Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Pride and Pepto-Bismol

This Sunday, we will begin a new sermon series on the book of Obadiah. We will also be finishing our sermon series on Obadiah this Sunday. Obadiah is the shortest book in the Old Testament, with only 21 verses. But even though it’s short enough to cover in one sermon, Obadiah deals with a big issue: sinful pride.

I attempted to begin-and-end this sermon series several weeks ago. However, I woke up that Sunday morning with a nasty stomach flu. Instead of preaching a sermon on pride and humility, I was humbled with symptoms I won’t describe here. You can almost taste the irony—or is that Pepto-Bismol?

The truth is that we all need to learn a lesson about pride. And then learn it again…and again…and again! C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, calls pride the “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, except Christians, ever imagine they are guilty of themselves.” But even as Christians, we often find that sin is a stealthy and slippery sin, infesting our attitudes and actions in ways we aren’t always fully aware of!

S. Lewis describes pride as “the Great Sin,” “the essential vice,” and “the utmost evil” that lies behind all other sins. I would argue that the essence of human sin is not pride but unbelief—as Paul explains in Romans 1, by our unrighteousness we suppress the truth about God. He is good and glorious and worthy of worship, but we doubt this truth and refuse to honor him. Yet pride follows hard on the heels of unbelief, and it’s not hard to see why. For lowly creatures of dust to rebel against our Creator is the ultimate expression of arrogance!

Since pride is built on unbelief, it’s no surprise that pride is a deceiver. We see that in Romans 1 as well. We claim to be wise, but end up becoming fools. We try to set ourselves up as gods, but end up worshipping the lesser creatures that we were meant to rule over.

Obadiah is a case study in the illusions of pride, carried out on an international scale. “The pride of your heart has deceived you,” Obadiah tells the nation of Edom. In their pride, they believe they are invincible. They believe they are not responsible for their neighbors. They believe there is no one who will hold them accountable for their actions.

How often do we find ourselves believing the same lies! The book of
Obadiah helps diagnose this disease in us. Thankfully, Obadiah also points us to the cure—as we’ll see this Sunday morning.

Unless I end up with a stomach disease again…