Philip Yancey, while writing his book Reaching for the invisible God, asked his friends this question: If a seeking person came to you and asked how your life as a Christian differs from his or hers as a moral non-Christian, what would you say? I've been thinking about what my answer would be.
I wonder if people see anything more to me than a decent guy who goes to church on Sundays. Shouldn't there be be more to a follower of Christ than that, I ask myself. And if there is, shouldn't it be apparent to everybody?
If I understand my faith correctly, I think the biggest difference being a Christian makes in my life is how I love others. Jesus said to his disciples, Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognise that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.” (John 13:34-35).
Christian love is radically different from any other love. Our natural love is always dependant on who the recipient is. We love people either because they are related to us or because they poses the qualities we admire; beauty, intelligence, courage, friendliness, integrity, social status etc. Christian love is unconditional. The message of the gospel is pretty simple, we had no desirable qualities that God should love us and yet he did. Go and do likewise, Jesus said, while explaining the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Loving people who have nothing to offer in return is hard. It means caring for people who might not appreciate the time, effort, money or self sacrifice you made for them. It means loving the unlovables. Followers of Christ love like that. But sadly, most people do not find the 'church people' that loving these days. In conversations with my non-Christians friends, I often hear about how judgemental, unforgiving and hypocritical the church is. Most also claim to be living more 'moral' lives than the alleged 'Christians'. It grieves my heart to admit they are right to some extent. Often, the church does not seem to follow it's central teaching; love God and love others.
However, there are plenty to Christians, that live out that message everyday. Consider the guy I heard about last week. One of South Korea's top surgeons, he leaves his six figure salary and comfortable life and goes to a remote village in northern China, where he's been running a hospital for the poor for the last 15 years. It takes more than a sense of philanthropy to do that. He could have sent money for a hospital and doctors if he wanted to. But somehow Christian love demands sacrifice, it's a giving of your life to others that makes love so powerful.
I recently watched a little know film titled 'Noble' based on the life of Christina Noble, a children's rights campaigner and charity worker who has changed the lives of thousands of street children in Vietnam through her work. Christina had a difficult life herself. Born in Ireland in the mid 40s, Christina was sent to live in an orphanage at age ten, gang-raped while living on the streets, her son forcibly adopted, and a victim of domestic abuse. Yet despite all these hardships, this woman went on to fulfil her vision of caring for the abused street children of Vietnam.
What compels these people to do what they do? I believe it's the message of the gospel. Loved people, love people. And most importantly, they love the people that ordinary 'moral' people don't love. The ones that have nothing to offer. That's called grace. That's what Christianity is all about. And that is what makes all the difference.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Friday, February 5, 2016
Friday, December 24, 2010
It's Christmas Eve, Dave
I have confession to make. One of my favourite Christmas songs, is a song that has nothing to do with Christmas. It also boasts some bad language and plays endlessly on the radio during December. Released in the year I was born, it's called 'Fairy tale of New York' by the Irish band Pogues. Songs have different meanings for different people. Good songs, like all great works of art, allow you to come up with your own interpretations. I found a life lesson in the otherwise ordinary lyrics of this song.
The song starts off with a drunk man recalling memories of a relationship that started at Christmas and then goes on like a conversation between two lovers. The last part of the song goes like this. The woman says 'You took my dreams from me, When I first found you'. Then the man replies 'I kept them with me babe, I put them with my own, Can't make it all alone, I've built my dreams around you'. Beautiful. Romantic. Comedy. That's why this song is an all time favorite.
But I like this song for a different reason. These last lines remind of God every time I hear the song. Because many times, like the woman in the song, I complain, "God, you took my dreams from me, things I had always wanted to have, the things I have always wanted to see and do, the places I wanted to go, the people I would have liked to be part of my life, the way I had wanted life to turn out. My hopes and dreams. You took them from me". And then, a voice inside seems to tell me, No son, I kept them with me, I put them with my own and my dreams for you are higher than yours. What a promise. I like fairy tales and I like happy endings, I don't know how my story would go but I do know how it will end, because I know, the author. He's written yours as well, and it starts with the Christmas story.
Merry Christmas my dear readers!
Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV
The song starts off with a drunk man recalling memories of a relationship that started at Christmas and then goes on like a conversation between two lovers. The last part of the song goes like this. The woman says 'You took my dreams from me, When I first found you'. Then the man replies 'I kept them with me babe, I put them with my own, Can't make it all alone, I've built my dreams around you'. Beautiful. Romantic. Comedy. That's why this song is an all time favorite.
But I like this song for a different reason. These last lines remind of God every time I hear the song. Because many times, like the woman in the song, I complain, "God, you took my dreams from me, things I had always wanted to have, the things I have always wanted to see and do, the places I wanted to go, the people I would have liked to be part of my life, the way I had wanted life to turn out. My hopes and dreams. You took them from me". And then, a voice inside seems to tell me, No son, I kept them with me, I put them with my own and my dreams for you are higher than yours. What a promise. I like fairy tales and I like happy endings, I don't know how my story would go but I do know how it will end, because I know, the author. He's written yours as well, and it starts with the Christmas story.
Merry Christmas my dear readers!
Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV
Friday, December 4, 2009
The Midnight Church
As we come to the end of another year, many people take some time out to analyse their lives. Every sensible man takes a moment, at least, to look back on what they have done, what they didn't do, what they accomplished, what they didn't, how many new year resolutions they managed to keep, what good they did , what bad etc etc. For the Christian it is a time of thankfulness, to be grateful to God, most importantly because they are still breathing, and for His faithfulness to them during the year. Sadly, we as Christians, often neglect to fully appreciate our dependence on God, not only for fulfilling our materials needs, but also for sustaining our spiritual life. We might never forget to thank for his blessing, but we do often forget to thank God for the fact that, if we are still clean in a dirty world, its because of Him, not us. Self-righteousness in the church causes terrible damage. Philip Yancey illustrated the fact very well in an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY entitled, 'The Midnight Church'. Written back in 1983, I think nothing much has changed in the last twenty five years. Its about time we get the point, we should be looking up to Him, rather than looking down on people.
THE MIDNIGHT CHURCH
by Philip Yancey
Its members consciously lean on each other
I attended a unique "church" recently, one that exists without a denominational headquarters or paid staff and yet attracts millions of committed members. Its name is Alcoholics Anonymous. A friend had invited me during a poignant conversation in which he confessed his problem to me. I'd like you to come with me," he said, "and I think you'll get a glimpse of what the early church must have been like." When I pressed him for details, he simply smiled and said, "Come, You'll see."
At 12 o'clock on a Monday night I entered a ramshackle house that had been used for six other sessions already that day. Acrid clouds of cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in the air. I soon sensed what my friend had meant in comparing A.A. to the early church: a well-known politician and several millionaires were mixing freely with unemployed dropouts and dazed-looking-kids who wore Band Aids to cover needle marks on their arms. The group conveyed obvious warmth, and conversations tended to be intimate and intense: alcoholics can expertly cut through a facade of polite aloofness or feigned strength.
When we went around and introduced ourselves, it went like this: "Hi, I'm Tom, and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Instantly everyone shouted in unison, like a Greek chorus, "Hi, Tom!" Then Tom, and each person there, shared a personal progress report on his battle with addiction. For many, these fellow members are the only prople in the world who treat them with care and respect, and even a ritual can have profound meaning.
Quaint phrases such as "One day at a time" and "You can do it" decorated the dingy walls of the room. My friend mentioned that those archaisms hint at another similarity to the early church. Most of A.A.'s received wisdom is passed down in the form of oral traditions from its founding members of more than 50 years ago. Nobody much uses A.A. 's up-to-date brochures and public relations pieces. Mainly, they rely on an old book called the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which tells the stories of the early members' lives in stilted, almost King Jamesian prose.
A.A. owns no property, has no headquarters and no consultants and investment counselors jetting across the country. Its founders intentionally built in restrictions to kill off anything that might lead to a bureacracy. They believed their program could work only if kept to its most basic, intimate level: the relentless support of one alcoholic giving his or her life to help another. Yet A.A. has proven so effective that 250 other organizations have sprung up in deliberate mimicry of its program.
There are good historical reasons for the parallels to an early church structure: the Christian founders of A.A. included a conscious commitment to God as a mandatory part of their treatment. The night I attended, everyone in the room repeated the 12 principles, which acknowledge total dependence on God for forgiveness and strength. In the testimonial time , it was jarring at first to hear people use religious terms equally in profanity and in expressing their dependence on God - both with utter sincerity. Agnostic members often first substitute the euphemism "Higher Power," but after a while that seems inane and they revert to "God."
My friend often reflects on what he calls "the Christological question" of A.A. A deeply committed Christian, he has put his intellectual faith in abeyance while struggling with simple survival. The A.A. "church," which has none of Christianity's underlying doctrine and centrality of Christ, keeps him alive. The Christian church seems irrelevant, vapid, and gutless to him. He is not alone, for others in his group tell stories of rejection, judgment, "a guilt trip." A local church is the last place they would stand up and declare, "Hi, I'm Tom, I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." No one would holler back, "Hi, Tom."
My friend admits he will find his way back to the church someday, and he has not abandoned the doctrine. In fact, he says A.A. has resolved for him some of the most troubling paradoxes of the faith - the free will determinism conundrum, for example: How can a person accept full responsibility for actions knowing that family background, the economy, and hormonal imbalance all contribute to to that behavior? A.A. is unequivocal: it requires every alcoholic to admit full and complete responsibility for all behavior. Rationalizations are forbidden. Or take the doctrine of original sin: It will take maybe 10 seconds to convince an A.A. member of that doctrine at which so many balk. A.A. members express the truth every time they introduce themselves. No one is ever allowed to say "I was an alcoholic."
For my friend, immersion in A.A. has meant salvation in the most literal sense. He knows that one slip could - no, will - send him to an earthly death. A.A. members have responded to his calls at 4 A.M., finding him in the eerie brightness of all-night restaurants where he has been sitting for hours at a formica table filling a notebook with the sentence, "God help me make it through the next five minutes." Now he is approaching the one-year anniversary of his last drink - an important milestone by A.A. reckoning. And yet he knows that 50 per cent of those who reach that milestone eventually fall away.
Standing inside A.A. and looking with a curious observer's eye at the local church, my friend wonders about the plinth of undergirding doctrine on which his new "church" rests. Meanwhile I stand inside the local church and looking with a curious observer's eye at A.A., wonder instead why A.A. met his needs when the local church did not. He had attended a progressive church that offered a similar climate to that found in A.A. There too, millionaires mixed with dropouts and members offered acceptance, not judgment. Why was it not enough ? I asked him to name the one quality missing in the local church that was somehow provided by A.A. He stared at his cup of coffee for a long time. Then he said softly one word: dependency.
"None of us can make it on our own - isn't that why Jesus came?" he explained. "Yet most church people give off a self-satisfied air of piety or superiority. I don't sense them consciously leaning on God or each other. An alcoholic who goes to church feels inferior and incomplete."
He sat in silence for a while; then a smile began to crease his face. "It's a funny thing," he said at last.-"What I hate most about myself, my alcoholism, was the one thing God used to bring me back to him. Because of it, I know I can't survive without him. Maybe God is calling us alcoholics to teach the saints what it means to be dependent on him and his community on earth."
THE MIDNIGHT CHURCH
by Philip Yancey
Its members consciously lean on each other
I attended a unique "church" recently, one that exists without a denominational headquarters or paid staff and yet attracts millions of committed members. Its name is Alcoholics Anonymous. A friend had invited me during a poignant conversation in which he confessed his problem to me. I'd like you to come with me," he said, "and I think you'll get a glimpse of what the early church must have been like." When I pressed him for details, he simply smiled and said, "Come, You'll see."
At 12 o'clock on a Monday night I entered a ramshackle house that had been used for six other sessions already that day. Acrid clouds of cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in the air. I soon sensed what my friend had meant in comparing A.A. to the early church: a well-known politician and several millionaires were mixing freely with unemployed dropouts and dazed-looking-kids who wore Band Aids to cover needle marks on their arms. The group conveyed obvious warmth, and conversations tended to be intimate and intense: alcoholics can expertly cut through a facade of polite aloofness or feigned strength.
When we went around and introduced ourselves, it went like this: "Hi, I'm Tom, and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Instantly everyone shouted in unison, like a Greek chorus, "Hi, Tom!" Then Tom, and each person there, shared a personal progress report on his battle with addiction. For many, these fellow members are the only prople in the world who treat them with care and respect, and even a ritual can have profound meaning.
Quaint phrases such as "One day at a time" and "You can do it" decorated the dingy walls of the room. My friend mentioned that those archaisms hint at another similarity to the early church. Most of A.A.'s received wisdom is passed down in the form of oral traditions from its founding members of more than 50 years ago. Nobody much uses A.A. 's up-to-date brochures and public relations pieces. Mainly, they rely on an old book called the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which tells the stories of the early members' lives in stilted, almost King Jamesian prose.
A.A. owns no property, has no headquarters and no consultants and investment counselors jetting across the country. Its founders intentionally built in restrictions to kill off anything that might lead to a bureacracy. They believed their program could work only if kept to its most basic, intimate level: the relentless support of one alcoholic giving his or her life to help another. Yet A.A. has proven so effective that 250 other organizations have sprung up in deliberate mimicry of its program.
There are good historical reasons for the parallels to an early church structure: the Christian founders of A.A. included a conscious commitment to God as a mandatory part of their treatment. The night I attended, everyone in the room repeated the 12 principles, which acknowledge total dependence on God for forgiveness and strength. In the testimonial time , it was jarring at first to hear people use religious terms equally in profanity and in expressing their dependence on God - both with utter sincerity. Agnostic members often first substitute the euphemism "Higher Power," but after a while that seems inane and they revert to "God."
My friend often reflects on what he calls "the Christological question" of A.A. A deeply committed Christian, he has put his intellectual faith in abeyance while struggling with simple survival. The A.A. "church," which has none of Christianity's underlying doctrine and centrality of Christ, keeps him alive. The Christian church seems irrelevant, vapid, and gutless to him. He is not alone, for others in his group tell stories of rejection, judgment, "a guilt trip." A local church is the last place they would stand up and declare, "Hi, I'm Tom, I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." No one would holler back, "Hi, Tom."
My friend admits he will find his way back to the church someday, and he has not abandoned the doctrine. In fact, he says A.A. has resolved for him some of the most troubling paradoxes of the faith - the free will determinism conundrum, for example: How can a person accept full responsibility for actions knowing that family background, the economy, and hormonal imbalance all contribute to to that behavior? A.A. is unequivocal: it requires every alcoholic to admit full and complete responsibility for all behavior. Rationalizations are forbidden. Or take the doctrine of original sin: It will take maybe 10 seconds to convince an A.A. member of that doctrine at which so many balk. A.A. members express the truth every time they introduce themselves. No one is ever allowed to say "I was an alcoholic."
For my friend, immersion in A.A. has meant salvation in the most literal sense. He knows that one slip could - no, will - send him to an earthly death. A.A. members have responded to his calls at 4 A.M., finding him in the eerie brightness of all-night restaurants where he has been sitting for hours at a formica table filling a notebook with the sentence, "God help me make it through the next five minutes." Now he is approaching the one-year anniversary of his last drink - an important milestone by A.A. reckoning. And yet he knows that 50 per cent of those who reach that milestone eventually fall away.
Standing inside A.A. and looking with a curious observer's eye at the local church, my friend wonders about the plinth of undergirding doctrine on which his new "church" rests. Meanwhile I stand inside the local church and looking with a curious observer's eye at A.A., wonder instead why A.A. met his needs when the local church did not. He had attended a progressive church that offered a similar climate to that found in A.A. There too, millionaires mixed with dropouts and members offered acceptance, not judgment. Why was it not enough ? I asked him to name the one quality missing in the local church that was somehow provided by A.A. He stared at his cup of coffee for a long time. Then he said softly one word: dependency.
"None of us can make it on our own - isn't that why Jesus came?" he explained. "Yet most church people give off a self-satisfied air of piety or superiority. I don't sense them consciously leaning on God or each other. An alcoholic who goes to church feels inferior and incomplete."
He sat in silence for a while; then a smile began to crease his face. "It's a funny thing," he said at last.-"What I hate most about myself, my alcoholism, was the one thing God used to bring me back to him. Because of it, I know I can't survive without him. Maybe God is calling us alcoholics to teach the saints what it means to be dependent on him and his community on earth."
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Greatest Sin
So what is the greatest sin? Most Christians agree that greatest sin is the first sin, the root of all evil: Pride. That is where sin entered into the world, in fact it defined sin for the first time.
Lucifer the arch-angel, had the desire to take what wasn’t his: the glory of God. In fact, he wanted be god. and so he rebelled against God, was defeated and cast out of heaven. ( Regarding Lucifer God says in Ezekial 28:17, ‘Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth’)
Ever since, every sin has pride at it’s root: the desire to be god. After Lucifer’s downfall, it was pride that caused Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, and from then on has caused mankind to fall into sin. Pride causes one to think highly of himself, to consider himself better than everyone else, as a result of which he begins to think that he should have control of everyone and everything; he wants to be god; god of others, god of himself and god of life itself. And this is where he is ruined, when a man becomes so disillusioned with himself that he can’t even see his true self, there is not much hope he can see anything else. Then ‘it’s all about me’ becomes his purpose in life. I once heard Ravi Zacharias say, ‘do you know what song they’ll be singing in hell? they’ll be singing I did it my way!’ .
It is a scary thought to think about what the Bible says regarding pride. It says: God fights against the proud. (This fact is so important it is mentioned three separate times in scripture: Proverbs 3:34, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5, )Imagine God, at war with you. You don’t stand a chance. The Bible says ‘if God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Romans 8:31). I believe the vice versa also holds true. If the Almighty God turns against you, there isn’t much hope of anything in your favour. You’ll lose every single time. Pride is that serious a sin. (Here are a few examples: ‘The LORD tears down the proud man's house’ Proverbs 15:25, ‘ The LORD preserves the faithful, but the proud he pays back in full’ Psalm 31:23 (NIV))
But the problem is, whether we admit it or not, we all struggle with pride. It is one of the things we inherit in our sinful nature. But through God’s grace and His son, Jesus Christ, we get a new nature. Only then can we even begin to tread the long and hard path that of humility. Yet even as Christians, we tend to fall into pride every now and then, most of the time without realizing it. That is why this sin is more dangerous than any other, we can spot pride in another in an instant, yet fail to see it ourselves. When I needed help in this area of Christian life, God used C S Lewis to teach me. It is some of the best Christian writing on the subject, you will ever read. I’ll let him take over now.
The Great Sin.
From Mere Christianity by C S 
I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?' The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive by its very nature - while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But that is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.
Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But only up to a point. What is it that makes a man with œ10,000 a year anxious to get œ20,000 a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure. œ10,000 will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is Pride - the wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more) the wish for power. For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible misunderstandings:
(1) Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says 'Well done,' are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.' The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says 'Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals - or my artistic conscience - or the traditions of my family - or, in a word, because I'm That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They're nothing to me.' In this way real thorough-going pride may act as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity.
(2) We say in English that a man is 'proud' of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether 'pride' in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by 'proud of'. Very often, in such sentences, the phrase 'is proud of' means 'has a warm-hearted admiration for'. Such an admiration is, of course, very far from being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that the person in question gives himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father, or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, clearly, be a fault; but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
(3) We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity - as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble - delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off - getting rid of the false self, with all its 'Look at me' and 'Aren't I a good boy?' and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
(4) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
(The excerpt from CS Lewis’ writing was taken from http://www.btinternet.com/~a.ghinn/greatsin.htm)
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