Why Cheaters Think It's Ok To Cheat
One of the nation’s biggest news stories last week involved a college admissions scam that included several high-profile people, including at least two Hollywood actresses. A California man, Rick Singer, spearheaded a scheme to bribe coaches and administrators at such colleges as Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, USC, and other prestigious universities. The bribes bought these privileged High School students extra time to take the SAT and ACT, make fake athletic profiles, and substitutes to take their entrance exams for them. This has proven embarrassing for both the colleges and those breaching this most basic of ethical codes (via Foxnews.com, Madeline Farber).
Someone observed that there is a bit of irony and hypocrisy in all of this. We feel outraged at this glaring lack of honesty and ethics, but students who attend these (and other) universities have been taught for decades that there is no such thing as absolute truth and an objective standard of right and wrong. Should we really be surprised when people live out the implications of their world view? Remove a measurable, immutable standard, and anything goes!
Then there's the Bible, which lays down an ethical code that is universal and logical. Its rules are blind to nationality, economic status, gender, or age. And it shows no favoritism, leveling the playing field by placing greater expectations on those who have more (see Luke 12:48).
Our challenge is to live lives of consistency, showing forth the benefits that come from respecting and adhering to God’s standards. Jesus calls such modeling “salt” and “light" (Matthew 5:13-16).
We cannot keep others from being cheaters and liars, but we can show them a powerful alternative!
Honesty Pays!
A customer who ate at Randy’s Southside Diner in Grand Junction unluckily left $3,000 in a bank envelope at his booth. Fortunately, his busboy was Johnny Duckworth. Johnny gave it to his boss, who through the ATM bank slip in the envelope was able to track down the rightful owner. That unnamed person gave Johnny a $300 tip, but strangers started a “gofundme” page for the struggling Duckworth and have raised nearly $4000 for the young man. In an interview, he said he did not for a moment consider keeping the money, adding, “I work for a living.”
You’ve not likely had honesty pay so well for you. At least not financially. But, as the proverbial adage goes, “honesty does pay.” How?
- In reputation. Honestly builds businesses, friendships, leadership, and the like, when people have implicit confidence in your word (cf. Proverbs 14:25).
- In relationships. People trust you and are closer to you when you are honest with them. The opposite is true, too, that people keep their emotional distance from you if you are dishonest (Ephesians 4:25).
- In righteousness. Your character is built through dedication to unconditional truthfulness (Proverbs 12:17).
- In reliability. Who will people come to, lean on, and go to? The honest. They know where they stand with such a one (Proverbs 12:19).
- In respect. While you may fear hurting feelings and alienating others through courageous honesty, you gain the admiration of most through transparency and scrupulous speech and behavior (1 Kings 22:13-14).
Sadly, doing the right thing was once routine, but now it merits newsworthiness. May the tribe of Johnny Duckworths increase. When we as Christians are renowned for our kind honesty, we will draw a world in search of goodness and trustworthiness to the One who “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).
Ford vs. Cadilliac
Martin Luther King, in his speech Three Dimensions of a Complete Life, recalls the challenge of taking a statistics course in college:
Statistics can be very complicated. You’ve got to have a mathematical mind, a real knowledge of geometry, and you’ve got to know how to find the mean, the mode, and the median. I never will forget. I took this course and I had a fellow classmate who could just work that stuff out, you know. And he could do his homework in about an hour. We would often go to the lab or the workshop, and he would just work it out in about an hour, and it was over for him. And I was trying to do what he was doing; I was trying to do mine in an hour. And the more I tried to do it in an hour, the more I was flunking out in the course. And I had to come to a very hard conclusion. I had to sit down and say, "Now, Martin Luther King, Leif Cane has a better mind than you." (That’s right)
Sometimes you have to acknowledge that. (That’s right) And I had to say to myself, "Now, he may be able to do it in an hour, but it takes me two or three hours to do it." I was not willing to accept myself. I was not willing to accept my tools and my limitations. (Yeah)
But you know in life we’re called upon to do this. A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford will accept itself as a Ford, (All right) it can do many things that a Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. laughter And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs. (Yes) Moses says in "Green Pastures," "Lord, I ain’t much, but I is all I got." laughter The principle of self-acceptance is a basic principle in life.
Dr. King makes the following application:
My sister is a generous giver. You would be amazed on the things she has brought my children, me, Sherry and others. You would be amazed at how much she gives to the church. She is a Cadillac and I am a Ford. I can’t out give her, I don’t have that gift, and I am not going to try or pretend that I can. I know where I am specially gifted and I know how generous God has called me to be and I am alright with that.
It’s not wrong not to give everything you have. It’s not wrong to hang onto your property, to hang onto your house. That’s a choice God allows you to make. The Lord has given us richly all things to enjoy. It’s just wrong to lie; to pretend that you are something when you are not.
"Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God's grace" (2 Corinthians 1:12).