Hello, and welcome to Keeping It Young podcast, conversations about marriage, family, and ministry life. I'm Dave. And I'm Bethlehem. And we are the Youngs. We're so glad you've joined us today as we continue in the book of Proverbs. Hope you're enjoying our study. Thank you for joining us again today, and I hope you're having a wonderful summer. We are right in the middle of our summer.
The summers are always so full for us, and just on the road, going and going and going and covering so many miles and meeting so many people. Just appreciate your prayers. Even for our summer of ministry, things are just super busy. And hope in the midst of this summer that you are learning a lot from God's word, that you're doing well, that you're growing in the Lord and maturing as well. You know, you can always reach out to Bethlehem and me.
We're always available to serve you, to answer your questions, and we're always honored when we hear from people. And so if we can do something for you or help you in some way. If you're enjoying our series, I hope you'll recommend it maybe to a connection class or a Sunday school class, or maybe to someone you know that is having difficulties or needing some wisdom or some directions or instruction. So like and share and subscribe. Maybe leave us a rating.
We would certainly be thankful for all of that. God's been good to us, hasn't he? Absolutely. And we have enjoyed our podcasting and are so thankful for how God has blessed us here on the podcast. And we are enjoying Proverbs. We are. And learning so much from it. I had no idea how many things we could find in Proverbs.
Well, it does go to show that the old practice of reading through the Proverbs with your family over and over and over again, there was wisdom in that because there is so much to be learned from the book of Proverbs. And I feel like we're just scratching the surface here with these highlights from these different chapters, but such good truth available even in those highlights. Yes, and I know several people have reached out to me and said, Hey, what commentaries are you using? And so forth.
And my first go-to in the book of Proverbs is the old writer, Matthew Henry. And I just really love his practical simplicity and straightforwardness about how he looks at them. Then I go to a Bible app that has the definition of words, and I look up Hebrew words and examine those and just see the different, the shades of meaning, the nuances of meaning that you find in the Hebrew dictionary is just amazing. And having Bible apps today really help us to do that. So it's just a real blessing.
So I don't know if there's a right or wrong out there. There's a ton of commentaries. We just have really enjoyed Matthew Henry's and use our Bible dictionary and things of that sort. So hope you're looking up some of these yourself and studying them. And I told you last week, if you were listening last week, that we were ready to jump into, we've got to emphasize our words, but I was wrong. That's actually next week.
He skipped over chapter 11, and we are going to be emphasizing this week from Proverbs 11, teaching our children integrity. We have to emphasize integrity if we're going to have a happy family and a happy life. So righteousness so far, diligence so far, and now we're here. God's blessings. God's blessings. And now here we are at integrity. Integrity is so important. Oh my goodness, it is. You want to be able to take someone at their word.
You want to know that someone's going to be honest with you. You want to know someone's going to get the job done if you ask them to do it, if you're paying them to do it. Isn't it frustrating that there is a lack of integrity in our world today, in our culture? And you can't always just count on it. You can't just say, oh yeah, this will get done because sometimes it doesn't. And what a blessing it is to deal with people who have integrity. And you will know it. Oh yes. Absolutely.
And it's so important in so many aspects of our life. Integrity is essential in your marriage. Integrity is essential in your children. It's essential for your future and work relationships. Integrity is just an essential element. So here's what Proverbs 11 says, A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. When pride cometh, then cometh shame, but with the lowly is wisdom.
The integrity of the upright shall guide them, but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them. Riches profit not in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivereth from death. The righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way, but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. Now he's talking here about integrity, dependability, trustworthiness, honesty, and all of those factors that come together.
And the Cambridge Online Dictionary, when you talk about integrity, one of the things they say is it's the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles that one refuses to change. I liked that definition best of all the ones I found. And so I want to read that again. It's the quality of being honest. It's the quality of having strong moral principles that one refuses to change. And I sat and I thought, okay, who in the Bible best illustrates that? I came up with two right away.
Joseph illustrates that because he was a slave in Potiphar's house in Egypt. His brothers had sold him into slavery. And yet, even though he had been done wrong, even though he didn't like where he was, even though this is not how he expected things to turn out, he could have absolutely thrown everything he believed away, all righteousness, all integrity, and just lived it up as a slave boy in that land with Potiphar's wife.
He was favored already, and yet he refused to back down on his moral principles. That young man had phenomenal integrity. And as far as we can tell, it was late teens, early 20s. Daniel was the same way. Daniel's entire life lays out for us a picture of integrity. And he refused, absolutely, absolutely refused to do wrong. And then he got his three friends to join him. We know him as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
And then it shows up again in chapter three, because his three friends would not bow to the pagan idol that Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself and demanded they bow down to. And again in Daniel six, when Daniel, as an older man now, prayed, even though praying likely meant he would be thrown in the lion's den and die. That is all a picture of integrity. What is integrity? It is an absolute honesty and a moral uprightness that we refuse to change.
And in Joseph and Daniel's examples, it's almost this fortitude to do right, no matter how small the issue seems to be. Especially we can see in Daniel's life, the first thing, the first matter of integrity that we come up against his character to say, you know what, our law has said we should not eat that food. And so would it be okay if we just eat this food over here, this produce, these fruits and vegetables and all of the things that mean pulse in the King James version of the Bible.
What an amazing example of character and integrity there, because that seems like something that would not even matter. Here they are captives and they're being commanded to eat this food. You would think, well, probably most of those Hebrew captives said, well, I mean, what am I supposed to do? I am a prisoner. I have to eat whatever they give me and okay, it's just food. But Daniel and his friends said, no, we absolutely cannot.
And don't you know that that just built more character and integrity into their being. So their foundation was just, okay, I'm going to do right no matter how small the issue may be. Integrity is taught. They obviously learned that somewhere and it is also caught. We see it when we observe and then integrity gets bigger. The more we live it, the stronger it gets. And so it becomes stronger.
Proverbs begins here, this idea of a false balance being an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight being his delight. And now what we find out as we studied that is this is an old command. And it was an old command that actually was written by Moses, but reiterated in the book of Proverbs by Solomon. And you find it in Deuteronomy 25 and verses 13, 14 and 15. So listen to these verses. The Bible says, thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small.
Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small, but thou shalt have a perfect and just weight. A perfect and just measure shalt thou have, that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. There's so much to be said about that. Yes. First of all, he draws the point there that we should be the same in private that we are in public and the same public that we are in private.
So if I am one way at home, but I go out into the world and I'm a dishonest businessman and yet I come home and I want things to be well, it's not going to work that way. And the other side of that is true. You know, if you've got to be right at home and right in public, you've got to be right in public and right at home. And that's God's idea of integrity.
Integrity is when I'm the same in public and in private, I'm the same righteous person in public and in private, and I'm dependable and I'm honest and you can trust me. Proverbs 16, 11. Let me look that one up here. Proverbs 16, 11 has the same idea. And Solomon said it like this, adjust weight and balance are the Lord's. All the weight of the bag are his works. He reiterates the same idea. Let's see here in Proverbs 20 and what verse is that?
Verse 10. Proverbs 20 and verse 10 when he says divers weights, different weights and divers measures, different, you know, and varied measures. Both of them are alike. Listen to this. Abomination to the Lord. Integrity is so important to our God that when we don't have it, he absolutely hates it with the strongest word that you can find in the authorized version to describe the things God hates the most. Wow. That's a pretty big deal. It is. So emphasizing integrity is absolutely essential.
Right. So that what the book of Proverbs is literally saying, if you say you're going to sell a pound of rice, it better fully be a pound of rice. It better not be three quarters of a pound of rice because integrity matters. And in Hosea, Hosea, the minor prophet Hosea, in one of his references, he talks about a merchant that is not honest, has no integrity, and he says, he is a merchant. The balances of deceit are in his hand. He loveth to oppress.
And so you find it yet again, that the idea of integrity is absolutely important, which just reminds us, we, all of us, you that are listening, all of us, we have to teach our children to have integrity. And if integrity is honesty, we have to teach them to be honest, dependable, always trustworthy. And for us, that was a spanking matter when our kids were younger. Yes. Lying was not permitted or even put up with in our household.
For any little thing, our children, we wanted them to learn to be honest about everything. Don't stretch the truth. Don't exaggerate your stories. And the great thing about having the five children is their siblings would call them out on it. That is not how that happened. No, that didn't happen. You did not do that. And so they keep themselves accountable, which was awesome. But as far as, hey, what happened here? Did you do this? How did this come to be? Did you do all of your schoolwork?
Did you finish the job? They had to be honest about that. And we wanted our children to learn integrity. Yes. And Matthew Henry said, he is not an honest man that is not devout. He is not a godly man that is not honest. And so this is a matter of our faith, of our spirituality. Dishonest business dealings are always offensive to God. If you're listening and you're a businessman or a businesswoman, make sure that as a Christian that everything you do is done with the utmost integrity.
And even a person who is not a believer but who has integrity is a person that can be respected and trusted. Integrity brings trust. We can trust a person who has integrity. And when you build a business on integrity and it's based on this is the right thing, you make a mistake, but I'm going to take care of it because I have integrity. This is the right thing.
If it costs me extra money to do the right thing because one of my employees made a mistake or because we just failed, I will go overboard to do the right thing. That is a matter of character and integrity. And it's something we have to live and something we have to teach our children if we're going to have a happy life and a happy family. Right? Yes. I would say even as a consumer, you need to have integrity and honesty and all of these self checkouts that they have these days.
Of course you are on camera. They are watching you as you are scanning your things. And there have been times though that I have missed something in my cart. And so I get out to the car and I'm unloading all the bags of groceries and I'll find something little sitting in the bottom of the cart that did not get scanned. And it could be so easy to be like, oh, I'm in a hurry. This is just a couple of bucks. Walmart will never even miss it.
All of the billions of dollars they make every year from all of the groceries. But I just, I cannot do that. I try to be a woman of integrity. And so I have marched right back in and I have said to the welcome person, I am so sorry. I missed this when I was scanning. I need to go back through and scan this and pay for this. And I even had one of the managers look at me in just disbelief and she said, no one ever does that. I cannot believe you came back in just to purchase that.
And I said, well, I can't do it. I can't just leave with this and not have integrity. So even as a consumer, you need to have integrity and honesty and teach that to your children. What a valuable lesson. Absolutely. And it makes a world of difference. And those kinds of lessons, when our children are aware that, that Bethle is willing to go back into a store to pay for something that costs, you know, 50 cents or $3, it says to our children, this is a big deal. We mean this. And it is the truth.
The Bible is teaching us very clearly here that it is an essential part of Christianity. Integrity and it's called integrity. Integrity may be as something as little as I, I take the shopping cart since we're talking about Walmart and I put it where it's supposed to be so that it's not going to, you know, go flying across the parking lot and hit a car. Right.
Or take up a parking space that someone with a white SUV in Pensacola, Florida may want to park in that parking place because you didn't put the cart back or I should say Pace, Florida. I don't go all the way to Pensacola just to Walmart. Are we testifying? Put the carts back people. This is getting deeply personal right here. Oh my soul. Nothing is more pleasing to God than fair and honest dealings is what we're learning in Proverbs. It actually models who God is.
When we are fair, when we are honest, when we have integrity, we are modeling God. This is who he is and let that be a comfort to you. Maybe just as a little bit of a side here, a lot of times I get questions from folks, you know, dealing with issues of life, you know, you know, what about my mom? My mom passed away, you know, I wasn't sure about, you know, this or her salvation and those are questions that can plague a heart, but can I encourage you?
The answer to those questions is that our God is a God of integrity and the Bible says things like, you know, will not the judge of all the earth do right? When God makes decisions, when God acts in relation to mankind, dear friends, you can rest assured of the fact that our God is a God of integrity. He will do right every single time and he does right in such a way that it's obvious to everybody this is the right thing to do and when you do the right thing, it's also the best thing to do.
Integrity is not just the right thing, it's the best thing to do. It makes life palatable, it makes life successful, it helps our relationship, it improves our business, it brings, if we can go back to our recent podcast episode of the Keeping It Young, it actually brings God's blessings into our life, right? So it is honesty, it is honesty, it is also humility because integrity is the opposite of pride.
I remember Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible because Nebuchadnezzar, he was quite a king, but he was judged severely by God for his pride. Herod was. Those were men who, when they did not, God had entrusted them to the throne. All power is from God, authority. And when they would not honor God and they lacked integrity, then they were judged severely by Almighty God. And you that are leaders, you that are political leaders need to hear that. God is real and God is judging.
God will judge lack of integrity. It is uprightness. The word means correct and right and straight. Integrity means I'm gonna do the correct thing, I'm gonna do the right thing, the straight thing. Psalm 25 verse 21 says, let integrity and uprightness preserve me for I wait on thee. This is an important, important topic. It is. And we were talking about humility with integrity. It takes humility to own up to things, to say, you know what, I was wrong there.
Or you know what, I shouldn't have said that the way I said that. That takes integrity and that takes humility on our part. So it's a very important thing. I was thinking about integrity in the illustration of a strong-willed child. We have people talk to us all the time about, oh my goodness, my child is so strong-willed and they just, it takes a lot to get them to obey. It takes a lot to train them in the way they should go.
But if I can encourage you, when you have a child who is strong-willed, and can I also just say all of our children are strong-willed in some area. You might have a child that seems like they're not strong-willed at all and they just obey and everything, but there will come something that your child will dig their heels in about. So all of our children can be strong -willed about something.
But as you teach your children, all of these different things that we teach on the podcast and all of the truths of the word of God, integrity is such an important thing because it teaches them to do the right thing every time, to own up to the honest thing every time. One of the things that a mentor of ours taught us is if you get a strong-willed child going in the right direction, that strong will will be to do the right thing. It will be to have integrity.
I'm going to do the right thing every time. That is such a blessing to see as we have adult children, as our children grow up, to see them step into that role of integrity and especially the ones who are outwardly more strong-willed, they can be very, can I say verbal about absolutely not, we will not do that in this household. This is the right thing to do and it just kind of makes us laugh and amuses us.
But also what a joy to our hearts that we are going to do the right thing to teach your children integrity. Absolutely. That's so true. Two more questions we have to answer before we're done today. Why does integrity matter? I guess we've already touched all over it. Why does integrity matter? The text I read to you in Proverbs 11 reminds us that integrity guides us. So when we are guided by integrity, then things will be well in our life. It guides us.
The Bible even tells us there that it makes a difference in death. And that's interesting. I think it was Matthew Henry again who said a good conscience makes the end of one's life easier. When I don't have things I have to make right because I cheated and manipulated and twisted and scorned. Just remember that it matters because you reap what you sow.
If you're going to go through life being dishonest and lying and failing in areas of integrity, then people will treat you in ways without integrity. You will reap it. You will have to face the fact that others... If you're willing to do people wrong in business dealings, people will do you wrong in business dealing. If you're willing to be shoddy in the work that your business does, people will be shoddy in the work that they do for you. We reap what we sow. So integrity matters.
It leads us to righteousness. It counsels us. It makes us gracious. It makes us generous. It brings life. It bypasses the judgment of God. And so integrity is important. I would say that it matters because it's frustrating to deal with people who don't have integrity. So please people, raise your little ones to have integrity. Nobody wants that kind of frustration. So how do you get it? How do you get integrity? There's three answers we'll give you here as we wind up today.
And the first one is you train it. You just have to know that. Proverbs 20 and verse 11. Let me locate this here and read this one to you so I get it correct. Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure and whether it be right. So you can look at a child and know. A child either has integrity or they don't. And if they don't have integrity, it is the job of the parents to take the necessary steps in a process of time to teach the child to live a life of integrity.
Yes. Your child will not automatically have character, honesty, humility, always do the right thing. They will not do that. We have gone over and over and over and over that. It is in the heart of the child to sin, to be deceptive, to be manipulative, to be disobedient, to not follow authority, to not do the right thing, to not share, to not be nice to people around them. And so for your child to end up to be an adult with integrity, it has to be trained while they are in the house.
This can be an ongoing process, even through their teen years, just to remind them of their work ethic, to remind them, yes, when you get out of bed, you need to make your bed, even though you have to be at work at six o'clock in the morning, because that's just integrity. It's doing the right thing. Yes, you have to be honest. You have to tell the truth every time and just working and working and working on them until they leave your home. And then they are a person of integrity on their own.
Yes. And either remember that your child either has it or doesn't. And so examine your child. Do they have integrity? Are they dependable? Can someone trust them? Can you trust them? Or could you say, are you at least in the process of training them in that direction? And what happens is when they get it and mature, integrity then directs their way. Because in the Proverbs 11 passage, as he's talking about this issue of integrity, he says the integrity of the upright shall guide them.
He says then in the fifth verse, the righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way. In the word perfect there is the mature. The righteousness of the mature, the perfect shall direct his way, but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. So either we teach our children to have integrity, to do the right thing, to live the right way, to honor God by making right choices, that either guides their life or wickedness guides their life. So how do you get integrity? Well, you got to train it.
And moms and dads, it never ends. You train all the days of their life. And at any given instance in your child's life, maybe your son is 16 and all of a sudden you see an area where he's lacking integrity, then you've got to really start teaching. You've got to go for a walk. You've got to sit down and do a Bible study. You've got to address the situation. You've got to place ramifications that have negative consequences so that your children get the idea. This is important. This is big.
And your children should always be looking back at your life and when they sit to talk about their upbringing, they should have ample opportunities to say, oh, remember dad pushed us about this and mom pushed us about that. Remember that? And what you're doing there is you're seeing the fruit of integrity being trained in the hearts of your children. Well, and they should be able to see it in you.
David and I were just talking through some things that, some decisions that maybe we will make in our life soon. And we were talking about how that we're not sure what to do about the situation. And we were just like, well, you know, we, we need to do the right thing. And I said, you know, I think if we do the right thing, if we stand, and of course that would be integrity, doing the right thing, doing the honest thing, then God will direct us. And the Bible does promise that.
So what, what a comfort that is just, you may not know what to do, but you do know what the right thing is to do well, then just do the right thing and God will direct you from there. Absolutely. And so you train it. That's how you get integrity. Two more things. You pursue it. That's a lesson for all of us. We have opportunities galore to pursue integrity, financial situations and business situations and walking out of Walmart with something we forgot to pay for situations, shopping carts.
I was actually in a grocery store somewhere not long ago, and I watched this couple, they were walking around in the produce aisle and every time they walked past the bags of grapes, they would pick off four or five of them, carry them around, eating them. And, and, and here they are, and they were doing it very openly, very publicly. And it dawned on me, here's, here's a couple that has not been trained, they're older, they were older, but they lack integrity.
That is, that has not been paid for. They're taking something that is not rightly theirs because they are lacking in integrity. We have ample opportunities to pursue integrity. And then the last one, of course, is to live it. It shows up in how we treat people, shows up in how we run our business. Integrity is absolutely vital. Any final thoughts? I would say even the people in your home have integrity with your children and you say, well, we are, our, our business dealings are very honest.
We are very careful about all of that. But even when the way you talk to your children, instead of, oh, soon, mommy, we'll get to that soon. And you're still sitting half hour later scrolling Instagram or, oh yeah, we'll do that sometime. Your children do remember. If you promise them something, just be very careful and make sure that you have integrity with your children. They will bring it up. They will bring it up.
So make sure if you say, oh yeah, we'll have, we'll go and have ice cream sometime this week, then take them to have ice cream sometime this week. And if things get busy or something happens and you absolutely can't, you can sit down and have that conversation of, you know what, we will do it sometime soon. I promise it's just, it can't happen this week, but make sure you have integrity with your children. Don't lie to your children about things. Don't manipulate them to get them to do things.
Have integrity with them. Show them that righteousness and integrity and character matter. Absolutely. Well, I hope you're enjoying this study. Next week, this time I mean it, next week we're going to talk about our words. And we have found here in Proverbs so many other areas as well. We're going to have a lesson about our words. We're going to talk about the value of influence, anger. Here's a big one coming up. Alcohol is in the book of Proverbs. Counsel. How do we pursue counsel?
And how important is counsel? We're going to talk about even in Proverbs 31, biblical femininity and all of that sort of stuff. These are areas we have to emphasize and master if we're going to have a happy family and a happy life. Yes. And that's what Solomon is writing about. Thank you for joining us again today. Hope you're enjoying this study. If we can help you reach out to us and let us know.
I hope you'll serve the Lord with gladness this week and thank you so much for just being part of the Keeping It Young family. Have a great day. The Keeping It Young podcast is a BACS 5 media production.