Introduction - Integrity: A foundation for Effective Living
My friend, Cecilia, is, apart from being our District Co-ordinator, a keen gardener. Maybe it’s a leftover from her degree in geology, but she likes nothing better than digging her garden, weeding it, watching things grow and generally getting her hands filthy in mud and clay. The trick, she tells me, of having a good garden is to make sure the soil is good, well watered, with good drainage, making sure it is free of weeds, and well dug. In other words, long before she plants anything in her garden, or in her allotment, she makes sure the ground is prepared - she puts down good foundations for her future growth.
Today, I want us to look at a foundation for effective living.
The foundation for effective living is integrity. A lot of people think integrity is just being honest. It’s far more than being honest. Integrity means living by my values. It means living in a way that I say I believe. My words and my lifestyle match. It’s when what I claim to believe matches my actions in life, my conduct matches my creed. I live based on my values and there’s harmony and congruence there.
Last week we started this new series called “The Purpose-Driven Life” and I said that God has a purpose and plan for every person. Today I want to tell you how to lay the foundation by taking step one: Prioritize the values that matter most, then evaluate your life and bring it into harmony with what you believe is important. This is the foundation for an effective life.
The Importance of Values
We don’t realize how much our values really do affect our lives - but they do. They control everything in our life. In the first place our values affect our stress. When our values are unclear, we get confused. When our values are in conflict, it’s called a dilemma. Either way, we produce unnecessary stress in our lives if we haven’t clarified what’s important and what’s not important. It causes stress.
Secondly, our values control our success in life. Show me what’s important in your life, tell me what your values are and without even knowing you I can accurately predict the direction of your life. When our values are lasting values, lasting success is built on values that last. Every time you make a decision in life, you’re filtering that decision subconsciously or unconsciously through your values grid. If our values are right it will lead us to growth, success, development. If our values are wrong, we’ll eventually crash and burn. What we think is important in life not only affects our stress, it also affects our success.
It also affects our salvation. Jesus said that it is possible to be outwardly successful – financially, socially and every other way – and be spiritually bankrupt on the inside. He said, “What does it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?”
So today, I want us to look at how do you lay a foundation of values for your life. How do you have a value-based life?
A Value Rich Life
There are four things we need to do if we are to have a life which is lived on the basis of good values.
1. CHOOSE YOUR SOURCE
I must decide where I’m going to get my values. This is very important because the source of my values will determine the quality of them. For instance, would you consider the Daily Sport a good source for values? The source determines how valuable your priorities are.
Where do we get our values? We get them from a lot of places. We pick them up from our parents. We pick them up from our peers. We pick them up from magazines and books we read, from the music we listen to. We pick them up from society in general. Today, one of the ways we pick up our values is through the media. The media is the number one purveyor of values today. Especially television. If you’re an average person you watch about 1000 hours of television a year. That means if you’re an average person, by the time you’re 65 you will have amassed 9½ solid years of TV viewing.
On the other hand, let’s say you went to church once a week for your entire life, that would only equal four months of spiritual teaching. Four months compared to 9½ years – tell me where you’re getting your primary values?
The Bible tells us that the values of the world are very well known and they have not changed. When you summarize it, regardless of all these secondary places, you’re going to get your values in life from one of two places – the world or God. You will get your values in life from either culture or Christ.
The world has always had three basic values in life. You need to be aware that this is what the world says is important.
Pleasure
If you ask most people, “What do you want out of life?” They’ll say, “I want to have fun…. I want to be happy … I want to feel good.” That’s different ways of saying pleasure. We spend more money on entertainment (on the entertainment industry) than almost anything else. We’re a pleasure-obsessed culture. We have pleasure seekers and thrill seekers everywhere.
Possessions
We love to show off our possessions. We are consumed with consuming and we’re very conspicuous about our consumption. We show off our clothes and show off our cars and show off our homes and our jewellery. We want everybody to see what we’ve got. We collect things and amass things and buy things we don’t need but we keep buying. We base our self-worth on our net worth. Possessions is the second value in our society.
Prestige
In our community, image is everything. We’re very status conscious. In fact, we create symbols so that we can let people know where we are in the pecking order. We want people to look up to us. We want people to think we’re important and successful and we have value. We’re very status conscious. A lot of the advertisements today appeal to this kind of snob appeal The problem is this: the media so bombards us with these values – pleasure, possession, prestige – over and over that even Christians get seduced by it. We buy into it. We think like everybody else that those are the ultimate values of life. Honestly, for many Christians their values are no different than those of an atheist. They’re just as hedonistic. They’re just as materialistic. They’re just as status conscious.
Our reading today from the letter to the Romans said: “Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” If you buy into the world’s value system - that the ultimate value in life is pleasure, possession and prestige - you will miss God’s purpose for your life. I guarantee it. Because you’re going to get your values from either the world or the word, from culture or from Christ. If you get seduced into the system - that you should spend your entire life trying to get more pleasure, more possessions, more prestige - then you’ll spend all your time on that and you will have no time to fill the reason you were created for this world in the first place. You’ll miss God’s purpose.
So the first step in building a foundation is choose your choice. Where am I going to get my values?
2. CLARIFY WHAT’S IMPORTANT
Make a list of your values. Make a list of what you consider to be the most important things in life. Write them down so that they’re not vague, fuzzy, so that you’ve actually thought them out.
Do this for a couple of reasons: One, you need to do this because most of the values that you have you didn’t choose. You didn’t choose them. You just assimilated them without thinking because you grew up in this culture. You picked them up from people all around you as you grew. Some of them you got were good and some of them weren’t so good. Some of them are self-defeating and some of them are actually hurting your life. But you didn’t automatically sit down and choose the value. You just automatically accepted it. You’ve never really thought them through.
The second reason you need to write out your values is because we rarely think about our values until we have a crisis, when we hit the wall. Then, all of a sudden, we get interested in, “What’s the purpose of life?” When you’re cruising through the world, going through life and everything’s going great, you don’t stop and ask the tough questions. You don’t stop and say things like, “What are my values?” and “Where are they leading me?” and “What’s going to be the end result of these values?” You don’t ask these kinds of things.
What happens is, you wait until a crisis occurs and one day you hit the wall and you:
And, all of a sudden, you start asking questions like, “What is really the purpose of life?” and “Are my values really leading me in the right direction?” We don’t think about it until the pain occurs. Nobody who starts snorting cocaine ever says on their first snort, “I wonder where this is going to take me in eight years?” We don’t do that. We wait until the pain comes and gets our attention. Then all of a sudden there’s a wake-up call and we start thinking, “Maybe my values are off a little bit. Maybe I’m too much of a workaholic. Maybe I’ve been investing all my time and energy in a person or a relationship or a job or a goal that I’ve wasted way too much time on.” That gets our attention.
Defining Success
This series we’re going to do on the Purpose Driven Life in the weeks ahead, it’s not going to help you a whole lot if you just come every week and sit and listen and go home. So I’ve planned a homework assignment for you every week. By the end of this series you will have a written out life plan and better discover why God put you on this earth in the first place.
Notice: Everybody has values. But few people have set down and specifically identified them. The first step in developing a Purpose-Driven life is to clarify your values. Get alone with a pen and paper and ask yourself these questions, and then make a list of the ten most important values that you want to build your life on. You need to come up with a personal definition of success. That’s the end result of this. Success to me is… and have it written out.
Success for me is a mixture of things: it is about, primarily finding out the purposes of God for my life and trying to achieve them. Some of those purposes are about following God's call to be a minister, one of them is to be in relationship with Ian, sharing love and laughter as well as pain and tears. Another purpose for my life is to teach others. All of these purposes are built into my definition of what success, for me is. What does success look like for you - what are the purposes that God has for your life?
Why is this important? Because if you don’t come up with a personal definition of success, other people will define it for you. And that’s a big mistake. Don’t ever let anybody else define success for you.
Success is a word we use all the time in our society. It’s probably a very overused word. But nobody ever stops to define it. Let me give you a definition of success: Success is the feeling we get when we live out our values. That’s what success really is. Success is not a destination. It’s not a goal, an achievement. It’s a journey, a progression. Success is not an achievement. Why? Because if your success is based on an achievement, somebody is going to outdo you eventually. Every record is broken eventually. Once your achievement is topped, what happens to your success? It goes down the sewer. If you build your life on something like “Success will be when I achieve…” somebody else is going to top it. Real success is when you decide what values are really important to you in life and bring your life in harmony with them. When you have a personal definition of success based on your own values, 1) nobody can ever take that feeling of success away from you and, 2) you can be successful at any stage of life. You don’t have to say, “Once I get to 40 or 50 or 60 or retirement, then I’ll be successful.” You can be successful at any stage of life as long as your values are being lived out in your life and you feel the satisfaction of that. That’s what success really is.
The starting point is: you have to decide what’s important to you. I hope you’ll do the homework this week. Decide what matters most. The key is perspective. And if you really want to know what matters most in life you have to take the long look. Look at your life ten years on, twenty years on, thirty years on. Look at it from eternity, standing at the judgment day and looking back on your life. Ask this question (this question sifts through values faster than any other question I know): “What’s going to last? What’s going to last ten years from now? Twenty years from now? For eternity? How much of what I’m doing right now is going to matter in twenty years?” The things that don’t matter, maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time on them. Maybe I shouldn’t spend any time on them.
When you take that question – “What’s going to last?” – and you apply it to the world’s value system of pleasure, possession and prestige notice what the Bible says in Hebrews 11:25 that pleasure isn’t going to last: “The pleasures of sin lasts for a short time.” Sin is fun. Nobody would do it if it wern't. The Bible even says that sin is fun – there is pleasure in sin –but it also says it lasts for a short time. You have your kicks but you have your kickbacks.
Possessions aren’t going to last. 1 Timothy 6:7 ”We brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out.” You’re not going to take it with you. It’s not going to last. The next time you hear about some millionaire dying and someone says, “I wonder how much she left?” – she left it all! She didn’t take any of it with her. Possessions aren’t going to last.
Then Mark 10:31 tells us prestige isn’t going to last. “Many people who seem to be important now will be the least important then in eternity.” And the next part of the verse says, “and many who seem least important today will be most important in heaven.”
If you want to see the end result of building your life around the world’s value system of pleasure, possessions and prestige, I have a book to recommend for you to read. It was written by the wealthiest man who ever lived and he was also the most powerful man in the world at that time. His name was Solomon and he wrote a journal called Ecclesiastes. If you read Ecclesiastes you’ll find the end result of living a life based on the world’s value system. He says, “I have the money and I have the power to do anything I want to do in life and so I did. I held back nothing. I experienced every pleasure, I amassed every possession and I gained all the prestige in the world that I could gain. I did it all. I tried it all. I tried food and I tried sex and I tried achievement.” Solomon had 300 wives. How would you like to have 300 mother-in-laws? He said, “I tried it all. But it’s useless, worthless. My conclusion is it’s all vanity.”
You choose your source – where am I going to get my values, the word or the world. Then you evaluate what’s important and you make a list of the things that you really believe are valuable. Obviously if you build them on the values in the Bible, these are eternal values. They will last forever.
3. CHANGE MY LIFESTYLE
That means I have to match what I value. I need to start working on bringing my life into line with what I say I believe. That’s called congruency.
I recently read about a Gallup poll. After polling all kinds of people, the poll said that the number one source of stress in our lives is not, not having enough time. It’s not, not having enough money. It’s not relational conflict. The conclusion was that the number one source of stress today was what they called incongruent values. What is that? It means when I say I believe one thing but I live a different way. That causes stress in my life. When my walk doesn’t match my talk. When I say this is important to me but my lifestyle says it’s not really important to me at all. That causes stress.
People say, “God’s number one in my life.” But we give God the leftover of our time. We give God the leftover of our money. We don’t tithe. We don’t put God first in our schedule. So God’s not really first. Incongruent values causes stress.
If you want to focus on changing your life, you’re going to have to focus on three key areas, bring values into three areas: my schedule, my budget, and my relationships. If you really want to build a value-based life you have to take your values and make sure they are applied to your schedule, your budget and your relationships.
First, your schedule. You need to say, My schedule needs to reflect what I say is really important. If God is really important in my life, I should have a daily prayer time. God should get the first day of every week – Sunday – in worship.
My budget should reflect that God’s first in my finances and I’m giving back to God first before anybody else gets paid.
My relationships. I need to look and see that I’m making time for the relationships I say are really important. Are my partner or my close friends getting the short end of the stick?
The purpose-driven life starts with a shift in your values.
A lot of you, I'm sure, are thinking, “I’d like to change. I know that what I say is important to me I don’t make time for, and the things I don’t think are important I spend all my time on. And all the things I want to do I end up not doing and all the things I don’t want to do I end up doing. I’m so confused and I’d like to change but I don’t have the energy or the power or the strength or the wisdom to do it.”
You’re right. That’s why you need God in your life. That’s why you need Jesus. God gives you the power to do what God wants you to do. You can’t do this on your own. You’ve tried to change dozens of times and it will last a week, two, three weeks at the most. It doesn’t work. You need God’s power.
The tragedy is most of us never get serious about changes in our lives until it’s too late. Please don’t wait until it’s too late to start looking at where the values you’ve been living by are taking you. Don’t wait until you hit the wall, until you look back and regret and say, “I wish I’d done that different.” Start now. Start building a foundation right now for the rest of your life based on values that really matter.
To do that, you have to do more than just decide where your source is going to be and clarify what’s important. Because even writing them down is not enough. You’ve got to take the fourth step, which will help you make the changes in your lifestyle. That is …
4. CHECK MY VALUES DAILY
As you know Ian and I recently got a wonderful new addition to our family. A lovely eating, chewing and sleeping machine called Beech. Our puppy is a source of absolute joy to us and most of the time we behave like over anxious parents. Of course, we have been reading all the books about puppy training and aren't doing too badly. One of the things that the books say is that we have to be consistent and check, each day, that we are following the basic rules - establishing ourselves as the leaders of our pack so that he knows his place and is secure and happy within it. There are about four things we need to make sure we do with each day, and we need to check and recheck them as some of them - like ignoring the dog when we first come in for five minutes or so - are incredibly difficult.
Once you have worked out what your values are and what success is for you, I suggest that you set aside five minutes every day to sit down and – once you’ve got this list prepared and put some Bible verses with it as you grow and find a good verse – and you look at those values and review and hold yourself up to this plumb line and say “Is my life in harmony with what I say is important? Is my schedule? Is my budget? Are my time and money and relationships in harmony with what I really believe God wants me to do with my life?” If it’s truly important, can you spare five minutes? I think you can.
How many of you have the Windows operating system on your computer? I took my life value statement and turned it into an icon and put it in my start up group. That means that every time I turn on my computer the first thing I see is my value statement. It forces me everyday to look at my life and say, “Am I living what I say I believe, what’s really important or am I not?” It forces me to come in contact with what I’ve held up as a standard based on what I believe to be God’s will and God’s purpose for my life. Many more days than not I’m saying, “No, I need to bring that back in line.”
If you’re serious about changing, you’re going to have to review and test your values on a regular basis. You don’t know what the future holds but God has given us a compass. It is the values that are in the Bible. They have been the same for 200, 300, 3000 years. Just as they were true in the year 1000 the were true in the year 2000. I do a lot of thinking about this.
There is a term that is used for God’s value system. God’s value system is called the Realm, or Kingdom, of God. The Realm of God simply means the values that God set the world up to be run on. The Bible says that if I seek first God's Realm, that means put God's values first in my life, God will take care of all the other needs in my life.
Some of you just in the last few weeks or couple of months, have come to a place of crisis. You’ve had a major crisis in your life, financial crisis, health crisis, relationship crisis, a career crisis, you’ve lost a loved one. In those moments you start asking questions like, “What is the purpose for my life? Does it matter? There’s got to be more to life than this. Are my values leading me in the right direction?” If you’ve had that crisis and you’ve asked those questions recently, I want to say to you “Congratulations.” Not that I’m happy for your pain. I’m not saying that. But if your pain gets you to ask the important questions that you wouldn’t ask if your life were in cruise control mode, I’m glad for that. Because I don’t want you to waste your life and neither does God. You were made to know God and God's plan and purpose and live by God's values. And when you know God and live by those values, life unfolds in a way that you can’t imagine is possible.
Conclusion
The Purpose-Driven Life starts with realizing that life isn’t working out without God. If you’ve gone through that crisis recently, I want to say this could be the turning point in your life. If you haven’t gone through the crisis, I urge you to take the steps now to save yourself some pain. Will you pray with me?
God, I want my
life to count.
I want to build my life on values that
last.
Help me this week to clarify what really counts and start heading
in that direction.
Turn my eyes away from worthless
things.
Help me to eliminate what isn’t of value in my life and to
begin living for You the purpose you made me and the values You intended me to
live by.
Most of all I really want to get to know You.
So
Jesus, come into my life and make Yourself real to me.
In Your name I
pray, Amen.”
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.