Pride–Your Personal Assassin

An assassin takes any advantage that affords itself and uses all kinds of devices in order to take down the target.  These trained agents masterfully disguise and deceive to accomplish a mission.

Satan himself is the master assassin and instructor in pride. Our flesh latches tightly to that innate selfish sinful tendency.  Just as the devil, the original assassin, can appear in different forms (2 Corinthians 11:14), so pride, our personal assassin appears in many different ways with the same purpose in mind–to kill. Pride destroys relationships. God rehearses instructions to us about the pitfalls of pride and the view we are to have toward it. 

David approached the battle with the Philistine in I Samuel 17, with humility.  Just because you’re a man after God’s own heart doesn’t mean you don’t fight and do what needs to be done or say what needs to be said.  When we engage motivated by pride, others are hurt, and so are we.  At the root of destruction, pride is found.  Certainly, since God is the one who “teaches our hands to war and our fingers to fight,” He has equipped us with the key to carry out our duties including the use of force, in humility.  The only thing stronger than the assassin of pride is humility.  We have the source of humility within us if we know Christ.  He is the Master of Humility.

Phillippians 2:1-8 “If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” When you humble yourself it will be seen.  We train for many things in our profession, let’s determine to be instructed in the humility of Christ, realizing we are just dust held together by God’s hand.  We need not die on a physical cross, but we can die daily to our own will and let Christ be seen in our lives.