Do you not find that pride is a bit of a dirty word? It’s a word that shifts the focus. We can argue about what’s right and wrong about what we do on the outside, but mention pride and you’re suddenly shining a torch into the dark, otherwise unexamined, cavities of my inner motivations.

And I wonder whether, in this day of Twitter profiles, Facebook statuses and blog posts, there’s a sense in which pride has also become legitimised, dressed up as standard social media behaviour.

As I think Carl Trueman said, with social media everything becomes very conscious. Everything is portrayal and image management. We’re all our own PR consultants.

And as is always the case, because this is the norm, I can use it as an excuse. It becomes a means of justifying my own unchecked behaviour. I tell myself, “well, I’m just doing what everyone else is doing”.

But the Christian worldview puts pride back on the table. And isn’t it a healthy addition? Don’t we need to have a category of pride? Don’t we want pride to be something we can address and call people up on?

Obviously here we come back to the human heart. It runs deep. And so I can’t presume to know for sure your particular motives, just because of what I’ve seen of your behaviour. And anyway, whoever said our motives were so black and white? In every good intention there is likely to be the not-so-silver-linings of pride, whether it is the rearing head of ‘didn’t-I-do-well-there’, or the subtle desperation of ‘please-like-me!’.

I was challenged on this as I read these powerful words of Richard Hooker, below. Around four hundred years old but piercing to the core. Let’s bring pride back to the table. There’s a wrong way of thinking about ourselves, a faulty estimation, “a vain opinion”:

Pride, is a vice which cleaves so fast onto the hearts of people, that if we were to strip ourselves of all faults one by one, we should undoubtedly find it the very last and hardest to put off.

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We must go further … and enter somewhat deeper, before we can come to the closet wherein this poison lies. There is in the heart of every proud person, first, an error of understanding, a vain opinion whereby they think their own excellency, and by reason thereof their worthiness of estimation, regard, and honour, to be greater than in truth it is.

This makes them in all their affections accordingly to raise up themselves; and by their inward affections their outward acts are fashioned. Which if you list to have exemplified you may, either by calling to mind things spoken of them whom God himself has in Scripture especially noted with this fault; or by presenting to your secret cogitations that which you daily behold in the odious lives and manners of high-minded people.

…

Give me the hearts of all people humbled; and what is there that can overthrow or disturb the peace of the world? Wherein many things are caused of much evil; but pride of all.

– Richard Hooker, Sermon on Pride, from Habakkuk 2

And actually the Bible shows us that pride flows from missing God out of the picture. When you lose sight of the God revealed in the Scriptures (as opposed to any little god we make in our image), then sure enough everything else gets distorted. We raise ourselves up, as Hooker puts it. But when we open up God’s word, we get our hearts examined and we get our pride exposed.

But there’s a surprise too. As pride is blown out of the water, the Christian faith also shows us the humble dignity that has been bestowed upon me and you, by our Creator and Saviour. What could be more ugly than having an overinflated view of ourselves, in front of the God of the Universe. But what could be more beautiful than finding that this God has yet lavished upon us his love and made us his children.

Don’t just believe your own PR. It’s much better than that. But perhaps not in the way we expected.

Feeling discouraged, all too aware of your failings? Feeling puffed up, deceived by your own public displays of spirituality? Ah, take a deep breath and rejoice in the gospel of our Lord Jesus. A gem from the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker…

Although in ourselves we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the person who in themselves is impious, full of iniquity, full of sin, them being found in Christ through faith, and having their sin in hatred through repentance, them God beholds with a gracious eye, putting away their sin by not imputing it, taking quite away the punishment due thereunto, by pardoning it, and accepting them in Jesus Christ as perfectly righteous, as if they had fulfilled all that is commanded them in the law: shall I say more perfectly righteous than if they had fulfilled the whole law?

I must take heed what I say; but the Apostle says, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” [2 Cor 5:21]. Such we are in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God himself.

Let it be counted folly, or frenzy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this: that people have sinned and God has suffered; that God has made himself the sin of people, and that people are made the righteousness of God.

Richard Hooker, Learned Discourse of Justification (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/hooker/just.iii.html)