Pride Goeth Before Destruction
The title of this blog post is from Proverbs 16:18.
Which when push comes to shove, is my favourite verse in all of scripture. There is something about it, that reminds me of the great controversy between Christ and Satan and how pride always ends up going before something bad happens. Case in point, Satan before his fall...
But this isn't relegated to heavenly battles, it hits home for me personally as well. Pride has gotten me into troubl more times than I can count, and what's crazy is that it's shown it's nasty face a few times during my walk with Christ.
How might you ask?
Jongo at times in his life, thinks he knows it all. I should 'know' better, after all I learned a long time ago that if I was the smartest guy in the room, I needed to get into a another room quick lol But honestly, the more I learned about the bible and God, the more 'confident' I became in the truth.
Sadly, that truth that I hold so dear, doesn't always resonate with others. So what happens is I tend to think....I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.
There's a problem with that, especially when it comes to ones beliefs and thankfully, I found some council in the bible about why this can be deadly....
Let's check out the book of Matthew, specifically chapter 13 and we'll read verses 24 to 20...
The famous parable of the wheat and the tares. Without getting into too much theology, this parable shows us that God's people are the wheat and the lost are the tares or 'weeds'. The point that really hit home for me wasn't the lesson about how Satan is the creator of all misery and sin in the world, it was.....Sometimes we can't see the difference!
So full of pride, I see someone in apostasy....I rebuke them, point the finger and tell them to repent! Which is biblical BUT and here's the big but....Just because someone errs doesn't mean they are lost. I can't parade my 'knowledge' of scripture over another and write them off....That's not my job!
In fact, being honest, I really don't know anything when it comes to God's plan lol. His plan of redemption is His plan, not mine! So only He will know, who is a wheat and who is a tare.
And there's a bit of time prophecy in these verses to cement this thought as well....
The 'harvest' is the end time and the second coming of Christ. And as that isn't happening right now, there is plenty of time for people to become wheat....And sadly plenty of time for people to become tares. So I cannot parade myself around, claiming holier than thou when....It's God's time, not mine!
Just reviewing this parable has really helped my approach to being a closer disciple of Christ's. I cannot judge, I must not judge. That is what God is going to do, so for me it's simple....
Spread the gospel, continue to humbly go to Christ' feet, and never think I know it all.
Posted Using INLEO
This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.
Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating your Leo power to @india-leo account? We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.
100% of the rewards from this comment goes to the curator for their manual curation efforts. Please encourage the curator @bhattg by upvoting this comment and support the community by voting the posts made by @indiaunited.
It's important to treat others with kindness and understanding instead of being judgmental.
Very much so!
Pride is a very ugly defect that is often confused with dignity, which is a great virtue.
Yup, it's a nasty nasty thing
No matter how rich or good we are, we should never be proud
God who has given all what we have to us has the capacity to take it back from us so we should never be proud
We should just be kind to people
Amen to that!
There is a tendency for some Christians to wear their faith like a crown to lord it over others rather than practice it as a way of living. I see this as a form of pride.
I have been learning, Catholic teachings or course, that none of us are assured salvation. The wages of sin is death, referring to justice. However, Christ's sacrifice is God's mercy that we are not punished for our sins. And, ultimately, His grace is what may grant us a place in heaven. It has taken some time to learn about what the Catholic guilt thing is really about. It is humbling to discover, talking about pride, that there is little we can do to save ourselves, instead relying entirely on God's grace. This softens my heart a bit when seeing others fall as it is a reminder that I am also fallen. It becomes more self-reflection of my own wrongdoings, which seem never ending.
Oh that's a can of worms for sure!
While I do believe we are saved by grace through faith, that doesn't mean...Once saved, always saved. That makes zero sense. It's as you said, Christ died for our sins, so how can we know this, accept Him yet continue to live in sin?
We should change our character and life, based on His sacrifice and the love we have for Him. I do agree with what you stated for sure, not sure if it's Catholic doctrine or not but hey, we agree on something LOL
That's never the case for Catholics. We can't ever claim to be saved. That implies that it is our choice to make, when it is clearly not as we are constantly falling short, remaining reliant on mercy and grace.
Why wouldn't it be our choice? God is love, and free will is the purest form of love we can have. If God didn't give us a choice, we'd all be robots without the ability to choose.
Does God know who is lost and saved? For sure. But I don't think He pulls the strings. He lets us choose Him. The falling short is because, human nature....The fall of man, etc. We are a fallen species which is why we need a Savior.
It took me a while to wrap my head around it. It takes a while for me to walk through it.
The reasoning is, how I understand it explained, God is perfect. We are not.
To be in His presence, we must be perfect.
Being human, there is no way we can make ourselves perfect. This does not mean we should not try. Our main vocation is the universal call to Holiness.
Circling back, our imperfection demands punishment, justice. But Jesus has granted us mercy, having paid for our sin. But that does not clean us to be in God's presence, to be saved.
For that we are entirely reliant on His grace. It is presumptuous to think that we can force Him to save us by any of our actions. We can't save ourselves by works.
It's the other way around. God's grace transforms us into better people. We can only cooperate with His transformation. Grace is His gift. We can't earn it. It is His grace that pushes us to perform those works, should we choose to accept it.
Therefore, it is still a personal choice to accept his gift of salvation, or reject it. But it is not we who drive our own salvation, we can only accept salvation by doing His will. In other words, good works aren't ours, they are His. We are merely His agents.
To me, this is a huge responsibility, not only to carry out His works, but to be receptive and discerning of His grace when He calls us to action. We are the driven, not the drivers. It's a free ride to salvation, if we choose to hop on the wagon and don't fall off, which we invariably will. But we can always hop back on.
Right, so it's a choice that God gives us. That's what I'm saying. I know there is nothing we can do ourselves, all have sinned and sin is the transgression of the law.
1000000% on Christ's righteousness, not ours.