Humility or Pride – God or Self 

Knowing God is essential in a Christian's life. Without some knowledge of God, and the desire to continually know more, we cannot love Him. Furthermore, the desire must go beyond wanting to know more of Him, it must be rooted in a much deeper desire to know him personally as the Lord and Savior of all. Pride is the great obstacle which I have encountered throughout my attempts to know God better. Pride divides more than any other vice. It is not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-- and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-- you do not know God at all.

—C.S. Lewis

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you. That raises the question inside me, am I a prideful man? Here is a simple way to tell. I can measure how irritated I become when that one person, who is obviously more arrogant than myself, does something insufferably prideful. The more miffed I am at his arrogance, the more prideful I am myself.

We see now that pride is to be avoided at all costs. Therefore, we must obtain the oppposite: humility. Paul said our attitudes should be like that of Christ Jesus: who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. (Phil. 2:5)

Christ lived into what true humility looks like. It is loving the Lord God with all you heart, soul, mind and strength. It is loving your neighbor as yourself. It is looking our for the interests of other people before after your own. It is wrapped up in the mystery of losing self to gain Christ. We cannot do this on our own. Therefore, humility is gained by, after repenting, asking God to show you your pride and asking him to help you change. Without this conscious decision (daily, I might add), you cannot expect to know God any more than you do at this moment.

This is how important humility is. It is the difference between knowing God and not knowing Him. It is the difference between repentance and being in prideful denial. It is the difference between service through love and resentment though arrogance. We can choose humility or pride. God or self.

Humility is all important in our relationship with God; it is also imperative in our relationships with other people. Humility promotes unity, whereas pride promotes an environment of mean-spirited competition. That is not to say that competition is, in and of itself, evil. The trouble begins when I use competition to elevate myself above others. God is pleased with those fear him, in those that hope in his unfailing love. His pleasure is not derived from how well we play a sport, unless we do it all for his glory, in which case we would in no way be elevating ourselves, but Christ, who made our bodies and enabled us to play as well as we do.

But humility, as I've said, promotes unity. It is through humility that a man asks for forgiveness. In a family, small or large, and even in friendships (of all kinds), it is absolutely necessary.

In closing, I would challenge the reader, as I the writer have been challenged, to become more humble. And unless I put you to sleep with my writing, you now know that what I mean by humble is far-removed from the definition you will find on Google. This task has very little to do with you, and everything to do with God. It is a strange phenomenon. Let God show you, bit by bit, which part of you need to changed into what, and let your focal point be God himself.