A few months ago at our debrief in Cambodia, I was asked to give a teaching to my whole squad that I had recently shared during a team time. The teaching had been about pride, and soon after I had shared it with my teammates, I became painfully aware of my own problem with it. You see, during that month, the squad was anticipating some changes in leadership, as our squad leaders were preparing to head back to America. We knew that 3 members of our squad were to be raised up to be the new squad leaders, and I had spent the last month or so thinking I was going to be one of the people chosen to fill this role. I was not.
I spent a few days wrestling with feelings of rejection and bitterness until God showed me that everything I was feeling was the result of my deeply-rooted pride. It was after this realization that I received a message from one of my squad leaders asking me to give the teaching at debrief. I knew exactly what God wanted me to tell them. It was truly humbling to sit in front of my whole squad and share the way I had been feeling and what God was saying to me about it. Here is what I shared:
The apostle Paul addresses the issue of pride in his letter to the church in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 3:21-4:7. The church had originally been planted by Paul, but other evangelists had come through later, which had created divisions in the church. The Corinthians were using their relationships with different people as part of their identity as Christians in the church and for power over others. The root cause of this division was pride and boasting. They were taking pride in things that had been given to them, but then they acted as though it wasn’t something they had received. The church was being torn.
In verse 6, the word Paul uses for pride literally means “overinflated, swollen, or distended beyond its proper size.” Think of it like an organ in the human body. If it looked like this, you would know there was something wrong with it. It is swollen, inflamed, and expanded beyond its proper size. In The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness, Tim Keller refers to this as the natural condition of the human ego. When our ego is in this prideful state, it has 4 defining characteristics. It is empty, painful, busy, and fragile.
EMPTY
Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard said, “It is the natural state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God. Spiritual pride is the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth, and find a purpose big enough to give us meaning in life without our focus being on God.”
Living with this illusion is what Satan wants for us. We have this emptiness that’s meant to be filled by God, but Satan wants us to fill it with an unhealthy preoccupation with other things like acknowledgement, approval, position, power, etc. We get so focused on these things that we get completely distracted from deepening our intimacy with the Father. We cannot be invested in both at the same time.
From the time I heard the news about the raised-up squad leaders, my focus had completely shifted inward. I was so focused on the rejection I felt from leadership and from our squad, that for a little bit, it completely distracted me from God. At some point I realized that in all the time of running this news through my mind, I hadn’t thought of where God was in it even once. I had to step back and say, okay, what actually matters to me is not the praise or approval of my squad-mates, squad mentor, or squad leaders. It’s not being acknowledged for my leadership ability. What I care about is deepening my relationship with the Father, and the way I’m going to do that is to accept that the current events are part of his plan for me and then ask him what’s next and how I can invest in the plan he actually has for me instead of continuing to focus on the plan I wanted him to have.
If we put anything else in the space that was meant for God, it’s too small to fill it.
In its natural state, our ego is empty, because God is not at the center of it.
PAINFUL
Think about your toe. You don’t walk around thinking about how extraordinarily well your big toe is working on a daily basis. Your toes just do toe things and you don’t really notice them because they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. That is, until they’re not. If there is something wrong with it, if it’s painful and swollen, then you’re constantly going to notice it. Parts of our body don’t draw attention to themselves unless there’s something wrong with them.
Our ego is always drawing attention to itself.
Think about when someone does something that “hurts your feelings.” Your feelings can’t get hurt. It doesn’t hurt your feelings. It hurts your ego.
BUSY
Our ego is busy because it’s always drawing attention to itself. Two main ways it does this are through comparison and boasting. We boast about the things we have that others don’t or we compare ourselves to others because they have more than us. Author, C.S. Lewis explains this in his book, Mere Christianity. He says, “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking, there would be nothing to be proud about.”
This was true for me as well. I actually thought to myself, “So what if I’m a gifted leader? If I’m not the best leader, then does it even matter? What is my leadership worth if there are people chosen to be leaders over me?” I was way too busy comparing myself to others to notice anything about what God had to say about me, to take pleasure in any of the gifts I possessed, or to celebrate the gifts of those on my squad.
FRAGILE
Anything that is over-inflated is in imminent danger of becoming deflated.
If our sense of self-worth is caught up in all these other things that aren’t God, then we’re always in danger of not finding fulfillment and being deflated.
So how do we overcome these things?
Paul said, I don’t care what you think about me…I don’t even care what I think about me! He doesn’t allow people to judge or define him. His ego is not puffed up, it is filled up, because God is at the center of it. He is an example of true gospel humility.
A truly gospel-humble person is not a self-loving person or a self-hating person. It is a self-forgetful person, whose ego it like every other part of their body – it just works. True gospel humility means we get to stop connecting every experience, every action, and every conversation with ourselves. We get to rest in already being the person that God has called into intimacy with himself in a way that has nothing to do with us or anything we do.
Unless we choose to live as truly gospel-humble people, then our choice is to put ourselves on trial every day. We spend every day in a courtroom, on trial, and in every interaction, every conversation, we are looking to receive verification of our worth. We continually look to man for the ultimate verdict that we are valuable, and Jesus has already offered that, regardless of our performance.
When God looks at us, He doesn’t see our actions, our works, our plaudits, or any of the things we would boast about. He just sees Jesus, because Jesus already stood on trial for us, and we get the verdict of immensely valuable, infinitely worthy, and unfathomably precious, regardless of our performance.
Pray Psalm 139 over yourself and listen to what God is saying to you!
*My teaching is from The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Timothy Keller, a book I highly recommend!
