God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.
God’s opposition to pride may be observed in the lives of three kings and one apostle. The pagan king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, despite being solemnly warned one year earlier, swelled up with pride and said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:10). Instantly God judged him with a humiliating and degrading condition that rendered all kingly functions impossible for seven years.
More than 600 years later, another king, Herod Agrippa I, received with approval accolades from people who shouted, “The voice of a god and not a man!” The Bible says, “Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died” (Acts 12:23).
Nebuchadnezzar and Herod Agrippa were bad men to begin with, but could a good king succumb to pride? We know of at least one who did. Hezekiah was one of the best kings that Israel or Judah ever had. But listen to these sad words in 2 Chronicles 32:25: “Hezekiah’s heart became proud and he did not respond to the kindness shown him; therefore the LORD’s wrath was on him and on Judah and Jerusalem.” Thankfully that grievous development gave way to grace in the next verse which says, “Then Hezekiah repented of the pride of his heart, as did the people of Jerusalem; therefore the LORD’s wrath did not come on them during the days of Hezekiah.” Even so, the damage wrought by good King Hezekiah’s pride turned out to be extensive and horrific beyond anyone’s imagination.
Pride is so bad and so dangerous that God allowed an apostle to be tormented by the devil just to keep pride at bay. In 2 Corinthians 12:7 the apostle Paul wrote, “to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.” Twice Paul says in that verse: “to keep me from becoming conceited” as though to remind himself that it was far more important that his pride be kept in check than that he should experience deliverance, comfort, fulfillment, or success.
Pride has always been regarded by Christian teachers as the greatest sin. The unanimity on that goes back centuries. In C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity he has a chapter titled “The Great Sin” where he writes this:
“According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
Lewis was right. I have read that Augustine and Aquinas also identified Pride as the essence of all sin. There is a good reason why Pride is mentioned first among the seven deadly sins.
A parenthetical note: this universal Christian consensus about Pride being the great sin has been challenged and denied in just these past few years by – of all people! – evangelicals. Even C. S.-Lewis-loving evangelicals. About seven years ago I was part of a team tasked with preaching through the book, The Sacrament of Evangelism by Jerry Root and Stan Guthrie. There is much good in this book. But one of the things that is not so good is that in chapter 6 the authors take pains to reject the Christian tradition and received wisdom that pride is the greatest sin. They see pride as a consequence of a deeper, more fundamental sin which they call “our unwillingness to receive God’s love.”
That rhetoric about “not receiving God’s love” has gripped the evangelical mind in recent years and diffused its influence through our sermons and books and training of young Christians. I hear it a lot, for example, on Christian radio or in Christian college chapel services. In such settings you will hear things like, “Our biggest problem is that we don’t understand how much God loves us, and we just really need to learn how to appreciate and receive his love.” I plan to return to this point in my fifth and final message in this series which I have titled “Evangelicalism and the Fundamental Misdiagnosis of the Human Condition.” But for now I will just state – crudely, baldly, and with all the conviction that my meager authority can muster – that Augustine and Aquinas and C. S. Lewis and a million other wise teachers through the centuries had it right in the first place. Pride is the great sin.
And, in my judgment, modern popular western evangelicalism has fueled pride, rewarded its manifestations among our key leaders, and failed to see (much less discipline) even the least subtle, most egregious expressions of it. The result has been an avalanche of corruption and scandal and disaster in the evangelical world that has put Christianity in a bad light and given opponents of the faith a reason to rejoice.
Let me tell you about an experience I had in 1985 that became pivotal for me in my understanding of some of these issues. I happened to spend two months in southern California. My fiancé and I went to a big church one Sunday morning. I scarcely remember anything about the service. The regular preacher was out of town. Same thing the next week. The third Sunday, an odd thing happened. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was so full of cars that we had to park a good distance away. I thought that was strange – it wasn’t Easter or Christmas. Then as we joined the throng of people going in we saw that the doors between the narthex and the sanctuary were closed. They had been open the previous two weeks and you could just walk right in. But now there were designated individuals managing crowd control, letting in groups of people at intervals so that the numbers would not overwhelm.
I was puzzled until suddenly a thought jumped into my head: “Oh - I bet Chuck Swindoll is back from vacation.” I was right. The crowd had materialized because people were there to hear their celebrity pastor. An alarmingly high percentage of that congregation had determined in their hearts that God was not worthy of their worship on a Sunday morning unless Chuck was preaching. I know that they would not have put it in those terms, but I am deliberately putting it in those offensive, cynical terms in order to awaken and wound the consciences of those who have succumbed to a shallow, celebrity-driven Christianity. The feeling of disgust that I had that Sunday morning has not diminished in 36 years. We who love Jesus Christ and who are eternally grateful for his death and resurrection on our behalf gather to worship him, remember him, and learn from him in the company of brothers and sisters in the faith who bear our burdens and whose burdens we bear. We do not go to church to hear an inspiring talk from a Christian star. That is an abomination.
I believe that the megachurch model that has come to dominate so much of evangelicalism in the past few decades has nourished that abomination. It has inflated the egos of alpha males in the pulpits of such places, and has attracted new generations of men who thirst for that acclaim. These are ambitious men who are not so much willing to lay down their lives in painful self-sacrifice and anonymity in obscure places, taking up their crosses to follow Christ, but who want, more than anything, to be the next Chuck Swindoll.
Here is an example of how that dynamic begins, festers, and ends in horror. In 2017, Joshua Harris gave a TED talk in which he said, “I could take you to the exact spot in my parents’ living room in Gresham Oregon where I knelt down and I prayed this prayer: “God, let me write a book that will change the world.”
That’s the kind of prayer that C. S. Lewis nailed to the wall of humanity’s great sin when he quoted the Roman poet Juvenal who spoke of “Enormous prayers which heaven in anger grants.”
Joshua Harris did not pray for the glory of God but for the glory of himself. It did not even seem to matter to him what his book would be about – just something, some topic, whatever – just something that would sell unbelievably well and strike its influence like a thunderbolt across the land, which, of course, could not help but redound to Harris’s honor and fame. He was 20 years old.
He got his wish. In 1997 he wrote the national number 1 bestseller “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” It was a very well-timed book that scratched the itch of Christian purity culture and skyrocketed him to evangelical fame. I never read the book myself for the simple reason that the title struck me as asinine. I mean, I am against fornication and adultery - but what’s wrong with dating? I think dating is just great.
Having been catapulted into evangelical fame, Harris at the age of 28 was handpicked by C. J. Mahaney to succeed him as lead pastor of Covenant Life Church in Maryland. Covenant Life was a megachurch with 20 full-time pastors and 30 full-time staff members. And just like Willow Creek and Harvest Bible Chapel that I mentioned last week, Covenant Life sent out its tentacles of corruption in all directions through its international organization Sovereign Grace Ministries. Sovereign Grace Ministries has since imploded under the scandals of rampant, unchecked, undisciplined sexual abuse.
But that’s another story. Here I’m just focusing on Harris. The ambitious young Joshua Harris was handed this influential evangelical empire in September 2004. Fast-forward to 2019, Harris announced that he was no longer a Christian. Of course he dissolved his marriage – apostates almost always do that. And now that he is out of the ministry, Harris has not gone out to get a regular job (I can testify that they are hiring over at Flavorchem - I’d be willing to put in a word for him), but rather he seeks to monetize his loss of faith just as he once monetized his embrace of it. For a hefty fee he’s willing to coach you through the ins and outs of rejecting Christ.
The Harris saga began not with the glory of God but with barely concealed diabolical pride, and now it ends with a middle finger thrust openly into the face of God for everyone to see. And what drives me nuts is the fact that so many of my fellow evangelical brothers and sisters have gotten sucked into these maelstroms of one man’s ambition and taken for a ride only to be left with bitter disappointment and disillusionment, wondering, “Gee, how did that happen?”
Well, among other things, we the evangelical public have been guilty of stoking pride-driven Christian celebrityism and its partner in crime megachurchianity. And perhaps one area where I might be able to render some small service to my evangelical brothers and sisters is to indicate a cluster of red flags and warning signs that keeps getting ignored.
Before going on to that, though, I believe I would be negligent in my duty as a steward of the Word of God if I did not give you some relevant Scriptures that speak to the apostasy of men like Joshua Harris.
Hebrews 6:4-6:
It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
Hebrews 10:26-31:
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
2 Peter 2:20-22:
If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A pig that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.”
The word of the Lord.
Joshua Harris was just one of many who found within contemporary evangelicalism a structure that was well-suited - designed in advance, so to speak, to satisfy the ambition of glory-seeking charismatic individuals. When we fan the flames of Christian celebrityism, when we file by the hundreds into stadium-like churches only if the star performer is there, then we are at least in part to blame for creating monsters. Or we share the guilt of attracting men who already are monsters but who have managed, for the time being, to cloak their true nature in the garb of humanity.
Consider for a moment whether celebrities in the secular realm ever tend to be virtuous. They’re not. Fame and power drag in their wake a sense of entitlement. Celebrityism creates a mindset that says, “I am so accomplished and adored that I deserve to have things that please me.” For men, if I may speak with grotesque bluntness, that usually includes a harem of some sort. How many men of fame – be they actors, sports figures, rock stars or politicians – how many of them are morally chaste? Hardly any. And now, among Christian celebrities, the occurrence of sexual transgression has become so pervasive that it hardly shocks us anymore.
And there is something else that I have noticed among Christian A-list celebrities who have not fallen sexually, at least as far as it is known publicly. An alarming number of them seem to find ways of signaling to us that women find them irresistible. Of course, they do somehow manage to beat them off with a stick, but, my oh my, random women sure do throw themselves at them a lot.
Mark Driscoll, whose open ambition was to have the biggest church in the world (and was well on the way to achieving it till his own elders sickened of him and insisted that he step down), claimed that while he was serving holy communion women would stick a note in his pocket, saying “Pastor Mark, you look tired, let me come over and help you. No one else has to know about this. It can just be between us.” James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (sorry, DOCTOR James Dobson – he always insisted on being called Dr.) claimed that once after he had had a fight with his wife he went for a drive, and some woman in a car next to him at stop light gave him the eye, smiled, and then pulled off down a side road as though beckoning him to follow. Of course, noble Dr. Dobson resisted, and kept driving on the straight and narrow highway. (Incidentally, I do not believe either Driscoll’s or Dobson’s story.) Chuck Swindoll tells the story of getting into an elevator at a hotel where two women got on and indicated that they would get off at whatever floor he got off on. Once again, our hero escaped the clutches of a foul temptress who could barely keep her hands off him (in this case, TWO foul temptresses). I heard Tony Evans tell of the time when a woman noticed his wedding ring and said to another woman, “Aww, he’s married!” He smiled and said, “What can I say?” Even if that happened, a humble man of God cannot tell that story. That’s something you bury in the sea of forgetfulness. Then there’s Paul Tripp. He founded a ministry with a unique, catchy name: “Paul Tripp Ministries.” (I’ll get back to that.) In a promotional video for one of his books, he tells how, dissatisfied with his wife’s lack of appreciation for him, he said to her, “95% of the women in this congregation would be happy to be married to me.” She retorted, “Count me among the 5%.” Even granted that he told the story in humorous self-deprecation, I still think, how much self-regard must a man ingest before he can allow himself to think that thought?
Our cult of megachurch celebrityism attracts and breeds the kind of man who will insist on being addressed with an honorific title, or who will name a ministry after himself, and who will casually assume that women all over the world are eager to launch themselves at him.
If I were to assemble the red flags indicative of pride and gather them into a single container labeled with one word, I would pick the word “Name.” Watch for the name. Pay attention to whose name is prominent.
A number of years ago WMBI had a short daily feature, just a minute or so, that opened with these words: “This is George Barna of the Barna Research Group with 'The Barna Report.’” That man was able to get his name out on to the airwaves three times in the space of three seconds. His books would feature full-length pictures of himself. Many years ago when I was pastoring a church I got a brochure in the mail that featured his materials. I actually counted the number of times the name “Barna” appeared. It was dozens, but, significantly, the name of Jesus did not appear.
Listen: you cannot put your own name forward when you represent Jesus Christ. I will repeat that for emphasis’ sake. You cannot put your own name forward when you represent Jesus Christ.
Last week I referred to a lying, sexually abusive fake Christian scoundrel from hell by the name of Ravi Zacharias. Before Ravi’s patterns of lies had been revealed, before his sexually abusive nature had been revealed, before it became known that he had pressured his brother’s girlfriend to get an abortion – before all that, he founded an institute. Do you know what he named it? "The Zacharias Institute." He also founded a ministry. He called that "Ravi Zacharias International Ministries". My point here is that his glory-seeking self-aggrandizement was right out there in the open the whole time, and we the evangelical public didn’t see it, pushed past it, apparently didn’t think it was a big deal. It was a big deal. You cannot name a Christian ministry after yourself.
Before going further with that I should make a careful distinction. If you own a business upon which your livelihood depends and to which your reputation is attached, it is completely appropriate that you stamp your name on that. If your name is "Schwartz" and you own a bakery, by all means call it “Schwartz Bakery.” Your name will rise or fall on the quality of your cakes, and that is as it should be. Christian journalist Julie Roys has no bigger fans than my wife and me, and her site is called “The Roys Report.” That’s fine – that’s her livelihood, her business, and the nature of her reporting and opinion pieces demands that it not be anonymous. Her name should be on that.
But when it comes to proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, and caring for souls, and training disciples – though someone may earn a living through that, it is never a business. We who are called to such work are not proprietary owners of it. We don’t even rise to the level of "local franchise owner" like someone who controls a Burger King or Subway. The Bible’s term for us is “steward”. In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul writes, “This is how we should be regarded, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” A steward is just a manager, or maybe only a servant. We stewards do not get to stamp our name on ministry. We hide, we must hide behind the cross and ensure that the name of Christ be paramount. Colossians 3:17: "Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus." John 3:30: "He must become greater; I must become less."
Paul Tripp and Ravi Zacharias are not the only Christian celebrities who have dared to name ministries after themselves. Locally we have "Ron Zappia Ministries" out of Highpoint Church in Naperville. Weekdays at 6PM on WMBI you can listen to J. D. Greear of "J. D. Greear Ministries." He is the former president of the Southern Baptist Denomination, which in my mind is the most corrupt denomination in the U.S.
Although not everything that Paul Tripp and Ron Zappia and J. D. Greear say is wrong, let me warn you - you are skating on thin ice, you are swimming in treacherous waters, if you go learn your biblical wisdom from men who are so foolish, so egotistical, so alien to the spirit of Christ and blind to what the Bible teaches that they would name a ministry after themselves. It is simply outrageous. But now I will tell you something even more outrageous.
There have multiplied in our day celebrity Christian megachurch men who have stamped their names not just on a ministry but on the Bible itself I regard that as sacrilege. This is the Holy Word of God. It is good that we have study Bibles with copious notes and cross-references that help us understand it better and learn how to apply it. But it is not good that proud men have seen to it that their names will be on bold display every time a humble Christian opens the Word of God. Today we have the John MacArthur Study Bible. The David Jeremiah Study Bible. The Chuck Swindoll Study Bible. And the Tony Evans Study Bible.
That is not right. You can write about the Bible and seek to unfold its truths to a spiritually needy church, but you can’t have your name printed on the cover. How dare any man contaminate Holy Scripture by linking it so tightly to his own unholy name! And how can the Christian evangelical public support that? It is shameful.
In 1769 a deeply troubled poet, William Cowper, wrote a wonderful hymn, Oh For A Closer Walk With God. That hymn contains the words, “The dearest idol I have known, whate’er that idol be, help me to tear it from Thy throne and worship only Thee." For some of us, the dearest idol we have known is our own miserable self. The sooner we see that and repent of it the better.
I conclude with a couple lines from another hymn, one I got to sing many times during my college days. The hymn is framed as a petition, a wish. The opening stanza is:
May the mind of Christ my Savior
Live in me from day to day
By his love and power controlling
All I do and say.
And then it concludes like this:
May his beauty rest upon me
As I seek the lost to win
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.
A Christian’s great joy is not to be remembered, upheld and valued by others, but rather to be a means by which others remember, uphold and value Jesus Christ. And for that to happen most effectively, we, the servants and stewards, must get out of the way. Let us pray.
God, since you oppose the proud, deliver us from pride. Awaken us to its presence within us and root it out by force if necessary. Thank you for those thorns of pain and humiliation and incapacity by which our pride is gouged out and kept from exerting its power to alienate us from you and your holy Son Jesus Christ. Humble our hearts so that we might receive your grace, and rejoice to give you glory forever. Amen.
Wow! Deeply profound! Thank you, pastor Paul for this needed message. May God continue to keep us humble and God honoring! 🙏😪😭✝️🙏
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