Pride

 

 Pride - a least favourite topic for me to share. However, I felt compelled to share, as this is one of the things that God wanted me to turn away from, which also was touched on during the recent Church camp.

It has been years I’ve “accumulate” pride in my life, whereby I thought I had more experience/holier than others, trying to impose my own set of ideas, causing distress in my interaction with others and service to God.

It occurs to me that when I think that I am better than the other, I am as if the Pharisee in the “Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector” – Luke 18:11, NKJV

The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.

The parable coincides with what I read in Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Chapter 8 – The Great Sin, page 122, paragraph 2

Pride gets no pleasure out of something, only out of having more than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.

There are also times that I was so full of myself, I was certain my thoughts are always right. I couldn’t stop but ponder upon the words of Virgil Vogt of Reba Place Fellowship:

“If you cannot listen to your brother, you cannot listen to the Holy Spirit”.

It is the pride of life (a term coined in 1 John 2:16, NKJV) that I have fumbles and stumbles a lot in my journey with Lord. May I be “turn and be renewed” [Church camp 2013 theme]. Amen.

-Yit Mun

Image taken from:
http://www.goodshepherdbh.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/pharisee-crop.jpg