What’s so bad about pride?

“There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves…. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others” (C. S. Lewis). That universal vice, that most unpopular fault, is pride. 

No man is free of pride. It’s a part of our fallen nature not only to think too highly of ourselves, but to be bent on being higher than everyone else. Pride clouds our vision so that we can’t see what we are by nature and it swells our self perception so that we see ourselves to be not only what we are not but greater than what we really are. Pride causes us to pant after distinction. We are desperate to be known, to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, and therefore cannot bear when another person seeks the same thing. The reason we don’t like a man who steals the party is because we want to steal the party. The reason we don’t like a man who’s admired is because we want to be admired.

So what’s so bad about pride? Everything. First of all, pride ultimately hates God. Pride cannot bear the fact that God is God. It cannot bear that God is the Most High, that the Lord alone is high and lifted up. It cannot bear the fact that it cannot accede the throne because God is already there. And it certainly cannot bear the fact that it can in no way ever get above God in order to look down on Him like it looks down on everyone else. And this is essentially why sinners hate God, because their proud hearts cannot bear to be below Him.

Thus a proud man can never know God because he refuses to know Him. To know Him as He is a man must admit that he himself is below Him and he must humble himself in order to occupy such a position––but this he cannot do. And as long as a man thinks he is what he is not and has what he has not, he can receive nothing at God’s hands and both salvation and reformation are impossible. The proud man is always looking down on others and as long as he continues to look down, he’ll never see Him who is seated above him.

This is why God often takes up a big stick when He comes after a sinner–because it takes a big stick to humble a proud man. God uses heavy crosses and great losses to bring a man to the end of himself, to break his proud neck and humble him. When God sets out to save a man given over to pride, He lovingly and mercifully comes with a big stick because nothing else will do, nothing else will bring him to his knees and bring him to say, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

But the real evil of pride for us as Christians is that it weasels itself right into the middle of our religious life. Of all the sins of which we are capable, none but pride is able to “be religious.” Indeed, when it comes to this, pride has pride of place. We can become proud of our generosity, proud of our deference to others, proud of our Christian service, proud of our obedience to our parents, proud of our love to our wife, proud of our submission to authority, etc. The point is, there is no virtue of which we cannot become proud. In fact, in a ridiculous sort of way, we are even tempted to be proud of our humility! We know pride is a sin, and so we seek to mortify it by exercising humility. And then we think to ourselves, “I am good to be so humble,” and almost immediately we take pride in it. Never forget that it is the devil’s masterpiece to make us think well of ourselves.

This is why our Heavenly Father so often brings trials into our lives that expose our sinfulness to ourselves–and others. It’s in order to humble us. He knows what a danger pride is to our walk. He knows that when we’re proud we either stop praying, stop leaning on Jesus, stop looking to His Spirit for guidance, stop reading the Bible for wisdom, or we take pride in our praying, pride in our dependence on Jesus, pride in our following the Spirit, pride in our Bible knowledge, etc.

So what’s so bad about pride? A proud man can never receive anything from God. A proud man is so up on himself that he needs nothing, will ask for nothing, and, sadly, will therefore die with nothing. As Christians, we must always be on our guard against pride. If we bring pride with us to the work of God, it will feed upon it and eventually ruin it. When asked what the three chief graces of the Christian life are, Augustine replied, “Humility, humility, humility.”

The next time God brings a trial into your life and exposes your sin, try humbling yourself by calling yourself what you really are: a wretched sinner saved by the grace of God, living every day by His sheer mercy, and in desperate need of daily forgiveness. When you can see yourself before God as nothing more than a sinner, and when, in the presence of God, who alone is really great and alone the Most High, you can learn to forget yourself, you’re beginning to learn something of the grace of humility and will then begin to learn what it means to live by faith alone in Christ alone.