Pride and the Minister of the Gospel

Notes from personal experience

Natural man

1. The effect of pride is first for the soul to magnify whatever is attractive and good and to hide from self-knowledge all that is ugly and sinful. The conclusion readily reached, which can exist side-by-side even with professions of sinfulness ("I am the worst of sinners!" proclaims the man, hoping by this to set his humility in the same category as Paul's), is that he is not so bad, for all that.

2. Then also, what will they think if they knew and saw the deep wanderings, the terrifying things that lurk in his heart? Perhaps they will think that he is no different from all sinful men, but he is loath to lose his self-deceit.

3. Self-knowledge and self-deceit, the first known intellectually and the second felt experentially. So a man knows he is a sinner even when he fails to hate his sin.

4. But it is just a little one! says pride. There are none that are little. Wasn't it just a small act of deceit when the pride of Annas led him to lie to the Holy Spirit and to the church?

Also in his work

5. His giftings are of unique purpose for the church, and unique prominence. In him works strongest that Pharisaical temptation, to offer up prayers on the street corners, to bless God that he stands in his place, that he teaches, that he is not like other men (does this not hide in your heart?). Thus he may brag about his relationship with God. He fails to learn from Paul that "our presentable parts need no special honor."

6. His knowledge was given him as a trust, but he must always know that the way of salvation is simple, that sufficient knowledge unto salvation is possessed by men who know nothing of the subtleties he glories in. Christ once told him that he must become like a child if he would enter. Has the knowledge of maturity puffed him beyond this simple state?

7. Thus he glories in what he knows, and thinking that all must know it, he makes for himself and others a maze of intellectual inquiry, a vain and empty pursuit that men have tasted the dust of from the Greeks onward. Knowledge is fear, says the Hebrews, who were wiser when they taught not to separate what is known from what is done.

8. Pride hides from view the gap between these two inseparable things. Pride makes one rest in the fallibility of one's own thoughts. Pride is self-deception. Thus Paul, who would beat his body and make it his slave, lest he speak from an empty knowledge and miss for himself the promises.

9. Pride holds him back from the warnings of Scripture, that a man may preach Christ from false motives, winning his audience but losing his own soul. Pride makes him forget what even the Apostle James held in reverence when he said that not many of us should presume to be teachers. Pride shifts his eyes first from his own path into the path of others.

10. A turn of phrase! Admired for some neat definition! When he has not praise he despises those who do under the mask of false humility. When he has it he puffs up his own opinions to despise those that disagree without acclaim. But all the time he lacks that terrible, consuming remembrance that it is the holy things of the temple which he handles, that Nadab and Abihu were consumed when the offered there idolatrous fire in the name of piety.

His conclusions, advice for those who minister

11. Speak plainly. If you hold in trust a communication from God to men, dare you confuse it with flowery phrases?

12. Search yourself. "Hate what is evil, cling to what is good."

13. The Words you speak to them and to yourself must be searching. They must grip and shake. They must enter your soul. This is that living and active Word, with its own power. This is where you focus, on this power, bending all your giftings and power to the workings of the Word of God itself and the actings of faith upon it. Here be concerned that God be glorified in the revelation of himself in what you say. If this consumes you, at cost to all dignity, all position, all fame, all honor among men, you will have entered the narrow gate, and you will have seized the kingdom of God with force.

14. Remember always the great mercy and love of God, that he would give such double-minded and sin-riddled men the gift of his mercy, the participation in this greatest of works, and thus forge in us the crown he will later place on our heads.

15. Would you give all for this crown? Would you have fame in your small circle, or this crown? Who among us who has tasted even a bit of the power of the coming age would exchange that crown for the world? Yet the time may be long from the power of that taste until perseverance has its reward, a sojourn in darkness and difficulty. Our hearts are weak and betray us. He who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death.