Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father gently remind of us our daily, desperate need for his grace. Father, we love you and long to please you, but actually following through with these feelings is hard to do. We need your help. We say we want to obey, but we so often and so easily forget your word. Forgive us for our meager prayer-life. Forgive us for neglect your word. And forgive us for our pride lurking in our hearts. Father, lead us in confessing and sacrificing our pride daily to you. In the name of your son Jesus, reveal any offensive way in us and lead us in the abundant life of obedience to your will!
Your Morning Song: "Tremble // What A Beautiful Name" by Phil Wickham
Your Morning Scripture: Proverbs 29:23
Pride brings a person low,
but the lowly in spirit gain honor.
...
The trick with pride is that it is so deeply ingrained in us, caught up in our blood and carved into our bones, that it exists in us without any conscious thought. And it is the heart of all sin, the pride that says to God, "My will over thy will."
How often do you consider how prideful you are? If you're anything like me, then, like me, you often forget. How easily I ignore my ever present pride and just about my day, getting things done, saying a quick prayer, reading a verse or two. Things to be done, things to do. But how often do I stop and look inside myself, through prayer and the Bible, to see what might be happening there in that heart-space place?
Not as often as I should. And so, like a fungus that needs no light or help to grow, my pride will creep out into my thinkings, sayings, and doings, until I am caught in the full growth of it, and hurt myself and/or someone else, and sin against God. I am brought low. How gracious God is to give me a mere online devotional moment to catch and correct my pride!
The lowly in spirit are not those without pride. The lowly in spirit are those who do not ignore their pride. The lowly in spirit are those who sacrifice their pride to God, denying themselves in order to give God delight. The lowly in spirit are those who God will honor by praising their faithfulness and showering them with songs of his delight that will fill the lowly in spirit up with his Spirit.
I am reminded of Philippians 2 where it is said that Jesus "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant..."
Are we willing to obey our Father's command and to follow his Son's example? How hard do we hunt our pride which haunts our well-spring hearts? How often? How sincerely? How humbly?
May the sacrifice of our pride at the foot of the cross be an aroma pleasing to our Father as we honor the example of his Son.
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