There is a famous story by Richard Connell, published back in 1924. It's about a hunter who fills an island with prey to hunt...only his quarry isn't animals. It's humans. Killing other people, Connell's story says, is the most dangerous game.
But is it really? Sure, Connell’s most dangerous game can destroy our physical bodies, but there are even more dangerous games that can destroy our souls and our relationship with Jesus.
The five I’ll focus on in this devotional series are: comparison, conceit, complacency, compromise, and conformity.
Day 2: Conceit
Conceit, or pride, is said to be the original sin. And, indeed, if we look back in the Bible, it was pride that drove Lucifer to try and overthrow God. And, unfortunately, pride is just as rampant today as it was in Satan’s heart when he rebelled.
So, if pride was dangerous enough to get someone thrown out of Heaven, it’s definitely time to evaluate our lives and see how we can overcome it!
When you start playing this dangerous game, you start to think that you know better than God.
Pride is subtle. It is the root of so many things, and yet, we don’t recognize it. In fact, pride has also been called the root of all sins. We touched on it a little bit yesterday in our lesson about comparison. When we compare ourselves to other people and feel that we are better than them, that’s a prime example of conceit/pride.
One dangerous facet of pride is that we start to think that we know better than God. When we pray, we always tell God what we think He should do. When our prayers go unanswered, we get mad at God and wonder why He didn’t cave to our whims: pride. When we disregard parts of the Bible that are just a little too hard for us to digest and label them as myths or ways society has changed, that’s pride. We can’t pick and choose what is relevant about God, or else we’re merely fashioning a god in the image of ourselves. In our pride, we are tearing God down and saying that we know better than His Holy Word. Which brings me to my next point:
When you start playing this dangerous game, you start fashioning yourself as God.
When you think you know better than God, you are fashioning yourself to be God. You get to decide which parts of the Bible you will live by. You want to listen to yourself and don’t want to acknowledge that someone could be greater than you. Pride is scared of relinquishing power to God, to admitting that there is a God who knows better than you and who deserves to be listened to. When we are filled with pride, we start to chafe at the fact that we are not in charge. We don’t like listening to God, we don’t like obeying God, or being judged by God. It’s much easier to toss God out of the picture and act as if there is no God so that we can be in charge of our own world.
Satan wanted to be God. Today, each one of us does, too. It’s only by the grace of God that we are able to conquer this. To defeat pride, we must fall on our knees—a position that pridefulness resents—and submit ourselves wholly to God and recognize that God is God, and we are not.
When you start playing this dangerous game, growth is nearly impossible.
Pride causes self-righteousness. Pride causes selfishness. And, of course, pride comes before the fall (Proverbs 16:18).
When we are prideful, we often resent when people try and help us to grow. There’s almost nothing more prideful than spitting out the verse: “get the plank out of your own eye before you get the speck of dust out of mine” (Matthew 7:5). See, the funny thing is, when most people say this verse, they are using it to justify their actions and shut up their critics. Usually, they use it as justification to continue on in doing what they want to do, without validating or considering someone else’s opinions. In their own pride, they use that verse as a crutch to not grow.
But that isn’t what Jesus is advocating at all!
Jesus’s actual words were to take the plank out of your own eye first—so that then you can help your brother to get the speck out of his. Jesus wasn’t using it to “shut up his critics.” He was using this verse as a launching pad for growth, but pride had twisted what was a call for humility and togetherness into a verse of justification for evil.
See, when people approach us with comments and want a heart-to-heart discussion with us, then we shouldn’t let pride get in the way of growth. None of us are perfect, but pride doesn’t want to admit that. Pride acts in self-preservation, and if we admit that we are wrong, then we have to also be humble. But pride doesn’t want that.
We also can bite back at people when we are too prideful. Because being in the wrong wounds our pride, we want to wound them instead. So we snap at them, tell them what they’re doing wrong, get angry...all of these are desperate acts of self-preservation from pride. And that makes people wary about approaching us in the future, which means that our flaws can go unchecked: and pride loves this.
Remember this example from the Bible: at the Last Supper, Jesus tells the disciples that they’ll all fall away from Him. Peter, blinded by his pride, declares that even if everyone else falls away (look at that bit of comparison!), he never will (and there’s our conceit!).
And we all know how the story goes. Before the rooster crows, Peter has denied God. His pride went right before a huge fall.
His pride made him blind to Jesus’s teachings. But, after he was knocked down a few pegs, Peter became humbled. And once he was humbled, he was redeemed—and went on to be a fierce missionary for Christ, doing things he never thought possible (like ministering to the Gentiles!).
God used Peter’s humility to escort him into deep growth, and He can do the same for us.
How to win this dangerous game: replace conceit with conscious humility.
Bible verses:
(Ezekiel 28:11-19)
(Proverbs 16:18)
(Matthew 7:5)
(Matthew 26:31-35)
(Matthew 26:69-75)
(Isaiah 2:12)
(James 4:4-10)
(Philippians 2:3)
(Proverbs 8:13)
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