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The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride

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Pride
First mes­sage in the series The Seven Deadly Sins
Length: 40:17
Size: 14 MB
For­mat MP3
Speaker: Glen Davis — 1/26/2005

I begin this mes­sage by read­ing some excerpts from the very illu­mi­nat­ing op-ed piece “The Low­down On High Self-Esteem by Dr. Roy Baumeis­ter. The full thing is worth reading.

Also, here’s this week’s hand­out:

Pride: A Sin-opsis
The Sin Clus­ter: Pride, Self-Absorption, Self-Centeredness, Con­ceit, Hubris, Arro­gance, Haugh­ti­ness
The Virtues They Dis­tort: Con­fi­dence, Humil­ity, Sat­is­fac­tion, Self-Awareness
Bib­li­cal Sto­ries About:

  • Satan: pride started him down the road to ruin (Eze 28:11–19, Isa 14:12–17)
  • Adam & Eve: they wanted to define moral­ity for them­selves (Gen 3:1–24)
  • Absa­lom: van­ity was his down­fall (2 Sam 14:25–26; 2 Sam 18:9)
  • Neb­uchad­nezzer: was warned by God yet still fell vic­tim (Daniel 4:24–37)
  • Uzziah: thought he could wor­ship God what­ever way he wanted (2 Chron 26:16–19)

Accord­ing to the Bible, Pride

  • deceives us—Jer 49:16
  • causes conflict—Prov 13:10
  • pre­vents us from grow­ing wise—Prov 8:13
  • leads us to destruction—Prov 16:18; Prov 29:23
  • is opposed to faith—Hab 2:4–5 , Rom 3:27
  • is opposed to God—1 John 2:16
  • is judged harshly—Isa 23:9, Zeph 3:11
  • is stupid—Isa 10:15
  • ignores that God gives us the very abil­i­ties which we boast of—Deut 8:17–20
  • is a fail­ure to keep God in focus—Deut 8:11–16, Hos 13:4–7, Jer 9:23–24, 1 Cor 1:26–31

Some ques­tions
What about Gala­tians 6:3–5?

What does humil­ity actu­ally look like?

How can I tell if I’m suc­cumb­ing to pride?

And finally, here are some of the quo­ta­tions I shared last night.

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893)

The true way to be hum­ble is not to stoop till thou art smaller than thy­self, but to stand at thy real height against some higher nature that will show thee what the real small­ness of thy great­ness is.

The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis

Per­fect humil­ity dis­penses with modesty.

G.K. Chester­ton

With the removal of all ques­tion of merit or pay­ment, the soul is sud­denly released for incred­i­ble adven­tures and rewards. If we ask an ordi­nary per­son how much he mer­its, he becomes hes­i­tant and instinc­tively mod­est. It is doubt­ful whether he mer­its six feet of earth.

But if we ask him what he’ll take or what he’s capa­ble of enjoying–the sky’s the limit. This gay humil­ity, this hold­ing of our­selves lightly and yet ready for an end­less string of unmer­ited rewards, is the secret of humil­ity, a secret that is almost too sim­ple to grasp. In fact humil­ity is so advan­ta­geous and prac­ti­cal a virtue that peo­ple sus­pect it must be a vice…

Humil­ity is mis­taken for a vice all the more eas­ily because it gen­er­ally goes with a cer­tain sim­ple love of splen­dour which amounts to van­ity. Humil­ity will always, by pref­er­ence, go clad in scar­let and gold; pride is that which refuses to let gold and scar­let impress it or please it too much.

And I closed by read­ing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozy­man­dias.