Hindrances to Answered Prayer - Part 2: Pride
Thank you for joining me for the second session of the Hindrances to Answered Prayer teaching. In this teaching we will focus on the the sin of pride.
Hindrance #1 – Sin of Pride
The sin of pride may be one of the reasons why God may not be answering our prayers. The dictionary defines pride as ‘the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's importance’. Pride makes us feel too ‘high and mighty’ to humble ourselves and pray and seek God’s help in our circumstances.
The biggest problem with pride is that it can be a very subtle sin in our lives. As Paul W. Powell once said:
“Pride is so subtle that if we aren’t careful we’ll be proud of our humility. When this happens our goodness becomes badness. Our virtues become vices. We can easily become like the Sunday School teacher who, having told the story of the Pharisee and the publican, said, ‘Children, let’s bow our heads and thank God we are not like the Pharisee”
What Does The Bible Say About Pride?
The scriptures have a lot of to say about the sin of pride. James 4:6 says it best,
God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.
How Does Pride Affect Our Prayer Life?
The effect of pride in our lives can be shown in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” - Luke 18:9-14
As shown in this parable, unanswered prayer may be caused by pride! God answered the prayer of the of the tax collector but rejected the prayer of the Pharisee!
How Do You Identify Pride?
In order to deal with pride in our lives, we need to first learn how to identify it. What should we do to identify pride in our lives? The tips below should point us in the right direction on how to properly identify pride
- We need to start by honestly searching our hearts through the help of the Holy Spirit.
- We also need to start 'listening' to ourselves while we have conversations with others. As we 'listen', we should ask ourselves a few critical questions
- Are we always the primary focus of conversations?
- Do we get bored when other people are telling us about themselves? Pride can sometimes be identified by our disinsterest in other peoples lives.
- We need to carefully examine our hearts when talking about our achievements. Before telling others about our accomplishments, we need to determine our primary motivation. Is our primary motivation to make others see the goodness of God in our lives? Could it be that our primary motivation may be rooted in pride?
- Be careful of social media. Social Media makes it very easy for us to ‘flaunt’ our own lives and show off. We need to carefully examine our hearts and ask ourselves some critical questions such as
- Why am I posting my vacation pictures on facebook? Is it to show off? Please note that posting your vacation pictures does not mean that you have pride. However, we need to search our hearts so as to ensure that our social media interactions are not motivated by pride.
- We need to be extremely cautious when other people praise us. If we are not careful, pride can easily sneak into our hearts.
- We also need to search our hearts when we feel that we are the only ones capabable of doing a given task. Many times that feeling can be rooted in pride.
- Be especially watchful of spiritual pride. Spiritual pride can be easy for us to cover up. This is because we tend to cover spiritual pride under the guise of ‘prayer’, ‘testimony’, ‘sharing a word from the Lord’ etc. To try and identify spiritual pride, we can ask ourselves these questions
- Do I really always have to be the one with a testimony?
- What is my main motivation behind telling people about my 'works of salvation' such as prayer and fasting?
- Do I always have to be the only one with a ‘Word from the Lord’?
- Do I always have to have an explanation about something in the Bible?
- What is the main reason behind me telling people about how the Lord is using me?
As you go through these questions, be very honest with yourself and let the Holy Spirit shine His light into your heart. You will most likely notice that for most of these questions, all we are trying to answer is the motivation behind what we do. The action may not necessarily be the problem. However, the motivation behind the action might be. One thing that we need to note is that pride only seeks to exalt the person. It’s focus is not to exalt Christ.
Searching our hearts is the key to understanding whether we are walking in pride. The Bible is very clear about the intentions of the heart as note in Jeremiah 17:9- The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? We need the Holy Spirit's help in order for us to identify pride in our hearts.
Once you identify pride, the next thing that you need to do is to confess your sin and ask the Lord for forgiveness. The good thing is that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us an to cleanse us from our unrighteousness” (John 1:9).
The good thing about the Lord is the He is always merciful and gracious to us to forgives us and restore us to the place of wholeness.