Description
Integrity Over Wealth
A reflection on Proverbs 19:1, highlighting integrity as an essential mark of Christian character… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
If there were two characteristics I could ask for in any Christian, but especially any Christian leader, it would be humility and integrity. And today’s verse meditates on the latter. Proverbs chapter 19 verse one. Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.
This speaks somewhat to me about the motivation that people have for spinning things, for being crooked in speech, for saying what they want people to believe is true, but which isn’t. A fool here in the Proverbs means one that is morally bankrupt. It’s better not to be that.
The motivation of those who are crooked in speech is often what they can achieve, what they can acquire, whether that be power or status or material things. And the writer of the Proverbs here says it’s better actually to be poor. It’s better to have none of those things, not to have power, not to have status, not to have lots of stuff, and to be walking in integrity.
And if we feel like we are short on those things, that we don’t have the power that we would like, that we are going short in our lives materially, we don’t have enough food, then it’s easy to say, yeah, I would rather not be poor. That’s not what the proverb is talking about here. It’s just making this contrast.
You can acquire a lot of things through a crooked life, through saying crooked things through being a crook. It’s not good. It’s especially not good when that happens within the body of Christ or those who certainly claim to be part of that body.
Well, the proverb says, reminds us, walk in integrity my friends. It is more important to our Father that we are obedient children than that we are wealthy children in the here and now.
When this life is all done, we will be rewarded for how we’ve lived. In the next life we will experience the bounty of God. Right now, right here in this life we are learning to love him. We are learning to walk with him. That should be our first priority and that, the writer of Proverbs says is better by far.
