2010 – Day 4. Jan. 4 – The Language of Pride

Reading and study of Genesis 10 – 11; Passage for Reflection: Genesis 11: 4 … NIV Then they [the descendants of Noah] said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

My Journal for Today: Today I move, in my Daily Bible study, into the account of Babel, as Noah’s descendants move onward and decide to build the “tower to the heavens,” which becomes an idol representing the original sin of pridefulness, that sin which was brought into the Garden by the serpent and became mankind’s undoing. When we look at pride, the mother of all sin, we need to realize, as my devotional Pastor, F. LaGard Smith points out in today’s study, that “PRIDE” is a two sided-coin, one having a good side and the other a bad – VERY BAD – side.

I’m a grandparent, and when I see our grandkids doing incredibly precocious things, the pride of being part of their very being and upbringing rises in me. That is not necessarily a bad kind of pride. Nor is the pride I have as being a Christian and seeing some whom I have taught or mentored becoming stronger and more mature in their faith in Christ. My pride here stems from the realization that Christians, some of whom I had led to Christ, are growing in their faith and surrendering their being to their Lord. That is pride in what God is doing, not the other type of self-centered pride which is the other side of the pride coin.

That type of selfish pride is seen even in little kids. It is that “terrible-twos” kid of pride where a child will lie rather than be uncovered doing bad things. It is the pride of the cover up of Nixon’s Watergate or of Clinton’s sexual affairs. It is the pride of Tiger Woods, thinking that he’s above God’s moral code. It is the pride of mankind who would build a building to rise to the heavens as a monument to their own accomplishments, not to recognize the greatness of the One True God. And that could be the twin towers in New York as well as the Tower of Babel. Yes, this is the pride which led God to give man many languages and to disperse God’s children into the world to form many nations, living prideful lives where wars and what we see going on in the ever darkening world occur even today.

So, Pastor Smith asks a very salient and pointed question at the end of his devotional today. He writes, What kind of pride do other see in me – an appropriate sense of pride [in God’s glory], which they will notice with respect, or a self-focused pride shouting to the world that it’s all about me?” And I added the phrase in the parenthesis above because it is our pride in what God is doing in our lives which should be the only pride we pursue; and most certainly any pride in self or our own accomplishments must be deferred to what God is doing in and through us, which reflects HIS glory, not our own.

My Prayer for Today: Lord, I pray today that my pride is only in You for what You are doing in and through You for only Your glory. Squelch in me any pride of self; and raise in me the recognition and thankfulness for what I might do for Your glory. Amen