Where Pride Properly Resides

Spirituality Column #241
June 21, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Where Pride Properly Resides
By Bob Walters

Years ago I had a colleague who would compliment my work by saying, “I’m proud of you.”

It annoyed me. I took pride in my own work and it was both unsatisfying and a little creepy, frankly, to have my work evaluated from the standpoint of someone else’s overreaching pride. I, um, had plenty of pride of my own.

A decade later I began attending church, discovered my life in Christ, was well-mentored by some amazingly intelligent Christians, read the Bible, and over time began to look really, really hard at the pride in my own life vs. the humility of Jesus Christ. No way have I “cured” my own pride, but I now understand pride from a biblical perspective.

And that perspective is this: Pride is the Lord’s alone. The Lord is humble, yet only in Him may pride properly reside. Simple, huh?

I know … it’s a seeming three-way collision of intellect, logic and faith, the kind that keeps “smart” people out of church. But once we understand pride as a “God” thing, humility as a “Jesus” thing, and faith as a human thing, it starts to make sense.

The Bible talks about pride a lot. In the Old Testament, where we learn so much about God, God is constantly telling people that their human, worldly pride will be their undoing, that it is willful, arrogant, foolish, sinful and in several ways destructive to them and offensive to God. The problem boils down to this, God tells man in Ezekial 28:2,

“In the pride of your heart, you say ‘I am a god; I sit on the throne of a god’ … but you are a mere mortal and not a god, though you think you are as wise as a god.”

The modern dictionary isn’t much help here, because it defines “pride,” generally, as “justifiable satisfaction.” What God says throughout the Bible is that the “pride” He detests is mankind’s misplaced, unjustified, self-satisfying and self-directed glory, which I interpret to be the biblical opposite of “justifiable satisfaction.”

Glory is God’s, not ours. Pride belongs to God’s wisdom, not man’s.

Jesus sets our standard and example: He was humble before God and Man. Therefore rather than harboring pride in our human selves and worldly situations, our pride must reside in our faith that Christ is our sovereign Lord.

God knows, it’s no sin to be proud of that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is thankful for God’s blessings rather than proud of the shiny spots in his life.

Life of the Party

Spirituality Column #111
December 23, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Life of the Party
By Bob Walters

And the Word became flesh … John 1:14

Above everything else, Christmas is a celebration of life.

Almost everyone in our culture, believing Christian or not, figures out a way to celebrate this “Winter Holiday” even if they can’t figure out what to do with Jesus: the Christ Child, co-equal in the Holy Trinity with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

We endure the tortured public rhetoric of political correctness – sure, sing a song in the school “Holiday” show that proclaims plainly “Christ the Savior is born,” but whatever you do … don’t call it a Christmas show – yet we all share the innate sense that there is something divinely special about us being alive.

God very obviously feels exactly the same way.

God came to us, through Jesus Christ, to save us. Yes, we are sinners and we needed to be saved in a way that we could not save ourselves – we cannot cure our own sin. But until we realize that God came because He loves us (John 3:16), not to punish us – Jesus, after all, is love – we cannot truly understand how very, very, very special this gift of life is.

Christ came because God knew we needed Him even though, as it says in John 1:10, “His own received Him not.” You can argue that “His own” refers to the Jews, since Jesus was in fact a Jew. But with the arrival of Christ, we all – Jew and Gentile – became “His own.”

Satan loves it when Christmas is about anything other than Christ. Satan – Mr. “Winter Holiday” – is the purveyor of death and darkness. In our God-given freedom, we find all kinds of ways to sin, to run from Christ and convince ourselves that dying with Satan through sin is better than living with God in light through Christ.

Do you get it? Satan equals Death. Christ equals Life … and Christ is the author of each of our lives because He, God, in fact became flesh like us.

That is the true meaning of Christmas.

The big deal at Christmas isn’t just that Jesus Christ is born, and born for everybody (again, see John 3:16).

The truly big deal at Christmas is accepting, believing and knowing that Jesus Christ is Life, Light and Lord.

Go tell that on a mountain.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wishes all a profoundly blessed and Merry Christmas. If you feel the magic, you feel Christ.

Smile When You Say That

Spirituality Column #103
October 28, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN), Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Smile When You Say That
By Bob Walters

It’s hard not to notice the anger hanging thick in the air this political season.

Between the two – anger and the political season – I think the more important and dangerous issue for Christians is anger.

Anger is a spirit and Biblical issue for all seasons.

Broadly, there are two kinds of anger … righteous anger and selfish anger. Both are based on fear, but on two distinctly different kinds of fear.

One fear is the reverent, righteous fear of losing something we love … like our communion with Christ. Our “Fear of God” should be understood in this way, as an expression of our commitment to love Him.

We also must understand that God’s Old Testament anger is about His love for us; His wanting to protect us from the dumb, destructive things we do with the freedom that He gives us.

And by the way, are we all agreed as Christians that we are supposed to use that freedom to find Him, love Him, and worship Him? Not to find, love and worship ourselves?

The other fear is the self-centered, “or else” kind of fear that makes us afraid something bad will happen. It causes the foolish anger Proverbs warns against – the fear of punishment and condemnation; the fear that destroys love.

Selfish anger is an outgrowth of Satan’s evil grip on our world and, too often, on our individual lives.

Believe me when I say I’m not preaching here from some elevated pulpit. Controlling my worldly fear and anger is perhaps the most difficult part of my Christian walk, because I know I have a fearful, angry, worldly beast within me. Satan knows it too.

The upside of being able to simply say, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” and mean it in a way that only the Holy Spirit can teach us how to mean it, keeps that miserable beast of worldly fear and anger in chains.

Then the real upside of a Christian’s experience … peace, joy, hope, faith. love (see Galations 5:22-23) – even in a political season – is truly ours.

So … smile when you’re in church. Smile when you pray. Smile because the sincerity and depth of your love for God is a gift of grace you could not earn.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), still thinking of this political season, reminds all to smile when we can obey Proverbs 15:1 and let our “gentle answer turneth away wrath.”