13 The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
and perverted speech I hate.
(ESV)
2 When pride comes, then comes disgrace,
but with the humble is wisdom.
(ESV)
25 The LORD tears down the house of the proud
but maintains the widow’s boundaries.
(ESV)
5 Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD;
be assured, he will not go unpunished.
(ESV)
18 Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall.
(ESV)
23 One’s pride will bring him low,
but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.
(ESV)
Proverbs 8:13, 11:2, 15:25, 16:5, 16:18, 29:23
13 The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
and perverted speech I hate.
(ESV)
2 When pride comes, then comes disgrace,
but with the humble is wisdom.
(ESV)
25 The LORD tears down the house of the proud
but maintains the widow’s boundaries.
(ESV)
5 Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD;
be assured, he will not go unpunished.
(ESV)
18 Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall.
(ESV)
23 One’s pride will bring him low,
but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Alright. Well, good morning. My name is Dwight Castle. I'm one of the pastors here at Redeemer, and I'm honored this morning to be opening God's word with you. We're gonna continue our summer sermon series in the book of Proverbs.
Speaker 1:Next week, Joel is gonna close out that series, but today, we're gonna continue and we're gonna dive right in. So if you will look at your worship guide, we have a selection of passages from Proverbs for today. We're not gonna read all of them, so if you'll just follow along as I read a few of these. We'll start with Proverbs 8:13, The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil, Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech, I hate. 112, When pride comes, then comes disgrace.
Speaker 1:But with the humble is wisdom. 1525, The Lord tears down the house of the proud, but maintains the widow's boundaries. 16:5, Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord. Be assured, He will not go unpunished. 16/18.
Speaker 1:Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. And 2923, one's pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Pray with me.
Speaker 1:Lord, this morning as we come to you and to your word, we are desperate for you. Lord, we need to hear from you today. We believe that you have a word for us, that you're speaking to us. And so, Lord, we pray that by your spirit, you will open up our hearts to hear this word. Lord, that you will make us more like Christ today.
Speaker 1:So now, I pray, Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart will be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. So, as you've probably picked up from these passages, today's topic is pride, and also its inverse, which is humility. But, if I'm honest, I'm gonna start with pride. I prefer to start with pride because who really is qualified to teach on humility?
Speaker 1:I don't feel like that's me. I understand Pride a lot more. I've got a lot more experience with Pride, and I don't mean to brag, but I'm a little bit of an expert on pride. Got a long resume, a lot to pull from. I don't think I'm alone in this, though.
Speaker 1:Pride is universal. Every single one of us struggles with pride, whether you know that or believe that or not. Because the interesting thing about pride is that most of us probably don't think that we struggle with pride. I mean, if I were to ask you right now to honestly raise your hand if that's really a deep sin of yours, how many people are gonna willingly raise their hands? I mean, we all see pride as bad.
Speaker 1:We all understand what pride is. We recognize it. We're even really good at seeing it in other people, but we don't think that we struggle with pride. I mean, maybe some of us in the right church setting will generically confess, yes, yes, pride. I should pray about my pride.
Speaker 1:But how many of us really understand the depths to which pride infiltrates our hearts and our motives. I mean, the nature of pride in and of itself is that you don't actually realize when you have it most of the time because it's so deceptive. It reminds me of the classic middle school prank when you put a kick me sign on someone on their back. The person who has it on them has no idea that they have it. Everyone else knows and they can see it really easily.
Speaker 1:It's kind of funny, but that person is unaware. This is how pride is, and so what Proverbs is going to show us today is that pride, though it's deceptive, is something that we all probably struggle with. It has a lot of different names, pseudonyms. We might even call it by some good things. Self esteem, truth telling, even at times we cloak it in humility.
Speaker 1:But ultimately pride is when we make ourselves the center of everything. All of our thoughts, all of the attention comes back to us. Now, if you have children, this is really obvious, children aren't quite as good at hiding it as we are as adults. My children, everything comes back to them. It does not matter what we're doing or how awesome or terrible it is.
Speaker 1:It's all gonna come back to what they get out of it. Right? This is what we do. And I pray that today, God's spirit will help us to have the eyes to see if this is true of us. Now, last year, my family spent some time in Philadelphia, which is the home of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 1:He's a bit of a hero there in Philadelphia, and there's quotes everywhere. And I found a quote that he said about pride I found very interesting. He says, in reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself. For even if I could conceive that I'd completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
Speaker 1:Historically, pride is recognized in our world as one of the 7 deadly sins. In fact, it's the first on the list. It's typically referred to as the original cardinal sin, the worst sin, and even the source of all of the others. CS Lewis identified this when he said unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all of that. They're mere flea bites in comparison.
Speaker 1:It was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti God state of mind. So there's a lot I could say about Proverbs today. There's a lot that scripture says about Proverbs, and there's a lot of different angles and perspectives of how we can look at it.
Speaker 1:But I think that Proverbs takes actually a pretty unique angle on pride. In these 15 plus verses where it speaks, it says a few common things. The biggest commonality that I found about these verses, though, is the use of very strong language. This is God's view of pride, how he looks at it, and he uses it it uses this even aggressive kind of intense language. Did you notice?
Speaker 1:Listen to a few of these phrases here. The Lord hates haughty eyes. They're an abomination. The Lord hates pride and arrogance. The Lord tears down the house of the proud.
Speaker 1:The arrogant in heart are an abomination. They will be punished. Pride leads to destruction. A high door leads to destruction. A haughty heart leads to destruction.
Speaker 1:Lots of destruction. Lots of hatred. What is going on here? What is the particular danger of pride that seems so bad in God's eyes, so deadly to our soul? The best way that I think we can begin to answer this today is to actually go back.
Speaker 1:We're gonna go all the way back to the beginning. Oftentimes, when you're studying scripture, it's helpful to refresh ourselves on what the selves on what the original story of creation and the fall is. What was God's original design and then what happened? What went wrong? So take yourself back.
Speaker 1:If you can imagine and try to picture what a pre fall world was like, Perfect, untainted, unbroken. And, this is chiefly reflected in how God and man's relationship operated. Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the garden every day. They saw God as he was, and they loved him, and they adored him. They had no thought for themselves.
Speaker 1:They lived in constant beauty of God's presence. Now, this is actually how John Piper defines the term humility. In typical Piper verbiage, he says this, humility is the disposition of heart to be pleased with the infinite superiority of Christ over ourselves in every way. Now, in case you don't speak Piper, what he's basically saying is your heart is fully satisfied in Jesus. You worship him.
Speaker 1:That's what humility is. You see Jesus. You're satisfied in him. If you've ever been to the top of a mountain and seen a view, maybe this reverberates with you a little bit. I actually went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail last week, went to the highest mountain in Maine, and I'm literally above the cloud line.
Speaker 1:I'm looking out as far as the eye can see, and you're just in awe. It's pure grandeur, And you can't help but reflect on God's beauty, his holiness, his power. You worship. This is what Adam and Eve were in every day. This is how they were.
Speaker 1:They saw God for who he was, and they loved Him. It was the essence of humility. But, then, sin enters in. And it ruins everything. Now, it is hard to overstate how devastating the fall was, how broken everything becomes.
Speaker 1:The brokenness from the fall is typically described in 4 categories, our brokenness in our relationship with God, our brokenness in our relationship with ourselves, our brokenness in relationship with others, and then our brokenness in relationship with creation. We're deeply broken on every level. I don't have to convince you of this. You know this. You feel this.
Speaker 1:We see this and mourn this every day in our lives. The worst part, the starting point of it all, is our brokenness in our relationship with God. Everything else flows from that fractured relationship, And, it all started with the sin of pride. This is what was at the heart of the first sin. Now, how, you might ask.
Speaker 1:Was what Adam and Eve did pride? They looked away from God, and they didn't see him as he was, as good, as trustworthy. Instead, they trusted their own wisdom. They were the first to commit the sin of pride because they failed to see and love God as supreme. Now, Augustine, the early church father, he wrote a lot about pride, and he believed that not only was this first sin the sin of pride, but he blanketly wrote that pride is the beginning of all sin.
Speaker 1:How is that? Because every time that we sin, we look away from God and His plan, and we look to ourselves. We trust our own wisdom, and we sin. There's actually a sin of pride that preceded Adam and Eve's in the garden, That was Satan, how he became the devil. He was an angel of light.
Speaker 1:He was known as the morning star, and scripture gives us little snippets of his story. It began with his lust for pride. He wanted to be great like God and even overcome God, and his demise is what followed because he exalted himself instead of exalting God. It's that same root sin. It's okay, Dwight.
Speaker 1:We see that pride is bad. Right? We see where pride began. We're even beginning to see how pride is maybe at the root of a lot of what we do. But what does this mean in Proverbs?
Speaker 1:Well, before we go back to Proverbs, I want to highlight one very important point. I don't want us to miss this. It's God's design. God's design for humans is that we would know him and love him above all. This is our purpose in life.
Speaker 1:This is humility. Pride is the opposite of this. So, in God's design, when we do this, when we look at him, when we look to him, God's made it so that we will flourish, we'll thrive. Now, He wants His people to know this, so He teaches them this lesson of His design across scripture. One other particular way is when God brings His people, Israel, out from slavery in Egypt, and He's establishing them as His people.
Speaker 1:He gives them His law. He tells them who He is and how they can live in a way that will please Him, and how they will flourish. One of the first things He says to them is, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your might. Jesus later affirms this as the greatest commandment. So, God is still telling His people here the same thing.
Speaker 1:Look to me in humility. Don't look at yourself. Don't look at others. Don't look at your circumstances. Look at me and how good and big and trustworthy I am.
Speaker 1:Then, you will flourish. So this is where Proverbs picks up. Proverbs follows the same theme of God's design, but it uses a different verbiage. It calls it the fear of the Lord. Now, if you want to understand Proverbs, you need to understand the fear of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Now, this is kind of a complex phrase, but for today, it's seeing God as ultimate and loving him. This is why Proverbs begins at the very beginning with, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If you want wisdom, if you wanna flourish, and thrive, and be happy, and full in life, love Him with all of yourself. This is what he said to Adam and Eve. This is what he said to Israel.
Speaker 1:This is what Jesus said to his disciples in the early church. This is what Proverbs is saying to us today. It's the key to understanding also why Proverbs has such strong language about pride. Proverbs is teaching us that pride is the opposite of god's design. Pride, in its very definition, contains the recipe for our own undoing.
Speaker 1:How? The design of pride is that it breaks down God's intent of us looking to him and seeing him as beautiful and ultimate. And God is warning us here, in no uncertain language, that it will destroy us. God is saying, yes. I will punish pride.
Speaker 1:But more so, he is describing how pride itself will punish and destroy us and our lives. Now, here's kind of an example of of this. If I were to tell my children not to eat rat poison Now, this might seem like an obscure reference, but trust me when I tell you it's not. A few mere weeks ago, I killed a 16 inches rat at my house. And I thought about, for our pleasure putting it up on the screen here, but I decided against it.
Speaker 1:I have it on my phone after the service. Come to me, and I'll show you. 16 inches. I measured it. So needless to say, I'm setting rat traps all around my house and putting out rat poison.
Speaker 1:And I came to my children who are running around like little rats. There are lots of them, beautiful rats. And I said, don't touch, don't eat this rat poison. Now, in my warning, there is a threat of consequence, but it's not really so much my consequence as the fact that if they eat rat poison, they will die. That is what God is saying to us here.
Speaker 1:God is warning us. He is that loving, protecting parent. Have you ever seen, like, the really petite, sweet, quiet mom whose kid, like, runs out in traffic, like, across the road, and all of a sudden, mama bear wakes up, and you're like, that was terrifying. She just roared at that child. Right?
Speaker 1:God is that loving parent here. He is the father yelling at his children whom he loves. Pride will destroy you. If you have a haughty heart, it will lead to your destruction. If you have haughty eyes and arrogance, the Lord hates what this is going to do to his plan for your life and your flourishing.
Speaker 1:If you build the house of your life in pride, you are seeking your own destruction. If you're arrogant in your heart, yes, the lord will discipline you. But even more so, your pride will destroy you. It happened to Satan. It happened to Adam and Eve.
Speaker 1:And all of the Bible and all of history are littered with examples of story after story of the devastation that pride has reaped. Now, as I mentioned, Augustine wrote a lot about pride, and he coined this phrase that a lot of people now use about pride. It's the inward curvature of our soul. You can kinda almost see and hear what that means, the inward curvature of our soul. So this innate unavoidable propensity towards pride in our hearts.
Speaker 1:You may have also heard the term navel gazing. That's not Augustine. It's probably Rick Warren or someone like that. I I'm not really sure. Either of these phrases really gives us a picture.
Speaker 1:We're looking in at ourselves, and what actually happens is this leads to our own ruin. Tim Keller says that this is how good things become ultimate things that we put so much weight and value on that it destroys them. Think about this in your own life for a minute. Let's bring this to bear in our lives. What are the primary ways that your heart can be tempted and tend to work out of pride?
Speaker 1:Now, there's lots of examples. For some of us, it is just really clear that we think about ourselves all the time. Right? So, you might think of yourself in a really good way or a bad way, but both are pride. You fixate on things, maybe your body, your fitness, some feature about yourself that you like or you don't like, your image, how others see you, maybe a possession of yours, your money, your gifts, your talents.
Speaker 1:You might feel good or bad. It doesn't really matter. You're obsessed. You always, if you're honest, find yourself, your thoughts turning back on yourself, imagining how others are viewing you, which can lead to another type of pride. How we stack up against other people.
Speaker 1:Comparison. And some people live here. You can stack up really well, and you can feel superior. You can look down on others all the time, think you've got it together. Or, you might live in self pity, and you might have bitterness, and anger, and jealousy.
Speaker 1:And the details and the facts don't usually actually matter. The point is, as long as you are a little bit better than that other person, or maybe not quite as bad as that person. Now, for some of us, we live in the holy spiritual realm of pride, maybe the most dangerous. Some people, maybe not many in here, but are so prideful they don't even think they need God. But a lot of us, we realize that we do need God, but functionally, we operate as if we don't.
Speaker 1:We don't live by the spirit. We don't deny ourself. We don't think about others. We don't spend time in God's word and in prayer. We live our lives to ourselves.
Speaker 1:And maybe some people do all the right things. Some of you check all the boxes. You're maybe that pious Pharisee, and even though everything you do has an outward appearance of being towards God, your heart is ever turned in on yourself. Now, there are many, many forms of pride. I could go on.
Speaker 1:All of them are deceptive. They're tricky. God hates it all. He hates what it does to us, and he's warning us. He's pleading with us.
Speaker 1:It will destroy you. And so he loves us too much to leave us in that. He will reveal it. He will draw it out. He will discipline.
Speaker 1:Alright. So how's everyone feeling right now? Really good. If you are bold enough to be like, yeah, that was me. I struggle with pride, you're kinda it's a dim picture right now.
Speaker 1:Right? What does this mean for us? If pride is that pervasive, if it's that unavoidable and God hates it that much, is there any hope? In his grace, God shows us a better way. James 46 says, god opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Speaker 1:And he's actually James is quoting Proverbs here, Proverbs 3. He goes on a few verses later to say, Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. Matthew 2312 goes even a step further and makes this clearer. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Now, this was a little confusing for me when I read this because I thought that if we humble ourselves, then God will be exalted.
Speaker 1:Why does this say that we will be exalted? I could spend a lot of time here. I'll be very brief. There's a few ways that God exalts us in Him when we humble ourselves before Him. If we take the posture of humility, which is looking to Jesus, we see God for who he is and we worship him, and then we will live into his design and we will flourish.
Speaker 1:Our lives will be good. Our lives will be exalted in looking to Jesus. When we see him as he is, we are also beginning to understand who we are, more rightly. Our identity is rooted, not in ourselves, but in who he is. And if we know God, we are children of God.
Speaker 1:We have an exalted identity as children of God, heirs of the father. And when we humbly submit to him day after day, he sanctifies us. What is sanctification? It's the process of being more and more like Christ, who is exalted. We are more Christ like when we look to him and we humble ourselves.
Speaker 1:So, God is lovingly and patiently teaching us that the path to life and honor and flourishing, It's counterintuitive. If you go after yourself and what you want, you're not gonna get it. But the problem, as Augustine pointed out, is we're not good at this. We always turn in to ourselves. We always exalt ourselves.
Speaker 1:Now maybe you see this a little bit at this point, and maybe you don't. If you have trouble seeing and assessing areas of pride in your life because remember, by its very nature, it's deceptive. You don't think you have it. If you don't think you have pride, you probably do. If that's you, here are a few suggestions to help you assess areas of pride in your life.
Speaker 1:First, ask God to reveal it. Now, don't gloss over this. God is faithful. He will reveal pride to you. Secondly, ask a trusted brother or sister.
Speaker 1:Now, be careful when you do this because you are welcoming in feedback that is gonna be hurtful, painful, but it's in love. They might see something you don't. So, ask and listen. And, 3rd, evaluate what occupies your time and your attention. What does your mind wander to when you're just in a daze?
Speaker 1:What do your eyes look at often? What do you find yourself thinking about? What controls the mind controls the heart? So when you finally see your pride, God will reveal it. When you see it, what do we do?
Speaker 1:Do we just try to turn that inward curve out more? Do we try to think about ourselves a little bit less? No. These would fail. Or if we succeeded, we would feel really good about ourselves and pride.
Speaker 1:So, we turn our eyes to Jesus. We confess that we are so prideful and we repent and we look to him. And then, when we do it again, we continue to do that, knowing that every time we fail, we're coming to someone who didn't fail. Philippians 2 is this glorious passage that reminds us that Jesus, though he was God, did not try to exalt himself. He humbled himself, taking on the form of a servant.
Speaker 1:And he looked to his father in obedience, even to the point of death, death on a cross. And what did God do? God exalted him and gave him a name above every other name that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue confess that he is lord. Jesus did what we cannot do. Even though he could have exalted himself, he didn't.
Speaker 1:So, what does this mean for us? When we see our pride, we take it to Jesus and we beg him for grace. And, here's the glorious thing. God loves giving grace to sinners. James 4 says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Speaker 1:So, the very act of turning to Jesus with our pride and saying, God, I'm prideful, is beginning the path to humility. We come to him. He gives us grace. And I love this here. 1st Peter 5.
Speaker 1:It adds words of compassion to this. It says, Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time He may exalt you, casting your anxieties on Him, because he cares for you. So when we humble ourselves by admitting just how prideful we are, we don't have to ignore the things that we struggle with. We bring them to Jesus. We bring our fears.
Speaker 1:We bring our worries. We bring our circumstances, our self absorption, our comparison, our self exaltation. We bring it all to Jesus because he cares, and we lay him down at his feet in a posture of humility. We trust him to give that grace and to exalt us by making us more and more Christ like every time. Now, one day, we will be exalted in the heavenlies with our father.
Speaker 1:And when we look to him, we'll see him clearly, face to face, and we will worship him like we never have before. But for now, we, the prideful people, we come to Jesus and we acknowledge that he did what we couldn't do. And we receive grace. We rejoice and we ask him to make us more and more into his exalted image. So, pray with me.
Speaker 1:Oh, Jesus, we are desperate. We confess that we are prideful people. I am prideful. Lord, we come to you and we thank you that you did what we could not. And, Lord, we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Speaker 1:You considered it joy, and we consider it joy now to look to you when we receive that grace in our time of need. And we worship you. You are high and lifted up and exalted. Help us to see you as you are, as glorious. Help us to love you rightly, Lord.
Speaker 1:In your name. Amen.