Proclaimer Blog
Pride is our greatest enemy
A second year Cornhill student recently asked me a very good question: ‘what sins are our Cornhill year group particularly in danger of?’ This Sunday I am preaching on the shortest book of the Old Testament at Emmanuel Church Wimbledon. To save you checking your Bible indexes, the shortest book of the Old Testament is Obadiah. Without wanting to preach my sermon here, it has struck me in my preparation that the book shows us just how much God hates and will humble the proud. Edom, against whom much of the book is directed, is condemned for ‘the pride of your heart’ (Obadiah 1.3), a pride which came from her trusting in her wealth (Obadiah 1.6), her friends (Obadiah 1.7), her wisdom (Obadiah 1.8), and her warriors (Obadiah 1.9). And yet none of those things saved her when, a century after Obadiah’s vision, God brought down proud Edom through an Arab invasion just as He had promised.
And so the answer to the Cornhiller’s question is, I think pride. Pride is a danger for all Christians, and as CS Lewis famously said, ‘pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.’ But it is a particular danger for those of us at Cornhill who are working hard to understand and preach the Bible. My biggest fear is that we produce people who can preach the Bible – but are proud about it. For as John Flavel once wrote: ‘They that know God will be humble and they that know themselves cannot be proud.’ As we start this summer term at Cornhill (what for the 2nd years will be their final term), please join me in praying that we at Cornhill would know that pride is our greatest enemy, and humility our greatest friend.
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