. . . but I thought many of you would benefit from it. Doug Wilson on pride.

Pride is a sin that God hates above all others . . . He does hate it, and because God hates it, so should we. But if we hate it rightly, as forgiven sinners, we will hate it first in ourselves. We have to be very careful here. I have seen some who hate (and sternly rebuke) what they perceive as arrogance in others first, and they do so, not as a humble one grieved over insolence, but rather as a competitor jockeying for position. The ugly result is nothing like humility hating pride, but rather envy hating any kind of blessing for others. "Who does he think he is?" is a sentiment that is almost certainly uttered from the seat of pride. Sinful pride hates competion, and loves to be catty about it. And sinful pride can feel good about this catty hatred of pride in others, because, after all, does not God hate pride as well? That's us, thinking God's thoughts after Him.

. . . We should learn to hate what wisdom hates. "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate" (Prov. 8:13). We sometimes think that we should not hate, but this is to reject the words of God. We must hate sins, and, if this is true, we must hate the mother of all sins—pride, arrogance, insolence.

Pride knows how to wave the most bizarre tokens of "accomplishment" over its head, and this brings us to the issue of doctrinal pride. "We Calvinists have the truth, to be distinguished from all those semi-Pelagian bozos out there." When it comes to the doctrines of grace, this is particularly insane—what do we have that we did not receive as a gift (1 Cor. 4:7)? And if it was a gift, why do we boast as though it were not? So, are we now to take pride in our knowledge that we are not allowed to take pride in anything? Boastful attitudes can mouth any words, including "free grace, exhaustive sovereignty," or "soli Deo gloria." Moreover, the gift of acknowledging God's sovereignty was a gift we did not want. At any rate, I certainly did not want it, and surrendering to Calvinism in principle (telling God that I was "willing" for it to be true) was one of the great eat-your-spinach moments of my life. No doubt there was great jubilation in the courts of heaven when old Wilson decided that he was willing for Romans 9 to stay in the Bible, what with the cherubim chest-bumping and all. The lunacy of this kind of doctrinal pride and conceit must be stated with great emphasis before the next point can be made.

. . . Submission to the Godness of God is what sanity means. Understanding who God is, and gladly submitting to Him should be our very definition of what it even means to be sane.

All this relates to the antidote to all pride. What heals the poison of arrogance and boasting? It is not "no boasting," but rather learning to change the direct object of our boast. What is the antidote to pride? The Bible teaching that the answer is boasting. "My soul shall make her boast in the Lord: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad" (Ps. 34:2; cf. 2 Cor. 10:17).