The sin that doesn’t admit it exists

It all started when…

My past isn’t the type of radical turnaround story everyone loves to hear. I wasn’t a drug dealer who mistreated women and cursed organized religion. I wasn’t a greedy, cheating businessman who transformed from criminal to church-going saint.

I was something much different, but equally as poisonous.

I was more worried about what people were doing wrong than the wrongs done to them.

I didn’t care what other people thought or felt if they were obviously flawed in their thoughts or actions.

God was on my side and wanted people to get their act together – so I thought.

But I was wrong.

I was a Christian who didn’t realize that pride was the disease corrupting my life and my soul.

The first step to fixing pride is admitting your life is built on the lie that you don’t need fixing.

Why Pride Is Self-Destructive

Pride begins where healthy self-esteem ends. It’s a deception that minimizes other people and their problems because it forces us to think only of ourselves (Galatians 6:3).

Our relationships with other people crumble because pride tells us to keep ourselves first. And our relationship with Jesus is broken because we care more about our reputation than listening to Him and doing what He says.

Religious pride fed me the lie of confidence in my own achievements. I didn’t realize all my good morals and avoiding obvious sins were failed attempts to earn God’s love when He already gave it freely. I wanted to accomplish more for God instead of celebrating the great things He had already accomplished for me.

The irony of pride is that the higher we think of ourselves, the further we’re bound to fall. Devastation is inevitable (Proverbs 29:23). But because God’s not done with us, freedom from pride is possible.

3 Ways To Move Past Pride

1. Admit it.

Moving past pride isn’t easy because the first step to fixing pride is admitting your life is built on the lie that you don’t need fixing.

Tell your friends. Tell God. Confess your sin of giving yourself more important than Jesus and other people. Join a Group of people different than you. People are not ranked more or less valuable to God, so we have no right to treat them as such (Romans 12:16).

2. Allow others to influence you.

Submit to others in your life, like trusted friends, pastors or mentors (1 Peter 5:5). By allowing people to talk candidly about how you’re thinking and acting, they’ll help you say “no” to pride and move past it.

3. Actively pursue humility.

We can’t just hope to avoid pride without fighting to defeat it.

Pride is thinking you’re good enough to earn God’s approval, while false humility is pridefully thinking you’re too bad for God. True humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less (Philippians 2:3-4).

The driving force of humility is grace. We can celebrate how God does great things for our good, things we could never accomplish without Him (Romans 11:17-21, Ephesians 2:8-9).