PRIDE CHECKLIST

If there’s one thing God can’t stand and tolerate, it is pride. Proverbs 8:13 says “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate.” God hates pride with a passion. Proverbs 6:16-17 tells us that “These six things the Lord hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him; a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood.”

While God is against the proud, He gives grace, help and strength to the humble (James 4:6). Why does God frown so much at pride? Pride was what opened the door for sin and a curse that resulted in people working and laboring in pain, living the hard way, and experiencing all manner of hardship and problems in the world. Adam and Eve sinned against God, but greater than their sin, was the fact that they never told God they were sorry. They came up with flimsy excuses to justify their wrong behavior. Adam told God “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me out of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Adam indirectly told God well, if You hadn’t given me Eve, nothing like this would have happened. Eve told God, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:13). Adam and Eve never saw the need to acknowledge their sin, repent and seek forgiveness. When there’s pride in your heart, you find it extremely hard to accept correction or say you are sorry, even when you are clearly in the wrong.

Pride and the devil go hand in hand, they work in partnership together. Satan is the root and originator of pride. Satan, a once beautiful angel in heaven, fell because of pride (Isaiah 14:12-15). Today, what he does is to get people to trip and fall through pride. He cleverly sowed seeds of pride in Eve’s mind, by telling her “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Satan told Eve, don’t you want to be like God, to be in charge and control like God, to be on the same level with God, to know everything God knows. God created us in His image and likeness, but God never created us to replace Him or be Him. It is outright pride to want to exalt and lift yourself to the place and position of God, to want to be omniscient; all knowing like God. Anyone who like Eve did, welcomes and entertains discussions, suggestions and ideas from the devil will only end up getting your heart filled with pride.

Here are some traces of pride to watch out for and guard your heart and life from. Pride is an attention seeker in pursuit of self-glory. Pride makes you brag, flaunt and boast about who you are, what you have, what you have done. Where there is pride, you are very quick to attribute to your skills, experience, connections, money and resources or spiritual knowledge and activities, the glory due to God. Instead of saying “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name goes all the glory for your unfailingly love and faithfulness” (Psalm 115:1).

Anyone who concentrates heavily on the faults and flaws of others while being completely blind to your own weaknesses and shortcomings, has created a room for pride in your heart. Pride gives you a superiority attitude that makes you feel too big to associate with or be seen in the company of certain people because of their social, educational or financial level, lifestyle or background. Pride makes you treat others like they are nothing. Pride gives you a false sense of hope. It makes you place all your hope and confidence in things that have no lasting value, no lifelong assurance or guarantee. For example, your position or riches. Pride makes you live a self-reliant instead of God dependent life. If there’s no room for God and no time for God in your life, then you have given pride the red carpet treatment, instead of serving pride a quit notice.

PRAYER:

O LORD, strip me of every form of pride and arrogance that can make me shut You out of my life. Father, don’t let pride keep me from rising to the heights you want me to get to or make me rise only to later fall in shame and disgrace.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay

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