September 5, 2014

Pride and faith. How do they connect? Are they related?

Pride is the absolute assurance in one's ability to create, accomplish, or complete. It is the thinking that one's way is the ONLY way, and everyone else's way is faulty and wrong. Selfishness. Arrogance. They all point to pride.

Faith, similarly, is putting one's trust in a source that is trustworthy. I have faith that a chair will hold me if I sit on it (this is a common analogy for faith). Its the putting aside of fears and doubts because you BELIEVE, not have seen or experience, that the source of faith can be trusted and will follow through on its purpose; in our example, to not collapse. 

So if one has faith in oneself, is it prideful? Is saying "I believe I can!" really wrong? Where is the line between humble faith and prideful doubt? One has to look to Jesus for that!

You see, God is the only one that can be prideful justly. Because He IS the ultimate power, He can put trust in Himself! He can SAY He is the best, because... well... He is. He is deserving of our worship! So if Jesus was both God and man, why didn't Jesus ask for everyone to bow down and worship Him? Why would God HUMBLE Himself to the body of a human? 

Love. Pure and simple. He loves us. Since we are faulty, we cannot have faith in ourselves like He can, because then our faith would have us believe that we can accomplish more than we can. Truth is, in our prideful state, we overestimate our abilities and underestimate the consequences. Which is why our faith needs to be placed in JESUS. He is the ultimate power, and He is perfect! Our faith will be satisfied in Him because He is TRUSTWORTHY! Also, it keeps our pride, arguably the human's greatest flaw, in check because we need to humble ourselves before GOD. You see, pride and faith in Jesus have an inverse relationship: as your faith grows, your pride shrinks. Humility is grown through faith in Christ!

God bless yall, and lets #LiveItLikeJesus