PRIDE - THE SPIRITUAL CANCER OF OUR SOULS

The greatest and most common sin that all of us are guilty of is PRIDE. Pride blinds us to the truth that we are all trying to live as mini-kings in our ego kingdoms of me, myself and mine. Pride keeps us from searching our hearts so that we will come to God with a desperate desire for Him to change our hearts. We worship God not for Who He Is but what He can do for us. We live our lives as slave kings trying to please the King of all kings instead of living as the children of our Heavenly Father with Jesus enthroned as King in our hearts.

In his sermon on chapter four of the book of Daniel, pastor Jason Lim drew attention to the heart beat of the spiritual cancer of pride – “I did it” & “I deserve it.” We see the success of our lives and our children as the fruit of our tireless efforts and we look forward to enjoying the fruits of our success in retirement and old age. The world entices us to focus on our wants and our narcissistic desires so that we become blind to the needs of so many others in the world around us.

We forget that life is not about us. True life is all about the Love of God that Jesus Christ died to reveal to us. God has sowed the seed of love in our hearts but it has not germinated or bore fruit in our lives. Our hearts are like a pathway, a rocky ground or a garden full of weeds. The circumstances of life  - good or bad - reveal the condition of our hearts in our responses to them. Are our lives bearing thorns for others or the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control?

The most critical step of changing our lives so that we can become the persons that God wants us to be is the act of humble submission and the total surrender of our mini-kingdoms to our Almighty God. But the God of Love will not demand our surrender. He is not a despot King who overcomes with the love of power but our Divine Healer who uses our adverse circumstances and the difficult people in our lives as His chemotherapy for the spiritual cancer of pride. He is our Divine Lover who woos us with the power of love and is patiently waiting for us to come to our senses so that we will turn back to Him.

But even as we do so, we need to recognise that there is a war within our hearts between our desires and God’s desires for us. The good news is that the battle does not belong to us but to God. As soldiers of the Cross, we are to simply stand firm with the armour of God and let Him use us as His instruments of healing and change in the world within us and around us.

We need our hearts to be filled with God’s love so that we can speak the truth in love and to bear one another’s burdens. Rebecca Van Noord makes the very important observation that community is not just to meet our social needs but for us to challenge and encourage one another to live for God. It is when we take rebuke graciously and seek forgiveness from God that the bond of community is forged. On the other hand, when we rebel or when we are sensitive or prideful, rifts will be created in the community.

We cannot love our neighbour as ourselves if we do not first love God above all else. Paul Tripp drew attention to the truth that “our willingness to gossip, to live in anger, and trim the truth reveals something deeper than a lack of love for people. It exposes a lack of true love for God.”

Our love for God is often conditional on what God can do or what He has done for us. We also feel that God’s love for us is conditional on our obedience and good deeds. However, a true love for God and the steadfast Love of God is rooted in what Jesus has done for us on the cross. We are to love God unconditionally even if we are not delivered from the fires of our afflictions.

We also need to believe that God loves us unconditionally even though we may be unfaithful and disobedient. The Blood of Christ has washed away all our sins. It is only our pride that keeps us from opening our hearts to receive the resurrection power of Christ and the love of God that is revealed through Christ Jesus our Lord. May the words from Psalm 57:9-11 fill our hearts with joy this Easter:

“My heart is confident, O God.

My heart is confident.

I want to sing and make music.

Wake up, my soul!

Wake up, harp and lyre!

I want to wake up at dawn.

I want to give thanks to you among the people, O Lord.

I want to make music to praise you among the nations

Because your mercy is as high as the heavens.

Your truth reaches the skies.”

From Prison To Paradise

The season of Lent is a time for self-examination, repentance. It is not a time to feel guilty but to come to our senses and see our spiritual blindness, understand our spiritual deafness and feel our spiritual deadness. It is a time to reflect on our journey home to our Heavenly Father. Our love for Jesus may drive us to our knees but it is our cross that will bring us down to our face to become totally humble, repentant and dependent on God.

We try too hard to be Christians. We can become an irritant to others or even shoot our fellow Christians who are hurting instead of helping them. We become Job comforters trying to save others instead of leading them to Jesus Christ as their Saviour. We try to carry our own cross instead of crying out to God for help to carry our cross.

The crosses we face in our daily lives are not to punish us but to train us and to draw us to an even closer intimate relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. On the other hand, we can become enemies of the cross when we fail to understand what it means to deny ourselves or to die to self. We forget that we are soldiers of the Cross but the battle is not ours but the Lord’s. We are called to be followers of Christ and not to be masters of our destiny.

We are on an exciting journey to live in heaven in the here and now. A young doctor who was dying described dying as the greatest adventure of his life. We need to encourage one another to see old age as the greatest and final adventure of our lives.

Autumn is a very beautiful season and winter is a season of wonder when we see God colour everything beautifully white in a snowfall.  When we face losses in life, we are in the autumn of life. When we become dependent and our lives become enveloped with the snow of a terminal illness and we become dependent and bedbound, we are in the winter of life.

In such times, we have a choice – to see our lives as half empty or half full. We can try desperately to live as mini kings in our kingdom of one or we can ask God to deliver us from our prison of self and bring us into His kingdom of Heaven so that we can live in paradise in the here and now.

Heaven and hell are not just places we go after we die. It is a condition of our lives in the here and now. C.S. Lewis made the point that “hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.” He reminds us that “it is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell - in each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

We are all addicted to the desire to have control over our lives, over others and our world. We forget that God's ways and not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.  We have been brainwashed into trying to please God through our actions instead of cultivating an intimate and loving relationship with Him. It is our image of God that is distorted and in need of change.. The gospel is that Christ came and died on the cross to draw us back to our true identity as the children of God.

The gospel of Christ is the timeless truth in truthless times – that God loves us and sent His only Son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross so that we can be fully human and to enjoy an intimate relationship with God as our Heavenly Father in the here and now. In order to do so, we need to be Christ centered and to be Christ centered,  the Cross of Christ must be the centre of our lives.

The primary struggle of human beings is not about finding a purpose in life but reclaiming their identity as children or God. It is seeking to return to paradise and being at home with our Heavenly Father from the prison of our egos. There is a spiritual battle between the kingdom of self and the Kingdom of Heaven deep within our hearts. The good news is that the battle belongs to the Lord. The bad news is that we keep trying to fight the battle in our own strength. Our focus is on the tiny picture of our lives instead of seeing life from the big picture of God’s love for us and the world.

During this season of Lent, let us examine how we are living out the tiny picture of our lives instead of the big picture of God’s amazing love for us.