I need you to be honest! Do you know someone who is arrogant? Are you arrogant? All of us can agree that none of us like arrogance, but if we’re being honest, I bet everyone of us has little pockets of arrogance. Today, we're going to deal with those.
Before we discuss what arrogance is there is a story in Luke 18:9-14.
This is what it says:
“Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: Two men went to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: I thank you, God, that I am not like other people- cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week and I give you a tenth of my income. But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner. I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
What is arrogance?
If we are going to understand arrogance, we must first understand pride. It has been said that Pride is the root of all other sins, I think that is true. Pride thinks that you’ve done something great by yourself. The reason pride is such a problem is because, the truth is that you haven’t done anything great by yourself. A very good, gracious, God allowed you to do anything good that you have accomplished and on top of that, no matter what you have achieved, was probably accomplished with the help of a lot of other people. Pride skews everything and says you’re the reason you’ve achieved what you have.
Arrogance is even worse than pride. Arrogance grows out of pride and causes you to believe that you’re better than other people. My question for you is, are there those pockets or areas of your life, where you are doing a good job and because of that you look down at other people who aren’t doing as good of a job in that particular area.
There are a few areas where Christians are commonly and unknowingly, arrogant. Where are these pockets? We are going to identify them and I am just going to let you know that I am not going to hold back. We are going to do a deep dive here and you might get offended.
Imagine a dentist. They drill down on the cavity to get all of the bad stuff out and that is what we need to do too. We don’t want to allow the bad stuff to stay and cause decay in our lives or walk with Christ. We want to get all of the bad stuff out.
Here are a few things that I have witnessed people being arrogant in.
1.) Spiritual Knowledge: Quickly and automatically assuming others are wrong if they disagree with you.
You may be arrogant if you quickly and automatically assume others are wrong if they disagree with you. Right now, I am talking specifically about if they disagree with you about the things of God. Here is the tension in this…realistically you might be right and they might be wrong. Arrogance comes into play when you won’t even listen to what they are saying. As Christians, we should be open minded.
What does it mean to be open minded? A good definition of being open minded is that we are able to entertain ideas without accepting them. As Christians, if someone says that we have a misunderstanding of the Bible, we should at least hear what they have to say. They may be wrong, but if we automatically dismiss them as being wrong or thinking what they have to say is irrelevant then that is probably coming from a place of arrogance.
2.) Our Good Habits: Thinking your spiritual habits (Bible reading, prayer structure, fasting) are superior or intentionally or unintentionally demanding God to “reward” you for your discipline.
The longer that you follow Christ, the better you will get at being spiritually disciplined. You will get better at praying, studying the Bible, giving generously, those kinds of things and you start looking down on people who may not be as spiritually mature or as disciplined as you are.
The second half of that is that you become really disciplined in doing what is right and you start to feel like you have God in your pocket. You may start to feel like God owes you something. You might find yourself thinking or saying things like, “Lord do you see me doing these things? Why are you not coming through for me on these other things? That is a form of arrogance.
By the way Christians, we don’t do anything for God so that He will reward us. There are incredible rewards in following Jesus now and in the life to come, but that isn’t why we obey God. We obey God, because we see what He has already done for us. We see how He saved us from hell. We see how He restored us to a right relationship with HIm. We see how He sacrificed Himself for us. He transforms our heart and through that we want to do right, not so that God will love us, but because we see how much God already loves us.
3.) How we Interpret the Bible: Arrogance towards God is attempting to rewrite or re-explain the Bible to make it say what we want it to say.
This is a really common form of arrogance in today’s society.
An example would be where for 2000 years Christian scholars have generally agreed that this is what a specific verse means, but last week you saw a Tik Tok where someone claims to have found a new definition of this verse, a new interpretation. Because of that, you decide that you like the new interpretation more than what the scholars say and so you adopt that as your belief.
I want to give you two important theological words to help you understand the importance of how we study the Bible.
The first is the word Exegesis. Exegesis is good. When we study the Bible we want to exegete Think of an excavator. It has a big claw and digs into the ground. When we approach the Bible we want to excavate what is in the Bible and pull it out. We want to discover what it was the original author is trying to say to the original audience. This is the correct, the intellectually honest way, to read the Bible.
What a lot of people want to do though, is to Eisegete. This brings us to the second word which is Eisegesis. This is when we take our already preconceived ideas: maybe our bias’, how we grew up, things from our culture today, maybe something we saw in a movie recently and we start reading that into the Bible. So in this case, instead of exegeting we are exegeting. Instead of pulling out what the Bible means, we are putting into it what we want it to say. This is a form of spiritual arrogance.
4.) Moral Superiority: Judging others lifestyles or struggles while overlooking their own flaws.
5.) Service: Feeling like others “need” you or your efforts to experience Jesus, rather than remembering that God’s work is already underway, and you are a participant, not the hero.
6.) Suffering: Thinking their trials are more significant or spiritual than those of others.
7.) Our Churches: Believing your denomination, church, or group is superior to others.
8.) Success: Believing that you are where you are in life, because of your own doing; forgetting the help you’ve received from God and others.
Now that we have talked about what arrogance is and what it looks like, it is also important to understand how arrogance hurts God, others, and ourselves.
1.) Arrogance steals Glory from God.
In Proverbs 8:13 the Bible says, “All who fear the Lord will hate evil. Therefore, I hate pride and arrogance, corruption and perverse speech.” God hates arrogance, because we are taking credit for something God has done. You may be asking yourself, well isn’t God love. Yes, He is love, but there are also things that He hates and arrogance is one of them.
When we give into arrogance, we make a big deal about ourselves and a small deal about God. It is impossible to make a big deal about God and a big deal about your achievements at the same time. You have to choose one. Choose God.
2.) Arrogance belittles others.
Arrogance at its core is saying that the blessings, mercy, and compassion that you have received doesn’t have to be shown to others. It is saying that God has blessed you for you and that you don’t have to be a blessing to others.
Jesus is constantly warning about this. My favorite warning about this is from Matthew 18:32-33 This is known as, “The Ungrateful Servant.” This man was forgiven a tremendous amount, but he refused to forgive even a small amount to other people. Here is what Jesus said,
“Then the master called the servant in. You wicked servant, He said. I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?
When we are arrogant towards others it belittles them by saying I know that I received all of these things from God, but I don’t have to pass them on to you. If you think back to the first story of the tax collector, the tax collector left that time of prayer thinking, “Wow what a sinner!” The tax collector left thinking, “Wow what a savior!” This is the difference between arrogance and humility.
3.) Arrogance crushes you in the long term.
Here is why this is the case. Jesus gave us rules, He gave us commandments. These commandments are to protect us. They are to help us to have life abundantly. When I was 12 I thought that the rules were meant to take away fun, but as I got older I realized that there is a lot of wisdom there.
You’re not really living until you understand how God designed us to live. Someone asked Jesus what is the greatest commandment. Jesus told them to love God with all that you have. Nobody asked Jesus the second one, but He threw it in anyways. He said that the first is like the second and it is to love your neighbor as yourself. He goes on to say that all of the law is fulfilled in these two commandments.
Arrogance says the greatest commandment is neither of these two things. Arrogance says that the greatest commandment is to love yourself. You won’t find that anywhere in the Bible. I really want to speak to the new “self love” movement. We’re seeing this everyone and as a pastor I have to tell you that it is a trap. It’s dangerous. The reason everyone is talking about self love is because everyone hates themselves right now. The self love movement says if we just love ourselves more than we will start to like ourselves and I am here to tell you that it is a dangerous thought process and is also the reason why we are here in the first place.
If you want to be comfortable in your own skin and with your own thoughts, if you want to appreciate how God made you don’t love yourself more, instead love God with all that you have and love others. If you do this, then in time you will find yourself becoming more and more comfortable with who God made you.
Arrogance puts you on a hamster wheel of going from arrogance to shame. Why? Because when things are going well you look out and think about how much better you are doing than others, but eventually your luck will run out and things will begin going badly and you will realize that you are not as successful as you thought you were, which will lead you to shame. You will be stuck in this endless cycle, because of your arrogance. Please don’t spend the rest of your life in this cycle.
We can’t talk about what arrogance is and the effects it has without discussing what we need to do about it. Let’s war against our arrogance! Here are three ways to do that.
1.) Repent from your current arrogance and commit to walk in humility, starting today. Draw a line in the sand and cross it. Ask God for help.
2.) Ask God to search your heart and bring any blind spots into the light.
I heard someone say this: He’s gentle in His correction, but firm in shaping us to look more like Jesus. Put more simply, everyone can come to Jesus. It doesn’t matter what your past is, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, it doesn’t even matter what you are currently struggling with. You can still come to Jesus and I am so thankful for that.
Listen up though, Jesus loves you enough that He will never leave you where He found you. He will remove the things in you that do not belong. That isn’t easy. It is usually very difficult. It may be painful at the moment, but it brings joy.
3.) Choose to be grateful and generous, not entitled and controlling of God or others. We step out of our arrogance and step into humility in every area of our lives.
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