In preparation for a dinner party, a woman stopped by a small butcher’s shop to buy meat for the meal. She had decided to stuff and roast a chicken as the main course. When she asked the man at the counter for the largest chicken he had, he reached into the cold-storage compartment, grabbed the last chicken he had, and placed it on the scale. ‘This one weighs four pounds, madam,’ he said. The woman thought for a moment and then said, ‘I’m not sure that will be enough. Don’t you have a bigger one?’ The attendant put the chicken back into the compartment, pretended to search through the melting ice for another bird, and then brought out the same chicken. This time when he weighed it on the scale, he discreetly applied some finger pressure to the scale. ‘Ah,’ he said with a smile, ‘this one weighs six pounds.’ The woman frowned, and making some mental calculations, brightened as she said, ‘I’m just not sure. I’ll tell you what – wrap them both up for me!’ There is no doubt about it, ‘honesty is the best policy’. And that is so in this life, and the life to come. Concerning this life, the Bible says, ‘People with integrity walk safely, but those who follow crooked paths will be exposed.’ And here is what the Bible says about the life which is to come: ‘Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts’ (1 Corinthians 4:5 NKJV).

© 2024. Written by Bob and Debby Gass. Used by permission under licence from UCB International.