Our pride, as delicate as it is, can be content to feed upon that stench and corruption which a little humility makes us nauseate…The character of man is, proud sinner. (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).
The basic issue of the unregenerate human soul is pride. While it may appear on the surface that the problem with the unregenerate soul is unbelief, yet if one looks a little deeper one sees that it is pride that keeps the soul from believing. In other words, an unregenerate soul is a proud soul. It may be very nice and very religious, but its unbelief is a result of pride. On the other hand, we can see that proud souls must be humbled in order to believe. God gives grace to the humble, but opposes the proud. Pride, then, while opposite to humility, is also opposite to grace. It is impossible for a proud and self-focused person to love the truth and reality of grace, though the proud and self-focused person may like or even love (in a sense) a false idea of grace
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 in Habakkuk shows us that the proud person’s soul is not right within him, but a righteous person lives by faith. The contrast, on one hand, is between the soul that is not right and a righteous person. On the other hand, the contrast is between a proud person and faith. True faith will always live in a humble soul while the proud soul cannot have faith as the two cannot live together or the two (faith and pride) cannot reign in the same soul. This is not to say that converted people are without pride, but that grace will break the proud heart (while it will not totally do away with pride in this life) so that the humble heart may have grace and as such faith receives grace and so grace reigns in that soul. Every soul is either at the mercy of self and the devil by pride or at the mercy of God by grace. So the essential character of the unregenerate is proud sinner, but since no one is delivered from pride and sin to perfection in this life, in many ways the regenerate also should see self as a proud sinner.
In one sense the phrase “proud sinner” is nothing more but a redundancy. It is the case that very sinner sins from pride and every proud person sins by being proud. When one sees the very nature of pride and of self, then one can see that the answer for that soul is not being good and nice, but to have a change of heart. A person can be good and nice and yet be that way out of pride. A person can be very religious and be given to prayer and fasting and giving of alms, but still only do those things out of pride (see the Pharisees in Matthew 6). That leaven of pride ruins all that is thought and said to be Christian because all that is truly Christian (faith and actions) are to be done to the glory of God rather than the glory of self. It is only grace that can work in the soul to deliver it from pride and self so that the glory of God will shine through the soul.
This should show us how a proud heart can feed upon that stench and corruption with which a little humility would make us sick to look at much rather than feed upon. The Pharisee loved to pray in order to be seen by men. The Pharisee loved to think of self as righteous and loved the thought that others saw that he was righteous when he prayed. In other words, the pride of the Pharisee fed on being seen as righteous by men. The pride of the Pharisee fed on his own perceived righteousness and filled him up with a sense of his self-righteousness. On the other hand, a truly humble heart is sickened at self when it sees self doing things like that. It is not that the humble heart is completely delivered from all pride and all self, but it has enough humility to loath itself for the pride and self that is left. It is much like Paul who cried out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Rom 7:24).
The proud heart feeds on religious actions because of what those things do for self. The humble heart is nauseated at doing things for self and desires to have a heart that is pure and so do all things out of love for God and His glory. The proud heart can go home after doing a religious action and dwell on that much to its own satisfaction, but the humble heart grieves over what it has done by self even with mixed motives. The humble heart hates the remaining self and pride and longs to be delivered from it so that it can live fully to the glory of its Beloved. While the humble heart is never fully delivered in this life from pride, it hates the pride and self that it must battle with.
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