No Small Breaches: John MacArthur on Defending and Rebuilding Integrity
Monday, August 21, 2023
The following blog post was originally published in June, 2016. —ed.
Failure is inevitable. No believer can always live up to the standard of Scripture—our remaining flesh and the habits of our former sinful selves inhibit our holiness in this life. But that doesn’t mean we give up—it doesn’t mean we surrender to temptation and impurity.
What it means is that we must battle the flesh on a daily basis, weeding out sin and watching out for temptation. Our integrity isn’t based on how easy we make righteousness look—it’s a matter of how faithfully we keep at the fight.
We must be aware of our inner bent toward duplicity. More than that—we must actively work to overcome that inclination, looking to the Spirit and the Word to avoid hypocrisy and cultivate integrity.
How do we do that? We recently asked John MacArthur—here’s what he had to say:
As John explained, integrity isn’t usually forfeited in a single moment of spectacular failure. Instead it’s slowly chipped away at by small compromises repeated over time, until the façade of righteousness collapses and the secret hypocrisy is exposed.
This week we’re going to consider how we can protect our integrity. What are the biblical means we have access to, and what is expected of us as we grow in the love and knowledge of God?