In a recent post reflecting on the beginning of 2010, Ray Ortlund made this statement: “2010 might be your year of release. It might be mine. One year from today, we might be with the Lord. Better by far.” He then asked some questions that would help us think about if we were ready or how we may stay ready. The final statement and question centers on purity; “Five, let’s die in purity. Is the blessing of God more savory to us than the pleasures of the body?” I would like to exchange the word purity with the word holiness; lets die in holiness. Over the next few days I want to present the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (Pride, Envy, Anger, Covetousness, Gluttony, Lust, and Sloth) as a way of practically examining our lives in order to develop some spiritual new year resolutions. Today is the topic of pride.
This is probably one of the root sins of humanity. In the garden, Adam and Eve were not willing to take God’s word as enough. Their pride and self-centeredness caused them to exchange the truth of God for a lie. They exchanged the authority of God for the authority of the Devil (Eve believed the ‘crafty one’ more than she believed God making his word authoritative). Pride is even more challenging for young men. In the account of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 we read the following: “But when they heard it, they went away one by one beginning with the older ones…” This statement is the response of the men to Jesus statement; “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”. The older ones were quicker to realize how sinful they all were. The younger ones, being more prideful, took longer to come to the realization that they too were sinners. Pride is a young man’s battle.
In Elements of the Spiritual Life, F.P. Harton gives a clear definition of pride:
It (pride) is exhibited in all forms of self-sufficiency and exaggerated ideas of one’s own virtue, abilities or importance; in contempt for others; in looking at things and acting from the point of view of oneself, one’s own comfort or advancement; the desire always to be thought well of, always to be the center of attraction, to be constantly waited on and considered; confidence in the inerrancy of one’s own judgment and opinion; the desire to impose one’s own will upon others.
Pride takes the form in many ways. Sometimes it is clearly seen in the narcissistic person who is utterly concerned with only the well being of themselves. Sometimes it is clearly seen in the vanity of oneself. But there are a few subtler forms of pride, ambition and presumption.
According to Harton, “ambition is the inordinate love of honours, dignities, and authority over others”, while presumption is the “desire for things which are too high for us”. This last one, presumption is a danger in a instant gratification driven world. We want to be experts before we can even be called amateurs. This presumption includes the spiritual and intellectual realms:
a penchant for the more showy virtue and a strong distaste for hidden ones, the desire to be a mystic before one has begun to master the foundation virtues of the spiritual life; intellectually by an airy omniscience on all subjects especially the most difficult.
To some degree, this sin is going to be noticeable in all of us, and the cure (or treatment) for this capital sin is humility. Humility is not self-debasing comments. That is the disguise for pride and is considered false humility. Humility is not stating things that you think you are bad at; it is being honest about your whole person; “humility consists in seeing oneself truly, as one is in the sight of God, nothing more nor less, realizing that one’s whole being, with whatever is good in it, is God’s though defiled by one’s own sin…”
The cry of the humble heart: “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” – Luke 18:13
