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Jul 29, 2018

Wisdom in Glory

Passage: Proverbs 15:33

Speaker: Brian Land

Series: Proverbs

Category: Grace Brevard

Pride is the mother of all sins. We are designed to be God-centered and other-centered, but from the very beginning we have sought our own comfort, pleasure and glory, which isn’t freedom and satisfaction but a fatal and contagious disease whose cure is found in Jesus who laid down his glory in sacrificial humility so that we could be restored to our Image and place with the Father.

ORDER of Worship

Call To Worship: Philippians 2:3-11 ESV

Reading: Colossians 3:1-2,12,14 ESV

Songs: 

Prayer: The Lord’s Prayer ESV

Sermon Title: Wisdom for Pride

Central Text: Various Proverbs on Pride

  • 3:34 
  • 8:13
  • 11:2
  • 13:10
  • 15:25
  • 15:33
  • 16:18
  • 16:19
  • 21:4
  • 21:24
  • 28:26
  • 29:23 

Illustration: GWBV - Break Room

Response: 1 Corinthians 1:27-31 ESV

Benediction: 2 Corinthians 13:11,14 NIV

Related Media:

7.29.18 Album

Related Scriptures:

  • Revelation 3:17-18 
  • Philippians 4:11–13
  • Luke 18:9-14
  • James 4:10

Discussion Questions & Applications:

  1. What does pride look like?
    1. Why is pride in others so annoying?
    2.  Why is it harder to see pride in ourselves than in others
    3. And why isn’t as annoying when we see it in ourselves?
  2. Many people believe that pride is the root of all sins. What do you think about that?
    1. Think specifically of particular sins... how can pride (putting yourself above) be the cause of it?
  3. Biblically “Pride” is literally “empty glory”. Explain the mental image that creates.
  4. Unpack this: “Humility isn’t thinking less (worse) of yourself, but thinking of yourself less (often)”
  5. We can’t simply “not be prideful” but replace our self-infatuation  with a passion for Something More Beautiful. How can this happen?
  6. Read Philippians 2:1-11 on humility and “how” to pursue it with regard to Jesus, The Truly Humble One.

Quotes:

  • "Unless you believe the gospel, everything you do will be driven by either pride or fear." – Timothy Keller
  • “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” “As long as you are proud you cannot know God.
  • “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
  • For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense. - C. S. Lewis
  • That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. - C. S. Lewis
  • The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, 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. - C. S. Lewis
  • The more pride we have, the more other people’s pride irritates us - C. S. Lewis
  • Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician - C. S. Lewis
  • Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it’s the complete anti-God state of mind. - C. S. Lewis
  • “When I began to look into this matter I was stocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation’ by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years. prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment—a very, very short moment—before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself;” - C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory)

Sermons:

Haughty Eyes by Timothy J. Keller

Proverbs 11:2,12; 13:10; 15:25,33; 16:18-19; 21:4; 28:26

Blessed Are the Meek by John Piper

Matthew 5:5

Pride & Humility by Charles Spurgeon

Proverbs 18:12