Living on mission requires that we live lives of integrity...

At the church where I serve, we have been spending our time together in a sermon series entitled living on mission. During this series our hope and our prayer is that we would enable, equip and empower us to live our day to day lives as a follower of Jesus on mission as a missionary to those that God has already placed in our spheres of influence who are far from God in a way that reveals and reflects Jesus to them.

And if you are here this morning and you do not buy the whole Jesus, Bible, church thing, let alone whether you should follow Him or live for Him, here’s the thing. What you will discover during this series is that there is a way that those who are followers of Jesus are supposed to live. And there is a way that followers of Jesus are supposed to talk about the claims that Jesus made about who He was and what He came to earth to do.

And my hope for you is that you would see what Jesus calls His followers to so that you can see how He feels about you and what He calls His followers to do when it comes to engaging you. That way, you can cut through the bad experiences that you have had with Jesus followers to see the truth when it comes to what Jesus calls His followers to be truly about as they live around you.

This week I would like for us to address one of the most common objections and accusations that those who are far from God have when it comes to Christianity and the church. If you are not sure you buy the whole Jesus, Bible, church thing, you may have made this accusation against Christians. And if you are here and you are a follower of Jesus, you may have heard this accusation made against the church and Christians.

The accusation and objection that I want us to address is this: the church and Christians are a bunch of hypocrites. Maybe you believe that the church is full of hypocrites. And if we could have a conversation at the courtyard coffeehouse, one of the first questions that you would ask me is “Well Dave, don’t you see that the church is just full of hypocrites? That’s why I don’t like to come to church, because the church is full of hypocrites. How can you say that the church is not full of hypocrites?”

If we were able to have that conversation, here would be my response. First, what do you mean when you say that Christians are hypocrites? The word hypocrite literally means to join in playing a part of pretending. The word hypocrite was used to describe someone who was an actor in the Greek theatre. In our culture today, we would refer to such a person as a poser.

A hypocrite creates a public impression that is at odds with ones real motivations or purpose. A hypocrite, by definition, is someone that says “here is the message and teachings of Jesus, and you need to follow them, but I am not going to follow them”. A hypocrite fails to follow the message and teachings that they impose on others. However, a follower of Jesus who strives to follow the message and teachings of Jesus, yet sometimes falls short is not to being a hypocrite. Instead they are being a human being.

So if you define a hypocrite as someone who falls short of the standard that they are striving to live, then we are all hypocrites. If that is how you define being a hypocrite, you will fit in quite well at our church. You would fit in quite well here because even if you don't buy the whole Jesus, Bible, church thing, you have a standard that you set for yourself when it comes to how you live your life. And there are times that you fail to live up to the standards that you set for yourself, don’t you? So if that is how you define a hypocrite than you will fit in here quite well.

Unfortunately, the sad reality is that there are followers of Jesus who are hypocrites. There are followers of Jesus who say “here is the message and teachings of Jesus, and you need to follow them, but I am not going to follow them”. And hypocrisy in the life of a follower of Jesus incredibly hinders our ability to live on mission.

So how do we as followers of Jesus address the accusation and objection of hypocrisy by followers of Jesus and the church? How are we as followers of Jesus, to respond to this accusation? To answer these questions, I would like for us to spend our time together by looking at a section of a letter that is recorded for us in the Bible called the book of James. This letter was written to early followers of Jesus by a man named James, who was the brother of Jesus.

To fully understand the significance of this letter, here is a question to consider: what would it take for you to believe that your brother was God? What would it take? What is so interesting is that in the accounts of Jesus life that are recorded for us in the Bible, James is someone who did not believe that Jesus was who He claimed to be. So what would it take to make a skeptic like James become a follower of Jesus that eventually became the Senior Pastor at the church in Jerusalem?

What it would take would be seeing your brother raised from the dead, which is exactly what happened to James. You see the transformation of James from skeptic to being a pastor and leader of the new movement called Christianity is one of the strongest evidences for the resurrection of Jesus and truth of Christianity. And James, as Senior Pastor, wrote a letter that addressed early followers of Jesus when it came to how they were to live out their relationship with Jesus in their day to day lives.

And it is in this letter to early followers of Jesus that we see James reveal for us a timeless and true principle when it comes to living on mission. And that timeless and true principle is this: Living on mission requires that we live lives of integrity. In order to embrace and engage in the mission that God has given us to be the vehicles that reveal and reflect Jesus to others, we must live lives of integrity that reveal and reflect Jesus to others.

Now to fully understand this timeless and true principle, we first need to wrap our minds around that the word actually means. The word integrity does not mean perfection. Instead, the word integrity literally means to be whole and undivided. Integrity is a consistency between attitudes and actions. Integrity is a consistency between character and conduct. Integrity is a consistency between what we say and what we do. Integrity is a consistency between our public life and our private life. Integrity is a consistency in what we strive for and what we call others to strive for. Integrity is walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

Now a natural question that arises here is “Well Dave that sounds great, but how do I live a life of integrity? And how can I grow when it comes to living a life of integrity? In a section of this letter, we will see James reveal for us four different ways that we live lives of integrity as we live on mission. Tomorrow, we will see James reveals for us the first way…