Pride | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 22, 1865

Pride.

"MANY persons do not comprehend how subtle a passion pride is; how easily it makes nutriment even out of its own severed members. One struggles successfully to overcome his avarice, and then becomes vain of his benevolence. One crucifies his shame and then glories in his boldness. Even the very act of self-crucifixion—the pain involved in it, the fortitude exercised, the success achieved,—become topics of self-complacent exhibition. Sometimes the disciple parades his cross before others; sometimes before himself. Sometimes he even displays it in the presence of God, like the Pharisee standing up in the temple and reciting to Omniscience the list of his fastings and his tithes.

This is a very different thing from that glorying in the cross of which Paul speaks. That was boasting in the cross of Christ; this in one's own cross. The one is delight in the work of the Redeemer, his atonement for man, and the system of truths and requirements which grows out of it. It is delight in his service, in the high and blessed privilege of giving up all for him, and in "knowing nothing save Jesus Christ and him crucified." An arrogant self-styled philosophy may pronounce this foolishness, and the rich and the great of this world may despise its followers as the "offscouring of all things;" but to the true believer it is "the power of God and the wisdom of God." The other holds forth for admiration, not Christ, but the disciple himself; gathering even out of the ashes of his own self-abasement the spark of spiritual pride. How difficult thus to preserve true humility, to become through inward crucifixion not only dead to the world, but dead to the cross itself!

Ah pride, pride! thou art that which holds many a man in the chains of his sins. It is a hard thing to take a man off his pride, and make him, instead of trusting in and boasting of his goodness, honesty, wisdom, and the like, to see himself a sinner, a fool, yea, a man that is cruel to his own soul.

This was the sin of devils, and it is the sin of man, and the sin from which no man can be delivered till his heart is broken; and then his pride is spoiled, then he will be glad to yield. If a man be proud of his strength, his manhood, a broken leg will maul him; and if he be proud of his goodness, a broken heart will maul him."—Bunyan.

There is a pride which looks on spiritual religion as a humiliation, or deems it even a mortification not to be endured. A mortification for this tiny speck of mortality not to stay by itself in its own littleness and frailty! A mortification to be brought up in the sense of God's own greatness. A mortification to be enabled by the Spirit of God, to have all our experience modulated and glorified by him! A mortification to be in God's wisdom, to be established in the confidence of his infinite majesty, to think with him and fear him, to move in the glorious order of his perfect mind, and be the embodiment eternally of his impulse! Oh, how petty and weak this pride! How contemptible this contempt! And yet, to be a Christian, to be given up to the Spirit of God, and carefully offered to his holy guidance,—how many look upon it as a meekness, a loss of dignity, a thing which only the tamer and less manly souls can descend to. I know not anything that exhibits the folly and deceit of man like this pride. As if it were some loss or abatement to be set in a plane with God, to have the inspiration of the Almighty, to receive a higher nature and life in the eternal life and impulse of God. It is as if the world of matter were to be ashamed of the sun, and shrink with inward mortification from the state of day! What is God but our day, the sun of our eternity, the light of our light? Without whom as the light of our seeing, the universe of nature were a mere phosphorescence of fate, unintelligent and cold, life a driblet of vanity, and eternity itself a protracted and amplified nothingness.—Bushnell.