When Pride and Grace Collide
Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash
Consider with me for a moment this one assertion: the major issues we face today as a world, a nation, and a church – from divineness to hatred to anger to fear to despair and more – all stem from one cataclysmic point of contact: the collision of pride and grace.
From Genesis 3 through the judgment scenes in Revelation, this collision is at the center of the story of Israel, the teachings of Jesus, and the birth of the church. It is also at the core of our steward theology. In this theology we see how we fight the battle with our old sinful nature that begs us to play the owner, to grasp at control, to claim our own rights and privileges, in short, to be the Lord of our life. In this ownership mindset we measure the quality of our life in terms of happiness, security, entitlements, and the extent to which we have full reign to make life choices free from challenges or interventions from anyone. We buy the lie that our best life comes from our right to choose whatever we want, believing such will bring us the most pleasure and happiness. We defend our choices by vilifying those who disagree with us. We place our self and our choices at the center of our life and reject any voice that would tell us otherwise. There is a name for this absolute ownership mentality.
Pride.
Pride says I can choose to live anyway I want to live, any lifestyle, any sexual expression, any set of priorities that please me, any worldview that supports my own opinions, biases, and perspectives, any group of people I choose to associate with, any way I choose to treat my body, any attitudes I may wish to have toward others, etc. Pride requires that nothing else comes before me and my personal decisions. In the church it takes the form of spiritual pride, perhaps the most heinous of all. It is the sin of the disciples who clamored to be the ones sitting at Jesus’ right hand (Matthew 20:21-22), or the Pharisees who lauded their knowledge and authority over others (Matthew 23:1-36). Spiritual pride breeds the hypocrisy so many see in the church and rightly condemn.
This definition of pride is different from the satisfaction we might take in a job well done. Whether in the church or in the world, it is the insidious side of our human centeredness that places are desire for happiness and self-justification on the throne of our life. In this sense, we own our pride. As owners, we desperately desire to control everything around us to bring it in alignment with that pride. Our pride is our identity.
In stark opposition to our desperate desire to live as owners of our pride, we are invited to be stewards of God’s grace. Grace is the great antidote to the poisonous effect of pride in our life. Grace comes from without. Grace, by its very definition, is a gift. It is nothing we earn, deserve, or to which we are entitled. Quite the opposite. Grace sheds a white-hot light on our pride and judges it for what it is. And there-in lies the problem.
According to John Newton’s hymn, Amazing Grace, grace is only amazing because it “saved a wretch like me.” I have a friend who went to be a youth pastor at a church and early on he discovered that they had changed the words to read, “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a soul like me.” When he inquired as to why they had changed it, he was told, “nobody wants to admit that they are a wretch.“
And that’s the problem. Unless we are a wretch, lost, and blind, grace is not amazing. In fact, grace is an insult. How dare anyone tell us that we need grace when we believe in our pride we have done nothing wrong. To accept grace is to acknowledge our deep need for forgiveness from sin that will destroy us. Without the acknowledgment of our sin, our brokenness, our desperate need for healing and forgiveness, the grace of God will be treated with disdain. To the prideful heart grace is anathema.
There is a story told of a group of seminary students who were debating the question of what was the one thing that most distinguished the Christian faith from all other religions in the world. They had a long list of possible answers, but one by one they had to abandon them because some vestige of each could be found in some other of the world’s religions. As the question perplexed them, they happened to see professor CS Lewis walking by the room. They went out and inquired if he would come join them and help them with this dilemma. He came in and heard their question and their explanations as to why none of their parts of Christian theology answered the question. Dr. Lewis reportedly smiled and said “This is quite easy. The one thing that distinguishes the Christian faith from all of the religions in the world is grace.” Only in Christianity, do we find a God who so loved the world that he gave (John 3:16), a Son who, for the joy set before him endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2), a Holy Spirit, who comes to guide us and lead us into all truth (John 16:13).
Grace is the heartbeat of the Christian faith because it’s the defining nature of our creator God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Is it any wonder why the enemy hates it so much. In his attack against all things of God, the enemy has crafted in the heart of man this passionate desire to throw God off the throne, replacing Him with our anxious pursuit of self-fulfillment and the demand for entitlements, rights, and privileges that feed our pride and fuel our desire to play the owner.
This is the great collision of our time; a world dominated by the ownership of pride in conflict with the gospel of Jesus Christ, which offers grace as it’s one unequivocal gift and only entry point through which everyone must travel to find, as Paul put it, “the life that is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19).
As we live and serve as ambassadors of this gospel, we should expect an escalating hatred of its core message from all those for whom pride has overwhelmed their spirit, including some inside the church. We must pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to bring people to the end of themselves – to that place where they find that for all its allure, the life of pride and ownership leads ultimately to emptiness, brokenness, and despair. It’s at that point that grace becomes amazing. May we be lovingly and graciously presenting this gospel to our generation for such a time as this.
