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Tuesday, April 05

People with integrity walk safely, but those who follow crooked paths will be exposed. – Proverbs 10:9 NIV

I would like to share with you a beautiful story that I heard many years ago. It is the story of a young lady attending a liberal American college where she was taking a course on persuasive speech. Part of the final exam required that the students pick a subject and speak about it in front of the class. The class would be responsible for grading the work followed by some Q&A time. The teacher admonished the students prior to selecting a subject, to refrain from choosing topics related to religion or politics as these were controversial subjects and often made it impossible to persuade the audience.

This particular student could not have picked a more controversial subject; she chose to speak to her liberal audience about her opposition to abortion. When she finished speaking, not only did she fail at persuading her audience, she managed to galvanize the students against her. The students bombarded her with questions that seemed more like an attack against her as opposed to a question and answer session. This all came to an end when one classmate angrily asked her the following checkmate question: “You mean to tell me that if a man raped you, you would not abort the child”? Without saying a word, the young lady walked back to her seat, opened her purse, grabbed her wallet, and pulled out a photograph. She held the photograph up for the entire class to see. It was a picture of a beautiful baby girl. While holding up the picture, she went on the say: “this is my daughter and I decided to keep her in spite of the fact that I was raped”.

The young lady was awarded high marks by her fellow students despite the fact that she failed at persuading anyone concerning her position. Her high marks were not the result of eloquent words or statistical data. Her high marks resulted from her deeply held belief. Her high marks were the result of her words matching up with her actions; this was a person who walked the talk and talked the walk. It was a her credibility that afforded her those high marks.

The main ingredient in moral authority is credibility. There is positional authority and moral authority. Positional authority grants you power because of your title, rank, or status. Then there is moral authority where there is no title, rank, or socioeconomic status as these can never give you moral authority. Moral authority is the result of a person doing what they say and saying what they do; it is the result of a person who possesses credibility.