Augustine defines pride in this way:
Pride puts self at the center and is not willing to trust or obey God; it holds oneself above or away from others and refuses to see oneself within the larger human family.


Augustine defines pride in seven different categories and explains how pride draws us away from God:

1. Pride is Irreverent
· It neglects public worship
· It fails to keep a life of prayer and devotion
· Use of holy things for personal gain
· Utilizing spiritual disciplines to try and bribe God

2. Pride is Presumptive
· Dependent on self
· Neglecting the means of grace and the sacraments
· Failure to see how our gifts and our work as a way to worship and glorify God


3. Pride is Distrustful
· Refusal to recognize God’s wisdom and love
· Baseless worry or anxiety
· Looking to other gods or ways to tell the future (i.e. magic, horoscopes, fortune telling, etc.)

4. Pride is Disobedient
· Rejection of God’s will for another way
· Allowing public opinion or custom to blind us to what is right
· Utilizing your own authority with cruelty or selfish ends


5. Pride is Impenitent
· Refusal to admit sins
· Comparison of ourselves to others
· Inability to admit wrong or to take ownership when wrong


6. Pride is Vane
· Giving ourselves credit instead of God in us
· Taking credit for something when it belongs to someone else

7. Pride is Arrogant
· Disregard of others
· Pride of race, education, religion, skill, status, etc.

Every week we get to a point in the sermon where we not only need, but want to look at the remedy…How do we live this life sans pride?

And every week we first say, turn to Jesus…
Vs. 4 says, Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
Pride leads us away from the means of grace. Pride says you don’t need prayer, or worship, or reading Scripture, or fasting, or silence, or the sacraments, or, or, or…
Pride says, you can do this on your own without God. And yet it is God’s kindness, God’s love, God’s consistent pursuit of us, that leads us to repentance and invites us to repent of our pride and live free to follow Jesus.
You see if we are actually taking time to practice the means of grace, Jesus will fill us with a focus on love of God and love of neighbor which will combat the vice of Pride. We will always start with Jesus as we seek to live a life of virtue instead of vice.

What are antidotes to pride?
If you did the Enneagram studies with me, you know that the vice of an Enneagram 2 is pride…and as someone who is a 2, I relate to this deeply. According to the Enneagram the virtue of the 2, or the way to work against pride, is love. And this makes perfect sense when we look at the way Augustine defined pride.
Pride is selfish, self-absorbed, self-seeking, self, self, self…Pride does it, as Sinatra so famously crooned, “my way.”

And the opposite of all of that is other focused…seeking the good of others, longing to be in community with others, seeking the good things of God.
All this we do through love.
Probably the most common phrase we know about Pride is “pride goeth before the fall” which is a shortened version of Proverbs 16:18 which says,
Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall.

But another famous proverb is in the very next chapter in Proverbs:
A friend loves at all times,
and kinsfolk are born to share adversity.
This proverb guides us to see that the opposite of pride is to be with others… Friends and kinsfolk are there to love and to help us carry our adversities, our burdens, our concerns… It is only through love that we can help one another.

Jesus invited us to abide in his love. Jesus commanded us to love one another. NT Wright in his Lenten Devotional, From Wilderness to Glory says this:
[Jesus] has come to make us more human, not less. He has come to give us freedom and joy, not slavery and a semi-human stupor. He has come so that we can bear fruit that will last, whether in terms of a single life changed because we loved somebody as Jesus loved us, or in terms of a single decision that we had to take, a single task we had to perform, through which, though we couldn’t see it at the time, the world became a different place. Love makes both the lover and the beloved more truly human.
When we love and seek the good of others before and over our own selfish ways, we become more human--we become more as Jesus would call us to be.

Another antidote of Pride is generosity.
When we are stingy with our time, with our resources, with our lives, we are living with Pride.

Our passage today says,
For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: 7 to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.

To those who seek glory…he will give eternal life
To those who are self-seeking and who obey wickedness…there will be wrath and fury

Wright has this to say:
The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity. Think about the best thing you can do for the worst person, and go ahead and do it. Think of what you’d really like for someone to do for you, and do it for them. Think of the people to whom you are tempted to be nasty, and lavish generosity on them instead…
God is generous to all people, generous (in the eyes of the stingy) to a fault: he provides good things for all to enjoy, the undeserving as well as the deserving.

Wright challenges his readers that we are to be this way too…because, if we can see how much God has loved us and how generous God has been with us,
Us…with all our vices
Then how could we offer anything less?

We will combat our pride by being loving and generous. We will combat our pride by taking all that God has so freely given us and sharing it with all we encounter.