I don’t know about you guys but I am the most prideful when I am doing something I know I’m good at. I’m a bit of a wizard on the ping pong table. I have the spiritual gift of ping pong (-; I played a lot when I was younger when my family and I would take vacations to Cape Cod. I have a mean serve and I can return just about anything. When I’m cleaning up shop on a ping pong table I start to get a little prideful.

Now I’ll tell you when I’m the least prideful. I’m the least prideful when I’m doing something I know I’m not very good at. Whenever I have to call one of the IT guys at work, my pride goes out the window. I have called them over to my desk to solve what seems to be an impossible computer dilemma. They come over, merely look at my computer and it begins to work again. Something idiotic turns out to have been the problem like I forgot to turn it on! I know I can just barely operate a computer so I’m not terribly prideful when it comes to that.

I believe that spiritual pride has a lot to do with what we think success is. For example, if I thought my entire purpose in life was to be good at ping pong, I could be pretty prideful because I’m good at ping pong. If I thought that career achievement was the overall purpose of my life, I could probably still be a little prideful because I’ve achieved some semblance of success even though I’m not where I want to be yet.

But what is the overall purpose in life? I believe it’s to know Christ and make him known. To truly love God and love people. To have real spiritual fruit in our lives like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self control (Gal. 5:22-23). If these things are the real goal in life, my pride starts to get a little nervous.

You see, I can’t create real spiritual fruit on my own. I can read the Bible, pray, fast, go on mission trips, lead stuff and all kinds of other things…but I can’t make my prayers get heard. I can’t make the Bible change my heart. I can’t create true love and true joy in my soul.

So…in the areas where it matters most, I simply can’t do it. If my view of success is a biblical view, then pride is completely absurd. Me being prideful when it comes to true biblical success is like me being prideful about my ability to speak Chinese. I don’t know Chinese and I don’t understand anything about the language. How completely ridiculous and even insane would it be if I was prideful about my knowledge of Chinese.

What’s your view of success? Maybe the reason you’re so prideful is because you have a really low view of what success looks like. If you begin to elevate that view of success then I believe you’ll begin to see the absurdity of pride.