Grace vs. Pride

But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
"God opposes the proud
But gives grace to the humble"

- James 4.6

Those are pretty strong words about pride, aren't they? That God "opposes" pride. What's so bad about pride that actually causes God to actively oppose it? Well, think about it. If you are prideful, then you are usually overly confident in your own abilities, in how you look, how smart you are, and yourself in general. What actually happens with pride is that it displaces God. One of the biggest keys to pride is the fact that it says, "I don't need anyone else's help, because I can do it myself!" That last little section, the italicized portion, says it all.

God actually designed us to interact and live with him. For us to lean on him, so that he can be our strength. What's more, is God loves us so much that he must pursue us, because he knows where we would be and what we would be like when left entirely to our own. But, to pursue us, he must deny our self-sufficiency.

Here, let's put it out really simple: Pride says, "I don't need you." When we connect with God, we find his grace, and we find him lavishing it upon us. What is God's grace? Everything we need: forgiveness, redemption, healing, strength, ect...the list goes on and on. That's what James was pointing out. When we walk around, in our daily lives, doing our daily things, we (at some point or another) come in contact with God. When we look into his eyes, we see his love, and we hear him speak to our heart that he has everything we need, in him we will not need or want. But this opposes our pride. How? Because our pride says we don't need anything - including God.

We are just like a little boy who wants to build himself a clubhouse. We go around in our daily lives, collecting everything we need to have 'the good life', just as a little boy would collect all the wood he thought he'd need for that clubhouse. But then when the collecting is done, we find that, though we have all the elements we can think of for our perfect life, it just won't hold together - just as the little boy takes all his pieces of wood and stacks them this way and that, striving for the best way to put it together. But all the striving is in vain, for every time the wind gives a nice hard blow, it all tumbles down. There is something missing. Our pride stands up and says we should be able to find everything we need on our own, and be able to put it together correctly. What is so beautiful about children, is that, though they think they know a lot, they seem to always understand that their father knows more. And what separates us from this little builder is the fact that he runs to his father and asks for help. Then his father pulls out a hammer and nails, and begins to teach the little boy how to build a clubhouse that will last the tests of time.

Let us always set aside our pride, and go to our Father. So that he can lavish his grace upon us, and teach us the secrets of building our own lives to last through eternity.

Inheritance of Sin, Inheritance of Grace

"Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men."

- Romans 5.18

Here's an interesting way to think of the fall of man, and then of salvation. Looking at the fall of man as an inheritance, we note that we all are of Adam's line - we have received from him the inheritance of a tainted soul, dipped in sin. Though none of us like it, through Adam, our minds and even our souls have been exposed to sin - those deceitfully intense but alarmingly quickly fading pleasures of sin, indulgences of ourselves. Carried in the lifeblood of his soul, this stain is passed on to the next generation from him or his offspring. Before the fall, Adam accompanied God daily, walking and talking intimately. How? He was pure, unsoiled. But after eating of the fruit, he became stained, a rottenness eating away at him from within, and he could not interact intimately with God because of the stain upon his soul.

But God desired the company of man, of Adam and his descendants. Yet Adam's line was stained, his blood spoiled, and none who came from him would be worthy to know God in intimacy. So God, seeing the dilemma in his infinite wisdom, perceived a solution to the problem. If the original plan had been for man to receive his purity of spirit as an inheritance from his father (a purity Adam would have been able to pass on had he not taken the apple). All God needed was one man who would give his inheritance of purity to Man, and who would then take on Man's rotten blood line (for the impurities in Man's line were not those that could be disposed of, they were written upon the very spirit of man, and could only be removed by being written upon the spirit of an unstained line).

Thus was Christ brought forth. God knew there were none who could provide this for Man, so he (God) provided it himself in Christ. Into a rotted and despoiled world he came, purity in flesh. And he set aside his inheritance of purity, of intimacy with God, so that we might take it up. All we must do is set aside our stained and spoiled inheritance, to take up his perfected bloodline.
That is salvation, the taking up of Christ's inheritance, and the setting aside of our own.