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Think of Yourself Less
Think of Yourself Less
A Shape-Shifting Sin
Pride deserves to die, but it is hard to spot and even harder to kill. Pride is a
slippery sin because it is a shape-shifter. Jonathan Edwards said pride is “the most
hidden, secret, and deceitful of all sins.” Let me give you an example. Here is a
conversation that I might have with myself after a meeting at church:
“That meeting went really well. I think the turning point might have been when I
asked that question which no one had thought to ask before. Wait a minute! That was
such a prideful thought. It sounds like I am taking credit for the meeting going well. I
am such a prideful person. I hate my pride.”
“Humility is fundamentally a form of self-
forgetfulness as opposed to pride’s self-
fixation.”
Meanwhile three seconds later, “I fight pride pretty hard. I’m glad that I caught that
initial prideful thought. I wonder if other people are as aware of their pride and fight
it as hard as I do. Wait a minute! It just happened again. I am taking pride in my
awareness of pride. O, deliver me from this body of death, Lord Jesus! Thank you
God that you give us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
You can fall into self-exaltation (takes credit for success) and self-promotion (put
those successes in other peoples faces so they will give us credit for them). But pride
can shift into the shape of self-degradation and self-demotion when we beat
ourselves up for our failures. We are still obsessed with ourselves. In the first form,
we are obsessed with our successes; in the second, we are obsessed with our
failures.
Maybe some of this will make more sense if we talk about what real humility is. As
C.S. Lewis said, true humility is “not thinking less of ourselves, but thinking of
ourselves less.” We can spend a lot of time thinking less of ourselves but we only end
up thinking a lot about ourselves. The problem of pride does not boil down to
whether we think high thoughts or low thoughts about ourselves but that we think
lots of thoughts about ourselves.
Humility is fundamentally a form of self-forgetfulness as opposed to pride’s self-
fixation. Humility can set you free because when you think about yourself less you
are free to think about Christ more. Humility puts us on the path of grace; pride puts
us on the path of opposition. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble
(James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5).
The collision between the glory of God and the pride of man has two possible crash
sites: hell or the cross. In other words, either we will pay for our sins in hell or Christ
will pay for our sins on the cross. Hell is like an eternal crash site and crime scene. It
is a horror movie in which there are no closing credits because it never ends.
God opposes pride actively and hates it passionately, which means that pride is
spiritual suicide. The reason is simple. Pride is on a collision course with God
himself and the date is set. “For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud
and lofty, against all that is lifted up — and it shall be brought low” (Isaiah 2:12). All
must be torn down so that one thing alone may be left standing. “The Lord alone will
be exalted in that day” (Isaiah 2:11). The Bible calls it the day of the Lord.