Barnpreacher
Puritan Board Junior
From Joel Beeke's Overcoming the World:
- Convicting stuff.
...faith battles against the pride of life. How prevalent such pride is in our hearts. As George Swinnock said, "Pride is the shirt of the soul put on first and put off last." The pride of life includes:
-Pride in ourselves and our own accomplishments. By nature we are filled with a desire for self-gratification and self-fulfillment. We live for ourselves, promoting our own wisdom and accomplishments.
-Pride in challenging the providential governing of God. Sects such as Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses challege God's rule by asserting man's power to save himself by his own efforts. So do the New Age Movement, transcendental meditation, and occult practices such as fortune-telling, horoscopes, ouija boards, and palm-reading. So do attempts to manipulate and destroy life through artificial birth control, abortion, or euthenasia, all of which intrude upon and usurp the role of divining providence.
-Pride in idolizing movie actors, sports heroes, government leaders, or other popular figures. John condemns all human idolization as the pride of life.
-Pride of materialism. Loving possessions such as our homes or cars or clothing more than God is idolatrous as it feeds our quest for pleasure. Dishonesty in business, tax evasion, and other unethical ways of increasing personal wealth feed the pride of life; so does envy or the wish to become rich at the expense of our spiritual welfare. Pride of life involves gambling and lotteries, and everything that prohibits our first fruits from being given to the Lord.
-Pride of desecrating the Lord's Day. How proud we must be to think that we don't need to set aside one day out of seven to worship the Lord and to receive the kind of spiritual food that will nurture us for the coming week.
- Convicting stuff.
