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Posts Tagged ‘pride’

FREE OF PRIDE

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 26, 2015| Leave a Comment »

 
He had dropped out of church when he didn’t agree with a building project that was being planned. After his wife died, however, he found himself wishing he had never left; his loneliness was almost more than he could bear. But would he have the courage to swallow his pride and go back to church? Finally he did, and his only regret was that he hadn’t done it sooner.
 
Maybe this reminds you of a situation in your life. Do you need to swallow your pride? Do you need to apologize or admit you were wrong about something? Do you need to work to restore your relationship with a brother or sister in Christ–especially if you were the one at fault? Or, like this person, do you need to get back into a fellowship of believers?
 
If so, confess your pride and seek God’s wisdom and strength for the future. Let go of your pride–and then patiently wait to see how God will work to restore and change your heart and your life.
 
Ecclesiastes 7:8    Patience is better than pride.
 
 
 
MIchael & Alison Smitherman
The Singing Net Surfers
 
 
 
When we face our pride and confess it, our pride loses its power over us. So today, let us face our pride honestly, confess it and repent. Then, that which we need so much will be available to us, and will be good for us.
 
Facing down pride,
 
Z gardener

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THE POISON OF PRIDE

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »

The pride that God loathes is not a healthy self-respect or a legitimate sense of personal dignity. It is the haughty, undue self-esteem out of all proportion to our actual worth. It is the repugnant egotism that is repulsive to both man and God. It is that revolting conceit which swaggers before men and struts in the presence of the Almighty. And God detests it.
 
Pride may take various forms. Spiritual pride trusts in one’s own virtue rather than in the grace of God. Intellectual pride gives its possessor self-confidence rather than God-confidence. Pride in material things enthrones self and displaces God; secondary things are exalted to the place of first importance. Social pride manifests itself in arrogance and status. All forms of pride emanate from the haughty human heart, and pride is the sin that God detests most.
 
What can you do about it? Confess your pride. Humble yourself in the sight of God. Look then at Christ, who “humbled himself and became obedient to death–even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:8).
 
Proverbs 16:5 – The Lord detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished.
 
  Michael & Alison Smitherman
The Singing NetSurfers
I will sing to my Lord as long as I live, I will sing
praise to my God while I have my being.
 
 
Sin springs from the false sense of separation; separation from God and from others. The particular sin of pride takes this false sense of separation to its worst manifestation. In pride, we not only falsely separate ourselves from God and others, but we perceive ourselves as superior to God or others. It is the gateway sin to all other sins. It is the original sin that caused us to be cast out of Eden. 
 
However, the gate to Eden was reopened by Christ’s sacrifice and we can live in the garden again. To live there, we must overcome our pride and turn our lives and our priorities over to God. We must see through the false illusion of our sense of separateness, and accept that we are God’s children, indivisible and eternally connected.
 
Then we can live in harmony with true reality as one of God’s children, no better or worse than any other. Then we can see the true picture of our selves in our world. Then the garden appears and we can claim all the hope, joy, love and peace that God put in this garden for our best good.
 
Coming together right now,
 
Z gardener

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On Confusion And Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modem resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counselors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.
 
We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog’, ‘my servant’, ‘my wife’, ‘my father’, ‘my master’ and ‘my country’, to ‘my God’. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots’, the ‘my’ 
of ownership.
 
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
Brothers and sisters, do not let yourselves be confused by the false illusion of possession. It is the child of the false illusion of separation. It too, is no thing and represents only the absence of unity and communion. It is false in any sense or true meaning. One may think they own their boots, but to whom will the boots belong when the current “owner” leaves this plane?
 
Unconfused,
Z gardener

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More On Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?’ The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. 
 
Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature— while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. 
 
Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. . . . . Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
And now we get to the kernel of truth that underlies what Lewis calls “the center of Christian morals”  and “that by which the devil became the devil”…pride. The competitive nature of pride is based on the false illusion of separation, the results of which are known as sin. To be “better than someone else” we must first succumb to the lie that we are separate from the other person. As we learned in America, and as stated by the Supreme Court, separate is inherently unequal. It is not only the law, but also our faith upon which that law is based, that describes sin as the false notion of separation from God and others.
 
So, the false perception of separation leads to the sin of pride, the greatest of sins, the gateway sin, the sin which blinds us to the light and subjects us to the dark, the absence, the no thing. Today Father, let us remove the blinding scales of false separation and pride from our eyes, so we can see all things by the true light and see clearly the Eden that is waiting here for us.
 
Seeing clearly,
Z gardener

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