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A Lifestyle of Integrity (Scholarship Essay)

Last Updated: June 14, 2021

Covenant Eyes awards thousands of scholarship dollars each year to students who demonstrate integrity. This year, we’re doing it again! Check out the application information and pass it along to a student you know or apply for the scholarship today.

The essays below were written by one of the previous year’s winners.


In 2-3 paragraphs, please explain how you use Covenant Eyes, and how it has impacted your life.

For the past eight years, Covenant Eyes has been an investment that has reaped bountiful rewards in my Christian walk. The open accountability enabled by this amazing service has truly been life changing and reliable. While filters and restrictions are beneficial, placing yourself under the auspices of a personal mentor or godly peer may be the strongest advantage that Covenant Eyes offers. It has been for me.

Having lived for two years caught in a losing battle with the lust that so catastrophically grips today’s Internet users, God brought me to humbly seek accountability from a mentor. My friend recommended that I install Covenant Eyes on my computer. I am ever so grateful that he did. By God’s grace, I have been able to walk free of the bondage that shackled my eyes and mind. I have been given a gift in brothers who will call me and ask hard question to discern my heart motives. I have been enabled to engage in a technological generation without needlessly affording opportunity to the pitfalls that it produces.

Today I use Covenant Eyes Internet Accountability on my Mac and iPhone. It is a safeguard for genuineness and integrity. Covenant Eyes does not remove lust, take away the struggle, or do the Christian walk for me. However, it has been the biggest step in transforming a losing fight into a victorious lifestyle.

Part of the Covenant Eyes mission is to equip men and women to live lives of integrity, to assist people in their commitment to set no worthless thing before their eyes. In your academic, social, and spiritual pursuits, describe how you strive to demonstrate a life of integrity.

Covenant Eyes, at its core, comes to the aid of people committed to living lives free from the entanglement of the flesh within and the world’s sensuality without. They desire to enable a lifestyle of integrity, which encompasses all life’s pursuits. For my walk with Christ, I desire to be transformed toward His likeness in all areas of my life.

As an “older” student at a Christian college, I often have the opportunity to pour into guys who have life questions and struggles. I fully believe that Christ has forgiven my past sins and erased my transgressions, having nailed them to the cross. For this reason, I can talk freely about my past struggles to those who may be in a similar place. I am not ashamed when someone sees the filter on my computer. In fact, I recommend it as an invaluable tool for online integrity. The college years are, for many, a time to make one’s faith his or her own, and Covenant Eyes is a great way to take ownership of living out what you believe.

In addition to the commitment to not place worthless things before our eyes, I believe that Scripture calls us corporately, and me personally, to the higher standard of the heart. Paul instructs Timothy to treat the young women in his church as sisters under Christ with all purity. Pornography serves to dehumanize people–to impersonalize “intimacy.” God calls us to just the opposite. Within my social structure, I am to see people as persons, near and dear to the heart of God, and honor them in brotherly affection. I am to love my wife in Christlikeness, not in self-seeking or self-gratifying ways. Integrity of the heart in relationships comes from seeing people through God’s perspective.

I am passionate about godly leadership in our churches, ministries, and mission fields. This is the reason I am back in college. I desire to be equipped to minister to the core of their hidden and hurting hearts. I long to see a holy transparency amongst our leaders. Integrity is foundational. For my own heart, calling others to walk in a life of integrity requires that I first live in like manner. Integrity in relationships may be doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. Integrity in my spiritual walk, however, means that I confess, or agree with God, about what He already sees and knows–to make a choice to do right, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and to act upon it.

I often wondered how David could pray that God repay him according to the integrity of his heart. Yet truly he set an example in his prayer that I desire to emulate in my daily spiritual walk: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me” (Psalm 119:23-24).


Are you or someone you know in college? Check out the Covenant Eyes Scholarship and pass along the information to a student you know or apply for the scholarship today. Applications are due May 31, 2017.

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