Dennis Tuuri

I don’t want Mr. Ed in there again. Sermon scripture is Psalm 10. Psalm 10. Psalm 10. Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? The wicked in his pride do persecute the poor. Let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined. For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire, and blesseth the covetous whom the Lord abhorreth. The wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God.

God is not in all his thoughts. His ways are always grievous. Thy judgments are far above, out of his sight. As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved, for I shall never be in adversity. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud. Under his tongue is mischief and vanity. He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages, in the secret places doth he murder the innocent.

His eyes are privily set against the poor. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den. He lieth in wait to catch the poor. He doth catch the poor when he draweth him into his net. He croucheth and humbleth himself that the poor may fall by his stronghold. He hath said in his heart, “God hath forgotten. He hideth his face. He’ll never see it.” Arise, O Lord, O God. Lift up thine hand. Forget not the humble.

Wherefore doth the wicked condemn God? He hath said in his heart, “Thou wilt not require it. Thou hast seen it, and thou beholdest mischief and spite to requite it with thy hand. The poor committeth himself unto thee. Thou art the helper of the fatherless. Break thou the arm of the wicked, and the evil man. Seek out his wickedness till thou find none. The Lord is king forever and ever. The heathen are perished out of his land.

Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble. Thou wilt prepare their heart. Thou wilt cause thine ear to hear, to judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress. The young children may be dismissed now to go to their Sabbath schools.

So deadly sins. And last week we did an introduction to the seven deadly sins and began talking about pride. And this morning we’re going to, or this afternoon rather, we’re going to continue to talk about pride.

It’s interesting to me on a day where we’re going to talk about pride and God humbling people that I’ve made any number of mistakes in this morning’s service already. And that’s certainly humbling to me. And I think that’s how we have to see life—as God humbling us and breaking us before him and causing us to be contrite and repentant before him. Things we do wrong and recognizing our limitations.

Now, we talked about the seven deadly sins being very important—historically very important for the church for the last 2,000 years. For most of the last 2,000 years, up until the last say hundred years or so, and even probably the last fifty years, the churches understood what those seven deadly sins were, at least. They might have had somewhat different lists, a little bit different order, might have had eight or ten deadly sins, but they knew about the seven deadly sins.

Remember, we mentioned that historically, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—that we’ll make reference to throughout this series—the Parson’s Tale, the very last one of those tales in the Canterbury Tales, is a sermon on the seven deadly sins, which was quite common during the Middle Ages in England. At one point they were actually ordered to preach on the seven deadly sins four times a year. All the pastors in England were to do this.

And you’re in the handouts in the foyer, as you come in. Hopefully you picked up that one copy that has on it a couple of summations of Chaucer’s analysis of what pride does and then the remedy for pride. We’ll be making reference to that a little bit later on. What we’re trying to do in this series of sermons is to do what G.K. Chesterton said is needful for morality.

Remember, we said that Chesterton wrote—and by the way, we sang a song written by Chesterton a couple of minutes ago—Chesterton wrote that morality like art consists of drawing a line somewhere. And today in our society, those lines are not drawn. They’re fuzzed over. Sin isn’t spoken of. And certainly, the sin we’re speaking of last week and today, pride, is hardly even recognized as a sin in our culture anymore. Indeed, it is promoted and encouraged.

Remember we said that these are not seven deadly sins deadly in the sense of the Roman Catholic doctrine of deadly versus venial sins. Rather, these are deadly sins in that they are the root from which all kinds of branches of other activities flow out of. And that is why they’ve been focused on in the church over the last 2,000 years.

We also mentioned that Dante’s purgatory, which we’ll be making mention of in this morning’s talk, is a description of the seven deadly sins as well as a soul seeks to cleanse himself and get out of purgatory. Of course, we don’t believe in purgatory in this church. Scripture doesn’t teach it. But the point is that it is a lifelong battle that Christians face, fighting those seven deadly sins.

We spoke about how it was quite common in the early and middle ages of the church to see the seven deadly sins in reference to the seven Canaanite nations or the seven demons that possess people in the New Testament or the seven-headed beasts in the book of Revelation. All these were seen as pictures of the great harm that these sins can do to our lives, but also of God’s power to overcome those sins in our lives. We see the battle, we engage ourselves in the battle, realizing that God gives us victory over these sins as we fight and fight hard against them in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, we’ll review. The seven deadly sins are again: pride, envy, and anger. And those are the three that some call the cold sins. Some have said these are sins of perverted love—pride, envy, and anger. And then the middle sin is sloth, which is defective love, as some have said. And then the last three are avarice or greed, gluttony, and lust. And these are sins some writers have said of excessive love. Those are the hot sins.

We have pride, envy, anger, sloth, and then avarice, gluttony, and lust. And that’s the order we’ll be considering them in.

As well, we began talking about pride last week. It’s listed at the head of these seven deadly sins. We said that historically pride is often seen not as one of the seven. Originally, there were eight deadly sins. Pride was the root, and then these other seven flow out of it. And while it’s now seen as a list of one of seven, we pointed out from other verses in the scriptures and other quotes from historic people such as Luther and Augustine—they all saw pride as the essential sin from which all these other sins flow out.

Pride, of course, was the sin of the devil and caused his fall. And pride was the sin of Adam and Eve, seeking to assert themselves as the giver of law instead of God’s law, judging God’s law, inverting the natural order, and putting themselves on top. It’s the first sin and it’s also the one that will be last conquered in us when God finally deals with us by taking us into eternity. Gregory called it the queen of sins.

And we said last week that essentially the sin of pride in its essence is a violation of the first commandment. The first commandment is thou shalt have no other gods before me. The sin of pride puts ourselves as a god before God. And so it’s an inversion of God’s order. It’s an attempted inversion. Of course, it can’t invert what God has done. But it’s an attempt to see ourselves as God, and God then is debased.

It’s the exaltation of oneself, and it’s the attempted debasement then of God. But really all it is, as Mark McConnell pointed out well in the question and answer period last week, is God turning us over into that path—the path toward cursing instead of the path toward blessing. That it’s an attempt to put oneself as God, but we’re not God. And so it ends up with ourselves becoming, as it were, demonic, and possessed with all these other sins.

Sin of pride is an exultation of oneself. It is selfishness, self-centeredness, self-satisfaction, self-exaltation, et cetera. And it is a very common phenomenon in our country. Our country seems to promote pride, particularly in our day and age. In America in 1989 or 1990, it is now.

I wanted to point out two verses that I did not mention last week in this section before we get on to the rest of the outline. We’ll see this later, but—and you’ll see it on your sheet—that Chaucer said through the Parson that contumacy also is a sin of pride. Contumacy, some of us are familiar with in Deuteronomy 17:12 and following, we read the account of the man who does presumptuously before God by refusing to listen to the governing authorities in church or state. And that man who enters into that sort of presumptuous sin and will not hearken under the priest—the scriptures say that man shall be put to death.

Later, a chapter later in Deuteronomy 18:22, we read of the prophet that speaks in the name of God. And if the thing doesn’t come to pass, again, that is a capital crime. He is a false prophet. And Deuteronomy 18:22 says specifically, the prophet hath spoken presumptuously. Presumptuously is one of those root words, one of a number of Hebrew words that can also be seen as prideful or exhibiting the results of pride. And it gives a good picture: presumptuously asserting our authority over the authority of God’s created order. Presumptuously asserting our word over God’s word. And that’s the essence of pride.

And those two passages of scripture point out quite clearly it is a deadly sin. God attaches the death penalty to it when it takes those sorts of forms. And then finally I wanted to point out one other verse in Ezekiel 31:14. I think that verse is cited on your outline. Ezekiel 31. That section of scripture talks about a tree that grows up real tall alongside a river. And when the tree thinks itself is being self-sufficient and is being exalted and lifts itself up in its own thought—remember we said the pride means to rise up, to be high, to be puffed up, to boil upward, as it were.

When the tree in the parable, or the allegory that’s told in Ezekiel 31, when the tree sees itself as exalted and self-sufficient, it is toppled. The tree has to recognize that it draws its sustenance from the lowly river. And so we also have to recognize that we draw our sustenance from the means God chooses to give unto us. We draw our sustenance from God himself. He is the source of life, of which the river in the scriptures is always a picture.

Well, the tree that doesn’t see itself that way is toppled by God. And I thought of that a lot this last week. God gives us windstorms. He brings us rainstorms. He puts all around our area, in his providence, during these last two weeks when we’re considering the sin of pride, pictures of what pride is—exalted trees—and then God’s judgment upon pride. These trees being knocked over. Great, tremendous trees, and yet becoming nothing in the sight of God. Devastated and judged.

Okay. So pride is a real bad deal, and we want to root it out of our lives. And to that end we want to talk now about the ways of pride. How can we recognize pride in ourselves since it is such a self-deluding sort of a thing? The ways of pride.

And as I mentioned in your outlines that are available, we have a quotation there from a man named Stanford Lyman, summarizing Chaucer’s depiction of how pride reveals itself. You might want to take that out for just a minute. I’ll just read this quote, and this is for you to take home to think through on your own—in each of these individual points. They all are worth preaching on—a whole sermon on each of them themselves. But let’s just read it over real quickly.

Here’s how pride evidences itself: Pride shows a malicious disobedience to the commandments of God. Boastfulness about the harm or the good that the sinner has done. Hypocrisy in concealing the bad and pretending the good. Maliciousness in scorn for neighbors and also for the precepts governing righteous conduct. Arrogance and beliefs about his own good nature and high station. Impudence and disdain for moral instruction and a complete lack of shame over sins. Insolence and refusal to acknowledge the judgments of others. Elation in its refusal to submit to a master or recognize an equal. Contumacy and indignant hostility to every authority. Presumptuousness in undertakings. Irreverence and withholding honor where it is due. Pertinacity in defense of follies. And overconfidence and wit and babbling in an ever constant stream of ego-inflating conversation.

That is a good summation of some of the aspects of how pride manifests itself. It manifests itself in various ways. Another way to think of this is some of the terms that are associated with proud people in the language of the last couple hundred years. One man calls those who are prideful as being “camel-nosed.” And if you have a picture of a camel in your head, the camel’s nose is always kind of going up in the air. Prideful people are camel-nosed. They may not do it externally—a lot of times they do, though—but in terms of thinking of themselves as better than others, they are camel-nosed. They are “highblown,” another expression we use. They’re puffed up. They’re full of themselves. They’re stuck up. “Proud as a peacock.” These are various physical or symbolic ways we can picture ways of thinking about what a proud person is like.

But now I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about several specific aspects of pride out of this list that Chaucer gives us and out of the scriptures and concentrate on them a little bit in more depth to get a full picture and help us to realize that while Psalm 10 talks about a proud man who is obviously a real bad guy—crouching in corners and killing people—that the root of all that was his pride. We talked about that last week, and that pride is not just found in the terrible wicked people that actually kill people in our society. That pride is endemic in ourselves and in fallen man indeed.

And so we want to think about that and want to help analyze—not just how the other guy is so bad off, but how we can correct the sin of pride as it attacks our very heart and tries to thwart all the good that God would have us do.

I read a quote this last week, and I don’t know how accurate this is historically, but it was interesting to me because it sounded very similar to what Otto Scott had said in last year’s Reconstruction conference. The quote said, “If the Puritans had been as vigorous in confessing their own sin as they were in confessing the sin of the royalists, perhaps they would have fared a little better over time.” Now, you know the context of all that is this church has a great appreciation for the work of the Puritans. We want to see ourselves and the new reformation that’s going on in America in historical context with the Puritans, and they had a great deal to commend themselves. I’m just—I use that not so much as a comment on the Puritans, but as a comment on us.

We don’t want to just critique what’s around us. We want to analyze ourselves. Our great enemies are not the world around us. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. Our great enemies are these internal sins to us that cause us to fall out of favor with God and to incur his curses upon us rather than his blessings.

So I want to make this very practical for ourselves. Okay.

First, the scriptures teach us that the ways of pride are the ways of our strengths. We quoted Dorothy Sayers last week, saying that the seven deadly sins could be classified as hot or cold. Dorothy Sayers also wrote that the devilish part of pride is that it attacks us not in our weak points but in our strong points, you know, and that becomes very difficult to resist. That certainly squares well with the teaching of scripture in the book of Jeremiah.

I hope I can keep all these papers straight. A lot of papers here. In the book of Jeremiah we read in Jeremiah 9:23 and 24: Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might. Let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord which exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, saith the Lord.

The point is that the rich person, the powerful or mighty person, and the person who is wise and been given wisdom and intelligence is liable to boast himself. That the word “glory” here can be translated as boast or to be proud of those attributes. God gives us good gifts. But because God gives us good gifts doesn’t mean we’re home free. We have to use those gifts in the way God sees fit to call us to use them. We have to use them humbly is what I’m trying to say here.

We may have these gifts, but the temptation we put to become prideful about those very areas of strength that God has given to us. And so it’s very important that if we have these sorts of characteristics—if we find ourselves particularly intelligent or particularly powerful or persuasive with men or well-blessed by God in terms of physical blessings—we recognize that going to come with those things a temptation to fall into the deadly sin of pride.

God warned us of this in Deuteronomy 8:11 and 17 as well. And I won’t quote them, but remember he says in those passages of scripture several times, he says, “You’re going to go into this land. I’m going to bless you. You’re going to have houses that you didn’t build, wells you didn’t dig. You have great blessing there. Be very careful that when you get into all those physical blessings going to pour upon your head, on the basis of my choosing you, my election of you, don’t start to trust in those blessings.” He warns them, warns them, warns them, and they fall away. The old covenant history is much a pattern of them falling away, taking things for granted, and beginning to think that we did this thing ourselves.

And so it is in America. God created a blessed nation, and now the nation says we can do these things in and of our own power. It was our own strength that really did this. It was trade routes were responsible for men coming to America. It wasn’t ultimately the guiding hand of God. We’re good. We can do these things ourselves. And so we then incur the wrath of God for the sin of pride.

Remember we said that Hezekiah—a good reconstructionist in his time, so to speak, a great king, a good man who led reforms in religion and state—and yet it was his blessings that led him into the sin of pride, and then showing the whole great number of blessings in the household of God unto his enemies. And so pride comes when we have strengths and when God blesses us.

Indeed, in 1 Timothy 6:17 in the New Testament, we’re told to charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

So success brings with it temptation to fall into the pride of sin. God tells us that with any temptation, he gives us the means to overcome it. So it doesn’t cause us—it isn’t so that we can’t escape it—but we must be aware of the reality that with the great strengths that God gives us, there will come a temptation to use them and to become wise in our own might and to become boastful of those things.

Seneca wrote that to be proud of knowledge is to be blind in the light. To be proud of virtue is to poison ourselves with the antidote. And to be proud of authority is to make our rise our downfall.

So it is God sees fit to give us a world in which our strengths become often, oftentimes a temptation for us to sin in the area of pride. And so when we have these things, we must analyze ourselves to make sure we root out pride in terms of its relationship to the strengths that God gives us.

Secondly, pride manifests itself in certain ways of speech. Now, on one hand, pride can result in a lack of speech to other people. We’re going to talk a little bit in a couple of minutes about the destructive elements of pride toward community. But pride can sometimes produce a man who is so wrapped up in himself and his own self-interests and his own self-importance that he doesn’t even enter into conversation with other people, and that can be one aspect of speech. But I think Chaucer was correct in saying that another element of the sin of pride in terms of our speech—as the Parson says—was when men speak too much before folks, chattering like a mill, and taking no care for what they say. Too much speech, talking all the time instead of listening to other people, is an evidence to ourselves of pride beginning to take over us and indeed causing us to sin.

Other scriptures are replete with these same sorts of warning. I’ll read a couple of them here. We read in Proverbs 27:12, “Most men will proclaim everyone his own goodness, but a faithful man who can find?” People are apt to speak in terms of their own abilities and strengths and let you know about those strengths, and that is a mark of pride.

Additionally, we can sometimes be boastful in our speech about things we aren’t really—we don’t really have in terms of goodness or our own conditions. In 1 Kings 20:11, we read that the king of Israel answered to another man and said, “Tell him, Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that taketh it off.”

So he’s saying there that don’t boast about what you’re going to do until you end up doing that thing you’ve done. Even then, of course, you shouldn’t boast in it. But what I’m saying is that our speech can be—if we find ourselves talking too much, that is sin that exhibits the sin of pride. If we find ourselves telling our good points to other people, that oftentimes be manifesting the sin of pride in our own strengths that God has given to us. And if we find ourselves boasting in the things that we think we can do but haven’t done yet, that also should be an indicator to us that pride is at work in our hearts.

One other way that our speech can manifest a sinful attitude is warned against in 1 Timothy 6:3 and 4. We read there that if any man teach otherwise—let’s see, if any man holds not to wholesome words, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine—let’s see, I’ll pick it up at verse 4. 1 Timothy 6:4: The context is if he doesn’t hold to sound teaching, this man is proud, knowing nothing but doing about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, and evil surmisings.

The point is that if our speech doesn’t restrict itself to the plain teaching of God’s word and the sound doctrine that comes from that word, but instead we find our speech oftentimes enter into areas of theological speculation, that’s another evidence to ourselves that pride is taking its root in our heart. We’re becoming high-minded in our speculations rather than holding to sound doctrine.

And 1 Timothy 6:4 reminds us that when we come across people like that who talk a lot about this, that, or the other possibility or speculation, that man is proud, doting about questions and strifes about words. And then the end result of that is envy and strife in the community itself.

And so the proud man exhibits his pride in his speech: bragging about real qualities, boasting about imaginabilities, speculating full of our own thoughts, as it were, instead of clinging to the thoughts of God’s word, speculative speech. All these show marks of pride. All of these also show, besides just marks of our own pride of our own abilities, a failure to appreciate that when we enter into conversation, God has given us a person to talk to who can bring something into our lives.

And when we find ourselves engaged in conversation and walk away from that conversation, and walk away from a number of conversations, not knowing anything about the person we were talking to, then that’s probably a mark of pride in our lives. Pride is an exultation of oneself, and by so doing it’s the debasement of God. But it’s also the debasement of other people, and it essentially says this: “This person has nothing to offer to me, but I can certainly teach them something.” And so that’s pride when we enter into those sorts of conversations for those sorts of ends. We focus on ourselves instead of the people that God has brought us into context with.

Now in Psalm 10, the psalm we read for the sermon scripture and talked about some last week—we’re going to use this again next week—but in Psalm 10, we see the marks of this person who is puffed up. In the speech, we read, for instance, in verse 5 that the proud man, this wicked man, puffs at his enemies. He boasts as one who has taken his armor off, or indeed hasn’t taken it off yet. He puffs himself at his enemies.

His speech is puffed up in that sense. Verse 7 says, “His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud, and under his tongue is mischief and vanity.” He’s trying with his speech to create a justification for his own deeds. And so he’s entered into deceit and fraud and lying. And so the root of lying as well is pride in oneself.

Okay. So pride manifests itself by centering on our strengths, and it manifests itself in the speech that we use before other people. And then third, another way of pride is the destruction of social intercourse—the destruction of social intercourse.

While the scriptures tell us that pride cometh before destruction, some writers have said that pride comes before the destruction of society as well, and for good reason. In the verse we just read in 1 Timothy, the man who dotes in those sorts of things ends up producing strife. And in other portions of scripture, that same thing is true.

For instance, in Proverbs 13:10, we read, “By pride cometh contention.” In Proverbs 28:25, “He that is of a proud heart stirreth up strife.”

And so the end result of a proud heart is perverted speech, and it’s a boasting in our own strengths and a pride in them. But it also has repercussions for the community in which we walk. It produces destruction to social community.

Now when we talk about the word “community” here, we could be saying—well, the community in our own household, the community in our church, or the community that we walk in terms of outside of the church—in our own household, the public sphere, if you want to look at it that way. What I’m trying to say there is that at the root of most marital problems or family problems is pride one way or the other—probably in both or all people’s account in some way. But pride is one of the things that has to be rooted out when you deal with marriage problems of yourself or family problems in your home as well.

Remember we talked last week about Proverbs 30—about how there’s a generation that really thinks it’s real hot and good and everything, and it’s puffed up in its own eyes, and it despises its parents as well. That generation—it’s washed, it’s clean in its own sight. It despises its own parents. You see, pride has an impact within the family as the impact of the child rejecting the parent.

What I’m saying that for is for you parents out there to notice when pride rears up its ugly head on your child—happens all the time—and it has to be corrected with the word of God, and of course with corporal punishment when needful, and as they get older, more and more instruction. That is what they’re doing. Pride is self-deluding. They’re not going to know what they’re doing necessarily. You got to point verses like Proverbs 30 out to them so they’ll understand it.

Pride produces social isolation and social destruction. I remember when I was a proud young man. I’m not proud anymore. I’m real humble. It sounded like, didn’t it? But I remember when pride really raged full-blown in my life a number of years ago. I used to love that Simon and Garfunkel song, “I Am a Rock.” And that’s a good picture of the proud man.

“I am a rock. I have no need for anybody else. I am self-contained in and of myself. I am self-sufficient. And because I’m self-sufficient, I have no need for the people.”

And that is a prideful denial that one does need community outside of oneself. God says it’s not good for man to be alone. It’s not good for man to be a rock. He should be in the context of a family, hopefully in the context of a wife and children, an extended community. But remember, one of the great blessings of the new covenant was that God would take the solitary and put them in families. And quite literally that often happens. It certainly happens in the context of the church.

It’s not good for man to be alone. He becomes self-sufficient in his own mind and denies the reality of his need for God and for the other creatures that God has given to him in terms of which he’s supposed to walk.

Pride stands in its own little sphere. Along with that self-sufficiency of pride that hurts social community, there is, along with that, a denial of obligation to one’s community. Sometimes people may be willing to use a community or a person for their own self-gratification, whatever. But a failure to serve that community demonstrates a prideful attitude as well.

It is often a phenomenon that people have talked about for generations and for centuries. But sometimes some of the most well-equipped people and some of the most gifted and qualified people do very little to help the communities in which they live—politically or religiously or in terms of other ways in which they can help out. And sometimes that seems so odd that a person who is so gifted wouldn’t help another person in the community—be it religious or political or in a neighborhood or whatever.

And yet if you understand that the root of that isolation is pride, and that pride frequently, as Dorothy Sayers said, attacks us at our strengths, it is not to be seen as so remarkable. It is to be seen as a natural temptation that man is going to have upon him if he has riches or wisdom or strength or other gifting or qualifications—to become prideful about that, to show, to think if he has no need for others, and therefore also to see he has no obligations to extend into that community help and assistance.

It was Agnes Wilson, I think, who is at least credited with coining the term that pride is “camel-nosed,” that phrase I used earlier. And those metaphors, as Wilson pointed out—camel-nosed, high-minded, puffed up, whatever—they all try to communicate an aloofness as well as an exultation of oneself and a rising up, a towering. They all also communicate an aloofness that is based upon one’s pride.

Henry Fairlie, writing in his book on the seven deadly sins today, said that pride sets oneself up, and in so doing it also sets oneself apart. And Fairlie then noted that the tower is one of the most frequent symbols for pride, and it is both lofty but it is also inaccessible—the tower, the high tower. And I think that’s true. But that’s a manifestation of the destruction of civil community.

A man named Alanus de Insulis wrote a book called “On the Complaint of Nature” in the 12th century. And Alanus said this: He said pride leads the proud to a self-selected departure from society, so that the proud “takes pleasure in individualizing their own actions, try everywhere to be lonely in a crowd, peculiar among the general, opposed to the universal, diverse in the midst of unity.”

And so the proud person—and we certainly see this in our culture where we have a whole generation that has been raised to think proudly of themselves—there is an aloofness. There’s an attempt to be different from the rest of the people, and there’s a derision of the masses or of the bulk of people that goes along with that as well.

Going to read a quote here from again Fairlie’s book, “The Seven Deadly Sins Today,” about this aloofness. And he’s quoting a man named William F. Mize here. Mize said that this withdrawal that comes forth from pride can take many forms. He said for instance the intellectual who retreats from the mediocrities of mass culture into the inner community of taste is an example of a prideful man producing social isolation. The liberal who retreats from the moral failures of those who are the wielders of power into the inner community of criticism and virtue. The reactionary who retreats into impossible dreams about a bygone past to escape contact with and responsibility for the present. The academic who retreats from the simplicities of the common life into the complexities of his expertise.

But the most widespread form, Fairlie writes, that it takes today is simply the retreat of people into their private lives. I remember years ago reading—I think it was Schaeffer, I think it was—who coined the term “the gospel of personal peace and affluence.” And you see, the gospel of personal peace and affluence says to the fallen man who is prideful and isolated, as it were, “That’s okay. You become a Christian, and now you can really have a good private life and really be insulated from the society around you. Just sit in your home.” The gospel of personal peace and affluence.

And then one of the correlaries of that, of course, was that eventually God will come and rapture you right out. Total abandonment from community.

And so pride leads into this sort of social isolation and into this temptation to retreat from responsibilities to community and to be self-contained and self-insulated.

I know—and what I don’t know, I have never seen “The Last Temptation of Christ.” I imagine it certainly was as blasphemous as I’ve heard, but when I first became a Christian years ago, I read that book, and the only thing I remember of the book itself, and I don’t know if the book was the same as the movie or what the deal was, but the only thing I remember was the last temptation. What it actually referred to was when Jesus was on the cross, for a split second he turns, thinks away, as it were, and he enters into it. Actually it is a dream, but you don’t know it in the book. There’s a long extended section where he’s sitting quietly at home with one of his wives, and they’re growing things under their vine and fig tree. And every once in a while the disciples come around and bug him. They say, “Get on with your job. Get on with your job.” And he doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Well, this is blasphemous as it relates to Christ, of course. But it is a good picture. And I have always thought that it accurately portrays one of the greatest temptations that comes from the root of pride in America today. That temptation is not to be involved in the calling of Matthew 28—to take the gospel into all the world and into everything that you do—but rather to work out there in a secular way, come home, and retreat, and have that nice little lifestyle: the gospel of personal peace and affluence.

The retreat away from community into personal isolation into insulated life, as it were, is a result of the sin of pride. It says, “I don’t need other people.” And then secondly, it denies the obligations that you have to other members of the community. Those obligations are real, and if we fail to engage ourselves in them, we will suffer God’s curse upon us.

Let me read another quote I want to read is from Gregory. Remember Gregory was the pope who first came up with the list of the seven deadly sins in the early years of the church. On this isolation that occurs, Gregory said this: “He who with enslaved mind admits this tyranny within himself suffers the first, greatest loss. For the eye of his heart being closed, he loses the calm of judgment. Then it comes about that all the good things of others become displeasing to him, and the things he has done himself, even when they are mistaken, alone please him. Now he always looks down on the doings of others, and admits only his own. He admires only his own actions, because whatever he hath done, he believes he has done with singular skill.”

See, pride begins to delude us, and it makes us think that what we do is right, what the other guy does is always wrong, and we always are critical of other people. And as a result, we become more and more ingrown, more and more withdrawn from the church, from the society, from our obligation to take the gospel into the workplace, et cetera.

There’s an excellent book—I haven’t got the book, but I love the title of this book that I came across in the reading. It was written in the 1800s, I believe, by a man named Hogg, and the name of the book is “Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” And when you hear the title, you think that it’s going to be a doctrine on justification by faith, but that’s not what it’s about.

In the book, this man encounters a devil. I’ve read a synopsis of it. I haven’t been able to find the book yet, but he finds this person coming to him, ever just kind of popping up on occasion. And this person convinces him that an action that he thought might have been wrong toward another person or toward doing something, it might have been sin. This person convinces him that after all, it wasn’t really sin. He finds out a way to justify it to him.

By the end of the book, you realize that this man that keeps popping up is indeed the devil. And it’s the sin of pride in the man’s own heart that sometimes comes out and enters into a dialogue with him. The point is that, as Gregory said, when sin takes its place in our heart it begins to delude us, and we begin to justify our actions to ourselves, and that justification involves usually a pulling back from society.

“Confessions of a Justified Sinner”—I think it’s a great title. And as I said last week, we are incredibly inventive in justifying our actions both to ourselves and then attempting to other people as well. The old “yeah but” syndrome, you know? “Yeah, that wasn’t a particularly good action, but I really did it for this reason.” And then the reason is a noble reason. You might even admit that maybe I shouldn’t have said that particular thing to you at that time. But then you put a rationalization to it, which is probably true in your own mind—that the reason why I did that particular thing was because of this other thing, which is a good quality.

For instance, if you go into a meeting with somebody and you attack them verbally—you’re in a bad mood, let’s say, or you’re just ticked off or whatever—and you kind of throw some barbs at them about a particular failing they might have. And then later, if you’re called on the carpet for it, let’s say, you say, “Yeah, I really shouldn’t have said those things. I guess I’m just too honest, you know, just too honest for my own good.”

See, honesty is a good thing. And we then plug in these good reasons back into sinful actions. And that is what that book is all about, “Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” And the result of all that is social and community breakdown.

I’m sure that this sin plagues men and women both in terms of its manifestation of a failure to admit when one’s wrong. But I think that men have a particular problem with this area. And I think that in your own lives, one of the ways you can practically try to start rooting this out of your life—this idea of justifying yourself and as a result breaking down community within your family, within the church—one of the things you might try doing is notice, first of all, keep track of how often you confess your sin to your wife when you’ve mistreated or you’ve done something wrong that’s affected the family.

Or how often do you actually confess it as a sin as opposed to how often you try to rationalize it and think of some reasons why you did it? “Yeah, it wasn’t the best idea, but this is why I did it. The rest of the world does things this way. What’s the big deal? Or maybe it was because of this end.” But in any event, track those things in your own life over the next week or two. And then make a self-conscious effort, men and heads of households, to admit your sins to your wife, to say, “Yeah, you’re right. I blew it. But I’m going to do better. I’m going to try hard to do it.”

If a man comes to me and says that he’s gone a long time without really confessing any sin in terms of my wife or my family—you see that just shows a lack of sensitivity to the scriptures. The scriptures say that we all have sin. We all are maturing in the faith, and that maturation means daily realizing the shortcomings we have—either direct violation of God’s word or a falling short—and trying to do what’s best by our wife. And it means acknowledging that to ourselves and to our mates and then moving on and developing community.

Tremendous impact of sin produces the downfall of community. Okay. So pride, or pride rather, manifests itself in our strengths and boasting about those strengths. It manifests itself in various forms of speech: not enough speech, too much speech, boasting speech, or whatever. It manifests itself in the breakdown of community that’s produced by that pride. And then it also manifests itself in a rejection of authority.

A rejection of authority. And here we could turn back to 1 Peter 5, which we read last week. Let’s do that. Turning your Bible to 1 Peter 5.

Now, remember this, it should be rather obvious that rejection of authority be one of the great ways of sin, as it were, the way it manifests itself, because ultimately sin is, as we said, an attempt to invert the order—to say that we’re God and he isn’t. And that’s certainly a rejection of God’s authority. And that’s the way it works out around us as well.

We read in 1 Peter 5, last week, starting at verse 5: “Likewise, you younger, submit yourselves under the elder. There’s an instruction to command her to submit to governing authorities. Yea, all of you be subject one to another. Be clothed with humility.”

The subjection we have to those in authority and to equals in the body of Christ—who we are become accountable to through our sin or through our actions or whatever—that subjection is based upon what? It’s based upon being clothed with humility, having a correct view of ourselves before God. And so the rejection of authority is the rejection of true humility before God.

“For God resists the proud and giveth grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time.”

And that’s so important that we recognize that verse 6 teaches us that when we do that, when we submit ourselves to governing authorities—whether it’s in the church or the family or the workplace, to your boss, to have a good attitude toward your boss, or to the governing authorities in the civil land—that what we’re doing is not ultimately submitting ourselves to them. It’s submitting ourselves to God. That means that a failure to submit ourselves to the governing authorities is what? It’s a rejection not of the authority, it’s a rejection of God. And that’s because the root of it is this pride that he says here is the root that needs humbling.

That pride leads to us to try to invert the order, and we deny that God is over all things. And so we’re to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, God ultimately, recognizing that he controls all things, including our employers and our functional superiors. And then in verse 7 says that this may not be easy. It may cause you a great deal of grief and headache and trial. But what does it say?

“It says to cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you.”

God doesn’t put you in this sort of a situation just to sort of tweak you and then laugh about the thing. He puts you in this sort of situation to cause you to grow and mature in beauty and in holiness and in spirit and truth before him. He cares for you.

“Then be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking to devour.”

How does he do that? The devil devours us the way he was devoured. The devil was devoured by his own strength. A mighty archangel fell because he wanted to be his god. And so the devil rips us up too through the sin of pride, which leads to a rejection of authority.

Okay? And there again, analyze yourself. How is your reaction to authority in the church? In the family? For you, to children and wives? And then also in the workplace, in the civil authorities, and also to other people who are functional equals to ourselves as well.

Okay. So these are some of the ways, the ways of pride—the ways it manifests itself, and they should cause us to spend some time doing some self-examination over these points.

People that are prideful spend their time criticizing and gossiping about others. They walk about with chips on their shoulders, always critiquing other people and never building others up. If you hold a grudge for a long period of time, if you pout, if you become overly sensitive, your feelings easily get hurt—these are all marks of pride, marks that we’re thinking mostly of ourselves instead of the order that God has given us to live out our lives in. These are all sins.

If we find ourselves, as we said last week, always wanting to win arguments, to force others to admit their mistakes, if we find ourselves impatient with the reality of God’s order that he has given us in our daily affairs—all these things are an attempt to throw off the providence of God and to be God ourselves. They exhibit pridefulness in who we are.

When we did through the elder evaluation form that we came up with a couple years ago, the guys under point 15, which was “self-willed,” which fits in nicely with the idea of pride, some of these questions are good ones to ask yourself in your context of what you’re doing.

Do you have a difficult time admitting that you were wrong in something you did or said? We talked about that one before. Or do you always self-justify your actions? Do you listen attentively to a person attempting to express his views or opinions? Do you enter into a conversation primarily just to say something or to interact with the other person and learn from them? Do you listen patiently to other people?

Do you think that your time is your own? Are you insulated from community? Are you pulled back from community and responsibilities, even within your family, from your wife? Is it your time instead of your family’s time that you’re always concerned about? If you think your time is your own, that’s a mark of pride in being self-willed.

Do you feel compelled to make sure that your opinion is heard and/or what you have said is the final say in a discussion? These things are all marks of pride and should be part of our evaluation of ourselves.

As I said, one of the most practical ways in terms of the family is for men to begin to confess sins to their wives and to recognize the necessity of—if you can’t confess it to your wife, I’m not sure who you can confess it to. Know your wife. The Bible says you become one, as it were, and really, if you can’t confess your sins to your wife, you probably are very close to, or already entered into, the sin of not confessing them to yourself and not admitting with God that what you did is wrong.

And so you must begin with