Let me define what I mean by integrity. Webster’s tells us integrity means “an unimpaired condition.”¹ It means to be sound. The Hebrew word for integrity, tom, also means to be complete or solid.

Integrity is completeness or soundness. You have integrity if you complete a job even when no one is looking. You have integrity if you keep your word even when no one checks up on you. You have integrity if you keep your promises. Integrity means the absence of duplicity and is the opposite of hypocrisy. If you are a person of integrity, you will do what you say. What you declare, you will do your best to be. Integrity also includes financial accountability, personal reliability, and private purity.

Integrity is rock-like. It won’t crack when it has to stand alone, and it won’t crumble though the pressure mounts. The words of Louis Adamic seem fitting, “There is a certain blend of courage, integrity, character and principle which has no satisfactory dictionary name but has been called different things at different times in different countries. Our American name for it is ‘guts.’”²

I like that. Integrity is having the guts to tell the truth, even if it may hurt to do so. Integrity is having the guts to be honest, even though cheating may bring about a better grade. Integrity is having the guts to quote sources rather than to plagiarize.

But there are some things integrity is not. It is not perfection. A person with integrity does not live a life absolutely free of mistakes. No one does. But one with integrity quickly acknowledges his failures and doesn’t hide the wrong.

When you walk in integrity, you leave it as a legacy for others to follow.  It’s what I call the thumbprint. Blessed are you if you had a father with integrity and a mother with guts or vice versa

“It is hard to think of any job in which the moral element is lacking. The skill of the dentist is wholly irrelevant if he is unprincipled and irresponsible. There is little, in that case, to keep him from extracting teeth unnecessarily, because the patient is usually in a helpless situation. It is easy to see the harm that can be done by an unprincipled lawyer. Indeed, such a man is far more dangerous if he is skilled than if he is not skilled”.³.

Do you work with numbers? Do you sell clothes? Are you a student?   Perhaps you practice law or medicine. The important thing is not what work you do, but whether you do your work with integrity. Perhaps you labor behind the scenes, and your only thanks is the inner satisfaction of a job done right. Do you cheat on your exams?  Are you cheating on your mate?  Do you lie to a friend?

You want to shock the world? Start here demonstrating the guts to do what’s right when no one is looking. It takes real guts to stand strong with integrity in a culture weakened by hypocrisy. Start today.

1. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. See “integrity.”
2. Louis Adamic, A Study in Courage, 1944, as quoted by John Bartlett in Familiar Quotations, 13th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., n.d.), 981.
3. Elton Trueblood, as quoted by Charles R. Swindoll in Leadership: Influence That Inspires (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1985), 35.

Taken from Charles R. Swindoll, “A Battle for Integrity,” Insights (March 2003): 1-2. Copyright © 2003, Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

A Battle for Integrity
by Charles R. Swindoll