Consider this message a public service announcement for you as you follow hard after Jesus.

I write this post as one who personally can attest to the content it contains from my own personal experience.    We’re going to talk about pride.  (Or, if you prefer to call it something else, whatever you call vain self-interest, narcissism, egomania, hubris, megalomania, pomposity, presumption, pretension, etc, ad infinitum.)

Following Jesus is not an easy commitment.  Christ himself says frequently that following him has consequences, some of which could be considered “costly.”  (Matthew 8:18-22; Luke 9:57-62; Luke 14:25-35)  All that is promised to those who follow Christ, beyond eternal life and forgiveness for sin, is a present world filled with difficulty.  In addition, as the passages linked above point out, people are frequently required to give up pieces of their life as part of following after Jesus, whether it’s money, friends, family or something else.   In other words, following Jesus requires sacrifice.

But is also requires something else:  humility.  No person who believed that they were truly capable of saving themselves would follow Jesus.  It wouldn’t be necessary.  No person who wanted to be powerful and rich in the worldly sense would follow Jesus:  He doesn’t promise that–and in fact, promises quite the contrary.   No person who was convinced they had access to the total truth of the universe apart from Jesus would follow Him–it wouldn’t make any sense.  So, if you’re following Jesus it’s because you know both your own need for a Savior (ostensibly because of your own sin) and because you’re confident that Jesus is able to save you from your sin and transform you into a person who will triumph over it.   You come to Jesus because you need Him.  He takes you on, and gives you the kind of life that He has.  Jesus’ life was characterized by humility, as were the lives of his earliest followers.  (Philippians 2:1-18)  This kind of humble life is therefore what you should expect.

When you receive Jesus, you come as you are, confessing your sins, including the ones you still habitually commit.  Jesus accepts you in your sin, but the expectation is that you will respond to the Holy Spirit and strive with God empowering you to overcome it.  It is a mockery of Christ’s sacrifice on your behalf to continue in your sin after you receive Christ and are forgiven for it.  (Romans 6:1-23) However, we are all, in at least one important sense, mockers.   Even the most sanctified people you know still have problems with sin.  It is the corruption of our flesh and our bodies which we inherit as part of being the children of a plundered creation.

In Genesis 3:1-24, we see that the serpent seduces the people through a temptation to wisdom.  Eve appears to be doing alright in her dealings with the clever serpent until she notes that the fruit of the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom.  In other words, pride kicked in.  The people looked at the forbidden tree, saw that the fruit looked good, and desired to be “like God, knowing good from evil.”  Unfortunately for the people, they got their wish fulfilled in a very different way than they thought:  they saw from the inside what evil looks like.    From that first sin to our time, sin works in the same way:  we see something that is desirable (and forbidden).  We take/do said thing.  And we bear in ourselves the due punishment for those sins including separation from God and earthly consequence, because sin is not good for us physically/mentally/emotionally either.   That is the state of affairs which led all of us to the cross of Jesus Christ to trust in Him for salvation.   So then, we cannot willfully, repeatedly and unrepentantly continue to sin once we know Christ’s salvation.   The Bible, as we noted, prohibits this is the strongest terms.  And because sin all boils down to pride (putting ourselves in the place of God or acting as though we were Him), that means the battle we all must fight is with pride.

We all know what pride looks like in others.  We see people blinded by their own ambition or conceit acting in ways that are obviously only for their own glorification or satisfaction.  The first trick in the battle against our own pride is to cease seeing it others and becoming painfully attuned to it in ourselves.  Reject the temptation to rail against the pride of others–it is a trap baiting you to become self-congratulatory about how good YOU are–which only causes pride to grow in you.   The first and most pressing place where you must deal with pride is in yourself.  The part of you that desires to be recognized, to be applauded, to have your own needs met before the needs of others–this is pride.  There is a 100% chance you struggle with it.  It is, unfortunately, one of the givens of human life on this planet.

There are essentially two sides of the pride coin.  The first side is the side we all readily acknowledge and can spot a mile away:  the person with the tendency to treat the world as if they were god–the only being that mattered.  People with this kind of pride spitefully use everything and everyone in the world as though other persons and things exist only for their own convenience.  This takes many forms, but nearly always  leads to resentment from others.  The second side of the pride coin is the more socially acceptable version where a person constant degrades themselves.  Though it might not seem like it, this is also pride.   There are two reasons why someone would degrade themselves constantly.  Option one is that they believe that by degrading themselves they will prove they are better than egomaniacs, which is really just pride through a different lens:  in both cases, the prideful person is setting themselves up as better or more important than others.   Option two is that people really believe what they are saying and that they are degrading themselves because they believe what they are saying (e.g. that they are worthless or valueless).   This is also self-possession, as it denies that all people are valuable as bearers of the image of God, and essentially makes the person’s own view of themselves more important than the objective and provable reality.

Humility, by contrast, is not thinking less of yourself.  It is thinking of yourself less (a turn of phrase for which I readily give C.S. Lewis credit).  In other words, if all pride is self-possession, humility is unselfish attention given continuously to others (and God).  It is also recognizing your own value as an image bearer but giving that value its proper place in the larger scheme of creation.  Humility always puts others first and tells the truth about the self.  Talented people can be confident in what God has given them (giftings, blessings, and otherwise) without ever succumbing to pride, so long as they remember the God who gave the gifts and the reason He has given them:  for the blessing of the larger world.  Pride ignores this mandate to be a blessing to the world and turns everything towards the self.  There is nothing less God-like (or if you prefer, less Jesus-like, and remember we are CHRISTians) than pride.

I beg of you as you read this that you drop to your knees and confess that you have areas of your life where you harbor prideful habits, thoughts and patterns.  If you are not aware of any such places, kneel and ask God to show you where such places are.  If you’re very brave, approach the people around you that you trust and ask them frankly if they think you have areas of your life in which you are prideful.  Be prepared, if you are serious and the friend trusts you not to freak out, to hear an answer you won’t like.  If you can’t bring yourself to really physically kneel down and pray (for some reason other than a physical malady), there may be a problem.  My advice to you if this is you is that you duck–the blow which is coming to humble you isn’t far off.   I have many Christian friends and acquaintances, and the number of people who have been humbled (some in horrifying and painful ways) is approaching 100%.  If you are truly following Christ and have never been humbled, your time is coming, so my advice to you is kneel or duck.   If you refuse to acknowledge that you are prideful (which by the way is always the first tell-tale sign that you’re a pride-a-holic), prepare to be knocked off of your mountain, as God always disciplines those He loves and cares for (Hebrews 12:1-12).   When you think you’ve been humbled as much as you can, remind yourself that there is another lesson just as far away as the point you forget that all sin is, in the end, the logical outcome of pride.

As you read this, save yourself a beating and kneel.  Or duck.  Seriously.   When life happens, most of the time it takes the form of prideful actions bearing the fruit of all sin:  death of one sort or another.  So in case of life, kneel.  You’ll be eternally glad you did.