pride (1) God gets my attention

When God can't get your attention through quiet whispers, sometimes he takes up a hammer. With precisely placed blows - a Bible passage, a friend's words, a magazine picked up and glanced at - he drives the point home. And when that’s not enough, he wields the sledge hammer of painful experience.

It gradually dawned on me late last year that the same word was popping up everywhere, as unmissable as those huge red-on-yellow billboards shouting “SEX!” beside the freeway. Except all my signposts were reading “pride”.

I read Pilgrim's Progress and watched Christian stumble because of his pride. I flicked through The Briefing and discovered a review of CJ Mahaney's Humility: True Greatness. I clicked on Cathy's blog and read words which laid my heart bare: "My bitter jealousy and selfish ambition are shown when other Christian women get a 'ministry opportunity' that I don't."

As if God knew this relentless repetition wouldn't be enough, a series of painful failures showed me the full ugliness of my pride. Like a surgeon who knows exactly where to cut, God relentlessly plunged his scalpel in just as far as it needed to go.

I’ve struggled with pride before. When I was young and confident of my godliness, I prayed a dangerous prayer: “Lord, teach me humility”. What followed was a drawn-out battle with sin which undermined my self-satisfaction. I vowed never to pray for humility again.

But God still hadn’t dealt with my pride in achievement.

It's not surprising that success matters to me. I lapped up the praise of loving parents, I went to a high-achieving private school, and I chose a prestigious uni course. On the first day, our lecturer called us “the cream of society”. (I transferred to Arts soon afterwards, but that’s another story!) No wonder that I expect to succeed. It's pretty ugly when you write it down, isn't it?

The ugliness wasn't apparent to me. When you’re succeeding you can fool even yourself with your assumed humility. You accept praise with just the right measure of self-deprecating gratitude. You feel oh, so humbly grateful for the gifts God has given you.

It took a series of failures, in a ministry I expected to succeed in, to reveal myself to me. Each one felt like a kick in the stomach. Horrified at the strength of my emotions, I prayed the prayer I vowed never to pray again: “Lord, teach me humility”.

One final painful and petty experience of failure, coming just in time for Christmas, and it was as if God prised opened a manhole into my heart, and I could see the pride within, like a festering black pit seething with worms.

God spares us this view of our sin most of the time. But occasionally he shows us the way he sees our hearts. God has made his views on pride very clear: "The LORD detests all the proud at heart" (Prov 16:5).

Thank God that, although my sin is greater than I will ever know, his grace is greater still.

This is the first in a series on what God has been teaching me about pride. Next time, I'd like to talk about the connection between humility and suffering.

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