Insecurity Is Pride
You don't need to know your worth. You need to know the worthiness of Christ.
When I was a young man, I played a lot of baseball. Baseball was kind of my thing. I had the shirt that said “Baseball is life.” My dad had me in baseball from the time I was six until fifteen. I would play every fall, every spring. My dad had me in camps. He had a personal coach for me at the batting cage. He wanted me to be a pitcher, but then my nickname as a pitcher became Wild Thing. So obviously I was not a good pitcher.
But by the time I reached the age of fifteen, I entered high school ball, and things kind of unraveled. It was really difficult for me. I was a good ball player, but I didn’t understand batting averages. In baseball, if you have a .300 batting average, you’re doing pretty good. That means that 70 percent of the time, you don’t make a hit. You don’t do well.
What happened to me in early high school is that I would get very angry. I was kind of perfectionistic. I wouldn’t succeed at the plate. I wouldn’t get on base, or I would strike out. And I would become very angry, because I knew I could hit the ball when I went to the batting cage. But for some reason, when I got up in the batter’s box, I became fearful, insecure. The pitches were much faster. The pressure more significant. And when I would strike out, I would go into the dugout and throw a helmet on the ground. I would just become self-consumed.
All of this was rooted in a sense of insecurity about how good I was and how I was doing. But more fundamentally than that, it was rooted in pride.
Pride. I was trying to find my worth, my identity, my evaluation, and my own success on the ball field. An insecurity that was driven by pride. And when I entered that batter’s box, it was pride I was battling more than the pitcher on the mound.
The Fork in the Road That Isn’t
There’s a common lie about humility and pride that many Christians believe. On the one hand, they believe that if you choose to follow Christ, it means you must be humble. Of course, this is true, but they insert into the definition of humility things that aren’t true such that to be humble means you have no desire, you have no ambition. That you should just be content in such a way that you would never seek out promotions or advancement in your career or vocation. You wouldn’t try to be better or pursue excellence. That somehow being a Christian requires you to essentially abandon your duties and your responsibilities in fulfilling those things.
This is the person who appears humble but is showy in their humility. They don’t really care, so to speak, what happens in their life or what happens during the day, because they are trusting the Lord. They don’t have any plans, because they view that as sinful, and they’re sure to make sure others know that they don’t have any plans. And it seems these people who misperceive humility have achieved some kind of spiritual nirvana where they’ve fully emptied themselves of any desire, any ambition, any want in life — and that is what is sometimes understood by humility.
On the other hand, there are people who are rich and successful, who have ambition and confidence. They can chase worldly fame. This seems to be a choice that Christians sometimes feel like they’ve got to make. I can either choose to be humble, which means I have nothing, or I can choose worldly success. I can be successful, wealthy, someone who’s famous, whatever it may be. And this is the type of person that many people identify as a prideful person.
This is a key difference, and many Christians think this is a fork in the road that they must choose. And I’m saying that neither are true. Because both can be focused on themselves.
Humility is about being focused on God and glorifying God. Whether you are showy in your so-called humility or you’re showy in your earthly riches or your prowess, you can be prideful. You can be a very successful man in life with a lot of wealth, you could have many cars, you could have land, and you could be one of the most humble men on the earth. You could also have nothing and be destitute, ambitionless, and you could be full of pride. What we have to focus on with humility is being filled by God instead of our own fullness or our own emptiness.
Pride Goes Before Destruction
Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. — Proverbs 16:18
You’ve probably heard this verse before. John Selden, a theologian and pastor, speaking of pride and humility, said it this way: “Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it is good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.”
Why does he say this? We often like to assign pride to those people who are either in power over us or in power under us. We like the idea of teaching humility for others, but rarely apply the teachings of the Bible to ourselves and our own station.
This proverb is clear that pride is the path that leads to destruction. Before destruction arrives in your life, pride is already there. It’s like the alarm that sounds before a fire engulfs the house.
And a haughty spirit is similar. It’s one that spurns correction and is full of oneself. It is another way to say prideful. And this is what comes before a fall.
We’ve all seen this story, heard this story. Someone who is high and lifted up in their own eyes. Someone who is successful, has everything they could ever want. And yet eventually they reach rock bottom. Their lives unravel. This is a very common story. You think of the first-round draft pick who got a million-dollar contract, and within two years he has destroyed his life. But it’s not just professional athletes. It’s all of us, is what the Proverbs say.
The proverb is clearly not commending pride. Pride is not something that we should pursue or aim for. Instead, it’s a warning against pride, that we should avoid it, because it is a vice, a sin, that leads not to life and peace, but to destruction.
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says this of pride:
The essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that are mere flea bites in comparison. It was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.
What is he saying here? He’s saying that at the root of every other sin — if you were to go through all Ten Commandments and all the law of God, and you were to look at what Jesus commands in the New Testament as well, building upon the Ten Commandments and others — you would see pride underneath it all. Pride is at the root of all sin: all murder, adultery, fornication, covetousness, greed. Underneath all of it is pride.
We Have Invented New Words for Pride
Now, this is all well and good. I think many of us would agree with this — yes and amen, pride is bad. But what do we mean by pride? And how does it play out in our life?
Many in our day confuse the vice and sin of pride with other social maladies. They’ve invented new ailments in place of pride. They avoid speaking of pride. In fact, in our day, pride is somewhat celebrated, you might say. But in the place of speaking of the sin and vice of pride, they speak of things like narcissism. “Oh, that person is a narcissist” — which seems to be a word and category used for anyone that you just don’t like. And it’s assumed that this is the same as prideful. Or they will use the concept of being an egomaniac.
But using these modern secular terms, we fail in two ways. The first is that we make pride some kind of social malady that can be remedied through therapy. And second, we make the person with a secular diagnosis of being a narcissist someone who is other, someone who is diseased, who has a unique malady, a deformity — as if we ourselves are not that, as if we could never be that. It is they who are the evil one. Because if this person is narcissistic or an egomaniac, that is some kind of psychological category that is a diagnosis for some people and not all people. But if we use biblical language, we see that pride is at the root of all of our sins. All of us deal with pride. We are all prideful.
How Do You Know If You Are Prideful?
Now you may say to yourself, “Self, I do not feel prideful. I do not think I am a very prideful person. How am I supposed to know if I am prideful or if I have a haughty spirit?” So I want to give you some practical insights.
One key indicator is if you lose a competition or fail to achieve a goal in your life that you set out to achieve, and you are wrecked, you are consumed, you are undone by the world. Well, that would be an example of pride. The example I gave earlier of me and baseball — this is someone who is consumed with their own performance, their own achievement. And the same could be said for any of us. Anything we set our mind to accomplish: if we lose, if we don’t achieve it, and we become not just bummed that we lost, disappointed that we couldn’t achieve what we set out to achieve, but self-destructive, self-consumed, self-loathing, and hateful of other people — well, at the bottom of that is pride.
It is about your aim and station in your hope and life. If your hope is in that which you feel you must achieve to be a worthy person. You have to get it, otherwise you are not a good person. You become crushed when you cannot achieve it — then pride is afoot.
Think about a business venture you set out to accomplish, a career path that you hope to achieve, and you don’t get it. You can’t achieve it. It is out of reach for you, and you become self-destructive: pride is afoot. You lash out in a variety of sins: pride is afoot. But if your hope is in God, and you’re simply just bummed and you can learn and grow when you don’t achieve, but you do not unravel, that is not pride.
Think about the last time you felt like your world was falling apart. I don’t know when that was for you. Maybe it was on the way to church. Maybe it was two years ago. Think about the last time you felt utterly disappointed in life because you couldn’t get something you wanted.
I think of some families who want to have children and are not able to have children just yet. Some people who have health diagnoses which they did not ask for and did not want to receive. Some people who struggle in their career and cannot seem to make ends meet. Some people are raising kids and the kids aren’t behaving like they want. Some kids have parents, and they have all sorts of thoughts about how their parents should behave in a different way.
But sometimes what happens is we are led to a place of — we call it being overwhelmed, or anxious, or like we cannot tell up from down. We become self-consumed with the situation we’re facing instead of looking to the Lord. And often what’s boiling underneath that is pride.
We’ve covered wealth, work, marriage, and parenting in Proverbs. What we see is that it’s not that upward advancement is bad. Seeking to pursue greatness, or have good goals in your life, or get wealth, or anything like that — that’s not bad. That’s in fact good. Paul himself says that if anyone aspires to the office of elder or pastor, it is good and noble that he aspires to such an office. Humility is not opposed to ambition or advancement or even confidence. But what pride does is manifest itself in ungratefulness and bitterness and resentment against God for not giving you something that you want or think you need.
The Test Is Correction
Pride isn’t discovered best through introspection. Many of us could be self-consumed and prideful in our own way, and all of a sudden we’re doing what they call spiritual navel-gazing — just looking at ourselves, trying to evaluate our own motives and heart. And you could spend your days doing that. It would lead to spiritual paralysis for many people, because you would become self-consumed with diagnosing: Was this prideful? Is this decision rooted in pride?
And so it’s not best discovered through this. You can waste a lot of time doing this. And pride is actually very sneaky. You will typically find a way to excuse your own pride.
Pride is discovered by one simple thing: Can you receive correction?
Can you receive correction? This correction can come in a variety of forms, and of course we can make the excuses: “Well, I can receive correction if it’s presented in the right way. If that person comes and corrects me and they use the wrong tone, or I just don’t like the way their face looked, or whatever it may be, and I thought it was a small issue, I am not going to receive that kind of correction.” No, no, no. We’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about exceptions. We’re talking generally: Are you the type of person who can receive correction?
Are you the type of person who, when a brother or sister in Christ comes to you and offers you a word of exhortation, can receive it? Not saying they’re always right and you’re always wrong, nothing like this. Are you the type of person who can receive correction even in the workplace, from a boss you may not prefer to hear from, about how you need to be corrected? Are you the type of wife who can receive correction from her husband? Are you the child who can receive correction from your parents even when you think you did nothing wrong? What kind of person are you?
Because this is where pride most often manifests. This is where we think of ourselves as not needing correction. The danger in this spirit, this attitude, this disposition, this behavior, is that if we cannot receive even correction from brothers or sisters or the authorities that God has put in our life, how are we ever going to receive correction where we need it most — from God’s Word?
Ultimately, if we cannot receive correction from God’s Word, that is the zenith of pride, because it is rejecting the good news that God saves sinners. The gospel message that God saves sinners is not just a word of hope, encouragement, and love. It is a word of correction. It corrects your self-evaluation. It says, “No, you are not good enough. You are, in fact, a sinner. Standing apart from the love of Christ, you are condemned, judged by God, to hell for eternity.”
To say that God saves sinners is to make a declaration of correction on other people. Yes, it is good news that we can have salvation, but the first word in the gospel is a correction. It is a conviction that we are sinners, that we cannot earn our way to God, that we cannot achieve our own salvation, that we cannot do enough to be reconciled to the Father.
And if we understand that, and we can live in light of that, if we have new life in Christ, a new heart, then all of a sudden we become people who are able to receive correction.
The Reward for Humility
If we are not to be prideful, then the opposite, of course, would be humble. So let’s look at that. What does it mean to be humble?
The reward for humility and the fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life. — Proverbs 22:4
Do you want riches and honor and life? The answer is yes. Most of us would say yes. We’ve covered this already. Most of us would be glad if somebody came to us and said, “I would like to give you riches.” We would be very thankful for this. “Thank you very much. I will either invest this or spend this or go on vacation, whatever it may be. I would like riches.” Would you like honor in life? Yes. Would you like a long life, a satisfying life? Yes. Find humility and the fear of the Lord. It’s the natural reward of those things.
Of course, when we’re talking about riches, we can talk about wealth, wealth creation, all sorts of things. Many of us wrongly diagnose that anyone who has wealth or riches is somehow an evil person or a prideful person, and this is not the case biblically.
Honor is an interesting word that they highlight here — that we all want honor, we want distinction, we want a type of glory. Think of how you imagine yourself as a grandparent one day with grandchildren surrounding you, and they honor you, they love you. I look forward to being a grandparent one day when I can spoil grandchildren like my parents spoil my children. We want that in life. We want that honor, that distinction, that glory that comes from a legacy where we love God and obey God and we’ve passed down an inheritance to those we love. And of course, you could obsess about getting this kind of honor, and that would be prideful. But the simple desire to receive honor — whether it’s in your career, your vocation, with friends, among brothers in Christ — this is not sinful and this is not prideful.
And then life. Think about your life. You want your life to be full. You don’t want a minute to be wasted. You want to squeeze all you can out of life. You want travel, fun, adventure, leisure, pleasure, and satisfaction. And many times it feels far off. It feels out of reach, like you can’t find rest or peace. And what this proverb is telling us is that only those who are humble and fear the Lord can find this kind of satisfaction. It is only by fearing the Lord and being a humble person that we can get life, honor, and riches.
Humility is a type of self-forgetfulness. Some teachers have taught it this way. It is not a kind of fake emptiness of care or concern. It is not a hollowness where you have no ambition or desire. It is an open-handedness toward whatever the Lord has providentially arranged for you day to day.
Humility doesn’t mean the house becomes a wreck because I just don’t care and we have no cares. But it does mean that when the house becomes a wreck because we live in a home, I don’t become crazy about it. It’s an open-handedness about whatever the day brings. It’s an open-handedness where I can go into my workplace and say, “Hey, I’ve been doing extra work. I would like a promotion.” And the boss can say, “We’re not going to do that right now.” And you don’t go home and want to punch a wall.
It’s an open-handedness to receive whatever the Lord has for you. This is rooted in a fear of the Lord.
How does this produce humility? The glory of the Lord, especially as a Christian, should weigh heavy on you. When we talk about the fear of the Lord, there are a lot of people who want to nuance this word fear. They want to make it seem like it’s not really being afraid. And, of course, I think this is a wrong way to communicate the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord does involve fear, actual fear. He is a wrathful, just God, but He is also merciful and kind and loving. He is beautiful and majestic. There should be a reverence and fear of the Lord that we have before us day to day. We should live before His face, because we do every day — aware of His presence, aware of His sovereignty, aware of His providence. And this produces humility.
Ultimately, this kind of attitude and heart and awareness can only come by the life-changing work of Jesus Christ, because to submit yourself and your life to Christ is to recognize one thing. You need salvation. You need salvation. You cannot achieve the full life that you want. You cannot achieve the honor that you think you need and deserve. You cannot achieve the riches that you want in life, and those things ultimately won’t satisfy you. You can only find satisfaction in God. To come to the Lord, to fear the Lord, is to admit that you cannot save yourself. It is a posture and disposition of humility before the Lord, of being a beggar before the Lord. I have nothing to offer in this exchange. It is a free gift. It is the grace of God to me to save. I cannot bring anything to the cross but my sin.
Let Another Praise You
And so these are some ways that the Proverbs talk about pride and humility. We are not to be prideful. We are commended to be humble. What about when we do succeed? How should we handle that?
Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips. — Proverbs 27:1–2
Now, the first verse should be familiar to you. Jesus speaks this way about tomorrow and about remaining humble in our plans. This, of course, is not to say do not make plans in life. This is simply to say have your plans with an open hand before the Lord. It is totally fine to seek out plans, to have desires and dreams and ambitions and try to sequence those out. That’s absolutely fine. It’s sinful when it becomes prideful: “I deserve to have everything go my way. I cannot believe everything didn’t go my way.” It’s to entrust our plans to the Lord. And that is what it looks like to be humble.
And then the second speaks to praise, the praise of men. The man or woman of virtue does not live for the praise of other men or women and doesn’t angle their life to receive the most praise. Instead, they gladly receive the praise of others in humility. They receive it as honor. So when someone commends you, tells you good job, celebrates you, you’re able to receive that. Great. And if someone does not praise you, you are not crushed. Good as well.
If someone celebrates you and you immediately move to dismiss them, that is often pride underneath. You often see this with people who want to posture as humble. You can commend them — whether they lost weight, they look good, they achieved something in life — and you come to them: “That was really good. I’m really proud of you. Good job.” And they go, “Oh, you know, it wasn’t me.” They try to distance themselves. You often see this as a husband. You might see this with your wife. You commend her: “You look lovely today, wife.” And the wife goes, “Oh, I just don’t like the way I look. I don’t like my hair today.” And if a woman can’t receive this, this is not noble. This is not humility. It’s often pride underneath. She is becoming the determiner of her own evaluation of herself. She’s not receiving the praise of others when she should.
And of course, we can all identify the person, or even in our own life, where we’re seeking out the praise of others. We want other people to celebrate us. “No one’s paying attention to me. I deserve to be the center of attention.” This, of course, would be pride. But the sinister version is the insecurity that lurks under the surface.
John Calvin put it this way:
That man is truly humble who neither claims any personal merit in the sight of God, nor proudly despises brethren, or aims at being thought superior to them, but reckons it enough that he is one of the members of Christ, and desires nothing more than that the Head alone should be exalted.
This is what humility looks like in Christ: that we together as a church body, that you with other Christians, do not despise any brother or sister in Christ. We do not aim to be thought better than them at anything, but we are content that we are simply one of the members of Christ’s body. We don’t lord it over others, as Christ taught. We desire nothing more than that the head alone, that Jesus alone, should be exalted.
Christians, we are not encouraged toward self-glorification, but we can desire honor. We should let other people praise us. And ultimately, why do we want to do this? Because our goal, our chief ambition, is to hear the words of Christ at the end of our life: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
And if we let this insecure pride go unchecked, I’m afraid that some of us would hear “Well done, good and faithful servant” from the Lord and go, “Lord, I didn’t do a good job. Lord, I can’t hear that from you. You know how much I failed.” And we just can’t receive praise at all, even from the Lord of lords and King of kings.
Let it be enough that your ambition be to hear from Christ, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” We should aim for the pleasure of God in you through Jesus Christ. We aim for the praise of Christ.
Insecurity Is Not Humility
Pride is a very tricky thing. And if it lurks beneath the surface of every other sin, then it’s something we should take seriously. It’s sneaky because it seems to fly under the radar. Pride turns our gaze inward, and humility turns our gaze upward toward the Lord.
Pride often flies under the disguise of someone who seems to be carefree and empty, as if they have no ambition. The person who is insecure is assumed to be the opposite of prideful, when in fact some of the most prideful people I’ve met are deeply insecure, because they make the measure of themselves not what God thinks about them, but what others think — or even more harshly sometimes, for the perfectionist, what they think of themselves. And that becomes the measure of themselves. And they constantly beat themselves down and beat themselves up and become either angry or anxious or consumed by pride.
You see, as it turns out biblically, insecurity is a key indicator not of humility, but of pride. How can this be so? Because you’re still evaluating yourself not by what Christ has accomplished on the cross and who He says you are, but by who you say you are. You’re not giving yourself wholly over to Him. It’s your own estimation that determines your worthiness in your mind.
So that the one who succeeds in all their achievements and the one who is deeply insecure are both tempted to attach their self-conception to their own worldly perceptions — whereas as Christians, we look to who? Christ. He is our evaluator. He is our judge. He is the one who has cleansed us, who has declared us righteous, and we can be satisfied in Him because we are His children, we are justified, and we are declared more than conquerors in Him.
Now, let’s say you agree with me up to this point. You’ve heard this from God’s Word. You see the complexity of pride and how it lurks and how it sneaks around. And of course, I believe this, otherwise I wouldn’t say it. And if you agree with me that insecurity is a marker of pride, this is very significant and a very challenging word. Because if we are insecure, and I hope you understand the worldly parlance I’m using when I’m talking about insecurity, if we’re insecure as men and women, as fathers and mothers, as brothers and sisters, then we are prideful.
And for too many, the answer to insecurity is to avoid talking about pride. Instead, the answer to insecurity is to talk about what? “You’re just so loved. You’re so lovely. If you only knew your worth.” And what they try to do is deal with insecurity, which is driven by pride, by giving you more pride, by simply feeding you more pride.
So they baptize the insecurity with platitudes. This is especially a temptation for women today, with many books written toward women about how you’re enough and how good you are, and the messages and the sermons are about your own self-worth, your own self-esteem — trying to get rid of that insecurity not by repenting of pride, but by self-talk, by worldly evaluations, by more books about how lovely you are.
And this is tricky, because in Christ, you are loved. You are loved. He does love you. He gave His life for you. But the difference is this. When we are the kind of perfectionistic, insecure, prideful person, and we come to Christ that way, we come to Him going, “I’m full of pride, Lord. I’ve made the determination of my own soul, my own life, based on my own analysis, or based on others’ analysis, and I have not looked to you, my Savior. I repent of my pride.”
And if we don’t do that, many times what we do is we come to Christ insecure, deeply insecure, looking to other people to evaluate us, looking to ourselves to evaluate us, and we don’t hear the good news of the gospel that you can be saved from pride. We hear something else, an alternative salvation: “If you only knew how worthy you are.”
And in that narrative, all we’re doing is calcifying our heart, hardening our conscience against pride. And many of us can become deeply deceived about these things. We won’t experience humility before the Lord, because we’ve actually never repented of pride, of sin. We have simply been offered a therapy session about finding our worth.
These are deeply different conceptions of reality. It is very much like if you went to the doctor and they treated a symptom for a deeper issue. And instead of dealing with and getting out the cancer, they just treated the symptoms and said, “Well, we’ll just deal with this and we’ll ignore the cancer.” And I’m afraid that’s what many people are doing. They’re ignoring the pride underneath. So that instead of finding life and humility, finding that honor, those riches, and that life that Christ offers via humility and the fear of the Lord, you actually become inflated with your own self-worth.
Instead, what the Proverbs teach, what Christ teaches, is that we come to the Lord as beggars, with nothing, knowing that we cannot save ourselves. And we come to Christ and repent of our sins, including pride. We find humility by turning to Christ and finding the pleasure of God, aiming to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
What a Humble Church Looks Like
Imagine what a truly humble person looks like. Maybe you know some in your life — someone who is confident, who knows their own capacities but doesn’t hold them tightly, someone who is affable. Imagine what a truly humble people looks like: a church that is humble, filled with humility, open-handed about their own capacities, their own giftedness, what they can achieve.
We may aim for great things. We may aim to influence our city for Jesus Christ, but we don’t hold it tightly as if we’re in control. We hold it with an open hand, going, “Lord, here we are, your servants, to serve you. Whether we have much influence or little influence, you do with us what you will. We come to you humbly. We only aim to please you.” It’s not about our might, our power, our cleverness, whatever it may be.
Pastor Matt Patrick and I have been serving as pastors of The Well Church for fifteen years, and I’ve been serving as a lead pastor alongside Pastor Matt for half that time. And this is confounding to many people, because most churches do not have two lead pastors. Most churches just have one. That is actually recommended. When you plant with your best friend, it doesn’t really go well that often. It did for us, but for many people it doesn’t. Think about starting a business with your best friend. It’s nice to be their best friend in social settings, but if you were to start a business with your best friend — dicey. Because you don’t just lose a business partner, you lose a best friend.
But people ask us: How can we serve together? Who has the final say? Who’s the boss? And to us, it really doesn’t cross our mind. Of course, I defer to Matt quite often, because the church plant was originally Matt’s idea. Matt invited me to plant a church with him and several others, to move to Boulder to plant a church. So I’m happy to defer to Matt. Matt is happy to defer to me.
We just completed a landscaping project, and the whole time it was like, “What do you want?” “I don’t know. What do you want? What do other people want?” I know Matt’s wife has an eye for flowers, so we invited Ari to take a look at the flowers. There wasn’t this contentious fight where I have to have my way or the highway. It’s just an attitude of an open hand. We’re happy to be here. This is such a blessing to be able to serve this church. This is nothing but the mercy and kindness of the Lord to us.
And so with the decisions we make, whether it’s me and Matt or our elder team, there’s an open-handedness about it, where it’s not my way or the highway. “If we don’t play this worship song, if we don’t have this ministry, I quit.” That is not a humble attitude. We aim for humility.
And if we extrapolate this kind of heart, this kind of attitude, and we have a church filled with people who are humble but for the Lord, then this is a church that can embrace riches and honor and life. And we have families that can embrace riches and honor and life, not because they’re entitled to such things, but because they fear the Lord and they’re a humble people. And they can receive the praise of others, not because they’re hungry and need the praise of others, but because they’re just happy to do what the Lord wants and happy to please the Lord.
And this will be very counterintuitive to a world that is consumed with self-pity and pride and vanity and self-esteem and self-worth. A world that ignores pride and even celebrates pride. And instead, what they find in the church is a people who are very humble. You could be of a high social status, making lots of money in the church, or you could make very little money. You could be a college student eating ramen. And when we come before the Lord, what are we? We are brothers and sisters in Christ before the Lord. Because we don’t lord it over one another. We may inspire one another to greatness. We may give praise to another, recognize their success — graduating with a degree, or starting a business, or becoming a new mother or father, whatever it may be. We can honor that. But we’re not consumed with these things.
In the church of Christ, a humble people, a people who fear Him — the outside world will see a people of virtue that are both self-forgetful and yet confident at the same time. Able to be assertive and yet able to receive correction. What a beautiful picture.
This sermon was preached at The Well Church in Boulder, CO on August 2, 2026. To listen to this sermon go here. To watch this sermon go here.