A Deadly Character Flow - Pride - Genesis 11 Series

Today I’d like to talk to you about pride. How many of you would say you have a problem with the sin of pride? I find it hard. It's kind of frustrating. Can I just say it’s a frustrating topic to preach about? I think it’s frustrating to preach about it because the people who need to hear about it don’t want to listen. I mean isn’t that the nature of pride? The person who’s prideful says, “Oh I’m glad you’re preaching on that. There’s a lot of people who need that sermon this week. I can think of a lot of people who need that.” But we tend to look at ourselves and we say, “I don’t think I have a problem with that.”

I’m surprised that my wife married me. Because if you hear our story of how we met, the very first time that we met Carrie was impressed with my arrogance. I had my feet up on the furniture, sitting back, and I just had this arrogant smug. I look back now in those days and I can see my arrogance. I was pretty prideful. I’d like to say that I’ve grown over the years. I’d like to say that I’ve grown over time and that God has done some important things in my heart and that I’m not as prideful. But I don’t know. I mean ask yourself the question. Are you prideful? I think we don’t know. It’s this kind of veneer that comes up around us. I’m only going to know if I’m prideful if I end up getting emotionally upset about something and I realize I shouldn’t have done that, or someone tells me something or corrects me. And then I recognize oh yeah, I’m outside of where I want to be.

If you’re a parent, you know that this is a challenge. If you’ve got a child who has got pride in their lives it’s really hard. Because you can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and they don’t listen. They don’t hear what you’re saying. And the more you talk, the more they shut you out. It’s like they put their hands over their ears. They don’t want to hear anything you’re saying. It’s really hard. When you try to give an instruction to a child and the child doesn’t want to hear it, says no, or has a bad attitude. They can’t see the pride that we see oozing out all over them, but it’s the pride that causes a problem. The child who is uninterruptible. You know you can’t interrupt them because, well, what they’re doing is more important than anything else. When you try to correct a child who is prideful and you know it because what do you get? You get the rationalization, you get the justification, you get the turning on you and saying unkind things to you. You see the mean words come out. You see the anger episodes, the victim mentality. You know all kinds of things happen when you try to work with a child who has a pride in their lives. It’s very difficult.

If you’re a young person watching this today, you’ve got to just ask yourself, am I proud? Is pride getting in my way? Very, very important question.

It's frustrating, isn’t it? It’s frustrating dealing with a proud person. I mean Jesus Himself was frustrated as He was working with the Pharisees. They were so proud. They were so proud that they couldn’t see Jesus right in front of them. So Jesus had these words He used to try to get past their barriers. He said this: Those who have ears to hear let them hear. He’s not saying everybody who has the ears physically let them hear. What He’s saying is if you have an openness about you and you’re willing to listen, this is important for your life. This will change you.

I want to ask you to do something today. I want you to make an assumption that you have a pride problem. In fact I want you to assume that you are the most arrogant person in this room, that you’re the most arrogant person online listening to this. See here’s what happens. We all have a narrative, a story that we tell ourselves that protects the status quo in our lives. It justifies us when we yell at someone or when we’re disrespectful. It justifies a bad attitude or a defying spirit. It justifies the ability to talk bad about someone. It justifies all kinds of these narratives we have around us, builds these kinds of walls of protection so that we are justifying in doing what we do and saying what we say. It justifies our actions and defends our reactions. This kind of wall we build, this narrative, this way we view the world, and this worldview that we have kind of cements in us that we’re okay doing what we’re doing. And we kind of justify what we’re doing.