I had written this article for my first Trumpet submission, but after today's small group (where Pastor Jae taught a bible study on pride and ego) I thought I should add this article to my blog...
The root of all evil is Pride, the exact opposite of Humility. “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind” [CS Lewis, Mere Christianity]. My prideful mindset was unconsciously satanic and it was the main reason why I (and many others) could not accept or get closer to the God. I stuck proudly to postmodern worldviews, defended moral relativism, and refused to dig deeper in to these philosophical meanings. I proudly believed in pure logic, failed to see the actual source of logic, created delusions that everything must be proven, and attempted to solve the mystery of God. Even when I tasted a drip of God’s wisdom and grace, I suddenly began to act righteous, compared myself with others, became more judgmental, and failed to understand that the core of Christianity is humility. I proudly thought (rather than just executing) of performing righteous acts, pointed fingers when others did not behave the way I believe we ought to, instead of completing erasing myself from all equations so comparisons could never be drawn. It’s understandable that nonbelievers would be prideful, as this world preaches competitiveness and the “survival of the fittest” is the way to live. However, It’s truly mind boggling how having faith in the Lord can make people become such prideful beings, especially when God is asking us to “kill” ourselves and to fix our eyes only to Him. “It is a terrible thing that the worst of all vices can smuggle itself in to the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell” [CS Lewis, Mere Christianity]. From my experience and meditations, I’ve drawn the below conclusions of pride, but hope to continue to discover how this cancerous vice makes people (including myself) delusional, and forces our thought process to be outside in.
1. Pride is based on competition in nature, as man can only feel Prideful when comparing himself to another. The form may be different and subtle for everyone- wealth, looks, cleverness, etc. And if everyone were exactly the same, Pride would not exist. But, as we all know, we live in a world that stirs Pride as our first instinctive, humanistic, delusional nature. This does not give us excuse to barricade ourselves from practicing the Truth- Love and Humility. We can easily tell how Prideful we are by seeing how much we hate it or how much we fight it. Think how much you hate it when someone brags about their large bank account or when someone talks “smack” towards you. In the absence of Pride, you would think that person is actually just plain silly, and would not feel any type of disgust at all (some may even play along). However, Satan works in deceiving ways. We hate it when others are Prideful because we immediate calculate how righteous we are compared to them, which is all a delusion, as no one is purely righteous. Although Satan persistently uses this vice, God has blessed us with a sword to fight the battle- Humility. I strongly feel that Humility is just as contagious as Pride, as one cannot continue being Prideful if the other is openly accepting all the blows- the Prideful man will quickly be able to see his own Pride in the presence of true Humility and will feel immediately foolish to continue. For example, when friends wrestle/fight (even for play), because of its competitive nature, as a winner and a loser will mostly likely be drawn, Pride will be stirred in both parties. If just one of the men chooses not to wrestle/fight, there would be none, and better yet, there would be no loser. The feeling of superiority would not be accomplished. I’m not saying to give up when someone challenges you. That’s not the point. Since you know the emotion of superiority is inevitable, the entire act in general should be avoided- mainly because you should care about the other person.
2. Pride also leads people to be self-centered. Instead of orbiting around God and our neighbors, we, due to our insecurities, grab the wheel and force the orbit to spin around ourselves. Naturally, it prohibits us from loving others because “everything is about me”. If we could only shun our prideful mindset, stop thinking about ourselves for once, and orbit around God and our neighbors, we would realize true freedom- freedom to forgive, freedom to serve, and freedom to love. Only when we stop orbiting around ourselves can we actually love another literally as ourselves. Don’t we always forgive ourselves for our own idiotic acts? We should be able to do exactly the same for all our neighbors (Criminals, Muslims, Atheists, etc), as we are all created in God’s image and to judge, we’d be essentially be attempting to play God. You can say it’s idealistic, but I say this is what it’s meant to be. We just lack discipline and are weak- becoming disciplined is a whole another topic.
“When we discern Jesus moving forward us and encircling us with an infinite, self-giving love, we are invited to put our lives on a whole new foundation. We can make him the new center of our lives and stop trying to be our own Savior and Lord. We can accept both his challenge to recognize ourselves as sinners in need of his salvation, and his renewing love as the new basis of our identity. Then we don’t need to prove ourselves to others. We won’t need to use others to bolster our fragile sense of pride and self-worth. And we will be enabled to move out toward others as Jesus has moved toward us” [Tim Keller, Reason for God]
3. Pride is a tricky vice. It’s used to crush other smaller vices and Satan laughs at us! “Be the bigger man and just say you’re sorry”, I remember saying. Obviously I didn’t realize I was falling in to one of His tricks again. He makes us believe we are performing the righteous act, but gives us cancer instead, as we quickly begin to clap ourselves on the back and collect our Pride. However, the more we become delusional, collect, and build on this vice, the harder it becomes to let ourselves go and see the Truth. Even when God blesses us with wisdom, it comes soaked with pride, and must be handled carefully. No matter the amount of wisdom gained, if a man judges another (and it’s easy because as Christians we believe we know what other men do not), he has underestimated the depth and breadth of God’s wisdom. For God’s wisdom is endless and no matter how much we strive, although we ought to, we will only merely eat crumbs of His wisdom. It’s like a child bragging to another child that he can ride a bicycle, while the other child is still on tricycles. As adults, we know this is silly, especially because the former child is bragging about his skills on a bicycle while there are incredible people that fly airplanes! These humanistic urges should be contained and we should constantly be in a struggle, as Satan relentlessly plays tricks on our minds and makes us think, “I’m being humble”, when we actually are, which immediately creates pride- pride at our own humility. CS Lewis describes how Satan speaks to his minions, to trick men even when they are attempting to be humble:
“By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible” [CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]
I end with this last quote, which is my favorite:
“How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men” [CS Lewis, Mere Christianity]
No comments:
Post a Comment