When Pride Dies

You Are at a Funeral

Maybe you didn't know that's where you were. Maybe you thought you were just having a bad theological week. But look around at what is lying in the coffin. It has your face on it, but it isn't you. It is the you who had a line in the testimony that began and then I decided. It is the you who — very quietly, very politely, in language that never quite admitted itself — believed that the difference between yourself and your unbelieving cousin was that you had made a better choice at some crucial moment.

That you is dead. You are here to mourn it. Don't pretend you aren't sad. The flesh does not go gently. It goes kicking.

And what is hardest is that nobody else at the funeral seems to understand how complicated the grief is. Because from the outside it looks like good news — praise God, he's finally grasping grace! — and from the inside it feels like a bereavement. An identity you carried your whole life has just been lowered into the ground. There is supposed to be some way to mourn this. There isn't a ritual. There isn't a casserole. There is just you, standing in the parking lot of your own theological funeral, trying to figure out who to be now.

Why Pride Fights So Hard

Because pride is not, at its root, the belief that you are better than other people. Pride is the belief that you are the author of yourself. That your life is a book you have been writing. That the chapter in which you met God was a chapter you picked up the pen and wrote. Pride does not necessarily want to be worshiped. Pride wants to be the one doing the writing. And the terror of grace is that it quietly removes the pen from your hand and reveals an older manuscript in someone else's handwriting in which every chapter you thought you wrote was already there in dialogue you thought you spoke and action you thought you chose.

When that manuscript is revealed, pride does not simply retreat. It convulses. It invents last-minute arguments. It says but I still had to respond. It says but God didn't force me. It says surely I contributed SOMETHING. Each of these is pride feeling for the pen in a hand that no longer holds one. This is why prevenient grace and faith-as-cooperation are such stubborn doctrines: they are the last foxholes pride retreats to when the open field is gone. They let pride feel like it is at least the one who said yes.

But Jesus said it plain. "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Not without me you can do very little. Not without me your contribution would be small. Nothing. The Greek is ouden — zero, zilch, the empty set. That is where pride must finally be buried: in the plot marked Nothing.

The Surgery Is Mercy

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

GALATIANS 2:20

Read that as what it actually is: a death announcement. Paul is telling you that the self who is reading this sentence is, strictly speaking, dead. It was crucified. It is past tense. It is not resuming operations. The life now in the body is another kind of life altogether — not the life of the old Paul, running down Damascus Road with a fistful of warrants, but the life of Christ in Paul, which is a life Paul did not start and cannot stop.

You have just joined that company. You are not the first. The room of people who have been through what you are going through tonight is very large. It includes Augustine, who sat in a garden weeping because he could not will himself to chastity and then could, because grace willed it through him. It includes Luther, who trembled in the confession booth while the old self refused to die and then did. It includes Spurgeon, who walked out of a snowstorm chapel at fifteen knowing he had not chosen Christ so much as been chosen, and wept the rest of his life for joy. It includes John Bunyan, who wrote Grace Abounding as the postmortem of exactly this funeral. You are in their company. They did not get over it. They got more of it. And every one of them called it the happiest death they ever died.

What Rises on the Other Side

Here is the strange thing about this funeral. You do not go home afterward to an empty house. When you step out of the cemetery of the hero-self, waiting for you is a different self — one you never met before, because you could not meet him while the hero was still alive. This self is lighter. He does not have to protect anything. He does not have to defend his testimony. He does not have to explain himself. He does not have to be impressive. He has been relieved of the entire project of being his own savior, and his shoulders — for the first time in his life — feel like shoulders and not load-bearing beams.

This self has a name in Scripture. It is called the child. And Jesus said the kingdom belongs to him. "Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it" (Mark 10:15). A child does not pretend to have authored his own arrival in his mother's arms. A child does not give speeches about how his adoption was at least partly his own idea. A child simply is where he has been placed — in arms, in a house, in a name. He does nothing but belong. And belonging is enough.

You are about to find out what it feels like to belong instead of achieve. You are about to discover that the ache in your chest has been resolved not by a better argument but by an older love. You are about to be told — not in a voice from the sky, but in the quiet authority of Scripture read with new eyes — that you were chosen before you were broken, loved before you were born, held before you had hands to hold anything. And you will have nothing to say back, because there is nothing to say. There is only the small, unbelievable relief of a coat being taken off your shoulders that you didn't know you had been wearing your whole life.

What to Say Over the Grave

Stand at the graveside one more minute. Look at the casket. The lid is closing. The hero-you is being committed to the earth. Say goodbye to him. He served you as well as he could, and he could not save you, but he tried, and his trying was a kind of love even if it was the wrong kind.

Then speak four words over him. They come from the prophet Jeremiah, and they are the only right eulogy for a dead hero-self: Not in my wisdom. Not in my might. Not in my riches. In Him.

"Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight."

JEREMIAH 9:23-24

That is the eulogy. The hero-self cannot be buried in the plot marked My Achievement. He must be buried in the plot marked His Kindness. And over the grave, engraved in stone that will last longer than the stars, the epitaph: This one was loved. This one was chosen. This one was never the author. And this one, finally, knew it.

Turn around. Walk home. The sun is going down. You have been crying, and that is allowed. You are going to wake up tomorrow with a kind of quiet you have not known before. Pride took a long time to die. The grace that killed it will take forever to finish loving you. He is not going to stop.