Living With Integrity and Forgiveness

I am in the midst of reading an autobiography titled Man From Macedonia: My Life of Service, Struggle, Faith, and Hope by Rev. Aaron Johnson with Deb Cleveland. I came across the book through a preacher friend whose wife is Aaron Johnson’s co-author.

Aaron Johnson is a sharecropper’s son from North Carolina who gave his life to Christ as a teenager, studied for ministry, and became involved in the civil rights movement under the tutelage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He advised North Carolina governors and served as state corrections secretary while pastoring a Baptist church. His book takes the reader to the front lines of the fight for civil and human rights in our country over the last fifty years, showing us “how human hatred and fear smells, sounds and feels-and how it feels to empower others with hope and trust.” It is a fascinating story of one man who has made a difference in our world.

I have long enjoyed reading biography and hearing the stories of great people’s lives — a few of those stories have even made their way into my sermons. As Charles Swindoll, one of our day’s great preachers, writes, “Who isn’t inspired by a man or woman who exerts phenomenal and beneficial influence? Who can read about someone’s courage to stand alone with single-minded vision amidst a slippery ever-eroding culture, and not want to emulate such a life?

This summer, I want to examine with you one of the great lives that we read about in the Bible — the life of Joseph. He modeled a life that anyone would consider great, doing so under difficult circumstances. His story occupies more space in Genesis that any other single individual, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His life is worth examining.

Joseph was loved to a fault by his father, hated by brothers who sold him into slavery, falsely accused of attacking his employer’s wife and put in prison. In the midst of all the mistreatment, he learned to let God work through him and rose, as Swindoll puts it, “above the all-too-common reactions of rage, resentment, and revenge.” He learned “to overlook unfair offenses, to overcome enormous obstacles, and model a virtue that is fast becoming lost in our hostile age—forgiveness.”

Aaron Johnson rose above hatred and fear in the South, just as Joseph rose above it in Egypt. We need to hear such stories, so I encourage you to look closely with me into the life of Joseph this summer. In a day when you can barely read the news without mention of another leader who has “lied,” we need to learn integrity and forgiveness from a man who modeled integrity and learned to live with forgiveness.