Pride

Anyone who has listened to what God has to say on the subject of pride is aware that His perspective is completely alien to our own. Our wisdom has sayings such as "Keep your head up" and " They can take everything from you but your pride". A merely human view equates pride with a love of one's self and sees it as an essential foundation of loving others. However, without God, acts of loving and giving become choices to be weighed in the balances. Without God, our first priority is always ourselves. Without God, our own needs always outweigh our available resourses, therefore the needs of others get left behind.

Anger and resentment are the harvest of a world of neediness. In this enviroment of brutal competition, pride is a defense mechanism. It is how I tell myself that I am better than you. It is why I see myself as more worthy and deserving of your love and devotion than you are worthy and deserving of mine. Pride is my wall of protection around my pain and vulnerability so I can keep you from robbing me of my resources. Pride's operational dysfunction is it's isolationist agenda.

Such a worldview sees God at the top of the heap of evildoers, who by virtue of a strength greater than our own, makes arrogant demands of us. Unfortunately, when we chose to shut God out , we imprison ourselves in an abject poverty of existence, in a living death. A natural mind cannot, on its own, comprehend the principals of the realities of God. Him who's heart is a fortress of pride will not yield to love in the face of all the persuasions at the disposal of diety.

This is the reality of who God is, that He made Himself into nothing and took on the form of a servant, the form of a man. As a man, he was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross! (Phil 2:8,9) This is the mind of Christ, that when he gave a demonstration how we are to treat each other, he washed the feet of his disciples! This is the way He works, when he informed His disciples that the one who wants to be first in His kingdom must be the servant of all the others, as Jesus Himself is.

God says that He mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble. (Proverbs 3:34) If He allows us to reap the bitter harvest of pride while we yet draw breath, then He will be assisting us to open our eyes to our lifeless condition so we may approach Him with humility (to learn from Him). Perhaps He might grant us a glimpse of the depthless value of this love that He offers us! Perhaps we might learn to imitate this inexhaustible fountainhead of love and humility.