If I bring my pride with me to the work of God, it will feed as sweetly upon it as upon any other distinction, and in the end fatally blast it. (Thomas Adam, Private Thoughts on Religion)
“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
This saying of Adam demonstrates the hatefulness and harmful nature of pride, but also why God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. The proud heart is all about self and its own honor even in the things of God. A proud heart would be proud of grace and use it to honor self if God gave grace to the proud. But as a holy God He can only give grace to the humble because true grace is always and only given to the praise of the glory of His grace. The nature of faith is that it receives grace, but pride will not receive real grace for the real reason that it is given. Grace is never given so that man may proudly use it, but that man may be instruments of the glory of God.
Habakkuk 2:4 “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous
will live by his faith.
The text of Habakkuk tells us that not only is pride wrong and sinful, but it quite opposite of true faith. The soul of the person that is proud is a soul that is not right. It is a soul that is wrong and off the path of what God created it for. On the one hand the proud person has a soul that is not right, but in contrast the righteous person lives by faith. This gives us a contrast between pride and righteousness and then pride and faith. Hebrews 11:1 teaches us that without faith we cannot please God, so if pride and faith are opposites, we learn that we cannot please God with a proud heart. In other words, the heart that has pride in it, regardless of the outward actions, is a heart that cannot please God. We can see how the Pharisees had all the right actions, but they were proud and did not have true faith or Christ. For a soul to truly seek grace is for a soul to seek to be delivered from pride.
Faith, as the eyes and sight of the soul, is required to behold the glory of God and the kingdom of God as well. Faith, as that by which the soul receives grace, is necessary to walk and live by grace. Faith is also necessary to do anything by grace and as such pride which kills faith (so to speak) means that the soul is disabled to do one spiritual thing which must be done by grace. Without any faith, then, pride can move the soul to do all of its religious actions. The soul that is driven by pride can do virtually any outward act that a Christian does and be quite proud of it. The proud soul can have pseudo-humility and even deceive itself that it is humble. Oh how religious people can deceive themselves about their spirituality and have so many deceptions of the heart as their pride feeds on all of their religion.
Isaiah 2:11 The proud look of man will be abased And the loftiness of man will be humbled, And the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. 12 For the LORD of hosts will have a day of reckoning Against everyone who is proud and lofty And against everyone who is lifted up, That he may be abased.
As Isaiah 2:11 shows us, it is not just the openly wicked person that God is opposed to, but it is all those who are proud and lifted up. Every religious person must come to the point of realizing that pride will ruin all of his or her religion. Pride means that the self is feeding on the things of self and the things of pride in religious things as well. That is what the Pharisees did. They did their religious actions and then admired themselves while thinking that they were serving God. Oh how deceptive our hearts are when the Bible speaks of how humility is necessary to do anything by grace and faith and our pride deceives us through pseudo humility. How we must have the humility of Christ as our life rather than working up our own humility by pride.
God Loves... Himself 
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