John Piper: “Boasting is the response of pride to success. Self-pity is the response of pride to failure.”
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
Chris Anderson’s thoughtful evaluation is worth more than two cents.
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.”
Kevin DeYoung’s “Defining Discourse Down” in First Things is superb. I benefitted from it even more after re-reading it this evening.
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.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” –Jesus (Matt 5:3)
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
This is convicting. Maintaining the kind of theological humility that Moo describes below is no easy task. It’s like walking on an extremely narrow path with steep drop-offs on both sides.
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. Continue Reading »
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