7 Deadly Sins: Pride

I am just at the beginning of a study with the youth at my church about the 7 Deadly Sins; so, for the next seven weeks that will be the subject of my blog posts as well.  I hope you learn as much from reading these post as I do from writing them.  The outline of these posts will often mirror the book I drew from to prepare for the lessons given to the you.  The book is call Killjoys: the Seven Deadly Sins.

Why study the 7 Deadly Sins?  Are you trying to focus too much on the subject of sin rather than on grace?  Aren't the 7 Deadly Sins just something for Catholics?

First, I believe we should study the 7 Deadly Sins because they are root sins.  They aren't more deadly than any other sin because the wages of all sin is death; perhaps, they should be re-named the 7 Root Sins because they are the root source of most every sin I can think of.  It's important to study how to attack sin at the root because we are to, as John Owen famously said, "be killing sin or it will be killing you."

Secondly, I have been saved by grace not by works.  If you are saved then that is true for you, too.  We don't work to be saved, but God works through us and in us to save us from sin.  We are saved from the penalty, power and presence of sin by God.  I have been justified (declared innocent) by God and am currently being sanctified (being made into the image of Christ) and will one day be glorified (instantly made perfect!).  Fighting sin is part of God's sanctifying work in my life which He does for me, at least in part, in and through my efforts.

Finally, the 7 Deadly Sins are not just for Catholics.  I am a Baptist and I am a youth leader at a Baptist church and we're studying the 7 Deadly Sins.  This list of sins was indeed created by the Catholic church but that is no reason a Protestant can't grow from it.  The Catholic church, in my opinion, has done some amazing things to further the Gospel and grow Christians for thousands of years and this is one of them.  If we reject helpful tools simply because they originate from a different denomination than us then we are already deeply entrenched in some serious pride.

So, after all that has been said here are the 7 Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and Lust.  In today's post the focus is pride and its mirror image, humility.  Each week I will focus on the sin and its mirror image so we can not only recognize the sin but destroy it because it is important to remove and replace when it comes to sin.

This post has had a long build up to what should be the meat of it, so I want to offer a few links to previous posts on the subject of Pride and Humility.  Sin's Root: Pride, Pride and Humility.

Having posted those links I will not be long on how to defeat the root sin of Pride.  Pride at its base is an issue of self-preoccupation.  When we are prideful we keep thinking "Me, me, me" and we must attack that.  The cross does that.  To quote from the book Killjoys: the Seven Deadly Sins "Those who see the cross rightly see themselves rightly."  I'll close with one final quote from that aforementioned book: "... we must pray and ask the Spirit to open our eyes to more of God's glory, so that we are ever more in awe of Him and ever less in awe of ourselves" today.