Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
(1 Corinthians 5:6-8, NASB)
I just finished performing in a production of “Annie,” and at one point, Mr. Warbucks says something like, “It doesn’t matter who you step on to get up the ladder if you don’t plan on coming back down again.”
That’s pride.
Pride is selfish and self-serving. It boasts in “self,” and says, “It’s all about me.” Pride says, “I’m better than you are, and so I deserve more than you do.” Prideful people are out for “number one,” and they don’t care who they have to step on to get what they want.
On the other end of the spectrum is humility.
Humility is self-less and other-serving. Humility says, “What can I do to help you?” It is sincerely interested in others and desires to lift them up.
As Paul wrote in another of his epistles: “Don't be jealous or proud, but be humble and consider others more important than yourselves. Care about them as much as you care about yourselves” (Philippians 2:3-4, CEV).
I’ve struggled with pride, with thinking that I’m somehow better than someone else. And then God reminded me that, first of all, He loves each of us equally. Second, He’s gifted each of us uniquely, and each of us serves Him however He’s gifted us. Third, I can’t do anything on my own; He works His will through me.
If I can do anything, it’s only through the strength of Christ. It’s not about me … It’s about Him and what I can do to serve Him and others.
And if I’m going to boast about anything, it must be about Him. Because without Him, I can do nothing.
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