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That you can experience lasting life change for your good and for God's glory.
Here the last several weeks on the podcast we've been talking about this
overarching theme of what it is to be in denial, to be in this place of denying
the problems and not addressing the problems that are in our life, in our
soul, and the fruit and things that they're bearing in our lives. And there,
There are two primary obstacles, two primary things that keep us stuck in a place of denial.
And I've kind of been talking about one primarily.
And that's the first thing is that shame, right? We don't want to talk about something we want to want to deal with our hurts.
We don't want to deal with our wounds that need healed. We don't want to deal with our cycles or habits.
We don't want to deal with those things because we might feel shame.
You might say, if people saw the real me, knew my problems, if I told people what was
going on, what would they think of me? What would my reputation be?
And I'm a broken person. I can't, I'm the only one who's struggling with all of this.
I can't be the one to open up and to trust and to get help. I feel so ashamed.
And that's a big obstacle that many, many people face with. We've kind of been talking about that, how that's common to the human experience.
And if we were all forced to have moments of honesty, what we would find is that everybody
feels that way, and that the problems we're dealing with are probably a lot more similar
to other people's problems than we would initially imagine.
So that's the first thing that keeps us stuck, shame. In the last several weeks, I've kind of been talking and meandering around that idea and
and some of the anecdotes to that.
But there's a second thing that keeps us stuck in a place of denial, and that's pride, right?
And you might immediately hear that in this episode, and you might be saying, like, pride?
Like, Luke, I don't have pride. Like, that's the, like, I'm not prideful.
Like, I'm a mess. I will tell you I'm a mess, right? I've got problems, like,
and you might think that you don't have any pride.
But I would challenge you, if you're right now, this moment, you're just like, you know,
I don't have pride, like, that's not a problem I have, I would challenge you listen to this
short episode, and walk away and seriously consider and ask yourself that question, after some reflection.
Because the thing is, is that pride often looks so different in our mind than how it
often plays out in some of our lives.
Sometimes it's so easy to identify pride in someone, but other times it's really subtle
and we have a really good way of excusing and permitting our own type of pride in our
life and not getting rid of it.
And you might say like, well, what's, you know, shouldn't we all have a little bit of
pride? Yeah, you should take pride in yourself.
But a pride that keeps us from growing, keeps us from learning, keeps us from following is particularly bad.
The Bible has a lot to say about pride. One of the more well-known passages that talks about pride is in James 4, verse 6.
This is James, the brother of Jesus, and this is what he has to say about pride.
He's quoting elsewhere, but here it is in James 4, verse 6, says this.
"...but He," talking about Jesus, "...gives us more grace.
That is why Scripture says, God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble."
And that's an important concept, that God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.
He gives us grace when we are humble. Why would God oppose the proud?
Well, that's back to the garden. We talked about that a couple weeks ago.
The choice Adam and Eve made when they grabbed the fruit off of the tree of knowledge and
evil, wasn't just eating a fruit, it was saying, no, we will become our own arbiters of what
is good and what is right, rather than trusting God to be the judge of what is good and what is right.
They were prideful, and they ate that. And then, funnily enough, even once they were caught red-handed with the fruit in their
hand, they still were not humble enough to say, you're right, we made the mistake, I made the mistake.
Them pointed down the line of responsibility.
And in that is this own sort of type of pride.
A lot of times we think of pride, we think of the person who's boastful, the person who's
going and saying, I've got these really big achievements, look at me, I'm awesome, right?
We look at that type of person and we're like, oh, that's so easy to identify. That's pride.
And it's easy to see in other people, but never to see in our own self. But I think that there's
It's also a way that pride can be a little bit more subtle, a little bit more nuanced.
It doesn't always have to look in this way of being, of constantly saying, just look
at my achievements, look at how awesome I am.
Look at all of that.
Because some of you might be saying, might be saying, well, Luke, like I'm, I'm a mess.
Like I'm not prideful. I've got nothing to be prideful about.
Well, let's let's unpack that a little bit and so it can there's um,
There's sort of two ways I can kind of conceptualize this in our lives in our,
Our narrative right as we kind of living our lives. There's a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves
There's a story that I we tell ourselves and that we want to repeat and tell other people about ourselves,
And if you're telling a good story where you yourself are the main character.
Right. You don't want to be the villain in your own story, right?
You don't want to be the villain. You want to be the hero.
And of course, we always want to be the hero. We want to be the guy, the person, the woman who saves the day,
who does the hard thing, who works through and triumphs over adversity.
But what if in your life, you're looking at your life and you're like,
I don't feel much like a hero.
Well, if you don't feel like a hero, we'll often go for the next best thing.
And that's the noble victim, right?
If we can't be the hero of our lives story, we will be the victim of our lives story,
we'll be the noble victim, the one who, if things had only gone right, if people only listened
to me, if only I had had all the things I needed, I would have succeeded with the best of them.
And now as I say that, can you hear where the pride maybe is sneaking in? The assumption that
My circumstances, our circumstances are not my fault.
They're the fault of other people's circumstances or what other people have done to me
or what I didn't have.
It's a removal of responsibility from ourself.
And it's saying, no, I'm truly a great hero at heart. I really would be thriving in life,
if it wasn't for all of these things that had been done to me or this awful tragedy that befell me,
or the fact that I was just surrounded by other people who just kept getting in the way
and ruined things for me, right?
The fault of our current circumstances is someone else's.
And if that's part of our narrative, that's pride.
Now, I don't want to say that there's nothing that ever happens in your life, or somebody
can do to you, or the circumstances that you find yourself, like, I'm very aware that not
everybody has the same advantages, I'm very aware that many things might have happened
to you that have put you at a disadvantage.
But that's only always part of the story. In everyone's story, there's always going to be things that are outside of your control
and things that are inside of your control.
And if we get to a place where we believe all the things outside of our control have,
all the effect on our life, and that we kind of ignore or don't talk about or don't focus
on the things that are inside of our control, we're running into a place where we're allowing
our lives to be dictated by only what's out of our control and we're abdicating or we're
ignoring the things that are in our control that maybe we're not doing well with or we're
not doing anything with.
That's a sense of pride.
One of the things that's really hard to kind of experience unless you have kind of an opportunity
to start over, right? Oftentimes we have these, you know, we have these moments in life to
start new, to start fresh. Every new year we've got a new opportunity to start fresh,
new habits, new goals, a word for the year, whatever it is. But the thing is, is that
once that clock hits midnight and it's the next day of the new year, you haven't magically
become someone who you're not. Same thing as if you were to pick up and you were just
to move out of your hometown. You were to drive far away, go to a new place where no
one knows you and start fresh. While there's a lot of things, a lot of benefits that potentially
come with that, there's something that you still have that still came with you when you,
made that move. You might have left behind all of your baggage, all the relationships,
all the trauma, all the routines, all the things that cling onto you in the old place that you were,
but you've still brought yourself.
And that often plays a larger impact on our circumstances than we might easily admit.
There's this saying that says that wherever you go, there you are. And the whole idea of this
very sort of seemingly simple statement is that no matter what apartment you're in, what neighborhood
you live, what town, state, wherever you go, you will always be bringing yourself.
You will always be bringing your habits, your way of being, your heart condition, your roots,
the way that you think of yourself and the way you interact with other people,
you will always be bringing that with you. And that always has a major impact on how life happens.
Oftentimes when we have opportunities to start over, to start fresh, we come with enthusiasm
and then soon we find ourselves back where we started. Same old story, new chapter.
And the reason for that is most likely because we haven't addressed ourselves.
We haven't addressed the things that we are bringing with ourselves.
Sense of pride, our sense of not being willing to learn from others.
This is a hard thing to swallow because I myself for many years and still to this day struggle with pride.
I remember I was working, I was doing some ministry at the time and I was on a team and
I remember there was this other guy on the team and I just remember thinking how prideful he was.
I remember just thinking, man, if he wasn't in this group, I could just be doing this so much better.
Like we were sharing some responsibilities, and I'm so much better at this than him.
And I would go around, and any time he did anything, he said anything that I thought
was prideful, I'd go around and I'd say, I'm so proud of you, I'm so proud of you, I'm
so proud of you, I'm so proud of you, I'm so proud of you, I'm so proud of you, I'm,
You you wouldn't believe what this guy did. He just so prideful and I had friends who listened to me complain,
And they eventually were just like luke. Like you really have like a problem with this guy.
And Eventually it kind of started to dawn on me that,
Part of the reason I didn't like him was because he was a mirror reflection of myself,
He was simply saying out loud the same the things I was saying inside of my heart
heart, I was just as prideful, if not more prideful than he was.
And I had to repent severely for having carried so much angerness and bitterness towards him,
all the while being guilty of the same things that he was, if not in a greater degree.
I still, to this day, struggle with pride to not be arrogant, to be a listener first,
to assume that others have information that maybe I don't have.
That is a hard place to come to, but it's the only place where you can begin to grow.
We see this in movies and stories all the time, right? If the person is arrogant,
and they think they know everything, they're never going to learn, right?
We've all met that person who just refuses to be taught anything.
And we can see easily in their own lives that, man, if they would just sit and listen,
to the thing I have to tell them, like, and they actually did what I told them,
like their life would go better.
But we don't see that we often do that same thing. We plug our ears.
We don't listen to the wisdom that other people have for us.
And so we need to get into this place of humility. I wanna share one other Bible verse with you.
This is out of Proverbs. Proverbs is a great book of the Bible,
and it has so much practical wisdom, and some of it is just so simple,
but so powerful and so difficult to integrate into our life.
This is Proverbs 15. We're gonna read for you verse 31 through 33 here.
Says, whoever heeds life-giving correction will be at home among the wise.
Those who disregard discipline despise themselves, but the one who heeds correction gains understanding.
Instruction is to fear the Lord, and humility comes before honor.
That is some heavy truth right there, right? Whoever heeds life-giving correction will be
at home among the wise. When someone comes to us and says they've got some feedback for us,
or they're saying, hey, like they're calling something out of us, a lot of times people
will give us feedback that we don't want to hear. They will call out of us something that's wrong,
and they won't always do it in the best way.
It's great when you have a good friend who comes and gives you loving feedback
and gives you time and support, but not everybody's going to do that.
Not everyone's very good at giving feedback, but you're probably getting some feedback
that might be true, but it's coming at you in a very harsh, very hard way to receive.
And as hard as it is for me to say, because I myself struggle with receiving feedback,
is that they might be very true, even if it's not being told to you in a kind manner.
There might be some things that are kind of overjudgmental, but at the core, there might be something true there
that if you would allow yourself to listen to the correction would make you wiser.
Those who disregard discipline despise themselves. If we disregard, ignore the wisdom
that other people have for us, If we believe that we know it all,
we would have the perfect life if things would only go right for us.
If we disregard the voices that are saying, hey, like you don't necessarily know it all.
Then we ourselves are hating ourselves.
We are preventing ourselves from growing, from getting better,
from receiving life correction and wisdom.
And ultimately, we're refusing to fear the Lord.
We're refusing to come to a place of humility and say, Lord, we don't know everything. We're not perfect.
I don't have it all together. I need help. I need help from your Word and your wisdom.
I need help from community, people speaking into my life.
I need help.
Because one of the really difficult truths, if I can share with you a really difficult
truth that is true of pretty much everybody, right, is that you...
Played an impactful role on where you are now. That doesn't say that you have full responsibility on exactly where you're at.
Like I said, I know that not everybody has the same advantages,
that things happen that are outside of our control.
There's a whole number of things that impact what happened to you,
you, how you find yourself, how you came to find yourself struggling with an addiction,
how you received that wound that came to be, how those relationship cycles and patterns
that you're stuck in, that place that you feel like you just can't see change, there,
are things that were outside of your control that have impacted the fact that you've found yourself there.
But then there are also at least a handful of things that are inside of your control.
Whether they're how you respond to a thing, this is a big one, right?
A lot of times when there's big things that happen to us, maybe someone does something
really awful or sins against us, that is something that's outside of our control.
But we do still have control over how we respond. We have control over how we go and get help and take care of ourselves.
We have control over what we choose to do in that situation.
And we don't always make the right choices. And that's okay.
We don't need to beat ourselves up. It's not that we need to be perfect in the things that are in our control.
It's that we need to be honest about the fact that we're not perfect.
That actually, yeah, that my addiction might have some things that outside of my control
happened to me that put me in a place where I find myself addicted, but there were also
things that I made choices in.
Recovery a lot of times is learning to parse out, to separate and distinguish what is mine
to own, and what is not mine to own.
Things get really messy, and a lot of times we find ourselves stuck when we're owning
things that we're not supposed to own.
Decisions that other people made, circumstances that were outside of our control, choices
that we made when we were young, things that we made in ignorance, old sins that we still
beat ourselves up over that Christ has offered forgiveness for.
We're owning things that we're not supposed to be owning. And then when we're not owning things that we need to be owning, how we're choosing to
respond currently, what are we doing to get help?
What am I doing to take care of myself? Am I putting in the hard work?
Am I taking hold of the resources that people are giving to me, the lifelines?
Am I listening even to bad criticism to try and find what is true there that maybe I need
to hear. Those are things that are inside of our control, and when we're not owning those things,
and we're owning things we're not supposed to own, that's a recipe for being stuck.
So I'd encourage you this week, take some time, be prayerful over it, maybe sit with these
passages. Maybe sit with just that James 4 passage. James 4, 6, the Lord opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble. Perhaps, just resonating with that, maybe perhaps,
Lord, help me to humble myself. Help me to see where perhaps I've not been
willing to seek help. Perhaps where I've been willing to shift blame where I
ought not to have. Maybe I need to listen to others who have gone before me, who,
have recovered, who have made significant changes, because they were once where I was,
perhaps I don't know what they now know, and I need to know that. Sit with that. Perhaps,
ask a trusted loved one, just ask them and say, please be gentle with me, but is there something,
is there a place where my pride is keeping me from seeing something that is keeping me stuck?
That's a hard question to ask, and not a question to ask everyone.
Ask those who you trust, and those who you know want the best for you.
Thank you for tuning in this week and joining with me in this conversation.
I hope it was helpful, even if it was a hard word to hear.
Let me know if you have any questions or how this is impacting you and your journey,
through recovery. You can always email me at Luke at ConduitMinistries.com and
And you can also leave any comments or anything here and I'll see those.
Music.