A warning against Pride found in our Proverbs today:

Pro 29:23  One’s pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.

Before we completely unpack that, we should define what pride is. Pride is love of one’s self.  Today there’s lots of celebrations around pride, where we are conditioned to think that being proud of something is good.  We base our entire identity around some kind of aspect of ourselves whether it is a football team, our ancestry, our age; and society tells us we should embrace that, but we should remember what pride really is, it is love of ourself, and that gets us into trouble because when we love ourselves, we begin to hate anything that comes between us and whatever it is that we are proud of.  Pride is an idol of sorts, and can send us into a murderous rage.  Holocausts across human history were based off of pride.  

So now that we have defined what pride is, and that pride is a bad thing, we take it back to God’s Word today:

Pro 29:23  One’s pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.

Someone’s pride will bring them to their knees.  God hates pride, those who have a high opinion of themselves, or put themselves above others will be humbled.  Look at the Pharisses, they could never not broadcast how righteous they thought they were, and then just as Jesus told us, their temple was wrecked by the Romans in 70 AD.  

The second half of the verse, He who is lowly in spirit obtains honor – tells us that someone who has a low opinion of themselves or who is humble, obtains honor.  If we look back at the sermon on the mount where Jesus gives us all the beatitudes; where He talks about Loving our enemies, The Lord’s Prayer…the very first thing Jesus says is Blessed are those who are in poor in spirit.  

Being poor in spirit, means having a low opinion of ourselves, with specific regard to sin.  Knowing that we are born sinners and can’t get anything right, whenever we realize that, we understand that the only way we can get it right is through the only One who was without Sin; Jesus.  But we cannot fully understand nor worship Christ until we first understand our sinful nature, which takes us back to the original Proverb; if we are proud, we are not going to understand our sin, we will woefully celebrate it, many of already do that.  But if we are poor in spirit, we stop being proud and that’s how we are able to come to Christ.  

So as we start out this week fresh, let’s remember today’s warning against Pride:

Pro 29:23  One’s pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.

That honor we obtain through a lowly spirit is the eternal life that is assured to us through Christ’s death and resurrection.