Humble Your Pride

Silently, stealthily pride creeps into human hearts. It filters through the body’s veins until it controls every action, every thought,and every whim. It is the vice that leads to every destruction– it breaks relationships and stalemates any feeling of charity or forgiveness.
A man controlled by pride is a man who thinks he can do all on his own; he heeds no help, he needs no God. “As long as you are proud,” C.S. Lewis writes, “you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” A proud man is focused entirely upon himself. He does not see others around him, unless it is their faults; he does not see God above him, for he has made himself his own god.
A proud man will take offense as quickly as a breeze can change its direction; one must watch what they say around a man consumed with pride, for he will analyze your words until he sucks as much offense from them as he is able to, and then turn and throw it like sand back to sting your eyes. When he is the one in the wrong, he will do anything to be seen as right. Men consumed with pride make their list of facts and twist them until it is only themselves that appear to be purely honest, strong, and good. A proud man is all the things that he tries so hard to hide; deep in his soul he believes there is no one as good as he, but God is the humbler of human hearts, for “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)
Pride is the devil’s main trick; he will happily ensnare you when you believe yourself to be humble; he searches and watches eagerly for a condescending look to pass from your eye, or a lifted nose or a snub remark to pass from your lips. “The devil laughs. He is perfectly content,” C.S. Lewis writes, “to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride- just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” It puffs your mind and eats your soul, and one day every proud man will awaken to the fact that he is nothing at all. The misery then will be enough to drown him in its depths, and like swelling ocean waves, close over him and carry him out to sea.
Pride, you see, is a drug disguised as you, and its only goal is your destruction– not only of your life, but of your very soul.