Update: Here’s a follow-up: ”BOASTING: ‘I deserve praise because I’ve achieved so much.’ SELF-PITY: ‘I deserve praise because I’ve endured so much.’”

Related: If you’re not on Twitter, you can follow John Piper on Twitter in your blog reader via his RSS feed.

What’s sad is that we can be just as proud and haughty in other arenas, can’t we?

(RSS subscribers may need to click on the title of the post to see the 55-second video.)

HT: Chris Anderson

Particuarly convicting:

The struggle to make much of Christ rather than self is a struggle for every preacher; we’re all prone to say “Behold me telling you to behold the Lamb of God.”

Update: Cf. Dave Doran’s “A Few More Pennies on Mark Driscoll.”

This part hurts the most:

We are all proud. Because I’m proud I get hurt when people disagree with me strongly. Because I’m proud I feel the need to give thirteen qualifications before I make an argument, not usually because I’m a swell guy but because I love for people to love me and loathe for them to dislike or misunderstand me. Because I’m proud I hedge my criticisms so that I won’t have to publicly repent and recant when I go too far and get something wrong. Because we’re proud, protectors of self more than lovers of truth, we often don’t discuss things with candor or with verve.

Read the whole thing—esp. the last four paragraphs.

Poverty of spirit is the personal acknowledgment of spiritual bankruptcy. It is the conscious confession of unworth before God. As such, it is the deepest form of repentance. . . .

Poverty of spirit cannot be artificially induced by self-hatred. Still less does it have in common with showy humility. It cannot be aped successfully by the spiritually haughty who covet its qualities. Such efforts may achieve token success before peers; they never deceive God. Indeed, most of us are repulsed by sham humility, whether our own or that of others.

I suspect that there is no pride more deadly than that which finds its roots in great learning, great external piety, or a showy defense of orthodoxy. My suspicion does not call into question the value of learning, piety, or orthodoxy; rather, it exposes professing believers to the full glare of this beatitude. Pride based on genuine virtues has the greatest potential for self-deception; but our Lord will allow none of it. Poverty of spirit he insists on—a full, honest, factual, conscious, and conscientious recognition before God of personal moral unworth. It is, as I have said, the deepest form of repentance.

–D. A. Carson, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World: An Exposition of Matthew 5–10 (Grand Rapids: Global Christian Publishers, 1999), 18 (emphasis added; originally preached in 1975 and published in 1978).

Related: Doug Moo on Theological Humility

1. On the one hand, theologians can be pugnacious, arrogantly close-minded, and overly confident about their positions.
2. On the other hand, they can be noncommittal, compromisingly ecumenical, and insufficiently confident about their positions (e.g., epistemological pseudo-humility).

What follows is from the “contemporary significance” section of Douglas J. Moo‘s comments on Romans 11:33–36 in Romans (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 391–92:

Theological humility. To my mortification and my family’s delight, I received in the mail just this week an invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). [Moo was born in 1950.] I have reached a point of life in which I find myself prefacing many things I say with “at my age.” Undoubtedly, as my children insist, some of the sentences that follow reflect hardening of the arteries or irrational fear of anything new. But a few of these statements, I trust, reflect some wisdom that the perspective of age has inculcated.

One of the most common sentiments I express these days is a greater humility about certain theological positions I hold. Like many young people, I felt confident of my positions in the first years of my career. I sometimes propagated views orally or in print that I had not thought through as thoroughly as I should have. While I have not changed many of these views, I am much more inclined now to notice evidence that might not fit my view. Therefore, I feel much more keenly the need to nuance what I teach by calling attention to this evidence and by admitting that my own view may not be correct. Increasing age should certainly not turn us into theological milquetoasts—uncertain about what we believe and swayed by the latest wind of doctrine. And I am as passionately committed to the essence of the Christian faith as I have ever been. But I would describe my current approach in theological study and teaching as “humble.”

What does all this have to do with Romans 11:33–36? Just this: Paul’s reminder that God’s thoughts are far beyond anything we could ever approximate and his plan more intricate and marvelous than we could even imagine certainly calls on each of us to exercise great humility in seeking to understand God and his Word. On this side of glory, all our theologizing is uncertain and tentative. Humility, willingness to listen, and respect for others are the appropriate attitudes for us finite creatures as we seek to plumb the depths of God’s character and truth.

To be sure, God has graciously given us in his Word a revelation of himself and his plan that everyone can understand. The essence of what that Word says is clear and undebatable. But the details are not always as clear as our theological traditions or denominational loyalties suggest. People holding views with more tenacity than Scripture justifies have done untold damage to the church and to the cause of Christ in the world. So even as we praise God for his amazing and gracious plan of redemption, we must also bow our knees in humility before him and keep a good perspective on our own limitations in understanding the specifics of that plan.