It’s Complicated

The other day, while on my daily visit with God, I came across David’s use of the word, integrity. He said Psalm 26, that he had walked and would walk in his integrity.

Interestingly, one of the Hebrew definitions of the word translated integrity there is “simplicity.” Integrity is, in other words, keeping things simple.

Every once in awhile I will receive a survey. It will be something like “why do I prefer this particular deodorant, or some silly thing like that. The first part of the survey is always a series of questions meant to establish a baseline and determine the demographics of their survey audience. They ask questions like general age, educational background, ethnic background, annual income and etc. one of those questions regards marital status and it is not uncommon for that question to be multiple choice:

• Single
• Married
• It’s complicated

No it’s not. It is not complicated. A person is either married or single. The only thing that complicates the point is that some people don’t wish to be identified according to the obvious. 

This demonstrates a key issue in our world today. Walking in integrity, doing the right thing, is not complicated at all. It is as simple as accepting the authorities that determine right and wrong, and choosing right over wrong. What complicates the situation is that we want to reconcile what is right with what we want.

We do this with the Word of God all of the time. We know what the Bible says, we might even claim we believe what the Bible sys, but when what the Bible says doesn’t fit what we want, we call it complicated. “It’s not that simple.” will be our response to challenges about our behavior, beliefs or circumstances. Truth is, it is simple. The Bible is right. If we simply do what we understand the Bible to teach it is simple. The only complication is when we decide we think differently, we want something else or we can’t bring ourselves to comply to the Word of God.

It’s that simple. Do as God teaches regardless the consequences. That’s integrity