Rayburn on Pride and Humility

Towards the end of the week for the next few weeks we will take the opportunity to think about character and how doctrine might be applied practically to the matter of heart examination. Today we feature an extract from an article entitled 'Pride and Humility' by Robert Rayburn which helps us understand one facet of the doctrine of sin.

'Pride is the idolatry of the self. It is the nature of pride as competition with God — the displacing of God by the self at the center — that has led many Christian thinkers through the ages to regard pride (superbia) as the mother sin and the essential element in all sin. It is strongly suggested in the Bible that pride was Satan’s primary sin (1 Tim. 3:6), and from that pride in his case came every manner of hostility to God and man: evil desire, hatred, cruelty, and deceit. In the same way, man’s fall resulted from his being persuaded by Satan that he might throw off his creaturely limitations and be “like God” (Gen. 3:5). From that pride has come all the rest of the evil that men think, say, and do, much — if not all — of which is motivated by the desire of men and women either to serve themselves or to protect their place at the center of their existence. Whether lust, greed, anger, or indifference toward others, it is not hard to see such sins as the expression of self-worship. A person does not necessarily deny that God is immeasurably greater than himself, but admissions of that type are no match for raging self-admiration in the heart.

The worst sin of pride consists in its breathtaking dishonesty: constructing a view of oneself in defiance of the facts...

Once Francis of Assisi became a celebrated figure and the object of constant adulation, he is said to have assigned to a fellow monk the task of reminding him of his failures and of how little he deserved the praise he was receiving. There are other reasons to confess our sins to one another constantly, but the mortification of our pride is chief among them. Hard work; but the selflessness of the truly humble is one of the most beautiful things in the world and one of the greatest honors we can pay to our Savior.'