Fixed Principles

Rock SolidOur pastor Bro Dennis is beginning a men’s study on leadership. Men, if you are a member of Midway Baptist Church or live in the Florida Panhandle, please consider this an invitation to join us on Monday evenings from 6:00 – 7:30 (Bible Study begins at 6:30).

I am so looking forward to this teaching.

As a retired Army First Sergeant who spent 4 years teaching leadership to senior noncommissioned officer at the NCO Academy and then my last 4 years mentoring them, I can tell you that leadership is the key ingredient to success. Without it you are like a ship without a sail and a rudder.

I do a leadership seminar on the seven vital characteristics of leadership and point them back to Biblical principles. The one characteristics that is most important is integrity. The Bible agrees:

    “The integrity of the upright will guide them, but the perversity of the unfaithful will destroy them.” (Proverbs 11:3)

I define integrity as “doing what’s right—legally and morally.” I teach that “People of integrity do the right thing not because it’s convenient or because they have no choice. They choose the right thing because their character permits no less.” Integrity is something you either have or do not have. Ninety to ninety-five percent integrity is no integrity.

As Solomon says, it is integrity that guides our way. I like what Matthew Henry says about verse 3 above:

    “An honest man’s principles are fixed, therefore his way is plain.”

Pastor Henry is speaking of clarity that many men desire but most never find. Why?

Because too many men sell their souls for a buck or power. This is why you hear some of the most nonsensical and perverted things come out of the mouths of so many elected officials and business leaders. The Bible calls them a fool:

    “Better is the poor who walks in his integrity than one who is perverse in his lips, and is a fool.” (Proverbs 19:1)

Why do men sell their souls, good men at that? Because they try to do the right thing in their own power, and since the Prophet Jeremiah rightly tells us that our hearts are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” we are lead astray by our “good intentions.”

When we give our lives to the Lord Jesus Christ, He sends us the Holy Spirit who teaches us how to live our lives upon fixed Biblical principles. King David knew this all too well:

    “As for me, You uphold me in my integrity, and set me before Your face forever.” (Psalm 41:12)

Our nation is in the mess it is in because we are spiritually bankrupt which has led us to economic and moral bankruptcy. Too many American, Christians among them, think if we could just balance the budget and cut our entitlement spending then things in our nation would get better. That is putting the cart before the horse or treating the symptom instead of the malady.

However, when I have fixed my life upon the bedrock of the Bible, then I can face all issues in life with a clear conscience and concrete confidence that no matter the outcome, God is in control and I can trust my life, my family, and my future with Him. I can also ask others to pray for me in the way the writer of Hebrews did:

    “Pray for us; for we are confident that we have a good conscience, in all things desiring to live honorably.” (Hebrews 13:18)

My friend Steve Deace always says that we need leaders of conviction and not position. The former will do what is right; the latter will only care if it will work. We’ve tried that and that is why we are a spiritually bankrupt nation. It a spiritually bankrupt nation is the antithesis of what our Founding Fathers envisioned when the wrote our Charters of Freedom.

So what about you? Are you a person of fixed principles or fleeting propositions? Are you a ship without a sail and a rudder, or are you anchored to the solid rock of the Word of God?

The way you answer these questions may just be the answers you are looking for…

In Christ
Dave
Ps. 37:4

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    Copyright © 2013 David Jeffers

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