Momentum: How To Ignite Your FaithSample

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM BANANAS Meet a man named Joe. He grew up in a good home where he was the youngest in a large family. At the age of seventeen, he left home and got his first job. He was reliable, trustworthy, hardworking and got one promotion after another. Now, Joe was also young and handsome. It was not long until the boss’s wife began to take notice of him. She flirted with him. She dressed seductively to see if she could get a response from Joe. Finally, frustrated that her subtle tactics weren’t working, she came right out and asked Joe to go to bed with her. Joe was young, single, and far away from home—and a beautiful older woman tried to seduce him. What do you think he did? This is not a story from a steamy novel. It’s actually a story straight from the Bible (Genesis 39). It is the real-life, true story of Joe-seph. Just like Joseph experienced, evil comes at us in many ways. Paul said “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). We overcome evil by doing what is good and right. Ironic as it might seem, the antidote to evil is good. I wonder if Thomas Watson, former chairman of IBM, had Joseph in mind when he said, “Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.” It’s about integrity. The word “integrity” is the idea of wholeness, that your life is “integrated” and how you act outwardly is reflective of who you are inwardly. Every time you go to the grocery store, you trust that the bananas you buy have integrity. All you can see is the banana peel, but you trust that behind the peel is a banana. You never wonder if you’re going to get home, take off the peel, and find an orange. One hundred percent of the time, you will find a banana behind the peel. That is integrity. The psalmist speaks of integrity when he says, “Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right” (Psalm 106:3). WHAT ABOUT YOU? How is your integrity these days? Ask the Holy Spirit to shine the spotlight on any area of inconsistency. Today’s Takeaway The distance between your convictions and your conduct is your integrity gap.