Worlds Apart
December 4, 2005
These past few weeks at church, there seems to have been one main topic of discussion for the sermons. Pride. One point the pastor brought up last week is that so many Christians live an amazing Christian life. They don’t drink, smoke, worship idols, don’t view internet porn and the list goes on. He was talking about how much easier it is to not do those things than it is to clean the pride out of your heart. In fact, many Christians are so proud of the fact that they are able to resist temptation the pride consumes them. They are full of spiritual pride.
I don’t know about anyone else, but this is something I truly struggle with. I don’t necessarily struggle with the spiritual pride, but other forms of pride. Of course, some of this pride is healthy, but other times, it is not. My pride keeps me arguing with someone when they don’t agree with me. My pride convinces me I am a better mother than other women who might choose to do things I don’t always agree with. My pride causes me to look in the mirror everyday and wish with all of my might that those dang stretch marks would disappear. Never mind the beautiful blessing that caused those stretch marks, I want those suckers gone! My pride has even been known to cause me to take a stance opposite of what I believe, just to save face. When I go to my hometown, I am always hoping to run into people that made my life especially difficult in high school. Not because I want to speak blessing upon those people, but because I want them to see how much better my life is than theirs! Obviously, my pride has interfered with my ability to forgive those who have truly scarred me. Forget that the hardship I endured because of those individuals allowed God to mold me into a better person and I should really be thankful. I could go on forever about how ridiculous and selfish my pride has made me, and it is high time to get rid of it.
This morning, during worship, the worship team sang a song and had posted the lyrics on the projector. Today, these words really touched me and I wanted to share them with everyone. I have owned the CD this song is on for ages, but had never really meditated on the lyrics until today, because I had never actually read them. The link below goes to these lyrics and I would encourage anyone in need of a good humbling or anyone feeling broken to give them a read.
http://www.christianrocklyrics.com/jarsofclay/worldsapart.php
Posted in Family
December 4th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
I’ll be damned if that does not cross my mind every single time I enter my hometown too.
This topic has been popping up around our neck of the woods lately too. I just got finished reading earlier this week in Mere Christianity Lewis’s take on pride and it echoed you thoughts above. In the chapter entitled “The Great Sin“, he describes the vice of pride as the first and worst sin that all of morality centers around. He also describes that the humble person is not “always telling you that, of course, he is nobody,” but he/she will seem “a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him” and that he will seem to enjoy life a little too easy because “he will not be thinking about being humble at all: he will not be thinking about himself at all“