Humble Pie...

...actually tastes pretty good.

Have you ever peeled back a bandage and got that catch in your breath and that flip in your gut when you saw the nastiness that was hidden beneath? Well, today I got to see my pride like the festering, oozing wound it is.

Sometimes I feel my heart is a dark, narrow and scummy corridor, full of wicked little secrets and sinful infestations.

Okay, enough with the analogies. You get the idea.

Thank goodness for Jesus.

And the Bible.

And C.S. Lewis.

"Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity-that is, by Pride.

The devil laughs.

He is perfectly content to see you become chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride-just as he would be content to see you chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer."

Buurrrn! "Rebellion is So beneath me." <-- How many times have I subconsciously thought that when trying to whip my sin nature into shape?!!

I've read "Mere Christianity" a few times already, I've got this stuff down (right?), so why is it every time I read it, it's like ripping open a wound I've cleverly disguised. It staggers me.

I am all about appearances, you see. How mortifying it would be to be thought of as Vain! So I tell the world I don't care what it thinks, that I'm above the opinions and appreciation of my fellows. Ugh!

Listen to Dude C.S.:

"Pleasure in being Praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says 'Well done,' are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.'...The more you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom... In this way real thorough-going pride may act as a check on vanity; for as I said a moment ago, the devil loves curing a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity. "

So again I throw myself on the mercies of God! How deeply have I wounded my Savior! Crushing my laziness, vanity, insecurity, and insubordination with the bitter weight of Pride?!! How it must mock the name of Jesus! What should I do?

Ah.

Yes.

Humility.

C.S. Lewis again:

" The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble-- delightfully humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you a restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and strutting about like the little idiots we are.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think of him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him."

*Sigh*

Humility sounds like bliss!

So. I'm really interested to hear what you think about all this! :D