Good Saul, Bad Saul - Part 3 of 3

We are at our worst when we fail to acknowledge God in our successes and when we miss the opportunity to learn from our failures.

Both of these mistakes led to King Saul’s downfall. After a great start in crediting God for his early success, Saul started “drinking his own Kool Aid” and thumping his own chest. He stopped giving credit to God whom placed him in his position. He also kept repeating his mistakes after plenty of opportunities to learn and repent from his failures. Pride was the culprit in both cases.

Pride takes our eyes off of God and focuses them back on ourselves like it did with Saul. Pride creates multiple forms of blindness:

Pride is something that is easy to see in others but is difficult to see in ourselves. If anyone is asked to come up with a mental picture of pride, they would never come up with an image of themselves. It would always be of someone else. This certainly makes pride a difficult sin to deal with because it often lives in us undetected like an invisible poisonous gas in the air.

“Pride is the carbon monoxide of sin. It silently and slowly kills you without you even knowing it.” Tim Keller

Pride makes us blind to our own issues and causes us to blame others when things go wrong. There are several examples of Saul doing this in 1 Samuel. He blamed others for his own disobedience. This disobedience led to losing God’s favor and ultimately his life and monarchy. His blindness made him bitter and paranoid since he wasn’t able to see his own issues and fully understand why he had lost God’s favor.

Pride inhibits our ability to see a clear path forward for growth and restoration. It’s hard to fight an enemy that we can’t see. It’s only when we take our eyes off of ourselves and focus them on Go that we are able to truly repent of our sins. True repentance is not just an acknowledgement of our sin, but a desire to “turn from” sin and go in a different direction.

We can blindly place ourselves in opposition to God with our pride. He hates pride and tells us this in the Bible in 22 different places.

1 Peter 5:5 …for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

We clearly don’t want to place ourselves in opposition to God nor do we want to forgo our opportunity to receive the grace that he gives to the humble. We are wise when we hate what God hates.

Proverbs 8:13 The fear of the Lord is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way…

Ask God this week to expose any blind spots in your life and help you see where pride may be hiding.

Stay humble,

Big E

Matt. 5:6