This morning’s word is The Power of a Simple Yes.
The anchor verses are Proverbs 11:25 and Proverbs 3:5-6.
There is a moment in every life when a simple choice becomes a turning point. For a restaurant owner in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, named Sak Yiengjuntuek, it came while he was cleaning out an old cabinet the previous owner had left behind. Inside a sunglasses case he found twelve thousand dollars in cash. In that instant he had a choice. He could keep it, and no one would ever know. Or he could try to find the man it belonged to. He did not hesitate. The first thing on his mind, he said, was to find the right person to get the money back to.
So he tracked the previous owner down. And when he reached him, he learned something that turned a simple act of honesty into a lifeline. The man was battling cancer, buried under medical bills. That twelve thousand dollars was his own money, left behind and forgotten, coming back to him at the exact moment he needed it most. He was almost crying on the phone. What looked like a small decision to return some cash had become hope handed back to a man who was running out of it.
This is the power of integrity. Not the grand gestures that make headlines, but the quiet, private choices that say, I believe in something bigger than what I can get away with. Sak did not have to make that call. He could have kept the money, justified it, or simply looked the other way. Instead he chose to do what was right. And in doing so, he showed something that runs straight through the heart of Scripture. Integrity is not about what we do when people are watching. It is who we are when no one is.
The Scriptures are plain about this. A generous person will prosper, the proverb says, and whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. That is not a promise of money for good behavior. It is a deeper kind of prosperity, the kind that does not depend on your bank account. It is what happens inside a person who chooses, again and again, to do the right thing even when it costs them. Something is built in you that no one can take away.
His choice was never really about the money. It was about the trust it built and the hope it restored. It was about looking at a man’s need and deciding, I will do right by you, even though you would never have known if I had not. That is the kind of integrity that changes a life. Not a feeling. A decision, made when it would have been easy to choose otherwise.
And integrity is not always easy. There are days when it feels like the world rewards the opposite, when the ones who cut corners and look the other way seem to be the ones getting ahead. But integrity was never about the immediate reward. It is about trust. Trust in the LORD with all your heart, Scripture says, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to HIM, and HE will make your paths straight. That is a call to do what is right and to leave the outcome in GOD’s hands, even when doing right makes no earthly sense in the moment.
Sak did not know how it would turn out, or whether anyone would even hear the story. He simply trusted that returning the money was right, and he did it. That is the thing about integrity. The smallest, quietest act of it can carry more weight than we will ever see.
Because when we choose integrity, it does not stop with us. That money was not just cash to the man who received it. It was a reminder that there are still people in this world who do the right thing when no one is watching. And that reminder travels. The man will carry it the rest of his life. The people who heard the story carry it now. One quiet choice becomes a ripple that reaches people the one who made it will never meet.
This is how GOD writes HIS story of redemption, one honest choice at a time. Not through the powerful or the famous, but through ordinary people who decide, where no one is looking, to do what is right. You will have a moment like that, maybe today. A small chance to be honest when dishonesty would be easier, to do right by someone who would never know the difference. Take it. GOD sees what happens in the room where no one else is looking, and nothing done in HIS name is ever wasted.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.