When I am driven by my own pride and not by humility, I begin to prefer myself to other people and begin to act in a haughty, a mean-spirited, and prideful way against other people, all of which, again, links pride to selfishness, because selfishness and pride go hand in hand where the center of our concern is the self.
C.S. Lewis said that the humble man will not be thinking about humility because he will not be thinking about himself at all. On this side of glory, we will all continue to battle against pride and the various ways that it can appear in our life.
And today, on this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul will share what he knew to be the only antidote for pride. Love does not boast. It is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way. It's this humble love that Dr. Sproul will address today. Before he does, I do want to remind you to request this entire 20-message series at renewingyourmind.org with your donation of any amount while there's still time, as this offer ends tomorrow. Here's Dr. Sproul continuing his study of biblical love from 1 Corinthians 13. As we continue now with our study of growing in the Christian life and developing a Christian character, we've really looked at this process in various segments.
We spent considerable time on the importance of establishing the assurance of salvation, and now we're looking at the standard of sanctification that we find in the New Testament in terms of the fruit of our salvation. We saw the fruit of the Spirit that Paul listed in Galatians, and we've also been looking now at 1 Corinthians 13, the great love chapter, because in that chapter, Paul elevates love to the greatest fruit of the Spirit and the greatest of the Christian virtues and incorporates in the Corinthian letter an expanded understanding of the fruit of the Spirit as it's connected to love. In Galatians, he mentions love as the first fruit distinct from the other fruits, whereas in 1 Corinthians, the other fruits are shown to be extensions of the virtue of love.
And so let's look once more at 1 Corinthians 13, and we'll look at it today beginning in the second part of verse 4. We saw already the passage, love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy. And then Paul goes on to say, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, and does not seek its own. Now these characteristics of love in terms of what love does not do are all linked to one of the most deadly of the deadly sins of which the Old Testament speaks, and that has to do with the sin of pride. The late Swiss theologian Karl Barth once made the observation that the three most basic fundamental sins of the human heart are first of all pride, and second of all sloth, and third of all selfishness. And these also are interrelated, but the Scripture has much to say about pride. We hear the famous expression, pride goeth before what?
The fall. Yes, that's not right, but I knew that somebody would answer my question that way. That's an abbreviation, a telescoping of the whole proverb. What the Bible says about pride is that pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit, haughty, H-A-U-G-H-T-Y, a haughty spirit before the fall. So we condense that and say pride goes before the fall. And one of the reasons why Scriptures tell us that pride precedes destruction and pride anticipates a falling is elaborated in the New Testament, as we've already seen in an earlier study on the book of James, that God resists the proud, and He gives grace to the humble. And so we see these contrasting human characteristics, pride and humility, humility and pride.
These two are polar opposites. Now pride, arrogance, haughtyness, what the earlier translation calls a vaunting spirit, all of these characteristics are again linked to the idea of pride. And now we have to ask the question, why are we so proud?
What do we have to be proud about? Paul tells us elsewhere, let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. And he also indicates that we ought not to think more highly of ourselves than we should, but that we ought to have a sober assessment, a sober evaluation of who we are, of our strengths, of our weaknesses, of our gifts, and of our lack of gifts, and have an honest evaluation of our own capacity. Now when we talk about evaluating who we are and having a sober assessment of the degree of our worth and of our strengths and so on, we need some kind of standard by which to measure that. And the Bible in measuring human activity uses alternately two different standards. In the first place, the ultimate standard by which all virtue is judged is God Himself supremely and then proximally in the person and work of the God-man, the perfect man, Jesus.
Now if we go to those standards to measure ourselves and make an honest evaluation of the character of God and then look at our own characters, what's the inescapable conclusion we're going to come to? That we have not just a little bit to be proud about, but we have nothing to be proud about because when we compare ourselves by the standard of virtue and of excellence and of loveliness, it is no wonder that the Scripture uses some of the most graphic terms imaginable to describe the baseness of our humanity. It's not just a self-abasement that makes an Old Testament man cry out, Behold, I am a worm. That seems to denigrate the value of humanity to say that we are as lowly as worms. You think of that thing that's attached to the earth, that squiggly, dirty thing called a worm, and we can think of very few things that are lower in esteem than a worm, and yet biblical characters will beat themselves on the chest and say, Behold, I am a worm. Jesus was not far away from this kind of an evaluation when He looked at His contemporaries and called them serpents. I remember John Calvin made a comment about babies when he was speaking about the inherent corruption of the human race and that infants are born in original sin, and trying to explain the degree of depravity with which we enter the human experience, Calvin made the statement that babies are as depraved as rats. And I've seen that statement quoted by opponents of Calvin and say, Look at this. What an insult to human dignity this is to call little babies as wicked or as depraved as rats.
And I have to go on record here of saying I also strenuously disagree with John Calvin and that association. I think it's a slip of the pen by the great reformer because he doesn't do justice to the rat. It's an insult to the rat. The rat is just going around doing what rats do, obeying the laws of nature, running away from cats and chasing after the cheese and spending their time rooting around in garbage dumps. But that's what rats are created to do. The rat has not risen up in protest against its Creator and conspired together against the Lord and against His anointed. No rat was involved in the conspiracy to execute the Son of God when He was on this earth. If people were concerned about the fallenness of nature and the ecological problems that we have today with the pollution of this world, if you want to get rid of the worst polluter, you don't want to just simply call the Pied Piper and eliminate the rats.
If you want to really purify this planet, what do we have to do? We would have to rid it of all human beings because it's mankind that is the chief carrier of wickedness and evil in this world. We don't like to think of ourselves in those categories, and so we are aghast when Calvin makes comments like babies are as depraved as rats and probably even more aghast when you hear me say that's an insult to the rat because I don't mean to suggest that rats are a higher order of being than human beings. The other side of this coin is that the Bible does speak of the high level of dignity that is accorded mankind in creation, that we are created but little lower than the angels in the order of creation, and we have been given dominion over the plants and the animals, including the rats, and that our station in the universe is of a higher degree than any rat. So obviously God has invested more dignity in people than He has in rats. That's what makes our sin so serious.
The very elevated status and station that God has given to us should make us profoundly grateful and profoundly humble that the Creator should bestow upon us this extraordinary level of dignity. And instead it has become an occasion for our pride and our imitation of Satan himself. The Scriptures say that the sin that induced Satan himself as an angel created above the level of men to fall away and to revolt against God was his pride. The basic approach of the serpent to Adam and Eve in the garden was an appeal and an attempt at seduction at the level of pride.
You remember the invitation that he gave to Adam and Eve saying that if you eat of this tree, what, you shall be as gods. And so the very first sin of the human race was the sin of pride, a sin of refusing to be willing humbly and gratefully to submit to the authority of God which authority is inherent and intrinsic. Now, if we compare ourselves again with the character of God, if we look in the mirror of God's holiness, if anything should teach us humility, that should be it because we have nothing of which to boast in terms of our own righteousness or of our own goodness, virtue, or merit. But the Bible is concerned not only with our evaluating ourselves with respect to the standard of the character of God. Even an unfallen creature has nothing to be proud about before the glory and the majesty of God. But also there is that sense in which Scripture at times condescends to speak about our relationship among ourselves as human beings. And there is where pride becomes significantly destructive in human relationships and where pride violates love because when I am driven by my own pride and not by humility, I begin to prefer myself to other people. And I begin to seek a higher status, a higher level of power, a higher level of applause, a higher level of honor than is rightfully mine. And in seeking for that honor and for that success, so often we denigrate those who compete and vie with us for the places of power and for the places of honor and so on and begin to act in a haughty, a mean-spirited, and prideful way against other people, all of which again links pride to selfishness because selfishness and pride go hand in hand where the center of our concern is the self.
Now, the New Testament at this point sets forth a radical ethic, an ethic that stands opposed to the customs, the mores, and the standard practices of every society in this world but particularly our society when it teaches that we should prefer the exaltation of others above ourselves. Think of the Pharisees and how often Jesus attacked them for their pride. How did they exhibit pride?
In a couple of ways. One, they were constantly seeking and maneuvering and working behind the scenes to get the chief seats in the synagogue. They were striving to control the positions of honor and authority.
They made the phylacteries of their garments wide. That is, the symbols of their status were exaggerated and accented in their public manifestations. They sought the applause and the acclaim of human beings.
They were puffed up and arrogant. And, of course, they hated Christ because Christ came as a revelation of the true standard of righteousness, and when the true standard of righteousness appeared, the false display of righteousness was seen to be counterfeit. Christ, who had eternal and intrinsic glory, majesty, and honor, made Himself of no reputation, willingly laid aside His glory, willingly laid aside His honor in order to serve and to save. And the Christian is called to imitate Christ at that point.
Remember what Paul says, have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God took His equality with God, that is, His status, not as something to be grasped or to be jealously guarded, but He emptied Himself. He laid aside His honor, He laid aside His glory, and took upon Himself the form of a servant and became obedient even unto death. This we speak of in terms of Christ's profound humiliation. He chose humiliation rather than exaltation in order to redeem us.
We never choose humiliation. We flee from humiliation. We hunger and thirst after exaltation. We love to be honored.
We love the applause of people and how dangerous that can be. Now, do you hear what the Scripture says? On the one hand, we are not to seek honor and glory and status, and yet we are to give it. There is not a leveling in Scripture of all humanity in a populist framework where everybody is to be considered on an equal status, as if there were no levels of honor or authority established in this world.
Now, we need to hear this and hear it carefully. The Bible requires us to give honor to whom honor is due. One of the Ten Commandments speaks of the need of giving honor. Honor your father and your mother.
That means that you humbly submit to their status and station as parents, and honor them in that role. We are to honor the king. We are to honor the civil magistrate.
The student is to honor the teacher. The employee is to honor the employer. We have different levels, and all of us live in all of these different levels. In some places, we are the ones who receive honor. In other places, we are the ones who are to give honor.
But we are to do it according to what God has established in terms of our circumstances. Where pride becomes destruction is when we refuse to give honor where honor is due and set ourselves up arrogantly and haughtily above the place where we have been positioned. Self-confidence is seen as the supreme virtue. And I understand in athletics particularly how important it is for a player to have confidence when they're executing their activities. But there is a thin line between self-confidence and self-reliance. Self-confidence in the virtuous sense is to be able to have a sober assessment of our own abilities.
Arrogance really comes from insecurity when we don't have the confidence and pretend that we do or try to force it and impose it by intimidating other people. But love is not like that. Love is not puffed up. Love does not make an ostentatious display of one's status, of one's wealth, of one's gifts, or of one's power and authority. To love is to be humble as Christ was humble. One of the most dangerous concepts we ever consider in the New Testament is this concept of pride. We may be able to escape the indictment that comes with the other criticisms of our behavior under the law of God, but who among us can ever escape the indictment of pride? You may have mastered all kinds of disciplines in your life, but none ever masters the power of pride in this world. Think of the ways, if you will, today in which your pride has gotten you into trouble, in trouble on the job, in trouble in school, in trouble in games, in trouble in your personal relationships, in trouble in your marriage, in trouble with your children. Think how much destruction has come into your life because of your pride. And also think in terms of the destruction that has come into your life because of other people's pride. And the only antidote I know, the only cure for pride I know, is an understanding of two things, of who God is and who we are. The more we understand the character of God and the more we understand who we are with respect to God, the more we will be driven and molded to bear the fruit of the Spirit in a humble love.
That was R.C. Sproul from his series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit. And this is the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Over the past few days, as Dr. Sproul has walked through the biblical definition of love, we've seen how far the world has drifted from a right understanding of love and even how some in the church hold to a very watered-down version of it. It's why it's so vital that we return to the Word of God and renew our minds, our thinking, according to Scripture. The message you heard today is from a 20-message series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit.
And you can have lifetime digital access to it when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. In addition to this extensive series on Christian character, we'll send you a new resource from Ligonier Ministries. It's a 90-day devotional called Our Great Salvation. This newly published resource is filled with biblical reflections on the Christian life and we'll send you a copy to thank you for your donation of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org, or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. But be quick because this offer ends tomorrow. Join us tomorrow as R.C. Sproul considers the fruit of self-control and how that relates to love. See you then here on Renewing Your Mind. .
