What worries you most about your ideological friends?

What worries you most about your ideological friends? The same thing that worries me most about me.

We are overrun by the cowardice of paper prophets. These thundering heroes build a following and a reputation by denouncing with great vigor and panache the errors of those who are not their audience. They are preaching against Ninevah in Jerusalem, pronouncing woe against Jerusalem in Cleveland. When we do this we get credit, an unearned reputation for courage when all we are really doing is tickling ears.

Now I have friends, plenty of them, at varying distances from my ideological sweet spot. And I have plenty of concerns over them, usually their distance from my ideological sweet spot. But what really concerns me is the weaknesses evident among those who are just like me, who believe what I believe.

Of course all sin, sooner or later, traces its origins back to the father of sins the devil, and the mother of sin in him, pride. Check the tag on any given sin and it is apt to declare, “Brought to you by pride.” Pride, however, has numerous nuances, and we are not safe if we avoid their kind of pride, while embracing our own.

We are sinful enough, in fact, that we can be proud of our humility, parading it around so that others will think well of us. We boast that we are the ones good enough to believe in total depravity. We can take our shame and turn it into pride, turning our scarlet A into an adornment. People like me, all along the way, we reject the worldliness of a gaudy pride, while nurturing the worldliness of a smug pride. We look down our noses at the world, our brothers and sisters in other wings of the evangelical church, the respectable people in our own wing of the evangelical church, all for looking down their noses at us. We are Smug-ol, alone in our dark cave, caressing our precious ring of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

It is smugness that worries me, that quiet, unassuming assumption that I am not only better than other men, but disdainful of them, beyond them, in possession of the one truth to unite them all.

The solution, of course, is not to deny the power of the truth we have learned. Insofar as our convictions flow out of the Bible, they are indeed eternally precious. Instead the solution, as is so often the case, is gratitude and humility. God did not reveal His truth to us so that we could stroke it in some dark cave. He gave it to us that we might let His light shine before men, and that we might give thanks to the praise of His glory.

Whether one, like the world, is proud of one’s sin, or if one, like me, is proud of one’s right thinking and right doing, one is still caught in the web of pride. What we must cast into the fires is not the righteousness but the pride. What we must do is repent and believe the gospel, giving thanks. People like me need to learn this wisdom from The prophet, that blessed are the poor in spirit, for ours is His kingdom.