The Folly Of Pride

I have been thinking a lot recently about the difference between pride and humility.  We have been hearing sermon after sermon about renewal, and they all involve men who humbled themselves under God.

Just this past Sunday we heard of Nehemiah humbling himself by recognizing his own brokenness and God’s awesomeness.  This is humility – to see ourselves and God correctly.  The reverse is pride.  Pride is believing a lie about ourselves and God.  It is seeing ourselves as something greater than we are and God as something less than He is.

When we exert humility we are imitating Jesus who humbled Himself even to the point of death (Philemon 2:5-11).  The harsh truth for us, though, is that we often exert pride and thereby imitate Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44).  For non-believers they can do nothing but imitate Satan.  Christians, however, have a choice, yet we often find ourselves in prideful opposition toward God!

Pride is our problem that we must repent of daily.  We see this in our opinions of ourselves.  Every person walking around thinks their own thoughts about God and life are the correct thoughts.  We constantly question God’s Word, and often we disagree with God completely which is shown by our disobedience.

We are in a poor and wretched state (Romans 7:24)!  Yet, God still loves us (Romans 5:8)!  He is patient with us (Psalms 145:8; 2 Peter 3:9).  He cares for us and longs to transform us to the image of His Son, the humble one (1 Peter 5:7; Romans 8:29).  And as we heard this past Sunday from Daniel, “Restoration will end with us feasting with Jesus!”  There is a great hope for us!  We will see Jesus and be made like Him (Philemon 3:20-21; 1 Jn 3:2).

Let us praise God for His humility!  Let us also recognize our problem, Sojourn, and cling to Jesus with all we have!