The Antidote for Pride
Yesterday I spent some time talking about the issues of pride within house churches. In that post I suggested that receiving the love of God and letting that free you from comparison drives out pride. Today I’d like to focus on a practical method of dealing with pride: confession.
If, when I talk about confession, you start to see pictures of confessional booths and men with collars, you’re probably thinking of the wrong thing. When the Protestant Reformation happened, Luther and his allies announced that all believers were priests and therefore you didn’t have to to a priest to get forgiveness of your sins. But the unfortunate side effect of the Reformation is the practice of confession was all but lost to Bible-believing church.
The apostle James, who as the brother of Jesus obviously believed in direct access to God and the priesthood of all believers, encourages believers to confess their sins to one another because it results in both spiritual and physical healing (James 5:16). At least one aspect of spiritual healing that confession offers is the ability to be healed of our pride. If we are honest with ourselves about our sin, it’s hard to be judgmental towards others.When we expose the darkness in our own hearts to another human being, it becomes much harder to create masks of greatness that feed our pride. If we do, we have brothers or sisters that aren’t deceived by the masks we wear.
Now this is a bit of a chicken and egg sort of problem: Does confession create humility or does humility cause someone to confess their sins to another person? I would tell you the answer is “Yes!” Obviously humble people confess their sins to others, but there are times when confession becomes an act of the will and true humility is birthed in the heart of a believer afterwards. It’s both/and. I can tell you, though, that those who are transparent and honest about the weakness are generally some of the more humble people that I know.
I’ve talked about confession at length here on the blog, both about how confession creates brotherhood and how true transparency births transformation. There are tons of benefits in addition to keeping us humble. The first step is to find someone: another man if you’re a man, another woman if you’re a woman, and begin a regular practice of confession with him or her. If you need a model for this, you can use one we’ve found helpful here.
The point isn’t that you do it perfectly, it’s more important that you start. You may notice a difference immediately, but if you don’t you’ll definitely notice a difference in a year or two. It’s a long game to protect your soul and keep you safe from pride that so easily corrupts spiritual things.
It’s also the place where transformation happens.
Pride in House Churches
I had a friend text me a few days ago and ask me one of the most beautiful questions I’ve been asked in regards to house churches. Part of the question is quoted below:
I know what pride & arrogance looks like inside the traditional church. What does it look like outside the traditional church?
What’s so beautiful about this question is that it assumes pride exists and has dangerous implications within organic house churches. The reality is, it does*.
In fact, pride is probably a greater danger for those who have left the traditional church setting. The idea that we have a ____________ (fill in the blank, better, more biblical, more effective, etc.) model of being church can having a damaging effect on believers. Believers who meet in homes are certainly not the first in the body of Christ to struggle with this reality. I’ve certainly witnessed believers who are part of house churches turn on the churches they have left with the same kind of judgment that they feel they have received from traditional churches. The reality is you can be right about something in the Kingdom and it still damage your relationship with God.
But pride creeps in in other areas as well. Often house churches suffer from many of the same problems that the early churches in the New Testament suffered from (because they were house churches as well). John wrote to his co-worker Gaius about Diotrephes, who loved to be the leader, and because of this he refused to work with the apostles and traveling workers that the Lord was sending to the church (3 John 5-10). This love of being known as the leader is simply another form of pride that crops up among house churches, even among churches that profess not to have leaders.
The fact of the matter is pride is a condition of the fall. We shouldn’t suspect because we are part of house churches, that religious pride can’t creep in. Rather, because humans are involved and all humans are broken, we should expect pride to creep in, especially where God meets us powerfully, the lost are brought to Jesus, and disciples are made.
Jesus calls us away from understanding our relationship with Him by comparing ourselves to others and into a glorious freedom where we become aware of the goodness of God in the person of Jesus. Jesus becomes our standard and our sufficiency, so we find in Him that we are both horribly insufficient and yet gloriously sufficient because the cross and the resurrection. When we are truly set free in the love of God, we no longer have to live in comparison to others and pride withers and dies.
Friends, when we are loved by God and experience His love deeply, the opinions of others matter little to us. We can love people without fear of being less than them and without having to be better than them. Because we serve Jesus, none of this matters. What matters is that God has poured out His love in our hearts and we get to share it with others.
Photo Credit: Peacock by Jarod Carruthers
*No doubt I will get someone who writes a comment about how bad pride is within the traditional church and why this article is misplaced. Let’s make sure we pull the log out of our eye before we offer to take the speck out of someone else’s eye (Matthew 7:3).
Reason #3 We Started A House Church
[This is part of an ongoing, irregularly published series on the reasons we started a house church. Reasons #1 and #2 will be listed at the bottom of the post.]
Since our first house church began, there have been a number of musicians who have been a part of our spiritual family. When we first went on this journey, my wife had been playing guitar for a six or seven years and had led worship in different venues. Others who had joined us either played instruments or sang, so its fair to say we were a musical bunch.
Over the years the role music has played has shifted and changed. There was a year or two where we played very little music because we were relying on music hold the meeting together and as we realized that we tried not to start every meeting with music. Then there have been worship gatherings where the Holy Spirit has moved powerfully during a time of music and we were all better for it.
The New Testament talks about singing in a gathering surprisingly little. Paul says in Ephesians, “Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts,” (Ephesians 5:18-19). He says in Colossians 3:16, “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts.” These two verses sum up what the New Testament says about singing when the church gathers together.
How does this relate to why we do house church?
What Paul is talking about here is a kind of singing that would take place between members of the church and the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs were a method of Spirit-inspired encouragement for either the entire group or specific individuals. There is an emphasis in the verses on encouragement and the spontaneity of the Spirit. In the church over the years this has “evolved” into musical arrangements, choirs, and worship teams, but the New Testament has in view an activity the whole church can participate in.
Yesterday as our house church met, this began to happen. We had sung a few worship songs together that we knew, but at the end of the final song, there was a significant time of spontaneous singing between several of the members our church that wouldn’t be able to happen in a environment with microphones. One of the sisters began to sing about Jesus as the treasure in the field that we seek and as she sang, the Lord convicted my heart about areas of my heart where Jesus isn’t my treasure. I was built up and challenged because of the spiritual song of another member of our body.
It’s not that this kind of activity can’t happen in larger churches. It’s just that the larger the group you have, the harder it becomes for this to be a ministry of an entire body and not just the ministry of a select few. This kind of thing can happen in small groups as well, but many small groups don’t see worship as their focus. House churches have the time, the focus, and the right size of group for brothers and sisters to sing to each other and encourage each other as an outflow of being filled by the Holy Spirit.
It’s yet another reason we planted a house church.
Photo Credit: Toddler Tunes by Elizabeth Pfaff
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 