The dangers of excessive pride.

Pride is a dangerous beast.  When we become prideful – when we allow ourselves to become the center of our own affection, we leave no room for God.

“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth;
a stranger, and not your own lips.”

–, ESV

This article has proven to be possibly the most difficult one I’ve had to write yet – I can never seem to get started on it, the draft has languished at the bottom of the drafts list for a month, and every time I do get started on it, something either comes up, or the content is so shallow and insincere that it’s just worthless.  Pride is a difficult topic – it’s so easy to get to a place where we are completely blind to how full of ourselves we really are, and it’s even harder to write about because it’s not unlike picking at a just healed wound; it hurts and likes to bleed.

I think that’s why there’s so many warnings against it in the Bible – God knows how susceptible we are to pride and warns us often of the damage that it can do to us!  Pride can quickly lead to a hardening of the heart; it’s easy to become so self-righteous that we can see no wrong in ourselves at all.  Take Pharaoh for example; while his pride was more in the vein of “I won’t believe that your God has any rights over me,” he stuck with that idea for entirely too long.  He was so obsessed with his right of rightness that he refused to see any reason when it came to the fact that his people were suffering and miserable.  His arrogance and pride got in the way, all the way up to the death of so many children.  I’m not saying that letting his entire labor force go was a decision to be taken lightly, of course not, his economy had grown to rely on them, but I’d like to think that it would only take one or two plagues before I saw reason were I in his position.

But Pharaoh’s heart was hardened (), and through that hardness he was stubborn, and unwilling to listen to reason.  He was full of himself, and the power that he perceived that he had, and there was a very, very high price to pay for that impudence.  Pride kills; it kills relationships, it impedes personal growth and ambition, and it tears us away from God.

I’ve compiled a list of passages that deal with pride.  You can find them here: Pride passage list.