And I, brothers and sisters, could not speak to you as spiritual people, but only as fleshly, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to consume it. But even now you are not yet able, -1 Corinthians 3:1-2 (NASB)

But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” –James 4:6 (NASB)

The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts. -Psalm 10:4 (NKJV)

How can I  Properly Praise You?

How do I properly praise you, my Lord?
Should I speak of your glory and power?
Brag that you who created the mighty ocean
Also created delicate flowers?
I could marvel at your timelessness
As the author of eternity,
But none of that speaks to my gratitude
For all that you’ve done for me.

How can I explain to everyone
Just how broken I was at the start?
Or demonstrate to anyone
The miracles you’ve done in my heart?
When I look back, to understand my path,
I see a loveless life in moratorium.
Then your love gave me the courage
To explore what I had always run from.

Day by day, and grace by grace
You made it safe to open up my mind.
But for the grace of your safety, Lord
I would have run from my fear and pride.
I am so grateful for your patience
As I learn how to give you my fears.
For, fear is a most stubborn opponent
One I have been fighting with for years.

We’ve also wrestled with my pride for years.
And that was just to learn what it is.
How many times have you heard me say,
“Oh, Lord, surely you don’t mean this?”
You have insisted that I give up all pride.
But with grace for my cries and grumbles.
Not once have I felt ashamed or forsaken
As you’ve taught me what it means to be humble.

It will always be a privilege to bow to you,
To honor your power, and sovereignty.
I will always have awe for your creations, Lord,
For each one reflects your majesty.
I feel wonder at this world you’ve created,
And gratitude for your Son, who set me free,
But, Lord, nothing compares to my gratitude 
For the miracles, you’ve performed in me.
Linda Troxell ©02/15/2022

Is it Pride or is it Humility?

One of the things I love the most about being a Christian is that it both demands and allows for growth. I wasn’t always so excited by growth. In fact, in the past, I avoided it as long as I could. Why? Because, I couldn’t help noticing that it tends to come at the end of a trial involving pain, fear, or both. For most of my life, I have run from all fear and pain.  

Learning how to be a Christian was designed to unfold as we grow in our Christian walk. God created the human mind, therefore, He understands how it works. He understands the limits of our ability to absorb new information quickly or to accept multiple changes in a short time frame. As humans, very few of us are comfortable with any change, let alone the fundamental changes required for sanctification. 

So, being gracious, clever and creative, God designed our growth in Christianity to be a wandering path rather than a short sprint to the finish line. We were justified to abide with God by Jesus’ work on the cross. However, we still need to be sanctified before we are holy enough to abide with God. God designed the path leading to sanctification to be a lifelong adventure.

He designed it that way because He knows that for us humans to do our best we need small amounts of information, spread out over time, and leading to small changes. It’s similar to what Paul said to the Corinthians about being infants in Christ. And I, brothers and sisters, could not speak to you as spiritual people, but only as fleshly, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to consume it. But even now you are not yet able, 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 (NASB)

In my walk with the Lord we have spent a lot of time working on my understanding of pride and humility. First I needed to learn what they are opposed to what I thought they were. Then, I needed to see how they applied to me. Because, until I accomplished that, I couldn’t begin to grow enough to take control of my own pride and humility.

Before we go on, I need to tell you some things about the next section. I will be discussing pride, sinful pride, the kind that separates us from God. It’s not the same kind of pride as we have in our children, in our work, or for winning an award. English limits our expression because it contains few words that express nuance. Take love for example, we have only one word to express our love for our grandma, our ice cream, and our God. When in fact, the kind of love we have for each is very different. In Greek there are 8 different words for love, each describes a different kind of love, romantic love, brotherly love, and Godly love, for example. But alas, not so in English

When speaking of sinful pride, it would make it easier to understand if we think of it as an attitude of arrogance, haughtiness, or superiority. These English words are probably a closer match for the original language word translated as pride in the Bible. Sinful pride comes from an attitude of lack and feelings of insecurity. It leads to envy, lies, distrust, hatred, and competition that separates us from our fellow humans and from God.   

The pride we have in our children, our work, or our achievements would be better expressed as joy or delight. When we speak of being proud of our children, we are essentially verbalizing our love for the child, the joy they bring us and our delight in having them. There is no sin in that. God gave us our children partly to bring us joy and delight. The same is true for our pride in our talents and achievements. God gave us talents and abilities to enable us to glorify Him and to experience joy, delight, and self-satisfaction.Please keep this all in mind as you read on.

Of course, this is a more complicated issue than can be discussed properly in this space. Please, if you have any questions, or want to know more about this topic, I urge you to pursue it with your pastor or read about it online. 

When I first learned that God loves humility and hates pride, I was comforted. Because, while I didn’t believe myself to have an excess of either pride or humility, I was sure I had more humility than pride. I knew that pride was distasteful, and I knew humility was considered better—after all, God loves it. But it seemed to be very limiting, so I didn’t see it as all that attractive.  But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” James 4:6

However, I believed I was more  humble than proud because I hated attention and I preferred to be invisible in groups of people. I didn’t like to talk about my achievements, and I was hesitant to share my creative work with others. I cannot tell you how much anxiety was involved in trying to rationalize my disobedience to God’s call to create this blog, before I gave in. So, because to me, these things seemed humble, I thought I simply couldn’t be proud. And, yes, I might as well confess, I felt pretty self-righteous about my humility. 

However, as God pushed me to learn more about pride and humility, I began to realize that my conception of each was way off. It wasn’t so much that my ideas were wrong, as they were woefully incomplete. Pride is so much more than simply being self-important. And humility goes far beyond a quiet and retiring nature. Ultimately, God would also teach me that I sorely mistaken about my own pride and humility.  

Learning to be humble is really important if we want to please God. But until we can control our pride, we simply cannot be consistently humble. Pride is an insidious and wiley foe because it worms its way into every part of our lives and distorts our thinking. Pride isn’t only being compelled to show no weakness or to ever admit to being wrong. That does come from pride, but as bad as that may seem, it is one of the less odious features of pride.

We have all heard, or perhaps even participated in debates about the ills of society and speculated about which is the most serious. Often that was followed by endless arguments about how to fix the problems. But I bet in that speculation, none of your ever guessed that the biggest threat in our world today, personally, spiritually, and societally, is pride.

Pride? Yes, pride. Pride is our worst problem as well as the most serious sin. In Proverbs there is a list of 7 sins that are most opposed to the holiness of God, and pride is first on the list. First because pride is at the root of all other sins. Without pride the other 6 deadly sins would not exist.These six things the LORD hates, Yes, seven are an abomination to Him:  A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, …. Proverbs 6:16-17  

It is not difficult to see how pride could be the root of the other sins. For, as C.S, Lewis said,  pride is “the essential vise, the utmost evil, the complete anti-God state of mind.”(Lewis, 1980, pp. 121-22). It is pride that made the devil oppose God to become the devil. 

We can look around our world and see every facet of pride in all of our institutions. Pride dominates politics, sports, business, religion, and more. And pride plays some role in all of the problems we see in those institutions. But we cannot let the pervasiveness of pride in the world allow us to overlook the fact that we all have some measure of pride ourselves. And because pride is insidious, we must recognize it and learn to control it. 

God hates pride because it separates Him from His people. The proud are so focused on themselves, they cannot focus on God. The proud believe they are better than others, as well as more important. From that position it is impossible to live the life God calls us to live. If we are always looking down on others, how can we look up to see God? God hates pride because pride is the most likely thing to separate us from God. The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts. Psalm 10:4

Many of you are thinking that although you may have some pride, it isn’t as serious as I make it out to be.  I used to think that too. And you may be right, it isn’t that serious… yet. But, pride is insidious, if left alone it will become that big. And consider this irony concerning pride, the bigger it grows and the more of our lives it infiltrates, the more unlikely we are to see it. We must find all pride in our lives Now! And we must remove it.

I thought my reluctance to share my achievements and creative projects with others was proof of my humility. Well, it wasn’t long before God set me straight on that point. He showed me just how little humility that involved. He showed me it was wholly motivated by pride. However, it took awhile for me to understand because it seemed counterintuitive. But, once it worked itself through my pride, it made perfect sense.

You see, what I thought was motivated by humility, was really hiding my light under a bushel to protect my pride. God gives us all abilities and talents we are to use to glorify Him. Holding back that which we create with those talents and abilities may seem humble, but it is actually blocking God. When we lose sight of who gave us our abilities and talents and we forget how He wants us to use them, it gives our pride an opening to hook up with the enemy and they begin to conspire against us. 

The enemy begins to whisper his lies in our ears, “If you share your newest poem they will ..…”, “Don’t tell them that you felt God’s guidance while writing, because ..…”  The enemy will tell us whatever will trigger our personal insecurities and then he sends in pride to seal the deal. Once pride enters the situation it erodes our trust in God and prevents us from sharing the fruits of His gifts.

I wasn’t refraining from talking about my achievements or sharing my talents because I was humble. No, in reality, it was because I was too proud to risk having my ego wounded. Sharing my talents and achievements would make me vulnerable to criticism. And my pride told me I could not survive criticism. I was allowing my fear to erode my trust in God and giving power to my pride. Before long, my fear became bigger than my desire to obey and glorify God. 

There was no humility in it, pride was definitely the driver of my behavior. As harsh as it may sound, by refusing to share what I created or accomplished with the gifts God gave me, I was rejecting God. And by refusing to accept myself, with joy and thanksgiving, as one of God’s creations, perfect exactly as He made me, I added insult to injury. All of this came from my pride, but this is definitely not the worst face of pride. 

Pride is so much bigger and more dangerous than this; much bigger and more dangerous than we can even understand. It is not hyperbole when I say, it is pride that is involved in every evil in our world. It makes sense that it would. Why? Because, pride is at the core feature of the enemy and the enemy is “the god of this world.” in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they will not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 2 Corinthians 4:4. 

God hates pride because He knows it is the essence of the enemy and that the enemy uses it to keep people from knowing His Son. God hates pride because it is destructive and it separates Him from His people. And we should hate pride too because pride makes it harder for us to hear God’s voice.

So, there we have a short glance at what pride is, and a small idea of what humility isn’t. 

We will talk about humility, but before getting into it, I have one more thing to make clear about pride. It’s important that we understand that very often we can’t find pride in the behavior because it’s in the motive for the behavior.  

Some behaviors are easily identified as pride driven. When someone needs help but refuses to accept it, for example, that’s clearly a function of pride. But it isn’t always so clear. For example, although I’ve shared that my behavior described above was a function of pride, the exact same behavior could come from humility. 

Because, the pride of my behavior was in my motive for the behavior. That’s also why it was difficult for me to understand it was prideful. If my motive for not sharing my achievements or talents was that it never occured to me that they might be helpful or of interest to others, it could be a different story. In that case, the behavior could well have been motivated by humility.

But I wanted to share what I wrote. Today, I believe that my desire to share was a prompt from God. Yet, I allowed my pride to get in the way of recognizing it as God. Because any of our behaviors can be driven by pride or by humility, it’s important that we search our own hearts to know which is motivating our behavior.  

Now, let’s look at humility. In a nutshell, humility is being free from pride and arrogance. It is the deep conviction and understanding that every human is of equal value; it’s the recognition that we are no more or less important than anyone else. 

However, humility is emphatically not, as some popular opinion has asserted, allowing oneself to be used or taken advantage of. It is not being a doormat. It is not humility to believe one is less important than others, it isn’t even Christian. If Christianity teaches us anything it teaches that we are all equally valuable in the Father’s eyes.

Jesus was the prototype of humility and He fought for his right to speak out. He spoke His truth when it was helpful to do so. He spoke His truth to those in authority when to do so pushed His agenda forward. Yet, He treated everyone with respect and honor. He was aware that judging someone’s behavior is very different from judging the person.

I’ve heard some say that given the outcome, Jesus was too humble and allowed Himself to be taken advantage of. I guess it could easily seem that way to someone who doesn’t understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, of course, those of us who do understand the gospel know the opposite is true. Jesus was in control of everything that came to pass. He drove the narrative, He acquiesced to His betrayal, and it all happened in His name and with His blessing.  

Being humble doesn’t mean always being silent. It means we don’t draw attention to ourselves to feed our ego. It means acknowledging that we are not always right and being able to say so when we’re wrong. Sometimes humility requires that we think of others before thinking of ourselves, and sometimes  it means attending to the needs of another person first. But it does not mean neglecting our own needs. Humility is not about being a martyr. 

Let me share with you a real life example of humility. You may have heard the popular C. S. Lewis quote, “Being humble does not mean thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”  It’s a great quote that makes the meaning of humility clear. And it is one of Lewis’ most popular quotes.

Only C.S. Lewis never said it, or wrote it. The quote is Rick Warren’s. You can find it in his  book, The Purpose Driven Life, Day 19, “Cultivating Community.” I am not relating this fact to set the record straight about the quote. For our purposes, that isn’t the important thing about this account. Warren should, indeed, get the credit. But, this blog won’t  be seen by enough readers to make a drop in that bucket. 

The important thing for our purpose is to know that Rick Warren, as far as I know, and I am familiar with his work, has never tried to set the record straight, has never taken credit for the quote, and has never made a fuss about the quote being assigned to someone else. 

This, then, is a picture of a humble man. Mr. Warren will not make a fuss that might overshadow the quote itself because he cares more about the quote helping others than he does about his ego’s need for recognition. Mr. Warren is that rare human being who is taking his own advice. He is thinking more about the quote being helpful to others, while thinking and caring less about his own ego. 

God has called His people to be humble from the beginning. For, only humility allows us to  love one another and take care of one another in the way God calls us to. We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves if we do not see others as being as important as ourselves. That, then, is the hallmark of humility. The sincere belief that we are no better or more deserving than our neighbors  He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8

What I couldn’t see when I was struggling with pride, is that my strong fear of being taken advantage of, as well as many of the behaviors that I believed were protecting me, from that, were themselves driven by pride. I was caught in a merry-go-round of pride with each revolution feeding the next.

There is no one characteristic that allows us to identify a person as either proud or humble. Most of us have characteristics and traits of both pride and humility. I’ve seen the most prideful person behave with great humility. And, yes, I’ve seen humble people display uncharacteristic pride. But as Christians, God asks us to work to rid ourselves of pride and to acquire humility. 

Like so many other things we strive for in our Christian walk, this isn’t easy.  Pride is generally an insidious flaw from which humans are rarely completely free, while humility is an elusive strength that humans seem to struggle to keep. 

So, how do we acquire humility? Going back to the wisdom of C.S. Lewis, he said, “…the first step, and it’s a really big one: First we must realize we are proud. Nothing whatsoever can be done toward humility until that step is completed.”  This may sound simplistic, and it is probably a bit sarcastic, nevertheless, it is true. We can do nothing about pride until we are humble enough to know we possess some amount of pride, identify it, and work with God to free ourselves from it. 

If we don’t identify our pride and what it is about, how will we know when we’ve overcome it? I suggest the first step is for us to ask God to point out the areas in which we are full of pride. Then ask Him to help us to let go of that pride. There may be another way, but if there is, I am not familiar with it.

Now, just one last warning for those going on this journey. Protect yourself from falling into the trap of false humility. Authentic humility is the result of a realistic self-appraisal, a fearless moral inventory undertaken using “sober judgment” and God’s grace. Its purpose is to find our flaws, yes, but not only our flaws. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. Romans 12:3

For our appraisal to be sensible and balanced it will need to look at both our flaws and our strengths. We must accept that we will find some good and some bad, for humans are a mix of good and bad. We can’t be afraid to come face to face with some faults, in fact, we should expect to. What’s important is that we give neither more or less weight to our faults or our strengths but that we weigh both honestly and realistically. And, it is important that we take an assessment periodically for a few reasons.

As humans we are only able to take in so much information, especially discouraging information, at one time. If we bring God with us He will not allow us to look at more than we can handle. So, it is inevitable that we will need more than one session to assess it all. If we are allowing God to help, of course, we will make progress. So, we will need periodic assessments to see our achievements. We will also need ongoing balanced assessment to stay aware of the changes that are also inevitable, be they strengths or faults.

If a self-assessment is unbalanced, if all misdeeds are weighted as unforgivable sins, and every flaw becomes testimony of the complete hopelessness of the person, then that person ends up feeling totally unfit, helpless to change, too fragile to try, and just thoroughly depleted. They can easily feel they have no choice but to invest in looking humble rather than in actually becoming humble. Beware of the trap of false humility.

Let’s Pray:

Lord, none of us is perfect, nor do you expect that of us. But we all need to look closely at ourselves and assess our levels of pride and where they are hiding. That is frightening. After all, one of the things that makes us vulnerable to pride is our fear of being wholly and irreparably flawed. But, Lord, if we trust you to come with us, you will not allow us to become overwhelmed. You know just how much we can take at one time and you will not allow us to see more than that. We need to remember that You will always be right beside us as we take a fearless moral inventory of our wrongs. Lord, pride makes it harder for us to hear your voice and it puts a chasm between us. So, we need to let go of it. And the only way to do that is to trust you to protect us for the enemy and from ourselves. So we are asking you now, Lord, please take our hands and hold on tight, for we trust you to keep us safe. 
We pray this in the holy name of Christ Jesus, Amen!

Points for Pondering or for Prayer
Or
Perhaps for Putting Pen to Paper

1. Many people have been confused by the term pride. It can be difficult to understand when it’s a sin and when it’s not. Were you aware that there is more than one kind of pride, one sinful and one not?
   
2. If you were aware, write a line or two about when you came to know this and how. 
   
3. If you were not aware there are different kinds of pride, did this cause a roadblock in your ability to identify the sinful pride and rid yourself of it? If so, write a bit about how. If not, write a bit about why not.
   
4. Have you ever struggled with being afraid to share your talents or abilities with others because of what they might say or think? Write a few lines about what that looked like in your life.
   
5. If you answered yes, were you aware it might be a function of your pride? Or, did you think, as I did, that it was actually humility?  Write a few lines about it either way.