Category Archives: Christianity

A word about PRIDE

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s sermon at CPCC, on Isaiah 47, was on the subject of pride. How timely to read this brief article by Jon Bloom of the Minneapolis ministry, Desiring God.

Jesus and Nazareth are inseparable. Jesus spent most of his life in Nazareth. The prophets had said, “He shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23). History would remember him as Jesus of Nazareth. Even the demons called him that (Luke 4:34).

That’s why this verse is one of the saddest observations made during Jesus’ public ministry:

And he did not do many mighty works [in Nazareth], because of their unbelief. (Matthew 13:58)

It’s a great irony that the Pride of Nazareth was rejected by the Nazarenes because of pride.

You know who this is? It’s Joseph the carpenter’s son! We know his family. I mean, they’re respectable enough people. But I know for a fact that none of them received formal religious education. Where in the world is Jesus getting this teaching? Does he really think he’s somebody great?

They were deeply offended. Why? Because he was one of them. So if he thought he was superior to them, he had another thing coming. Familiarity bred the pride of contempt in them.

What is frightening in this account is the power of pride to blind and deaden the soul. Just consider the consequence of such pride for the Nazarenes: the merciful power of the Messiah was withheld from them.

Pride is to be feared and treated like a cancer. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). We do not want to miss out on any gift of God’s grace because we are nurturing pride in our hearts.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23-24)

pdb

How’s your love life??

Posted on by
Reply

Questions are everywhere. Online surveys abound, not to mention all those questionnaires circulated by your friends to get to know you better. (Has one of them has recently asked you, “How’s your love life?”). Perhaps the greatest, the most important question asked, raises that very issue. It put to Jesus and recorded in the New Testament, in MATTHEW 22:37 — 

36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

I call this the greatest question because of the answer Jesus gave — asserting that this one thing is the greatest duty laid upon human beings:

37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment.”

heart-sketch-web1The greatest commandment is to love God. Do you love Him? Do you see how Jesus was concerned that we love God with more than a passing affection — and with more than mere feelings? Every faculty of a person (heart, soul, mind) is summoned to love the Lord your God. And this is to be without reserve, without limit (“all your heart, all your soul and with all your mind…”).

Examine your heart, my friend. This is no small thing to gloss over or ignore. It is the very reason you were created — to know and love the Lord your God (and then, love others in His name).

Get time with God — in His Word, the Bible, and on your knees in prayer. Gather with others who love Him dearly. I pray for you what Paul prayed (Eph. 3:17-19),

…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

pdb