Check your pride at the door

Last week I mentioned the vital importance of covenant community for growth to Christian maturity. One of the greatest hindrances to covenant community is pride, an overestimation of, and preoccupation with, the self. Knowledge puffs up and divides the church, but love edifies. So if we are to be knit together this morning by means of the Word, sacrament, and prayer, you must check your pride at the door. That’s actually the only way properly to heed the call to worship. The call to worship is a call to “bow down” and “kneel before the Lord our Maker” (Ps. 95:6). That is in fact the meaning of one of the NT words for worship, proskuneo. It means to prostrate yourself before God. And we do this every week in our confession of sin. But take heed because your heart and mind can remain puffed up with pride, even when you drop to your knees. The psalmist goes on to tell us why we are to bow and kneel in our worship, it’s because, “He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of his hand.” Pride is banished by the call to worship because God ALONE is God and you are not. You come before him as a people belonging to him; a people held in his hand. You are a dependent people; people dependent upon the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. The heart of pride, however, thinks: “I’ve got it pretty well together;” or, “I’m not like so and so, I don’t struggle that.” That sort of thinking is what goes before a fall. Which helps us to see that one way or another we will be on our knees. We can start there and be lifted up by God in his grace, or we can end up there, humbled by God in his discipline. So as you contemplate kneeling before God in confession of your sins, be sure that this posture is indicative of your heart. For, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble (Prov. 3:34).” And this grace is what we need to live together in peace.