Disclaimer:
Due to the large amount of sermons and topics that appear on this site I feel it is necessary to post this disclaimer on all sermons posted. These sermons are original to the author and the leading of the Holy Spirit. While ideas and illustrations are often gleaned from many sources including those at Sermoncentral.com, any similarities and wording including sermon title, that may appear to be the same as any other sermon are purely coincidental. In instances where other minister’s wording is used, due recognition will be given. These sermons are not copyrighted and may be used or preached freely. May God richly bless you as you read these words. It is my sincere desire that all who read them may be enriched. All scriptures quoted in these sermons are copies and quoted from the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible.
Pastor James May
YOUR PRIDE IS SHOWING
One of the greatest problems that all of us have is our sense of pride. While not all pride is considered as sinful, it is that pride of our own heart that causes us to lift ourselves higher onto a pedestal that can quickly crumble beneath us. God knows how to bring down the prideful spirit and he will never fail to do just that.
Proverbs 16:18, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
With a “promise” from God’s Word that the prideful heart and proud spirit are destined to fall and face destruction, it would be to our best interest to look into the subject of pride in the heart of man and examine our own hearts to see what pride lurks in the deep recesses of our heart so that we can attempt to root it out.
I want us to look at the prideful attitudes of some of the characters from God’s Word and see if we can identify with these same men. Let me say that if you find yourself feeling some of the same things and reacting in the same fashion as any of these men, then find an altar fast and start letting God work on the pride in your heart before it destroys your testimony.
Destroying Pride in the heart is one of the hardest battles that we all fight.
I like what Benjamin Franklin had to say concerning his own pride when he wrote his autobiography…”There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
Pharaoh:
Exodus 5:2, "And Pharaoh said, Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go."
Pharoah’s pride and self-confidence would not allow him to recognize that God was in control of his life and his kingdom. Pharaoh would not confess that there was a God greater than he because all of Egypt bowed before Pharaoh and he was considered as a god by his own people.
G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate conspirator under former President Richard Nixon, was quoted as saying this after he was released from prison: "I have found within myself all I need and all I ever shall need. I am a man of great faith, but my faith is in G. Gordon Liddy. I have never failed me." Mr. Liddy, if that’s true, why did you wind up in prison for so long? I would hate to know that I had to depend on you to get to heaven one day.
Mr. Liddy, Pharaoh, and a lot of people that I know will not admit to themselves or anyone else that God is real. They refuse to allow God to touch them, change them or direct their lives and they rush headlong into ultimate destruction.
Their pride and self-reliance get in the way of their finding God’s will.
Naaman
2 Kings 5:11, "But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper."
Here was a man of power and position. He was the Captain, or commanding general if you will, of the Syrian Army. But, Naaman had a big problem. He was covered with leprosy.
Leprosy, as you may know, is a type of sin and, in the time of Naaman, there was no cure. In Naaman’s case I think the sin that was most prevalent in his life was the sin of pride. It covered him because of his power and position.
He became angry at the prophet of God for not coming out to him and only sending a servant. God was going to heal Naaman but it was going to come under God’s terms and not in the way that Naaman desired.
There is a story about Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military hero of World War II and Korea.
MacArthur was highly thought of in Washington and was regarded as a leader. But he also had a reputation for being above everyone else personally. In order to fight this image of being a snob his Public Relations people came up with an idea. They would have him review a group of veterans. In the middle of the review they would have him suddenly recognize an enlisted man who had served under him during the war.
"It will be a tremendously moving and human moment," the advisers said to MacArthur. "Out of hundreds of men lined up for your inspection, you will suddenly pick out a single individual, call him by name and recall past campaigns." MacArthur agreed to go along with the plan.
So they set up the inspection and chose their veteran. The lucky soldier would be unaware that he’d been singled out for the honor. They went through the army records, found out everything about the fellow and figured out precisely where he would be standing when MacArthur marched through the ranks. To be on the safe side, they arranged for an aide to nudge MacArthur discreetly when he was directly in front of the proper soldier.
It all went off like clockwork. MacArthur saluted the veterans, the veterans saluted MacArthur. The general began his march along the long lines of soldiers. At the right moment, the aide gave MacArthur the nudge.
MacArthur halted. He turned and looked at the man standing stiffly at attention in front of him. "Jones!" he boomed. "We were together on Corregidor. You are Corporal Jones. I remember you."
Jones looked startled for a moment. Then he stared at the general with a puzzled expression. Finally, he blurted out, "MacArthur, I don’t know any MacArthur!" Jones didn’t know his own commander.
General MacArthur got his bubble burst that day and it served him right.
God knows how to get you off your high horse. It pays to remind ourselves that we are nothing without Jesus. It is God who must get the glory for our work, not us.
God often wants to bless his children but we are so caught up in our own ways that the blessings are blocked from reaching us. We cannot and will not receive the blessings of the Lord unless our pride is under control. And we cannot receive God’s blessings unless we allow God to move in his own time and in his own manner.
Uzziah
2 Chronicles 26:14-16, "And Uzziah prepared for them throughout all the host shields, and spears, and helmets, and habergeons, and bows, and slings to cast stones. And he made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal. And his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till he was strong. But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the LORD his God, and went into the temple of the LORD to burn incense upon the altar of incense."
Uzziah was a man who liked to blow his own horn, so to speak. He loved to make people sit up and take notice of the things that he was able to accomplish.
There are so many Christians who serve the Lord solely for the purpose of gaining recognition for their abilities and not just because they want to be a blessing. It’s not hard to spot them in a crowd because they are always talking and they love to brag. Their sermon is always the best. Their church is always the biggest, best and fastest growing. Their music is better than anyone else’s. Everything about them is bigger and better than anyone else and they love to tell everyone about it.
The story is told of a turtle who wanted to spend the winter in Florida, but he knew he could never walk that far. He convinced a couple of geese to help him, each taking one end of a piece of rope, while he clamped his vise-like jaws in the center. The flight went fine until someone on the ground looked up in admiration and asked, "Who in the world thought of that?" Unable to resist the chance to take credit, the turtle opened his mouth to shout, "I di…..d! "
There is also the story told by the late Mississippi Christian Comedian named Jerry Clower, who tells the story of one man in the area of Yazoo City . It seems that his man not only loved to tell yarns but told them so much that he believed them to be the truth even when he was the one who made them up.
The preacher decided to make an attempt to cure the man from his perpetual bragging and lying once and for all so he made up an unbelievable story of his own and went to see his wayward church member.
The preacher’s story went like this:
Yesterday in the middle of the service the back door of the church flew open and in walked one of the biggest, meanest black bears that I have ever seen. He was standing on his hind legs, growling and snarling and threatening everybody. The women were screaming, the children were crying and the men were throwing hymn books that only made the bear madder. Then, from nowhere there came this little tiny dog about the size of a Chihuaha and it barked, growled and nipped at the feet of that bear and ran him right out of the church.
Now my brother, do you believe that story? The man answered, “Well of course I do, that was my dog!”
Our own pride blinds us to the truth and we will accept a lie and when we accept and believe a lie, then we are deceived and it’s easy for Satan to bring us down. Watch your pride and ask God to get rid of it before the fall comes.
Hezekiah
2 Chronicles 32:25, "But Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up: therefore there was wrath upon him, and upon Judah and Jerusalem."
Nebuchadnezzar
Daniel 4:30, "The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?"
These two men were guilty of pride in their own accomplishments. They had taken the blessings of God, used those blessings to lift themselves up and then refused to give God the glory for anything that he had done for them.
We must never forget that it is not by our might or power that God’s kingdom will grow but it is by the power of the Holy Spirit. All I am is a messenger to bring to you God’s Word and to try to lead you into the path that the Holy Spirit wants us to take. It’s up to you to follow and it’s up to God bring an increase of his Spirit within your heart.
Make sure that you give God the credit for what is done in your life and in the church.
The last example I want to give is that of Belshazzar.
Daniel 5:23, "But hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified…”
Belshazzar had come to the place of ultimate pride. He had come to believe that he was above the power of God to reach him. He desecrated the sacred vessels of God’s Holy Temple. It was as though he stood and shook his fist in God’s face and dared God to do anything about it. That’s the place of ultimate pride and you can count on God doing something to bring you down.
That night would be the last that Belshazzar lived upon the face of the earth. From that day to this and for eternity he will forever pay the price for his rebellious pride. He is forever reminded that pride goes before a fall. One day he was King of all that he surveyed and the next, he was in pits of hell, humbled under the mighty hand of God.
Belshazzar had taken God’s own vessels and used them to flaunt his pride in the face of God and that was all that God would take.
One news release told of a Charlotte, North Carolina, woman who set a world record while playing a convenience store video game. After standing in front of the game for fourteen hours and scoring an unprecedented, seven and a half million points on the game called "Tapper," the woman was pleased to see a TV crew arriving to record her efforts for posterity. She continued to play while the crew, alerted by her fiancé, prepared to shoot. She was shocked to see the video screen suddenly go blank. (No, it wasn’t a Windows based PC game that just locked up).
While setting up their lights, the camera team had accidentally unplugged the game, thus bringing her bid for ten million points to a swift end! The effort to publicize her achievement became the agent of her ultimate failure.
When God says that a proud heart leads to destruction and a haughty bragging spirit leads to a fall, that’s exactly what he means.
We need to be careful to give God due credit for what he does in our lives. Whatever talents, abilities, and gifts you may have are not of your own creation. They were given by God.
A lot of people may say that they worked hard to become a musician or a singer or a preacher or whatever – but we must realize that all the hard work in the world won’t make you any of those things unless God first gives you the ability and the gift to build upon.
Let’s all watch our prideful spirit. Let’s not be caught lifting ourselves higher than we should.
It’s a wonderful thing to know that God created us in such a way that it is nearly impossible to pat ourselves on the back, or to kick ourselves in the rear too hard.
If we will but humble ourselves and then not develop pride in our humility then God will lift us up and exalt us in his time and in his way.
