The Pride of Privacy

This past weekend, our pastor preached a powerfully convicting sermon about faith, or the lack thereof. Titled “The Answer to All Questions is the Holy Spirit,” my pastor used the first chapter of Luke (a very unusual sermon source for mid-February) to compare the stories of Zacharias and Mary.

In one instance, a righteous man who was described as walking blamelessly before the Lord was completing his priestly duties in the temple when Gabriel the angel appeared to Zacharias and told him of the impending birth of his son, John. In the other instance, the same angel visited Virgin Mary to foretell the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.

Now, both people who were visited by Gabriel were shocked, and both individuals basically asked the same question: “How can this be?”

But one question (coming from Zacharias) was answered with a rebuke and months of divinely inflicted silence, while the same question garnered Mary a patient explanation and a verbal blessing from God’s emissary.

So, what was the difference? Why did the same basic response evoke two very different outcomes?

Faith – that’s the difference between two opposite answers to one shared question.

The well-aged priest simply could not muster enough faith to accept the answer to the one prayer that had permeated most of his long life on earth. But Mary, young though she was, took the angel at his word – by pure, innocent faith.

At this point in his sermon, our pastor reminded us that as lifelong “church folk,” we can sometimes pray so long and so hard for something that we get to the point that we no longer truly believe that God will answer. Our faith fails in the long haul, and we give up before God’s perfect (but often prolonged and protracted) timing plays out in our lives.

As I pondered this convicting truth all week long, the Holy Spirit began to show me areas in my own heart where I have basically given up on receiving God’s answer to my prayers. Worst of all, amid my faltering faith, I put on a good “church folk” front and never admit my doubts and questions. I act as if all is well when, in truth, all is far from well within my heart.

And that, my friends, is the absolute definition of pride.

The Holy Spirit continued to speak to me about my pride, but I balked, reminding Him that I simply walk by faith, not by sight, just as the Bible instructs me to do. I elaborated on my excuses, explaining that when I do speak of my ongoing, unanswered prayers, I (also according to Scripture) speak words of life about my prayers – because the power of life and death is in my tongue. My self-defense unraveled as I claimed my silence came from not being able to “speak those things that are not as though they were.” In essence, I choose to keep my questions and doubts private, not giving fuel to the enemy’s fire.

My justifications sounded empty … and prideful, even to me.

Things grew quiet at this point in my inner conversation with the Holy Spirit. Very quiet. And His silence was a huge clue that I was wrong, very wrong; God was simply waiting on me to confess my sin and get it right.

So, there, in the quiet stillness, I humbly admitted that my so-called privacy had merely become an excuse to cover up my pridefulness over my tired and waning faith. I also confessed just how much I needed to humble myself and ask fellow Christians for help with my questions and doubts.

In His great mercy, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). This universal truth became even more apparent as I began to study and research how other believers have struggled with pride – throughout the Bible and even in the modern church.

Ironically, C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that the church already knows the answer to the question of pride: “The Christians are right: it is [p]ride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But [p]ride always means enmity – it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”

Likewise, in an article written for Cru, Chris Lawrence states that it’s not so much a question of whether we as Christians struggle with pride but where (what area of life) we struggle. He admits that for most believers, searching for and finding those hidden areas of pride is “like a tourist surveying an iceberg, we probably only see 10 percent of the full picture.”

For me and my recent tour of the iceberg of pride, that percentage was closer to zero. It finally took the precious stirring of the Holy Spirit to even catch a glimpse below the surface of my self-deceptive pride. I had expertly concealed it under the nice, neat, polished picture of my acceptable-looking faith. When all along, what I really needed was to confess my doubt to the Holy Spirit and ask the questions.

Thankfully, God did not force me to be mute for many months before delivering me from my pride and lack of faith. Instead, He simply prompted me to keep studying and trusting His Word. Though it may have a very different time clock than my own, His Word is truth, and it never fails or falters. Then, I was encouraged to share my questions aloud with other trusted believers (including those who read this blog). And finally, with the grace that only God gives us, I was reminded through my pastor’s Sunday sermon that humble submission to the Holy Spirit is always the correct answer to my questions.

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