Praise and Pride

"For I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

Matthew 11:29

I am so quick to diagnosis what sin is. It should be self-explaintory right? Whatever is black and white defined as wrong, right?

But then there is this character named pride who loves to throw a wretch in our plans. Pride has this sneaky tendency to disguise itself as something that is all fine and sweet. For so long, I was blind to pride in my life. I thought if I was good at something - I should receive endless praise for it and have a line of people that will fed my ego. It's funny that I didn't recoginize the problem with that sooner.

The part that made it interesting is that the things I was prideful about were my spiritual gifts. GIFTS- things that I did nothing to earn. Yet I thought of myself as "better" because I could do what others could not. The thing about pride is that it will distort a good action into an opportunity for us to promote ourselves and leave God in the dust.

We need to get serious in our fight against pride.

When I look at the life of Jesus, I don't see one ounce of pride. I see Him repetively choosing to act in humility and encouraging others to do the same. I believe that people were drawn to Him because He didn't care about making His name known but was more interested in reassuring others that He knew them.

Jesus' humility was attractive.

Recently I felt the overwhelming pressure of how easy it is to fall back into pride and craving praise. I feel like I can't win and that I am constantly guilty of only wanting recogintion. I has been a journey to let the Lord speak into that part of my life and let Him correct me when necessary.

I've made progress but there's still a lot of work to do.

A few days ago I was praying about this and I asked -

"Lord how do I fight against pride and how do I know when I've gone too far?"

I heard Him answer me back with this -

You'll know when you start to care more about the praise than you do the people.

Well that got my attention. I never want to reach a point where I care more people telling me "good job" then actually caring about them as a person. I want to know their story and why they were impacted by the words rather than just craving their validation. I don't want to miss what matters.

People matter.

Praise doesn't.

The more I observe the Lord's character and heart, the easier it becomes to keep those 2 facts straight.