Apart from the news and an occasional game of tennis (when an Aussie is playing in the finals of a Grand Slam) I don’t watch much television. However, being laid aside for a few days in hospital this past week I watched a little more than usual. A program I was particularly interested in was a documentary about American evangelist, Billy Graham, on SBS. I recall going to a Billy Graham rally in Melbourne as a fifteen-year- old kid with a couple of school mates. I must say that Billy left a big impression on a kid who was just at a crucial stage of sorting out his Christian identity.
The documentary was very informative and gave a lovely picture of the life of a godly man whom the Lord used mightily for His glory. However there was also a section in that documentary that jarred badly. Billy Graham befriended himself to a number of American presidents. In some instances the evangelist was able to serve as a spiritual mentor to the president. However his relationship with Richard Nixon came unstuck after the Watergate Affair. Let me hasten to say that I’m only going by the impression left by this one documentary and I’m not sure how accurately it depicted the situation but it seemed to me that Billy had some apologising to do for things he said and did in his relationship with President Nixon.
What made me stop and reflect on this was that just a few days earlier someone had unloaded on me his disgust that someone who has publicly betrayed his wife and family could be appointed as the leader of a political party. He raised with me the question of integrity. Can we separate private morality from public morality? That’s a good question. We live in a culture where we increasingly hear about people lacking integrity. So, what is this thing called integrity and did Billy Graham demonstrate a lack of integrity in befriending President Richard Nixon.
The word integrity comes from the same root as the word ‘integer’. If you still remember your grade-four arithmetic you will recall that an integer is a whole number, over against a fraction. The numbers 5, 10 and 100 are all integers. On the other hand 0.5 is not an integer. Hence integrity is a word that suggests wholeness and completeness. That ties in well with the Bible. The old King James Version of the Bible uses the word integrity16 times – all in the Old Testament. There it translates a Hebrew word that meant completeness; from a verb ‘to complete’ or ‘accomplish’. So in a moral sense it came to mean uprightness. I could give you examples from the list of 16 occasions where it is used. So, for example, the word integrity is used of the man Job and also of King David. Not surprisingly it is also used of Jesus in the New Testament.
Integrity then suggests the kind of wholeness where those in question have their life together in harmony, as whole people. Or to put it another way, in such a person there is a proper integration of belief and behaviour, of profession and conduct – and then across all areas of their life. The opposite of integrity is the hypocrisy of which Jesus accused the Pharisees – a lack of wholeness – because words and works do not mesh into an integral, unified whole.
I think that my friend, who criticised the political process, was right. It’s not showing integrity when one standard of behaviour applies to work and quite a different one to marriage and family. That’s not having it all together. Sadly, Billy Graham, didn’t have it all to together when he supported Richard Nixon. Of course we need to admit that none of us have our act together perfectly. We live in a fallen world where all of us will have moments when we need to offer our apologies because we got it wrong. But there’s a world of difference between an honest mistake made in a moment of bad judgement and a deliberate attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of others. We need Jesus to deliver us from our lack of integrity.
John Westendorp