What Is Your Integrity Quotient? - Genesis 20 Series

Did you know (I didn’t know this before this week) that there are only three people in the Bible that are said to have integrity. Now there are lots of people who had integrity in the Bible, don’t get me wrong. But only three people the word ‘integrity’ is used to describe them. One of them is Job. Remember the dialogue between the three friends in Job about whether his suffering was because of his sin. But no, he was a man of integrity and he was suffering. That was one example.

A second example is David, the man King David in the Old Testament. I love those stories of David. He was a man of integrity, often challenged. Even when he sinned he responded with integrity to that sin and to the repentance involved in that process. David was a great guy to do that. In fact I want to share with you as we’re going forward the integrity psalm that he wrote. This is a psalm, Psalm 15. If we’re going to define integrity we could go to Webster and we could find the definition there. We could go to Google and they have good ideas about what integrity is. But this is the Bible. Let’s see what the Bible has to say about integrity. It says in Psalm 15 – Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy mountain? The one whose walk is blameless, who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from their heart; whose tongue utters no slander, who does no wrong to a neighbor, and casts no slur on others; who despises a vile person but honors those who fear the Lord; who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind; who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken. So there’s David speaking about integrity. I love what he says there. It's just a reminder of the practical things we can do and say as we are practicing integrity in our lives.

But today we’re going to focus on the third guy. The interesting thing about this third guy is he’s not a believer. He’s a pagan king with integrity. And that’s the story in Genesis 20. What makes the story even more interesting is here we have a pagan king with integrity (it says right in the passage he has integrity) and he’s facing off with a guy who believes in God who doesn’t have integrity. Isn’t that interesting? A guy who believes in God (Abraham) who doesn’t have integrity facing off with a king who does have integrity. It’s just a really interesting story. Let’s go into the story in Genesis 20 and see what God has to say in this passage for us.

It says – From there Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar. Now he’s down in southern Israel or below, right on the edge of Israel in the south and he is down there with all of his flocks. Remember he’s got a lot of animals. We’ve already read that he has 318 fighting men that have been born into his household. So this guy’s got a lot of animals, a lot of people that are part of his entourage. So he’s nomadic; he goes down in this southern area and now he decides to go over to Gerar.

Now why is he going over to that area? Well likely because he needs more feed for his animals and so on. So he’s going over there to Rome for a little bit. He’s going over into this pagan place. This is Philistine territory he’s going to work. He’s going into this place where he’s going to be faced with this pagan area and he’s going to be doing that because work is driving him there. So we’re going to talk today about going to work in a pagan place. Practical for many of you as you go to work each week.

He says – Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” You’ve got to be saying to yourself, “Didn’t we already do this story?” No. This is a second story. He already did this previously when he was in Egypt. He said to the king, “Oh she is my sister.” Now we’re going to see here that Abraham has a problem. A problem with his own integrity. He’s lying at this point and he has this problem with integrity at work. It seems when he finds himself in these other places where he’s got to face off at work he doesn’t have the integrity he needs to face those things, so he lies and he says she’s my sister. Why does he do that? Because he’s thinking if they know she’s my wife and she’s so beautiful, they’re going to take her and kill me. So we’re going to protect me here and we’re going to have her be my sister. So what happens here is the same thing that happened down in Egypt.