Destroy Your Pride

Your Pride is your enemy.

Your Pride is what cancer wants to be when it grows up.

When we even *think* we detect signs of cancer in our bodies, we go into a panic. We go to our physicians and permit them to do all manner of things to our bodies in a seek and destroy mission to strip it from us. We will even ingest poisons and toxins which ravage our bodies, with agonizing repetitiveness, for the mere hope of removing it successfully.

Why won't we make war like this upon our pride, which is as thorough a bringer of Death as all the forms of cancer known to man?

Because pride has had the benefit of good public relations for literally thousands of years, and has by that facade had the luxury of delivering defiant death to souls with the efficiency of the most silent of assassins.

Aristotle, for example, said of it, "Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them." The philosophy he championed declares that one in fact needs pride just to live. They say it is the pillar that supports one's mind. They say that one can not rely on their own ability to make rational judgment without it.

To espouse this (and every major civilization from the time of the Greek Empire to now has this at its foundation) effectively separates God from His creation by telling them that it must depend upon and therefore provide ample sustenance to its pride, and so does not require God to sustain it; it is its own life source. It says that without pride you can neither trust your own judgment nor your ability to possess any other virtue... or even survive.

It says, in a nutshell, that pride is our *needed* friend, and without it we will die.

A blatant substitute for God, wrapped in the bait of Self Empowerment and Self Entitlement, barbed with the hook of being left to pay for the wages of sin. A deception worthy of the Father of Lies.

We who would follow Jesus must be aware of the existence of that most powerful of inner parasites, that deadly cancer, pride, in our lives.

• Pride will make us depend upon our own cleverness rather than on YHWH who made every living thing.
• Pride will not permit us to see the truth of our sin through the gauze it spreads over the eyes of its infected host. 
• Pride cuts off the flow of Living Water, and will not permit a man to accept the hard truth about himself, nor confess his wrongdoing, nor seek the grace and mercy of God for deliverance from it. 
• Pride's only purpose is in blinding the host it feeds upon long enough to bear them both to eternal death.To succeed in that effort, the parasite must avoid at all costs allowing the host it feeds upon to recognize it as an Enemy, and thereby do what is necessary to be in right relationship with YHWH, allowing the Living Water to eradicate all traces of it from the body. Pride will make a man stand in the face of the onrushing tide of judgment and let it destroy him and everyone who clings to him.

No one exemplifies the total acceptance of worship of pride as Satan. This embracing of pride as a god will end in everlasting fire for him; all that power, complete commitment to his course, all his corrupted wisdom, is bent upon succeeding where he knows he is doomed to fail, and the truth in no way alters his course... and he was Lucifer, the mightiest angel ever made.

How metastasized must mankind's pride have become to go on deceiving itself and refusing to fear God and give glory to Him? A sound question, especially considering how dimetrically opposed to that philosophy, upon which the system of things is built, the Word of God is regarding pride. The warnings against it are stark.

Do not take my word for it. Here are but a fraction of what God's Word says, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face, of this thing Aristotle called a virtue necessary to live;

• "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall." Proverbs 16:18
• "When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom." Proverbs 11:2
• " 'The terror you inspire and the pride of your heart have deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks, who occupy the heights of the hill. Though you build your nest as high as the eagle's, from there I will bring you down," declares the LORD.' " Jeremiah 49:16
• "We have heard of Moab's pride--her overweening pride and conceit, her pride and her insolence--but her boasts are empty." Isaiah 16:6.
• " I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze." Leviticus 26:19
• "This is what the LORD says: 'In the same way I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem." Jeremiah 13:9
• "The LORD Almighty planned it, to bring low the pride of all glory and to humble all who are renowned on the earth." Isaiah 23:9
• "On that day you will not be put to shame for all the wrongs you have done to me, because I will remove from this city those who rejoice in their pride. Never again will you be haughty on my holy hill." Zephaniah 3:11
• "For God does speak--now one way, now another--though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride," Job 33: 14-17.

Where in the Word does it suggest that pride is anything other than a thing we are to a) be completely free of if we want to live, and b)a thing to be replaced by humility?


We must not allow the parasite of pride to attach itself to the host of our soul and take it inexorably down the wide, well trodden path. We must allow the Lord to set us free to take the narrow, seldom trodden path. 


We must, or we will die.


Give your pride to God and allow Him to remove that barbed hook from your mouth, and free you from it forever. It is an ongoing process that takes getting daily nourishment from God's Word, obeying what is written within it, and humbling yourself to accept the truth of Jesus and His unspeakable gift of ransoming us by paying the wage of *our* sin. Deny yourself and all that goes with that denial, including your very pride, take up your cross, and follow Him.


Amen