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Your life includes all of you. Work you. Home you. Church you. Private and public you.
A person of integrity is someone whose life is seamless, whose many “yous” are one and the same, who is good, through and through.
Becoming a person of integrity means giving Jesus access to all of you. If the soul were a house, this means allowing him into every room of it.
It’s possible to happily give Jesus access to some rooms but put little Do Not Enter signs on others. Maybe I’m glad to have Jesus rearrange my relating-to-family room, but I’d prefer he stay out of my finance room. Maybe he’s welcome in my devotional room, but not my political-views room.
Groups of Christians can do this too, posting “Keep Out” signs to block Jesus from entering culturally cherished beliefs, practices, and goals. (Jesus’ original audience included religious groups who identified themselves as God’s people but whose traditions were off-limits to Jesus’ revision; this continues today.)
Sometimes we only allow Jesus into certain parts of our lives. Or, to flip it, we only allow certain parts of Jesus into our lives—perhaps his power without his humility or his love for one people group without his love for another. This kind of selective surrender and selective receiving leads to disintegration. Eventually, things fall apart.
On the night of his betrayal, Jesus held up his cup and said, “Drink ye all of it…” That word “all” can be translated as whole. I don’t know if by “all” Jesus meant “all of you drink” or “drink it all.” But I do know he drank his cup to the last drop. He is our model of integrity.
To enter his covenant is to take the entire cup he offers, bitter and sweet. To trust him is to allow him into every nook and cranny of our personal and communal ways of thinking. Why wouldn’t we? His way is better than our way in every dimension of life. His way is wholeness. |
Grace Pouch