few engineers within the company determined that it was impossible to meet the anti-pollution standards with acceptable margins of profit. And therefore, because the technology was not currently present to do so, the goal for the moment was to fake it until you could make it. Because if you did not, your own job was in jeopardy.

Now, either explanation, and I'm not saying which is true, says that whether you are upstream in the process at the highest levels of decision-making or if you're down somewhere just carrying out what's required to keep your job, that both levels have extreme pressure put upon them to do what is unacceptable in scripture, which is to deceive people in order to make a profit. But if your goal is to just do what's best for business, that pragmatic can drive you.

And I recognize for most people in the room, what we're not thinking about is the people at the highest levels. I mean, I have trouble even telling you the number of people who came to me after the first service saying, "I know the pressure you're talking about. I know what it means to feel pushed and pushed and pushed beyond what I feel comfortable about." And that's not news. I've mentioned to you in previous weeks the Pitney Bowes and Univet Royal surveys, where managers of these major companies were surveyed and depending on which segment, between 60 and 70 percent of the managers said that they were regularly pushed against their integrity in order to perform at work.

And of course, that's just reflecting what they were doing earlier on so many of them, because the Stanford and Rutgers studies, these high-powered educational institutions, would also say in their own surveys between 60 and 70 percent of their students regularly cheat in order to get the grades to work in the industry where they will have to cheat again. It can be really tough.

And so we have to make some decision that integrity is being called for in our lives and our work beyond "It's good for my business." Ultimately as believers, we have to say the reason for integrity is "It's good for God's business." And at times that may not seem to match our earthly gains. Friend, will you allow me to pray with you that the work God is doing in your life through the teaching of his word would take hold and help you?

Heavenly Father, thank you for the fact that you pardon and give purpose to messed-up people like me, like us. Today help us so to believe in your grace that we rejoice to receive it and live to reflect it. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Chris Sobak: That's Pastor Bryan Chapell, and you've been listening to Unlimited Grace. If you've been blessed by this message and would like to hear more from Dr. Chapell, I would encourage you to visit unlimitedgrace.com. In addition to messages from Pastor Bryan, you can explore the video series Walking in Grace. Join Dr. Chapell for a walk as he shares real-world examples of God's grace in our lives. You can find that when you visit unlimitedgrace.com. Please be sure to join us next time as once again we endeavor to put Christ at the center of our efforts so that lives might be transformed by his unlimited grace. This ministry is brought to you by Unlimited Grace Media and continues to be made possible with your generous financial support.