Pride Comes Before (and After) the Fall

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!”   Philippians 2: 5-8 (NIV)

Have you ever confidently attempted a trick or a specific line on the mountain and had it go horribly wrong?  Like embarrassingly wrong; and maybe you even got injured and needed people to help you out?

Yeah, me neither. Asking for a friend.

Many of us have broken ourselves on the mountain. And there’s one particular already-broken part of us that we have all dealt with on the mountain; it’s called Pride. It’s not the worst broken piece to discover inside us, buuuut honestly, it’s right up there. Because the plague of Pride tends to offset the very foundation of our identity. It affects how we (mis)understand who we are, who God is, and how we ought to operate in the world around us. 

Humanity has struggled with Pride for as long as we’ve kept history. Some of the Fathers of our Faith, (the likes of Lewis, Calvin, Luther, Augustine, and Aquinas) all refer to Pride as “the great sin”.

C.S. Lewis says, “there is no fault which makes a man more unpopular and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves (THAN PRIDE). And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.”

We recognize pride. We feel it. We pretend it’s not there. We mask it. We distract ourselves away from dealing with it. Sometimes we even justify it as a ‘normal’ part of our culture. But it’s a large part of humankind’s brokenness. Is a little bit of Pride all that bad? Try it. You want a date with humility, get prideful. Job, Eve, Lucifer, Uzziah…many have struggled with and fallen due to Pride.

So, how should we deal with Pride?

Try this simple solution to combat the idea of your own superiority: spend more time focusing on the answer than the problem!

Phil. 2:5–8 reads, “…have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross!”

If Jesus is the ultimate model, let’s watch and learn.