[Listen to an audio version of this sermon here]
Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. What will people do? Will they abandon us? Will they try to control us? Will they move on and leave us behind, alone?
Will we have enough? Will we be taken care of? Will some unexpected threat rob us of our way of life? Will those we love have enough?
Will we be able to understand the situation in the world? Can we understand it enough to function and act in our interest? Is our life significant? Does anything we do really matter?
Will we be able to do what we need to do? Will we get sick and be unable to work or serve those we need to? Will we make mistakes that will harm us? Will we be able to get the things done that we need to?
These sorts of questions can easily overwhelm us. Life is full of anxiety and unsolved problems.
So, what are we to do? We have two options. One, we can seek to solve these things ourselves. This is the pride solution. It leads to the dissolution and disruption we see all around us.
The other option is to trust God. We see the problems, but we see the God who sees us above them. This trust leads us to a joy and peace that enables us to accept our place in the world and to serve others in love.
Today, we want to consider the sinful pride solution that we all tend to employ. Pride is endemic to the human race, and it is a wrong and unjust attempt to place ourselves at the center of things. When we get anxious, we easily try to make ourselves big or retreat into a smaller world where we are in control. We will see this in the life of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham.
Now, remember that the Bible teaches us the solution to sin, but it also teaches us about sin. The goal of teaching us about sin is so that we can repent, turn from it unto God and find healing, grace, and restoration from the Father, in Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is one passage that teaches us about sin, and, it is a very instructive one.
Hagar
Hagar’s pride is quite out in the open. It is probably what we think of when we think of pride. “[Abraham] slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress” (Gen. 16:4).
Now, think about Hagar. All her life she was considered to be very low. Sarah was above her as her mistress. Hagar might have wondered if her life had any meaning or if she had any significance at all. That is certainly the anxiety of a slave.
Then, she was chosen to have a child for Sarah with Abraham. In her eyes, this must have been an amazing privilege. Then, she actually conceived and was pregnant.
It is not at all surprising that at this point that she would look down on Sarah. She was able to get pregnant, and Sarah was not. It was wrong for her to view things this way, but think about it. She had been looked down on as a slave her whole life! Now, she had the child of her master in her womb. She had significance! It’s only one small step to compare herself to Sarah in pride.
There is anxiety in pride, but there is also pride in anxiety. We can condemn Hagar, but we can also see with compassion how the difficulty of her situation might have led her there. If we can see the anxiety in pride, then we can see the sinner with compassion and condemn their sin.
In addition, how common is this pride? We seize on almost anything we do well as an excuse to look down on others. If we are in better shape, have better behaved children, are a better cook, are more successful, have nicer things, study more, or are better at sports, we value it far more than we should. If we find others doing things well, we tend to downplay it. We value ourselves in excess of what we should and do not value others to the degree we should.
We also take pride in our own particular virtues. If people are good at getting things done and being on time, they look down on those who aren’t and highly value their own virtues. If they are good at dealing with people, they look down on anyone who is impatient or rude with people. It’s the sinful tendency of all of us. We inflate our own virtues.
Of course, we learn to be clever about it. We find pride in things that are bigger than us. Patriotism is a good thing, but our love of country can easily blind us to our nation’s weak spots and become an occasion for exalting ourselves. We can have pride in our nation or group, which is more plausible than exalting ourselves. However, we get exalted with the group, and so we can have our cake and eat it, too.
Even self-loathing can contain an element of pride. German psychologist Dr. Karen Horney had an astute observation about this. She said that our imagination tends to construct our self-image as “a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god” (Neurosis & Human Growth, 22). But what happens when reality conflicts with this illusion? She says, “What does it do to a person when he recognizes that he cannot measure up to his inner dictates? To anticipate the answer briefly: then he starts to hate and despise himself” (ibid., 85). She said that this was so common in her dealings with people that she concluded that “pride and self-hate are actually one entity.” So, she suggested that we call “the sum total of the factors involved by a common name: the pride system” (ibid., 110–111).
Pride is the true endemic. It persistently manifests itself in human life in all sorts of ways. We are all trying to be the star of the show. We will see this a bit more as we look at Sarah and Abraham.
Sarah
How did Sarah’s pride manifest itself? She thought she could control life. She was anxious about her childlessness, which is completely understandable. The method she chose to deal with it was common in her day, but it was contrary to God’s law. She let her desire to be in control overcome her principles.
Often, this sort of pride starts as a good ambition. God has not made us to be passive in the face of the world. He has made us to be active. We should not sit passively in the face of problems. We should seek, under God, in acknowledgement of His Lordship, and in dependence on His power, to make the world a better place.
However, this desire so often gets out of bounds. We begin to believe that we should be exempt from the common problems of human life. Others may have to wait or struggle or experience illness, but I should be exempt! This is the pride in anxiety.
Then, it leads us to deal with others unjustly. It leads us to punish others when we feel out of control, either by a verbal tongue-lashing or by withdrawal. We find all sorts of ways to put others under our control. We shall see this in the next sermon.
Then, we compromise our standards. We should be able to enjoy this or that, we might say, so we steal or lie or skew things in our own direction. The lie at the root of all this is that we can be in control of the world. It is thinking that we can look down on the world as God does. We can’t.
That’s the pride in anxiety, and we need to repent and acknowledge our limited control of the world. Sarah needed to repent of her belief that she could control what she could not. This was the pride in her anxiety.
Abraham
And what about Abraham? We might not think that he is prideful. If anything, he seems to be self-deprecating. He just allows Sarah to lead. “Abram agreed to what Sarai said” (Gen. 16:2).
But if we think about it a little bit more, we can see that Abraham feels the anxiety just as much, and he also has pride. The pride of the compliant is that they can make everyone happy all the time.
So, they will go along with whatever others say, even if it is harmful and even if it is unjust. Whomever they have chosen to make happy will feel accepted and affirmed, even if they do wrong.
Abraham’s pride is to think that he can solve someone else’s fundamental issues. He can solve Sarah’s problems, he thinks. He can make her happy all the time. To do this, he will refuse to take a stand about what is right, will engage in what is actually an affair, and acquiesce in the mistreatment of others. As long as Sarah is happy in the moment, everything will be sacrificed. This is Abraham’s pride, that he can make someone happy all the time.
It’ easier to see the pride of Sarah. It’s harder to see the pride of the compliant. We often rebuke the person who is actively prideful, but we miss the pride in the passive. We see the person who wants to control everything, but we miss the person who sits passively by and refuses to control the things that they should. Both are rooted in pride, pride in our specific characteristics and personalities.
Conclusion
We are guilty before God because of our sin, but we often suffer from false guilt. We feel guilty because someone we care about isn’t happy, but this is not our responsibility. We feel guilty because we made mistakes, but we are not exempt from mistakes. We feel guilty because we didn’t anticipate every problem, but there is no way we could. Others come to us with expectations that we should have done this or that, and we acquiesce and are apologetic. Much of this is rooted in our pride, that we could avoid all mistakes, that we could make everyone happy, that we could fulfill all expectations, that we could have succeeded in everything. We need to watch out for these things.
Our true guilt begins with our pride system. It is to think that we are much greater than we are and can solve life’s problems on our own. Ironically, when we think that we can control all sorts of things that we can’t, we end up losing sight of controlling the things that we can! By refusing to accept our place under God with Him as the star of the show, we miss the role we could play.
Consider Jesus. Read His life carefully. You will find that He showed compassion to people. However, he never refused to take responsibility for what was His. He did not let others deter Him from the path the Father had set for Him. He was willing to speak His mind, though He did it with great wisdom. He trusted His Father, even when His Father said to go to the cross.
And it is the Spirit of Christ that is working in us, if we have trusted Him and invited Him into our lives. He can help us to see what is our real obligation and what is not. He can help us see our significant but limited role in this life. He can help us to take responsibility for what is our responsibility and let go of what is not. “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (Rom. 6:11–12). The goal is that we would live out of the life of Christ. This will empower us to live a life of joy and peace in loving service to others instead of the disruption and dissolution that is all around us. This is the grace and the gift that is abundantly ours in Jesus Christ. This is seeing the problems of life but seeing the God who is above them and who sees us. Amen.