How to Live With Integrity

Living a life of integrity includes all areas of your life. Your public integrity is what other people see in the workplace or in your home and church. Your private integrity exists between you and God—that involves those things you allow yourself to do when no one else will find out. Keeping your integrity levels high is God's standard for you as a follower of Christ. Blessings will come as a result of your personal integrity, just like Daniel experienced protection from the lions when thrown into the den. Let me give you five ways to cultivate integrity.

1. Don't wait around. Don't look to your boss or your spouse or your environment to get better before you make a move. Integrity has to do with who you are on the inside regardless of what is happening on the outside. Don't blame others if your level of integrity isn't what it should be.

2. Set your standards in advance. Decide on the things you won't compromise on before you find yourself in the middle of a problem. You and I cannot become Christians of integrity on the spot. We cannot wait until the action gets hot and heavy to make our decisions about integrity. Establish your guidelines in advance.

3. Develop a recurring devotional life throughout your day. Make spending time with God the rule, not the exception. As we see in the case of Daniel, cultivating your walk with God throughout the day will do as much or more than anything else to help you to become a person of integrity.

4. Find some friends who will hold you accountable for living up to your standards. Find the friends who will ask you the hard questions about what you're doing and not doing. Be authentic. Allow room to share failures. Don't judge, and you won't be judged. Stay in contact, and reach out when you need a reminder to stay strong.

5. Major on God and not your circumstances. If Daniel had majored on his circumstances he never would have maintained his integrity. He would have become just like everybody else. He would no longer have been extraordinary. God did not save you so you could become like everybody else. God saved you to be extraordinary.