Integrity When No One Is Watching

Cover Article

by Michael Jones · Week of July 12, 2026

Imagine a tree growing deep in a forest where no human eye ever falls. No one applauds when it stretches toward the light. Yet it grows, steady, silent, true, because that is what a tree was made to do. The person of integrity is like that tree. “The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity” (Proverbs 11:3). The Hebrew word for integrity, tom, means wholeness, being undivided. God is looking for people who are the same in the dark as in the spotlight. “Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out” (Proverbs 10:9). There is deep safety in being whole. You never have to keep your stories straight, because you only have one story, the true one. Jesus said, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). Give in secret, pray in secret, fast in secret, “and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). The person becoming more like Christ is not the one building a public reputation; it is the one quietly becoming whole on the inside, where only God can see.

Daniel is one of the finest portraits of integrity in Scripture. When King Darius needed someone to oversee his kingdom, Daniel stood out: “Daniel so distinguished himself among the administrators and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom” (Daniel 6:3). His enemies searched for corruption and found none: “he was trustworthy; he was neither corrupt nor negligent” (Daniel 6:4). When they conspired to trap him through a law forbidding prayer, Daniel did not flinch. He opened his window toward Jerusalem and prayed “just as he had done before” (Daniel 6:10). He did not pray louder to make a point. He simply continued being who he had always been, the quiet refusal to become someone else when the pressure mounts. It cost him a night in a den of lions, yet God “sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions” (Daniel 6:22). The Lord does not forget those who trust Him in the dark.

We live in an age that rewards performance. Social media coaxes us to curate highlight reels, and before long we manage multiple versions of ourselves: one for the office, one for church, one for close friends. The result is exhaustion, the opposite of wholeness. But becoming like Christ means allowing God to fuse every compartment of your life into one. Paul urged, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters” (Colossians 3:23). When your audience is God alone, the performance stops and transformation begins. David captured this longing: “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4). When God’s face is the one you are trying to please, every lesser audience fades. “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts” (Psalm 139:23–24). That prayer is the beginning of integrity, an invitation for the God who already sees everything to transform what He finds.

When we gather as the Lord’s church, integrity is the oxygen of our fellowship. We sing, “speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19). We partake of the Lord’s Supper on the first day of every week (Acts 20:7), remembering the One whose life was perfectly whole, the same on the cross as in the carpenter’s shop. We are called to be living proof that the gospel works, not by projecting perfection but by letting “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16), shaping us from the inside out. So this week, ask the hardest question: Who am I when the door is closed? Bring those gaps to God. He already sees them, and He is not shocked; He is ready to heal. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The God who sees in secret is also the God who restores in secret. Trust Him with the real you. That is where Christ makes you whole. - MJ

Other congregations are welcome to reprint this. It may be reproduced in another congregation’s bulletin or newsletter without asking permission. An acknowledgement of Orange View Church of Christ is appreciated but not required.

Bible Questions & Answers

What is speaking in tongues, and does it still happen today?

This is a question that comes up frequently, especially when believers encounter other traditions that emphasize miraculous gifts. It deserves a careful, text-driven answer. The first thing to establish is what tongues actually were. At Pentecost, Luke records that the apostles “were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2:4). The Greek word glossais is the ordinary word for languages. The crowd was amazed because they heard the apostles “declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues,” in their own native languages (Acts 2:11). Parthians heard Parthian, Medes heard Median, and so on through the nations Luke lists (Acts 2:9–11). These were not ecstatic utterances; they were real, recognizable human languages spoken by men who had never learned them. The gift served a confirmatory purpose: it was a sign to unbelievers (1 Corinthians 14:22) and confirmed the apostles’ message as divinely authoritative. The writer of Hebrews notes that God bore witness “by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will” (Hebrews 2:4).

In 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, Paul addresses tongues in the Corinthian assembly. He affirms the gift was genuine but insists on strict guidelines: no more than two or three speakers, each in turn, and only if an interpreter is present (1 Corinthians 14:27–28). Without interpretation, the speaker must “keep quiet in the church” (14:28). Paul ranks tongues below prophecy because prophecy edifies the whole body while uninterpreted tongues edify only the speaker (14:4–5). He reminds them, “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (14:33). Yet Paul also points forward to a time when these gifts would end. This is the crucial text: “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears” (1 Corinthians 13:8–10). The Greek word for “completeness” or “the perfect” is to teleion, meaning that which is complete, mature, or finished.

What is “the perfect” that Paul anticipates? In context, Paul contrasts partial revelation, “we know in part and we prophesy in part,” with something complete that would replace it. Tongues, prophecy, and the word of knowledge were vehicles of piecemeal revelation during the apostolic age, before the New Testament was fully written and collected. When God’s revelation was completed in Scripture, the partial means of delivering it were no longer necessary. James calls God’s word “the perfect law that gives freedom” (James 1:25), using the same root word, teleion. The apostles laid the foundation of the church (Ephesians 2:20), and once a foundation is laid, you do not keep laying it. Paul himself recognized this trajectory: miraculous gifts were “the signs of a true apostle” (2 Corinthians 12:12), tied to the apostolic office. As the apostles passed from the scene and the canon was completed, the miraculous gifts that confirmed their message fulfilled their purpose and ceased. The church was no longer in its infancy; it now possessed “everything we need for a godly life” through the knowledge of Christ in Scripture (2 Peter 1:3).

None of this diminishes the Holy Spirit’s work among us today. The Spirit is powerfully active, but He works through the completed word, the gospel that is “the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). He convicts through Scripture (John 16:8; Hebrews 4:12), indwells every baptized believer (Acts 2:38; Romans 8:9), and produces fruit in our lives: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). The Spirit’s fruit is not less impressive than tongues; it is more so, because it reflects the daily transformation of a soul into the likeness of Christ. God gave those early believers what they needed to launch the gospel into the world, and He has given us what we need to carry it forward: His complete, sufficient word and the indwelling presence of His Spirit. Our calling remains what it has always been: to preach Christ, to call people to repentance, to baptize them into His death for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38; Romans 6:3–4), and to walk faithfully by His revealed truth. That is the Spirit’s work in us today, and it is more than enough. - MJ