Pride Is a Mother

Pride is a mother. That does not mean pride is female, though females can be proud. Pride gives birth to all sorts of sins. There is a fundamental reason for this.

What is pride? We start by thinking of pride as outsized “Me” admiration, and that is one face of it. Haman bled self-promotion, and then bled for it. But we could say more basically that pride is the gumption to call good anything outside of God’s will.

Another way to describe God’s will is reality, and pride assumes it has authority to rewrite the dictionary. Reality is a gift of God, completely undeserved, and God says it is good. But gifts have order and limits. Gifts have boundaries. This is tricky logic, but: outside of the good is not good. Inside the lines of good is what God wills. Will we be happy inside of what He wills? To affirm His will is to submit, and to love and be thankful and glad in that place is humility of the happiest kind.

Pride wants to live outside the good boundaries of God’s gifts.

So pride births:

• laziness, wanting to live outside the gift of work
• lust, outside the gift of the marriage bed
• lies, outside the gift of truth
• homosexuality and transgenderism, outside the gift of male and female
• drunkenness, outside the gift of self-control
• greed, outside the gift of contentment
• anger, outside the gift of patience
• slander, outside the gift of love

Pride is the kind of mother you’ve got to cut out of your life.