The Path to Contentment - Position

My heart is not proud, Lord , my eyes are not haughty Psalms 131:1 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/psa.131.1.NIVUK Pride is a sin. In fact, it's a gateway sin. It's a sin through which other sins enter our heart and foul it up further. There are a few striking examples in the Bible: Moses instructed the Israelites to remember where their wealth came from so that they didn't take pride in it and claim that they produced it themselves, without God's help (Deuteronomy 8:11‭-‬14). But what happened, in fact, was that they did become proud (Hosea 13:6). There are also the famous incident in Daniel 4 where King Nebuchadnezzar becomes proud and loses his sanity. Isaiah's gave a famous prophecy on the fall of a great, proud king (Isaiah 14:12‭-‬15). This reaches its ultimate expression in the casting out from heaven of satan (Revelation 12:10). Do you see it? Pride is regarded as a highly dangerous sin in the Bible (1 John 2:15‭-‬17; Proverbs 16:18). The two specific words for 'proud' and 'haughty' in this verse both refer to height, to exalting and lifting one's self up. They both point to one specific area of pride which lies at the heart our culture and many other cultures of the globe, and is a specific sickness for which we must seek a cure: Comparative pride. What is that? Imagine a huge ladder, with every human being ranked individually from top to bottom. This is how comparative pride works. We feel good when there are people beneath us. We feel bad when there are people above us. For example, if we compare ourselves to a starving person, we feel rich. If we compare ourselves to a multi-billionaire CEO, then we feel poor. The problem is that we are conditioned to think this way since we were small. We are ranked against our peers in school, at university, in work. Some parents even rank and compare their children. So what happens? There are winners and losers. When we win, we feel happy. When we lose, we feel sad. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous. Now I'm saying this as someone who was conditioned by his neighbourhood and his school to believe that I would not achieve anything and therefore would be at the bottom of the rankings. So I tried to rebel against it. I tried to prove them wrong. I tried to join a football team, but that only confirmed the conditioning because I wasn't good at football and it broke my heart when I realised it. I tried to work hard and be clever. But few people at my school valued that except some of the teachers because there were plenty of things I was not good at. One of my technical teachers, however, hit the nail on the head. I know, it's what technical teachers do, right? But he absolutely got it right. You see, whenever someone did a good job in his class - which wasn't that often, and less often for me - he used to say, "Well, in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king". What he meant is that we only looked good because of who we were comparing ourselves against. If we compared ourselves to someone else, we'd look bad. That's where this way of making sense of the world falls down badly. It's relative. It's not fixed. We might be superior to someone one day and inferior to someone else the next. And that is why this is a poor way to feel good about ourselves. That is why Paul is firmly against relative pride (2 Corinthians 10:12; Galatians 6:3‭-‬5). Even more so in these famous verses: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. Philippians 2:3‭-‬4 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/php.2.3-4.NIVUK Where Paul talks of 'in humility value others above yourselves' he was writing to a Roman military garrison town in modern-day Greece and telling them to view others as higher ranked than they were. Or, if we go back to our ladder analogy, as being on a higher rung. You see, here is the sobering reality. We are fed through our magazines and our advertisements and our influencers and even our very culture that we will only feel better about ourselves, and therefore contented, if we are superior to other people. This is what leads to the nastiness and gossiping and sniping and exceptionalism and racism that has poisoned us as people. The thing is, we are not contented. It has not worked. And the reason why it has not worked is because it is a wrong model of society. You see, King David had every reason to boast and be proud of his achievements. He was the greatest king in Israelite history. He'd led Israel in some of their battles and to some of their greatest victories. He put them in a state of peace with all their neighbours. He laid down the designs of the first Temple in Jerusalem - one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Yet he said these words. He said that his heart was not proud and his eyes were not haughty. Moses had reasons to be boastful and proud and haughty. He led a million people out of slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea and across the desert to the brink of entry into the Promised Land. He saw God do great and mighty acts along the way, including the defeat of the army of world's greatest superpower of the day. But what was said of him? He was the most humble man in all the earth (Numbers 12:3). Another great leader who had every reason to be proud, boastful and haughty was the Apostle Paul, yet he rejected every reason for the sake of Christ (Philippians 3:4‭-‬11). For generations we have been living our lives the wrong way. We have been allowing the world to steal our contentment. We have allowed ourselves to be measured against other people. I even did it as a child. I had a guy I hung about with in Primary school. He was cared for by his grandmother, although I'm not sure 'care' was the correct word. He was often dirty. His uniform was often tatty. He smelled quite bad. He was not so bright. And what was the main reason I hung about with him? To be honest, it was because next to him I looked good. But if I'm really honest, it had no impact at all on my contentment levels. Why? Because while there may be people worse off than us, there will always be a lot of people better than us, and they are always the ones who make us feel discontented. Allow me one last example. School prize-givings. My daughter's school asks the teachers to allocate points for effort, behaviour and quality of work. Only a few kids in each class win awards. So when your kid wins something, you feel pride for them and pride for you, almost as if your parental skills are being validated somehow. My nephew has serious problems with his brain. He goes to a special school. They held a prize-giving for seriously ill and handicapped children. One of them won a prize. Do you know what for? He'd opened his eyes for the first time. Which parent do you think celebrated the achievement the most? Pride is a sin. Relative pride is an absolute nonsense. It's time we saw it for what it is. But how do we handle it when it's forced upon us? When I was younger, I just accepted it. It was just part of life. I was good at some things and not good at others. Of course, it was the things I was not good at that seemed to matter to me the most. As I got older, I recognised that it was not a good thing at all. I worked for a company that decided to bring in a ranking system for its employees and use this to determine how much bonus they paid out. When I saw this coming, I knew right away that this would be corrosive to team spirit. And I was right. One of my colleagues in particular was very negative about it. She saw herself as lacking the opportunities to get a good bonus and made everyone aware of it. She saw herself as directly competing with me and seemed to be determined to do what she could to make me aware of it. I was having none of it. While she was ranting, I stopped her in her tracks and told her, "I'm not competing with you." She looked at me as if I'd said something crazy. "I am not interested in competing with you." I told her again. "I think we should just do our best as a team and let our manager decide who gets what." She had no answer to that. So that's what I did. I was also careful to work with her and other team members to make sure they understood that, despite how the bonuses were being allocated, I did not see myself as being in competition with anyone. And that's how I deal with it. I refuse to compete with others. I do my best and measure my results against my results in a previous period or year. I compete with myself. I believe that's the best thing to do. Competing and comparing is how our culture tries to steal our contentment. So we stop it. Having seen that we need to control our desire for position, the second desire we need to control, in my next post, is our desire for PERCEPTION: