The Potency of Pride and God's Merciful Warnings

To understand more of God's perspective on pride, we continue from this little chapter in C.J. Mahaney's book "True Humility":

"Jonathan Edwards called pride 'the worst viper that is in the heart and the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ'; he ranked pride as the most difficult sin to root out, and 'the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts.' Despite this thorough understanding of its ugliness, Edwards himself constantly battled his own pride (a fact which gives me hope, knowing I'm not alone in this struggle). 'What a foolish, silly, miserable, blind, deceived poor worm am I, when pride works', Edwards once wrote. In his sermons and in his vast writings he constantly warned against pride, especially spiritual pride, which he viewed as the greatest cause of the premature ending of the Great Awakening, the revival that had brought so much spiritual vitality to the church in Edwards's day. Pride also undemines unity and can ultimately divide a church. Show me a church where there's division, where there's quarreling, and I'll show you a church where there's pride. Pride also brings down leaders. 'Pride ruins pastors and churches more than any other thing,' Mike Renihan has written. 'It is more insidious in the church than radon in the home.' When you read about the next public figure to fall, remember Proverbs 16:18 - 'pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.' That person's situation might appear circumstantially complicated, but at root it's not complicated: Pride goes before a fall."

God's Merciful Warnings
"The Warnings from Scripture about pride could not be more serious and sobering. And they're an expression of God's mercy, intended for our good. God is merciful to warn us in this way. He's merciful in this act of revealing this sin to our hearts and in identifying its seriousness and potential consequences. He is merciful, and He intends to protect us. So throughout His Word, God exposes pride as our greatest enemy. By unmasking pride - as well as introducing us to humility, our greatest friend - God is laying out for us the path to true greatness, a path that we see most clearly in our Savior's life and death."

May we walk that path together as we follow Christ!

(Well, I am heading for Virginia Beach for a week's vacation...but I will be sharing a few more "odds and ends" things about the issue of pride being our "greatest enemy" and humility being our "greatest friend" in the next week or so)

I hope I wet your appetite enough for this great little book by C.J Mahaney that you may pick up a copy for yourself and read through it.

God is opposed to the proud!

So, it has been made clear to us that God hates pride and why He hates pride!

Now, let us ask ourselves: what do we hate?

Let's join C.J. Mahaney again on this subject:

"I'll tell you what I hate. I've got two lists. One is a silly list that begins with foods that I sometimes think must be products of the Fall. I detest meatloaf (remember this is C.J speaking, not me...I love meatloaf...ok, back to C.J.). I loathe sauerkraut. And I hate cottage cheese. I even hate it when anyone eats cottage cheese in my presence; it ruins my appetite. I also despise any and all professional sports teams from New York City - that's simply part of my heritage, being born and raised in the Washington DC area. That's just the beginning, a little sampling of my silly list of things I hate. But I also have a serious list of things I hate. I'm sure you have one, too.
I hate abortion. I hate child abuse. I hate racism. What do you hate? You and I hate nothing to the degree that God hates pride. His hatred for pride is pure, and His hatred is holy. John Calvin wrote, 'God cannot bear with seeing His glory appropriated by the creature in even the smallest degree, so intolerable to Him is the sacrilegious arrogance of those who, by praising themselves, obscure His glory as far as they can.' And because God cannot bear with this arrogance, He reveals Himself in Scripture as actively opposed to pride. Actively!!
'God opposes the proud (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5).' Opposes in this statement is an active, present-tense verb, showing us that God's opposition to pride is an immediate and constant activity. The proud will not indefinitely escape discipline."

We will stop here for today...but let's keep this thought in our minds - God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. It is a very rare thing indeed for God's Word to speak of God's dispostion with us as "resisting" or "opposed"...and the thing that puts God in this posture is PRIDE!!

Let us be a humble people who know what it is to have God's grace at work in our lives!