The Remedy for Pride

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13–16)

James is talking about pride and arrogance and how they show up in subtle ways. “You boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”

When you take three categories of temptation to self-reliance — wisdom, power, and riches — they form a powerful inducement toward the ultimate form of pride; namely, atheism. The safest way for us to stay supreme in our own estimation is to deny anything above us.

This is why the proud preoccupy themselves with looking down on others. C.S. Lewis said, “A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you” (Mere Christianity).

But to preserve pride, it may be simpler to just proclaim that there is nothing above to look at. “In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 10:4). Ultimately, the proud must persuade themselves that there is no God.

One reason for this is that God’s reality is overwhelmingly intrusive in all the details of life. Pride cannot tolerate the intimate involvement of God in running the universe, let alone the detailed, ordinary affairs of life.

Pride does not like the sovereignty of God. Therefore, pride does not like the existence of God, because God is sovereign. It might express this by saying, “There is no God.” Or it might express it by saying, “I am driving to Atlanta for Christmas.”

James says, “Don’t be so sure.” Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live, and we will get to Atlanta for Christmas.”

James’s point is that God rules over whether you get to Atlanta, and whether you live to the end of this devotional. This is extremely offensive to the self-sufficiency of pride — not even to have control over whether you get to the end of the devotional without having a stroke!

James says that not believing in the sovereign rights of God to manage the details of your future is arrogance.

The way to battle this arrogance is to yield to the sovereignty of God in all the details of life, and rest in his infallible promises to show himself mighty on our behalf (2 Chronicles 16:9), to pursue us with goodness and mercy every day (Psalm 23:6), to work for those who wait for him (Isaiah 64:4), and to equip us with all we need to live for his glory (Hebrews 13:21).

In other words, the remedy for pride is unwavering faith in God’s sovereign future grace.

John Piper 

Are you resting…or borrowing trouble?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

“Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.” Psalm 116:7

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

I heard of a woman who woke up her husband because she thought she heard a burglar downstairs. He went down with a flashlight, shining it all around. Sure enough, there was a burglar in their home! He said, “Hold it right there. I’ve got a gun on you!”

He picked up the phone and dialed the police. “And another thing,” he said to the burglar, “Before they haul you off, I want my wife to come down and meet you. She’s been looking for you for 24 years.”

A lot of people are that way. They borrow trouble by anticipating or worrying about what may happen. What you need to do is stop looking to yesterday in guilt or anticipating tomorrow with anxiety.

ACTION POINT:

Simply rest in the day the Lord has given you today.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Authentic Faith Is Eager for Christ to Come

Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (Hebrews 9:28)

What must you do so that you may know that your sins are taken away by the blood of Christ, and that, when he comes, he will shield you from the wrath of God and bring you into eternal life? The answer is this: Trust Christ in a way that makes you eager for him to come.

The text says he is coming to save those who are “eagerly waiting for him.” So how do you get ready? How do you experience the forgiveness of God in Christ and prepare to meet him? By trusting him in a way that makes you eager for him to come.

This eager expectation for Christ is simply a sign that we love him and believe in him — really believe in him, authentically.

There is a phony faith that wants only escape from hell, but has no desire for Christ. That kind of faith does not save. It does not produce an eager expectation for Christ to come. In fact, it would rather that Christ not come for as long as possible, so that it can have as much of this world as possible.

But the faith that really holds on to Christ as Savior and Lord and Treasure and hope and joy is the faith that makes us long for Christ to come. And that is the faith that saves.

So I urge you, turn from the world, and from sin. Turn to Christ. Receive him, welcome him, embrace Christ not just as your fire insurance policy, but as your eagerly awaited Treasure and Friend and Lord.

John Piper 

Will you draw love’s curtain of mercy?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

“Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.” Proverbs 10:12

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

There are people in every fellowship who take joy in finding something bad about somebody else. When they hear something ugly, they take great delight in exposing it.

Love does not rejoice in iniquity. Love wishes it never happened. Love tries to cover it up. That doesn’t mean we condone sin; we cover it. Not “cover-up,” but cover. Let me illustrate.

Noah had three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Ham came and saw his father’s nakedness and was quick to tell others. Shem and Japheth walked backward into the tent and covered their father to help him cover his shame – not to condone what he had done, but to cover it.

ACTION POINT:

Wouldn’t the world be a lot better place if we had that spirit? When the enemy tempts you to “stir the pot,” remember that love rejoices not in iniquity.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Words for the Wind

“Do you think that you can reprove words, when the speech of a despairing man is wind?” (Job 6:26)

In grief and pain and despair, people often say things they otherwise would not say. They paint reality with darker strokes than they will paint it tomorrow, when the sun comes up. They sing in minor keys, and talk as though that is the only music. They see clouds only, and speak as if there were no sky.

They say, “Where is God?” Or: “There is no use to go on.” Or: “Nothing makes any sense.” Or: “There’s no hope for me.” Or: “If God were good, this couldn’t have happened.”

What shall we do with these words?

Job says that we do not need to reprove them. These words are wind, or literally “for the wind.” They will be quickly blown away. There will come a turn in circumstances, and the despairing person will waken from the dark night, and regret hasty words.

Therefore, the point is, let us not spend our time and energy reproving such words. They will be blown away of themselves on the wind. One need not clip the leaves in autumn. It is a wasted effort. They will soon blow off of themselves.

Oh, how quickly we are given to defending God, or sometimes the truth, from words that are only for the wind. If we had discernment, we could tell the difference between the words with roots and the words blowing in the wind.

There are words with roots in deep error and deep evil. But not all grey words get their color from a black heart. Some are colored mainly by the pain, the despair. What you hear is not the deepest thing within. There is something real and dark within where they come from. But it is temporary — like a passing infection — real, painful, but not the true person.

So, let us learn to discern whether the words spoken against us, or against God, or against the truth, are merely for the wind — spoken not from the soul, but from the sore. If they are for the wind, let us wait in silence and not reprove. Restoring the soul, not reproving the sore, is the aim of our love.

John Piper 

Do you live each day like it’s THAT day?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.” 1 Peter 4:7

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Years ago, G. Campbell Morgan, a great expositor of the Word of God, said, “I never lay my head on the pillow without thinking that perhaps before I awake, the final morning may have dawned. I never begin work without thinking that Jesus may interrupt it to begin His own.”

Every night before we go to sleep, we ought to say, “Jesus may come tonight.” And every day when we get our tools and go to work, this may be the last day of work that we do. We are to be looking for His return. We are also to be longing for His return.

ACTION POINT:

Are you praying for Jesus to return? If you love Him, you ought to be longing for His return. I have Him in my heart, but I long to lay my eyes upon Him and walk with Him and talk with Him. “Even so, come Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Freeness of Grace

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:4–6)

The decisive act of God in conversion is that he “made us alive together with Christ” even when “we were dead in our trespasses.” In other words, we were dead to God. We were unresponsive; we had no true spiritual taste or interest; we had no spiritual eyes for the beauties of Christ; we were simply dead to all that ultimately matters.

Then God acted — unconditionally — before we could do anything to be fit vessels of his presence. He made us alive. He sovereignly awakened us from the sleep of spiritual death, to see the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4). The spiritual senses that were dead, miraculously came to life.

Ephesians 2:4 says that this was an act of “mercy.” That is, God saw us in our deadness and pitied us. God saw the terrible wages of sin leading to eternal death and misery. “God, being rich in mercy . . . made us alive.” And the riches of his mercy overflowed to us in our need. But what is so remarkable about this text is that Paul breaks the flow of his own sentence in order to insert, “by grace you have been saved.” “God . . . made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him.”

Paul is going to say this again in verse 8. So why does he break the flow of his own sentence in order to add it here? What’s more, the focus is on God’s mercy responding to our miserable plight of deadness; so why does Paul go out of his way to say that it is also by grace that we are saved?

I think the answer is that Paul recognizes that here is a perfect opportunity to emphasize the freeness of grace. As he describes our dead condition before conversion, he realizes that dead people can’t meet conditions. If they are to live, there must be a totally unconditional and utterly free act of God to save them. This freedom is the very heart of grace.

What act could be more one-sidedly free and non-negotiated than one person raising another from the dead! This is the meaning of grace.

John Piper