Pride
Pride is a manifestation of the sin nature, which is full of self and in conflict with God (Proverbs 16:5).
A few examples of pride are arrogance, haughtiness, grandeur, pompousness, loftiness, boastfulness, jealousy, and self-righteousness.
Satan’s modus operandi of pride resulted in his fall. Thinking independently of God is imposing our will over God’s will, and it resulted in Satan’s downfall.
Notice Satan’s five “I will” statements in Isaiah 14:13–14 (see also Ezekiel 28:17). Man’s nature is the same; man wants his own way. Even in infancy, the sin nature manifests itself by crying to get one’s way.
We will struggle all the days of our lives with our sin nature—with ourselves as our own worst enemy. We all turn to our own way, away from God (Isaiah 53:6). Our way seems right to us, yet apart from Christ, our way continually leads away from God.
C. S. Lewis argued in 1943 that mere knowledge of right and wrong is powerless against man’s appetites.
Instant self-gratification is the pursuit of pleasure, possessions, and power. These thought patterns are the inevitable result of the wholesale evisceration of morals, values, “self-evident truths,” and the standards by which we received our freedom and heritage.
Right and wrong are moral absolutes, but in the 21st century they are often viewed as hang-ups that supposedly find healing in the pleasures of life rather than in the treasures of God found in Christ and the Word of God. Relativism has deceived the masses into believing in personal freedom without old-fashioned restraints.
Our society lives in an upside-down world. Untruth has become truth. Adultery, promiscuity, perversion, and other sins have become merely old-fashioned words for today’s “enjoyable pleasures.” Today, many young people fear disease more than the judgment of God.
Driven by the pursuit of pleasure, many become miserable. Instant gratification offers only temporary enjoyment through endless pursuit. Many addicts, after temporarily stopping the endless cycle of drugs, sex, and alcohol, have found both relief and amazement upon realizing the very pleasures they pursued were destroying them as they traveled down the road of despair.
The search is deceptive—so enjoyable, yet so miserable; so subtle, yet so empty. Endless pleasures cannot fill the void in the soul where Christ belongs. That void can only be filled by the Savior, not by the search, nor by the pleasures of life in the devil’s world.
Boasting of one’s deeds in self-righteousness is like hiring a trumpeter to announce one’s good works—perhaps even television crews to record them. There is almost nothing more irksome than the trumpet of self-congratulation.
We seek political solutions for our moral failures. We turn to government for answers and provision. We have denied the power of God in favor of the power of government, and this will contribute to the downfall of freedom.
Realizing the depravity of human nature, we must accept our own hopelessness apart from the Savior Jesus Christ. Only then can we, by faith, see the reality of life in Christ.
For the unsaved, destruction is at the end of the road. Swallow your pride and believe in Christ (John 3:36; Acts 16:31).