pride

Pride is a killer. And it's sneaky. Pride is a sniper.

I was talking to God recently, and He was explaining the way pride gets in a heart and then masks itself as a dozen other things that somehow seem less threatening. We can deal with all the little things, or we can deal with our pride and knock it out. Funny thing about pride is that we don't like to admit - to ourselves or others - that we struggle with pride ... because it hurts our pride to do so.

He went through a half-dozen other things, and explained how it all goes back to pride. A victim mentality, for example, is Pride telling us someone wronged us - whereas a humble heart would say, "I'm that person's servant, he couldn't possibly have wronged me." Pride keeps us from loving our neighbors as ourselves because it tells us that our neighbors' wrongs are worse than our own. Pride keeps our passion for God on low because it tells us we can do the task we're appointed to do without Him - or that we know the person preaching and couldn't possibly get anything out of the message. Pride leads us into temptation because we think we can handle it, or into false humility when it convinces us that pride has never been an issue in our lives. Pride ensnares us in a fear of man, and will disguise itself as an inability to really worship because we don't want to look silly.

Then He compared it to dental work, and I'm not sure why. All the little things are cavities - you scrape it clean and patch it up with good stuff. A Holy Spirit filling. Pride requires a root canal. To deal with pride you have to dig down to the nerve and kill it. You have to clean it all out, and when you're done there's a much bigger hole to fill in. You need a lot more prayer and a lot more Word to fill it up. Maybe it's because I've had a root canal in the natural, and I can relate.