The Great Sin

Having spent the last few weeks in Haiti, I've had more time than normal to be still and meditate on God's Word as well as to devour a list of reading material that would have normally taken me a month to finish.

Reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity was a breath of fresh air. Not only does he do a great job talking through the basic tenants of the Christian faith as if he himself were the greatest skeptic, he unleashes a fresh perspective on so many topics that have in recent years eluded the Christian Church.

One such topic that caught my attention was of "the great sin".

"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 ever imagine they are guilty themselves". - C.S Lewis

It is a vice that perhaps none of us would accuse ourselves of, while at the same time would show the slightest mercy when we see it in others. It is the vice of pride. It is vice of Satan himself. And it is crippling the American Church.

It is through pride that Satan fell from beloved angel to despised among all generations and cursed to the ends of the earth. It is pride that leads us to every other vice. In essence, it is pride, the self-serving part of man that continues to feed himself and look out solely for his own interest that makes room for sin.

The more pride we have in ourselves, the more we despise it in others.

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go around; 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." -C.S. Lewis

There is nothing pride loves more than power.

How is it then that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear themselves to be very religious?

[The following is an excerpt from Mere Christianity]

"I am afraid it means they are worshiping and imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of 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 supposed 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...

...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 pride. The devil laughs."

It appears that many of us, as Christians, have replaced one vice for an even greater one. The danger is that, in the name of self-help and "living our best life now", we've elevated ourselves to a height at which the only possibility of viewing others is "downward". Perhaps we no longer care what people think of us because they are so far beneath us. We are in danger.

The moment we think that certain "sins" are beneath us, we have foolishly elevated our standing. The devil laughs, for he has cured a small fault by replacing it with an even bigger one.