Under Our Radar

I finally got around to writing this post. I’ve been putting off writing this post for a week now, and that is because I do not like the subject I am going to write about. I am going to write about pride, which took me a week to understand and now I think I understand it enough to write about it. To understand pride I had to understand what it exactly is, which in the easiest definition, pride is a sin. Pride I have found is the one sin that everyone commits, and everyone sees in other people but never in themselves. The proud man will say to his friend how proud someone else is, but never how proud they are. It is the humble man who admits his pride. That is one reason why pride is so dangerous; it has a way of going “under our radar”, and a way of finding its way into everyone’s lives. Even I have never taken a look at myself until I read “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, (it’s a very good book, I strongly recommend it). To explain what pride is it makes it easier to give a visual example, so the best possible example is the Pharisees. Jesus went on a rant against the Pharisees in His “7 woes” Matthew chapter 23. Verse 5 says “They do good things so that other people would see them”, the Pharisees didn’t live a righteous life to glorify God, they only wanted people to say respectable things about them. Verse 7 says “They love people to greet them with respect in the market places and love to have people call them ‘Teacher’” Jesus doesn’t like that, He says we have only one Teacher, and that is God and God alone. Verse 27 says “You are like tombs that are painted white. Outside they look fine, but inside they are full of bones of dead people and all kinds of unclean things.” The Pharisees were so consumed by their outward appearance that they neglected to take care of the inside. They were painted “white” with good deed, but their pride consumed them and they were rotten on the inside. The Pharisees thought they were good, they played by the rules, but they failed to understand what the rules were for, that they were guidelines for a relationship with God, and they enforced them on other people and were proud. But you know what Jesus has to say to pride people? Verse 33 “You are snakes! A family of poisonous snakes” Why does God hate pride so much? I mean what’s the deal here? It’s because pride is idol worship-it’s the worship of self. Pride takes God out of center stage and casts Him to the side, it’s a huge self promotion. When we are proud we worship ourselves, not God, in the proud man’s eyes he’s his own savior. Sadly we as a church do very little about it. There are no “proud men’s” or “proud women’s groups” sins of the spirit are just as real as the physical sins, and sometimes worse. What then is the cure? Humility, bowing down and submitting to God’s will, accepting the fact that we are not perfect, that we need God, and putting Him first is the cure. Pride was the devil’s sin, let’s not let it be ours.