Is pride always a sin? Well, like many things in life, it depends on what you mean by pride. Few words in our moral vocabulary convey so wide a spectrum of meanings as “pride.” It can connote anything from narcissism to self-confidence to self-respect to alternate lifestyles and sexuality.
Christians have long counted pride as a sin, even the “original sin” from which all other sins find their origin. C.S. Lewis calls pride “the essential vice, the utmost evil.” He asserts that pride “is the complete anti-God state of mind.” But many people today, especially in secular culture, find pride to be an essential virtue and a key component in emotional maturity. But pride should not be confused with self-respect, feeling proud or even proper self-esteem.
Paul Sands, Associate Professor of Theology at Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University wrote …
“Unlike pride, self-respect does not imply feelings of superiority. As the philosopher Jerome Neu points out, it has to do with rights and dignity, not merit. The person with self-respect “has her pride,” but that means she is ashamed to violate her conscience, not that she thinks herself better than others. Self-respect is indispensable to a life of virtue. It is the skeleton of the soul that protects integrity by preventing the wrong sort of flexibility. A person may have too much self-esteem, but no one can have too much self-respect.”
Pride also should not be confused with feeling proud. Pride is an enduring character trait; “feeling proud” is a transitory emotion. Nor should pride be confused with proper self-esteem. There is a proper self-esteem that is the result of evaluating oneself with “sober judgment.”
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. Romans 12:3
At its core, pride is an inordinate self-esteem arising out of self-centeredness. Or as Paul Sands asserts … pride is an irreligious and antisocial assertion of the self. We see this in the way pride elevates the self over others. Pride expands the self. The proud are “full of themselves” — “puffed up” or “inflated” with self-importance. We say the proud are “stuck up” and that they “look down their noses” at everyone else. We might even say that they ride a “high horse.”
Pride shows up in three areas in our lives … vanity, conceit, and arrogance. Vanity is preoccupied with appearances. Conceit is an exaggerated opinion of one’s virtues and accomplishments. Arrogance is a feeling of superiority that shows itself in a lofty, overbearing manner. Whereas vanity needs admirers and conceit needs inferiors, arrogance needs no one. All three can be intertwined in a complex dance of pride.
Paul Sands writes, “Pride gives rise to human misery as sowing a field yields a harvest. From a biblical point of view, we may say that pride leads to calamity, fosters self-contempt and self-pity, undermines community, and alienates from God.”
The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rock, in your lofty dwelling, who say in your heart, “Who will bring me down to the ground?”
Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, from there I will bring you down, declares the Lord. Obadiah 3–4
“Vice decays wherever virtue flourishes”, writes Sands. One should attack pride by cultivating humility. As C. S. Lewis explains, “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all.”
Humility is sometimes confused with sham humility. Authentic humility is based on realistic self-appraisal. The humble evaluate themselves with “sober judgment.” Paul Sands writes that … “Sham humility, on the other hand, lacks a sense of proportion. It elevates peccadillos into crimes against heaven. It counts every flaw as proof that the self is fundamentally defective. Sham humility leaves one feeling demoralized, depleted, weak, fragile, and hopeless.”
The haughty looks of man shall be brought low, and the lofty pride of men shall be humbled, and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. Isaiah 2:11
Is pride a “deadly sin”? Yes. Vanity, conceit, and arrogance disrupt and disorder individual lives, families, and communities. Thus, the solution is to seek humility through reflection, confession, repentance, and faith. Spend some time asking the Lord to show you where pride has entangled you or where sham humility is smothering your authentic joy. Then ask God to give you a humility that you may wear for life …
Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” 1 Peter 5:5
-Pastor Jerry
