WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF PRIDE?

Today, we want to look at “THE CONSEQUENCES OF PRIDE.” Ezekiel 28:11-19 say, “Your heart was filled with pride because of all your beauty.”  

The greatest force working against you is pride. Pride is the mother of all other evils. Therefore, to make it to Heaven in the life to come, you MUST eliminate every atom of pride from your life in this present world.

Pride has disastrous consequences, and these include:

1. Pride will make you to face the world from a selfish point of view, blinding you to your faults and leading to jealousy, envy, and a judgmental attitude toward others.

2. Pride will lead you to destruction. Pride is a deadly evil that is working against you for your complete destruction.  “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty (snobbish) spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

Pride can destroy your life. How can pride destroy one’s life?  Psalms 10:11 says, “He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it.” The wicked say to themselves, “God isn’t watching! He will never notice!”

3. Pride makes you to be restless because it makes you dissatisfied with what you have and concerned about what everyone else is doing.

4. Pride will bring you low. Pride will demote you. “A man's pride shall bring him low…” (Prov. 29:23a). Therefore, do not allow any atom of pride to be found in your life because it will surely bring you down.

5. Pride lures you into living independent of God (Mk. 6:1-13; 6:5). There is an incompatibility between blind arrogance and the presence of God in your heart. The proud person depends on himself or herself rather than on God. This causes God’s guiding influences to leave his or her life.

When God’s presence is welcome, there is no room for pride, because He makes you aware of your true self.

“Because of their unbelief, He couldn’t do any mighty miracles among them except to place His hands on a few sick people and heal them” (Mark 6:5).

6. Pride will undermine your faith (Lk. 18:9-14). Jesus could have done greater miracles in Nazareth, but He chose not to because of the people’s pride and unbelief.

The miracles He did had little effect on the people because they did not accept His message or believe that He was from God. Therefore, Jesus looked elsewhere, seeking those who would respond to His message and miracles.

“I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For the proud will be humbled, but the humble will be honored” (Luke 18:14).

7. Pride will bring shame to your life. Great as you are, once you become proud, shame will follow you. “When pride cometh, then cometh shame (disgrace): but with the lowly (humble) is wisdom” (Prov. 11:2).

8. Pride can cut you off from God and others (Eph. 2:11-22). The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable did not go to the temple to pray to God but to announce to all within earshot how good he was. But the tax collector went recognizing his sin and begging for mercy.

Self-righteousness is dangerous. It leads to pride, causes a person to despise others, and prevents him or her from learning anything from God.

The tax collector’s prayer should be our prayer because we all need God’s mercy every day. Don’t let pride in your achievements cut you off from God.

“Christ Himself has made peace between us Jews and you Gentiles by making us all one people. He has broken down the wall of hostility that used to separate us” (Eph. 2:14).

9. Pride will distort your view of yourself and others. Jews and Gentiles alike could be guilty of spiritual pride - Jews for thinking their faith and traditions elevated them above everyone else, Gentiles for trusting in their achievements, power, or position. 

Spiritual pride blinds us to our own faults and magnifies the faults of others. Be careful not to become proud of your salvation. Instead, humbly thank God for what he has done, and encourage others who might be struggling in their faith.

10. Pride will lead to a hardness of heart, which, in turn, leads to an arrogant disregard of God and sin. “When his heart and mind were hardened with pride, he was brought down from his royal throne” (Dan 5:20).

11. Pride will lead to ignoring God and a life of disobedience. “These wicked people are too proud to seek God. They seem to think that God is dead” (Ps. 10:2-11).

12. Pride can destroy relationships faster than almost anything else because it is always taking away from others. Pride strengthens your position at the expense of others. It is selfish.

“They will be boastful and proud . . . They will be unloving and unforgiving . . . They will betray their friends” (2 Tim. 3:2-5).

13. The pride of your heart will deceive you. “The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?” (Obad. 3).

14. An inflated estimation of your past successes will lead to prideful behaviour and, ultimately, judgment. “When Uzziah had become powerful, he also became proud, which led to his downfall” (2 Chron. 26:16-20).

15. Pride will render you blind to your own sin. “The proud Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer” (Lk. 18:10-11).

16. Pride finds comfort in false security. “You are proud because you live in a rock fortress and make your home high in the mountains” (Oba. 1:3).

17. Pride can infect your spiritual life and divide the church. “If you pay attention to the Scriptures, you won’t brag about one of your leaders at the expense of another” (1 Cor. 4:6-7).

18. Pride may keep you from asking others for help. “Do you understand what you are reading?” . . . And the Ethiopian Eunuch begged Philip to come up into the carriage and sit with him” (Acts 8:30-31).

19. God hates pride and will judge it severely. “Instantly, an angel of the Lord struck Herod with a sickness, because he accepted the people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God” (Acts 12:22-23).

20. The proud do not experience God’s mercy. The Pharisee did not go to the temple to pray to God but to announce to all within earshot how good he was. The tax collector went recognizing his sin and begging for mercy.

21. Pride will bring you down to hell no matter who you are. The final destination of all proud people is hell fire. It was pride that brought Lucifer to hell. So what makes you think that you won't go there if there is any atom of pride found in your thoughts? Be careful!

WHY IS PRIDE SUCH A TERRIBLE OFFENSE TO GOD?

Pride is a deadly evil that is working against you for your complete destruction. So today we want to look at the very reason why pride is a terrible offense to God. For some reasons God abhors pride:

1. The goal of pride is to elevate you above others, and often above God Himself.

2. Pride makes you independent of God. Pride makes you to feel self-sufficient. By pride, you are saying to God “Leave me alone, I can do without You.”

3. Pride makes you to worship yourself and makes you to want other people to worship you too. Look at what happened to Herod because he accepted people’s worship:

“Instantly, an angel of the Lord struck Herod with a sickness, because he accepted the people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God” (Acts 12:22-23).

4. Pride makes you want to take the place of God - the place of worship. This is idolatry (Ex. 20:1-5). Only God should be worshipped. For instance, Nebuchadnezzar wanted people to worship his image (Dan. 3).

5. Pride makes you to compete with God for His glory and praise. But God will never share His glory with anyone.

Pride is the mother of all other evils. Scripture also teaches that pride is a precursor to all other forms of sin. Pride is the soil in which all manner of sin germinates and grows. Beneath all your sins is the rotting bones of pride and arrogance. Numerous sins are the direct fallout of pride:

Envy. Envy is the resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, an advantage that you are convinced ought rightfully to be yours. But why should someone else’s success or promotion or praise provoke envy in our hearts? Why not joy, instead? The answer is because we don’t want others to appear better than ourselves; we are convinced that we are more worthy and more deserving of the advantage.

Bitterness. Bitterness is that sour feeling in our souls when someone has offended us or defrauded us or failed to deliver on what we thought they owed us. But why should that provoke bitterness? Because it makes us look bad in the eyes of others, or it deprives us of something we think we deserve.

Strife. Strife flows out of a competitive desire to be number one, the desire to be acknowledged by others, the desire for power and authority and praise. 

Deceit. Why do we lie and mislead others and speak in fuzzy rather than forthright terms? Typically, it is because we hope to gain something for ourselves that we think we deserve, or we do it to hide something from others that we fear might make us look bad. 

Hypocrisy. We are motivated to pretend to be something we are not because we fear being seen and known for what we really are.

Slander. Why do we speak negatively of others? Why do we slander them? Perhaps because we’ve been hurt ourselves, and we want revenge, or we want to gain acceptance with others, and the only way is to diminish them in the minds of those people whose favor or respect we must have.

Greed. Greed at its core is the desire to make more of and for ourselves than God wishes or permits. And pride is the poker that stokes the fires of materialism. We can’t stand the thought of people thinking we aren’t as rich and successful and talented and deserving and sophisticated as others.

Every one of these sins grows from the same deadly taproot: pride. Simply put, pride is that ugly part of your heart that causes you to be more concerned about yourself and your own reputation than you are about Christ and His.

For these reasons God hates pride with passion because pride aims at dividing and scattering His Kingdom.

God said, “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate” (Prov. 8:13).

So in His eternal plan, God wants to do everything possible to take pride away from you because He knows what pride can do to your eternal destiny. He knows what pride can do to corrupt the grace, wisdom and power He has given to you.

Because God loves you so much, He wants to take pride away from you, because He knows the danger of pride.

“For God may speak in one way or in another yet man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night. When deep sleep falls upon men, while slumbering upon their beds. Then He opens the ears of men and gives them wisdom and instruction, causing them to change their minds, and KEEPING THEM FROM PRIDE and warning them of the penalties of sin, and keeping them from falling into some trap” (Job 33:14-18).

So, by all means God wants to take pride away from your life, because He knows that pride will bring you down to hell.

For instance, God allowed the thorn in the life of Paul to keep him from pride, due to the abundance of revelations that were given to him, so that he may not glory in his revelations and wisdom. And even when he pleaded with the LORD to take away the affliction (thorn) from him, the LORD said, “No, My grace is sufficient for thee: for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

God was saying to Paul, “That thorn in your body is meant to bring you low, to humble you, otherwise I will destroy you – otherwise you can’t come to Heaven. I allowed that thorn in your flesh so that all the time you’ll be looking up to Me for help. In that way I can sustain you and you won’t run away because you know that you’ll always come back to Me for help.”

That is God for you: His intention is to make you humble, glorious and great. When you are humble, your wealth will not corrupt you.

When you are humble, in spite of your great riches, you’ll still have (eternal) life. That is the beauty of humility.

“By humility and the fear of the Lord are (1) riches, and (2) honour, and (3) life” (Prov. 22:4).

When you are humble in spirit, honour will uphold you. “A man's pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit” (Prov. 29:23).

HOW DOES GOD REMOVE PRIDE FROM OUR LIVES?

God’s way of removing every atom of pride from your life is by taking you through the wilderness experience.

The wilderness experience refers to trials, afflictions, adversities, persecutions. That is why people despise and abuse you for no obvious reasons. God has a purpose in it.

With all your fasting and praying, binding and loosing, that unpleasant situation in your life is still there. Why? Because God has a purpose in it!

For instance, it was so in King David’s life. David said, “I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies. 4 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid. 5 The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me. 6 In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of His temple, and my cry came before Him, even into His ears” (Ps. 18:3-6).

“He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me: for they were too strong for me. 18 They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the Lord was my stay” (Ps. 18:17-18).

David was not a sinner when he was going through all these adversities. Yet he had to go through the wilderness experience so as to eliminate every atom of pride in his life.

God allowed those persecutions in your life so that He could open your eyes to the deceitfulness of your pride. By this experience you will see your nakedness, and your need for complete dependence on God in all things.

The wilderness experience will help to bring you to yourself, and cause you to see life differently. For instance, Nebuchadnezzar saw life differently after going through the wilderness experience by attending the University of the Forest for 7 years.

This helped him to turn to God and depend on Him completely for everything. In humility, he submitted himself to God.

Woe to anyone who refuses to be persuaded even by terrible trials to turn to Jesus Christ, he shall surely enter into everlasting destruction.

God is saying, “If you turn away from Me, I will allow troubles to come into your life. If you don’t hear, I’ll increase the intensity of the troubles, so that you may repent.”

But woe unto that man that will harden his heart to divine adversity, which is really a messenger of salvation to his life.

So you should realize that sufferings and adversities are messengers of humility sent to purge you of every atom of pride so that you can become great in the hands of the LORD.

Also realize that it is grace that uproots pride. Perhaps the most sobering summary of pride is found in Proverbs 26:12 - “Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him” (Prov. 26:12). 

Why is there little hope for him? Because pride puts a person beyond the perceived need for instruction. The proud heart is impervious to rebuke and insensitive to conviction. That’s why he’s more hopeless than the fool.

So how then can one uproot pride from his heart? How can one overcome its deceitful influence? Paul asks the arrogant Corinthians, “For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).

It is difficult for the person who understands the sovereignty of God’s grace to be prideful, unless of course he takes credit for understanding it. Pride is taking credit for what God has done. 

To know that all we have is a gift, that all we experience and enjoy is an expression of God’s goodness and not ours, to know that everything in our possession - especially our salvation - comes from the hand of God is to take the first step in defeating and dethroning pride from our hearts.

Therefore, please do not allow any atom of pride to be found in your life because it will surely demote you in this world and bring you down to hell in the life to come.

CONCLUSION: The Word of God should settle God’s stand in this matter: Without holiness no man shall see the LORD (Heb. 12:14).

Watch out for the next edition of Good News from the Pulpit!

•          Your friend: I. I. MADUBUNYI (Senior Pastor).

Promise of God: This week, “God will perfect all that concerns you” (Ps. 138:8).