james on Arrogance

All: Knowing God, we often believe our way is the best way. In our arrogance, we ignore your will and your ways. We confess our dependence on knowledge and our independence from you. Thank you that yo...

All-knowing God, we often believe our way is the best way. In our arrogance, we ignore your will and your ways. We confess our dependence on knowledge and our independence from you. Thank you that you...

In a statement created by Christian leaders across the world, the Lausanne Willowbank Report calls for church leaders to return to the humility and servanthood that Jesus manifested in His earthly min...

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

A person who suffers bitterly when slighted or insulted should recognize from this that he still harbors the ancient serpent in his breast. If he quietly endures the insult or responds with great humi...

Of all the values at our disposal, humility seems to be the least attractive. You don’t see many television ads or billboards extolling the virtues of humility, do you?

The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us in our daily conduct.

In the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day, humility was a despised trait. They viewed it as a sign of weakness. And our culture today is no different from that world of two thousand years ago. Maybe it’s...

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

Heavenly Father, we confess that in our pursuit of good, we often miss opportunities to bring you honor and glory. We try to address our shortcomings by compensating for them, rather than by orienting...

Almighty God, you are king of everything. You are Lord of our lives. You control the stars in heavens. And you humbled yourself to be a servant to us. In response to this, we continue to reign as king...

Researchers at the University of London concluded that “a substantial majority of individuals believe themselves to be morally superior to the average person” and that this illusion of ours is “unique...

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”

In the context of justice, I think what Christians need to confess about their pride isn’t so much about taking credit away from God but from the people we help. One version of this is sometimes refer...

The character trait of humility is the second-most frequently taught trait in the New Testament, second only to love.

A truly gospel-humble person is not a self-hating person or a self-loving person, but a gospel-humble person. The truly gospel-humble person is a self-forgetful person whose ego is just like his or he...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed ...

In her aptly title book, Being Wrong , Kathleen Schulz describes just how difficult it is to be wrong: A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the ti...

At a dinner party, [The Scottish playwright George Bernard] Shaw sat next to a young man who proved to be a bore of historic proportions. After suffering through a seemingly interminable monologue, Sh...

Lord God, forgive us for how we have let our faith atrophy. We grow complacent, stagnant, and we fail to strive to follow you. Give us passion, give us courage, and give us motivation to excel for you...

Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.

Dear Heavenly Father, we lower our heads before you and we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are yours. Sometimes we carry on our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed m...

O God, who is rich in mercy, We come before you humbled and in need of your grace. Many of us have been in the church for so long that we have forgotten how each day your mercies are new, your grace ...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

In their book Friend and Foe, social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer cite a study by Emory University scientist Frans de Waal regarding comparison. De Waal trained capuchin monkeys ...

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

The Golden Result is a corollary to the Golden Rule, which calls us to do to others as we would have them do to us. The Golden Result says that people will usually treat us as we treat them. If we bla...

In the Christian subculture, there is an unspoken standard, a notorious goal to “win the contest.” It’s there, the contest. We don’t say it out loud, because it sounds ludicrous spoken into the open a...