Proverbs 6:16-17, “**These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: a proud look …”
Introduction
God has a plan for your life. God is perfect. Therefore, His plan is perfect.
It is impossible for you with your sin nature to execute the plan of God for your life. Therefore, God has provided through His grace a way for you to execute His plan, purpose, and will during your lifetime.
Whenever a Christian fails in executing the plan of God for his life, sinful pride is the primary reason and motivating cause.
Pride is the basic mental attitude sin. As you will see in this study, sinful pride or arrogance precedes and supports all of the sinful mental attitudes the sin nature produces.
Satan was the first creature guilty of pride. His motivation of pride is found in one line of Isa. 14:14, “I will make myself like the Most High God.” The original sin of pride is amplified in the following passage.
Ezek. 28:14-17
A Description of Sinful Pride
Pride is a lofty self-respect totally apart from reality. It is high esteem of oneself from some imagined or real superiority.
Pride is the antithesis of grace. The believer who is arrogant is totally blind to the grace of God.
Pride is synonymous with vanity, which is empty pride in regard to one’s person, attainments, or possessions coupled with an excessive desire to be noticed, a lust for attention, lust for approval or praise from others.
Pride is the pomposity of vain glory. It is supercilious and haughty contempt of others.
Pride supports a whole array of sins, such as jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, implacability, revenge motivation, revenge tactics, self pity, conceit, inordinate ambition and competition, slander, gossip and maligning.
Pride is a mental attitude sin which overflows into the motivation, decision making and activity of the individual. Pride includes several different concepts.
Egotism. This is an excessive preoccupation with self and must be distinguished from ego, which is self consciousness and is perfectly normal.
Vanity. This is self admiration and an excessive desire to be admired by others. Hence, vanity is easily flattered and patronized.
Conceit. This is exaggerated estimate of one’s abilities and attainments.
Pride is defined in terms of the sin of jealousy in
James 3:14-16,“But if you have bitter jealousy and inordinate ambition in your heart, stop being arrogant, and stop lying against the truth. This pseudo wisdom is not that which comes from above, but is earthly, natural, and demonic. For where jealousy and inordinate ambition exist there is disorder and every evil deed.”
Prov. 13:10, “Through pride comes strife, but wisdom is with those who receive instruction.”
**1 Pet. 5:5, “**Likewise you younger men be subject to the elder , and all of you cloth yourselves with humility toward one another. `For God makes war against the arrogant, but He gives grace to the humble.’ Therefore, humble yourselves under the powerful hand of God, that He may promote you at the proper time.”
Application
If God does not promote you, you are not promoted.
God promotes men and women of who have absorbed the word of God.
God promotes humble or grace oriented people.
Promotion is a matter of doctrinal inculcation and grace-orientation.
Promotion is a matter of glorifying God through the execution of the plan of God for the believer in the church age.
Promoted believers are the invisible heroes of the church age.
2 Tim. 3:2-7“For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, slanderers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without virtue love, malicious gossips, without self control, brutal, not lovers of God, treacherous, thoughtless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but having denied its power, in fact, avoid such persons as these. And among them are those who creep into households and captivates silly women who are loaded down with sins and lead on by their multifarious lusts, always learning but never able to come to metabolized knowledge of the truth.”
The Arrogance of Nations Brings Them Under Divine Discipline
Lev. 26:19, “And I will break down the pride of your power. And I will make your sky like iron and your land like bronze.”
Isa. 9:8-9, “The Lord sends a message against Jacob and it falls on Israel. And all the people know it, that is, Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria, who spoke with pride and pride of heart.”
Ezek. 7:10, “Behold, the day is coming. Your doom has gone forth. The rod of discipline has budded because pride has blossomed.”
The Effects of Pride
The arrogant person rejects authority.
Pride motivates emotional sins, such as: fear, worry, anxiety, hatred, anger, violence, murder, guilt, guilt complex and self pity.
Pride reproduces itself in jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, implacability, revenge motivation and function, inordinate ambition and competition, gossip, slander, maligning and judging.
Pride transformed into self righteousness produces legalism.
The Solution to Pride
Occupation with Christ is the ultimate problem solving device regarding pride. Refer to the Grace Notes on Occupation with Christ.
Prov 8:13, “The respect for the Lord is to hate evil, to hate pride and pride and the evil way. And I hate a perverted mouth.”
Daily attention to the techniques of the Christian way of Life will give you a grace mental attitude that becomes more and more free of pride as you grow in Christ and in the knowledge of His word.