Truths to Combat the Religious Spirit of Pride as it Relates to Salvation:
If anyone knows me, they know that I love to have a good conversation with others who share similar interests. Over the weekend, I was blessed to hang with some of my sisters in Christ. We attended a conference and went to lunch afterward. We sparked up a conversation about God’s grace which put me in the mind of some of the below tenants of the gospel that we must know if we are to be firmly rooted in Jesus Christ.
The nature of man-kind outside of Christ is sin:
In the beginning, God made the different creatures in creation with the command that every living thing was to produce after its own kind. That means that birds produce birds, cats produce cats, fish produce fish, and man-kind produces man-kind. We cannot deviate from the nature of our own kind.
However, because of the sin of Adam; the nature of man-kind has been subjected to sin. Thus, those born in the blood-line of Adam must die. Die to what? We are required to die to our sinful nature from the bloodline of Adam, and take on a new nature in Christ Jesus, who is called the last Adam.
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Romans 6:11
This reckoning is a mindset or way of thinking. It is no longer depending on the old way of doing things which is the natural sinful way, but on Jesus Christ whom we have been awakened unto. Again, coinciding with the sinful nature of man is the carnal mind which the Bible says is not subject to the laws of God neither can it be (Romans 8:7 ).
Other scriptures speak of the wickedness of the heart of man:
For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them. – Matthew 15:19-20
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? – Jeremiah 17:9
We cannot escape the above sin nature outside of Christ. We cannot wholly according to the standard of God do good works outside of Christ. All of this is done in Christ. We renew our minds in Christ by the washing of the water of God’s word (Ephesians 5:26).
The spirit of religion seeks to eliminate the need for Christ:
The only way to avoid fulfilling the works of the flesh is for us to walk in the Spirit of Christ, also known as the Holy Spirit. This is a daily process. It’s a process of consistent surrender to Christ and his word. We have to daily die to old ways of thinking to live unto Christ and to manifest the life of Christ to others. We do this again by renewing our minds with the Word of God in music, preaching, teaching, personal reading and study of God’s word.
For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. – 2 Corinthians 4:11
So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. – Galatians 5:16
However, the spirit of religion which is rooted in pride and self-righteousness does not acknowledge Christ in that way. The spirit of religion seeks to eliminate the need for Christ. This is what the Pharisees and Sadducees did when Jesus walked the earth with them. They accused Jesus and his authority because they felt that their good works made them more qualified. They felt that they did not need Christ.
We know that we are being tempted to walk in a spirit of religion when we focus more on our works and our track record than Jesus Christ and his word.
This spirit of religion often operates in a spirit of pride and self-righteousness
It is easy to walk in pride after we have been saved for a while. We can easily forget that our righteousness is not of ourselves, but of Christ. At that point, we can begin to dishonor God’s grace.
We can dishonor God’s grace by rejecting it as our keeping power as if we keep ourselves from sin or we can choose to dishonor God’s grace by practicing sin expecting God to simply turn a blind eye toward our sin.
As Christians, we do have to make a choice to follow and obey God, but the opportunity to do so along with the empowerment to do so does not come aside from Jesus Christ.
God’s word says, “But as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name. – John 1:12
Jesus extends his grace to us so that we can believe in him. Once, we believe he empowers us to become his sons. This son-ship is a position from which we see ourselves as his. We no longer walk in fear of having to be perfect or of making honest mistakes, but we trust God’s word when it says if we sin we have an advocate with the father and he is faithful and just to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 2:1). We trust that God is for us and we submit our wills to him in obedience knowing that he will empower us to do what we naturally cannot do.
This follows the same pattern that Ephesians speaks of when it says that salvation is through faith by grace so that no one would be able to boast. Because of this, there should be no boasting regarding salvation outside of giving glory to God. This salvation thing is through no goodness of our own. If we look at the Jews in the old testament, they got this part wrong after a while too. Many Jewish people thought that God chose them because they were somehow better than others, but the Bible clearly states that God chose Israel because they were small and needed to depend on him. In doing so, God would use the Jews to reveal himself to all man-kind. He also chose them because he loved them.
This is much like how God saved us because he loves us. You know John 3:16. Whenever we forget that we are saved because of God’s goodness and grace; God is faithful enough to remind us by allowing circumstances that humble us and bring us to dependence on Christ. God uses everything to work together for our good.
We as believers are faced with the challenge of holding the right perspective and heart posture regarding this: The correct heart posture, I believe, would be the posture of thankfulness and humility knowing that without Jesus Christ we are nothing. To God be the glory!
[1] For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15:22
[1] Because the mind of the flesh is hostile to God: It does not submit to God’s Law, nor can it do so. – Romans 8:7
[1] The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” – Romans 8:15
[1] The Lord did not love you and choose you because you were greater in number than any of the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed (bought) you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. – Deuteronomy 7:7-8
Leave a Reply