Before Destruction

Isaiah 57:14-15

October 13, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So our quest for “A Thousand Thank Yous” goes on. If you haven’t yet stopped by the wall in the foyer yet, here are a few of the things people shared last week: “Thankful for my sobriety, changing my life than my family’s life.” “Thankful for laughter.” “Thank you for my village. I could not raise [my daughter] by myself.” And there are lots more out there; you should stop by and read some. I hope it has been enjoyable and maybe even a bit thought-provoking as you looked for ways to express gratitude this past week. Maybe you even did more than you were asked to do and now you can’t stop yourself from giving thanks. That’s a great problem to have! But this morning we’re going to have a different focus, suggested by the Old Testament prophet Isaiah in this morning’s passage. Isaiah says, “Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people” (57:14). Obstacles are inevitable in anything in life, but you might not think of that in terms of practicing gratitude. Nevertheless there are many obstacles that might get in the way of our thankfulness, but there is one in particular we really need to get out of the way if we’re going to become the grateful people God wants us to be.

But first, let me remind you that like all of the prophets, Isaiah was writing to people in a particular time and place. Sometimes we try to read him and the other prophets as if they were writing to us in twenty-first century America. They were not. That doesn’t mean their writings aren’t useful to us; they are. It’s just that we can’t really understand what they are saying if we don’t understand as best we can the reason they wrote these words in the first place. That’s true of all of Scripture, for that matter. We don’t live in that world, a world where exile from their homeland was part of everyday life. They had been conquered militarily and were pretty down spiritually. But Isaiah wasn’t even writing to the people in exile. He was looking forward toward those who would return to their land, which when he wrote this was still a long way off. None of it probably made much sense until they began to return to the promised land. There was undoubtedly a lot of excitement about going back to a place where most of them had never lived, but when they got there, life was a lot more difficult than they thought it would be. It was’t like they came back to their land and just picked up where they left off seventy years before. No, they came back to a ruined and poverty-filled land; it might have even felt like God was still punishing them. So God, through the prophet Isaiah, wanted to tell them that, even though life was hard, he was with them. He was not punishing them, but since the problem that led to the exile was their reluctance to live the way he told them to live, if they were going to experience his presence again they were going to have to live in a new way (cf. Goldingay, Isaiah for Everyone, pg. 219). His way. And there were obstacles in the path toward that new way, which is why he tells them that it they were going to get to know God again, they would have to do the work to remove the obstacles. Now, we could probably name a whole lot of things that stood in their way (and that stand in our way), but for the biggest one was (and is) pride.

Why do I suggest that pride was their biggest obstacle? It’s because of what God tells them in the next verse. In verse 15, the emphasis is on who God is, on the reality that he is absolutely different from and other than human beings. He is the “high and exalted One,” he “lives forever” in a “high and holy place” and “his name is holy” (57:15). In other words, everything about God is far different from us. Sometimes people say they want to understand everything about God, but we couldn’t do that no matter how hard we tried. In fact, a God we could completely understand would not be worthy of worship. In a world where Jesus is portrayed as all sorts of things—a life coach, a CEO, a financial guru, a therapist, a buddy or a wellness instructor among other things—we need to remember (as much as they did then) that God is not any of those things. He is God, the one who created the universe and who lives outside of time and space. He is holy, he is other, he is eternal, he is worth of worship. And he doesn’t have to have anything to do with us (cf. Goldingay 219).

And yet, Isaiah says, not only does God live in a “high and holy place,” he also lives with those who are “lowly” and “contrite.” He lives among those who are humble, who think rightly of themselves, who see themselves in right relationship to the creator of the universe. This holy other God is willing to live with us, but there is an expectation he has of those he will live with: “contrition and humility. Those who are proud and self-righteous can never know his presence, because their pride and arrogance have shut the door on him” (Oswalt, OneBook: The Book of Isaiah, Part III, pg. 23). Pride is an obstacle that must be overcome if we are going to fully live a life of gratitude. So what is it, and how do we overcome it?

The book of Proverbs is a collection of wisdom sayings, mostly reminding us that true wisdom comes from God above. It’s a very practical book full of things you might have heard your grandmother say, things she might not have even known came from Proverbs. One of those sayings I remember hearing often when I was growing up is Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Except I usually heard it in the King James: “Pride goeth before a fall.” The writer of Proverbs observed life and found that every time there was a fall, every time something fell apart, it was preceded by pride. Pride, he says, comes right “before destruction.” One simple definition of pride is this: “Focusing on ourselves rather than God” (Vaughn, Radical Gratitude, pg. 66). Earlier generations called this the worst of the seven deadly sins, and it was believed to be the sin that led to Satan’s fall. In the 14th century, a poet named Dante wrote an allegorical poem about the afterlife called The Divine Comedy. The narrative follows the poet himself as he travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, and honestly a lot of our ideas about the afterlife are more influenced by Dante than they are by the Bible. In the part about Hell, he describes various sins with word pictures, and when he comes to the sin of pride he pictures a person carrying a heavy boulder that bent the deceased double. For eternity, they would walk with their eyes to the ground, not being able to stand up. Since they spent their lives looking down on others, now they would spend eternity unable to look up at God (Vaughn 66). It’s a stark picture of pride, but it gets very close to the truth.

Here is one of the challenges of the English language: we only have one word “pride” to describe to many different things. To be sure, there is such a thing as good pride: like having pride in your work and being proud of an accomplishment. That’s not the kind of pride I’m talking about today because that kind of pride often turns to praise and giving thanks to God for the abilities he has given you. No, the kind of pride that goes “before destruction” is often known today by names like autonomy, self-sufficiency, “my rights,” “I’ve got to be me” or “I did it my way.” In our culture, we treasure our independence, and while that’s a good thing it was never meant to lead us to where we are today, where we deny that we have any need for God or for community at all. Israel, in Isaiah’s prophecy, was made for community. The early Christian church was characterized by the love they had for each other in community. But today the church has become just one more consumer item among many. Pride isolates us from each other and from the life God intended us to live.

C. S. Lewis said that pride puts us in an “anti-God state of mind” and it is mutually exclusive with being grateful. Being a thankful person has nothing to do with “autonomy, self-sufficiency, and self-congratulation.” When we are learning to be thankful, we are leaning to rely upon and look toward someone else—in our case, God himself. We are learning to trust in him, to rely on him and to look to him for anything good in our lives. Remember what James said? “Every good and perfect gift is from” ourselves? Our own achievements? Our own skill and talent? No, that’s not what James says. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). It’s an interesting thing to consider this thing called pride in the season we find ourselves in right now, with a major national election approaching in just a few weeks. If you believe most of the candidates for any office, at least one of two things is true. Either they have single-handedly made the world a better place or their opponent has ruined society as we know it. And sometimes they will tell you both things in the same breath! Either way, the root of modern politics is pride: the only one who can save us is me. We think we want the person who is dependent on no one, when in reality what we need is the person who is dependent on someone who is stronger, the same thing Israel needed in Isaiah’s time. “The biggest obstacle to gratitude is refusing to admit that apart from Christ, we can do nothing” (Vaughn 71). Apart from the high and holy one, we are unable to accomplish anything of lasting value. 

In one of C. S. Lewis’ “Narnia” books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there’s a marvelous scene where Eustace, a young boy who thinks he’s better than everyone else, ends up turned into a dragon. He is in great pain, in part from the transformation, and that’s when he meets the great lion, Aslan, the Christ character in the Narnia stories. Aslan tells him he will need to undress, remove the dragon skin, if he wants to be a boy again. So Eustace scratches and claws and removes the skin, only to find that underneath that layer he is still a dragon. He tries again, with the same result. He begins to feel hopeless, like he should just give up and remain a dragon. But that’s when Aslan says, “You must let me undress you.” So Eustace allows it, and when the lion’s claws dig into his skin, Eustace thinks he is going to die. It’s painful! But under the care of the great lion, Eustace is turned into a boy again, but he is not the same. The experience has changed him. The process hurt, but it changed him more into who he was meant to be. Lewis’ message is clear: “Christianity was never about self-sufficiency. It is about God’s sufficiency” (Vaughn 76). And so if we’re going to “remove the obstacles out of the way” (57:14) of God’s people (us), we are going to have to let him do a work in us. We need to be transformed from the inside out by the one who lives forever.

Now, while the work is ultimately God’s, there are things we can do to cooperate with what he wants to do within us. I’m going to suggest three things this morning, mostly because I’m a preacher and we do things in threes, but there are undoubtedly many more ways we can get in the flow of what God wants to do. The first thing we can do is something I hope you’re already learning more about since we talked about it last week, and that’s to practice thankfulness. Say thank you to those whom God is using in your life. Say thank you to God for the many, many blessings you experience every day. See, here’s what happens when we do that. First, our focus is on someone else and beyond ourselves. Second, we’re reminded that we are not really self-sufficient, that we need others (including and especially God) in our lives if we’re going to thrive. We were made for community, not for going it alone. So how’s it going with your thankfulness project? How close are we to having a thousand thank yous on the wall in the foyer? Let’s continue to practice thankfulness and remember the many, many ways we have been blessed.

A second strategy to overcome the obstacle of pride also takes us out of ourselves, and that is to find a place to serve. There is nothing that challenges our pride like serving someone in need. Several years ago, in another location, I went with a group on a trip down to Appalachia, the parts of eastern Kentucky that feel like they are from another time. Things that we take for granted are often a struggle for them or even non-existent. One woman’s house that we worked on had no running water other than the stream that was in front of her house. It was a different world for everyone who was on the team, and when we would talk about our experiences in the evening, most of the stories told were about finding our pride being stripped away. I heard many stories of gratitude and also wondering how we could better help the people who lived in this place. All except one man, a highly skilled and talented professional. He didn’t say much during the week but you could tell he wasn’t happy. Near the end of the week, the “why” came out: “I’ve been here all week and no one has used my skills. I didn’t come here to just work.” He might as well have said, “I didn’t come here to just serve.” Somewhere along the way he missed the point of the whole trip. We weren’t there to benefit ourselves or promote ourselves. We were there to serve. His pride got in the way; it was an obstacle to him. One way tear down the pride that threatens us is to step out in service to others.

Some of you have filled out the “Serve” tab in the Church Center app, and others of you have quite easily and naturally found your way to a place of service here in the church or in the community. But if you haven’t, you can check out that technological solution in the app or you can chat with a ministry leader like Ginger or Jess or Pastor Rick or myself. We would all love to help you find a way to get connected, maybe in a ministry here or maybe some place in the community where your gifts and skills can be well used. But the important part in all of this is to remember: serving is not about you. Pride is about you; service is not. I’ve told you before about me as a seminary student being sent to wash dishes at the homeless shelter. I was frustrated. Why didn’t they give me something important to do? It was only later I realized that the most important thing that could be done that night was to do what needed to be done. To wash dishes. To serve. To combat my pride.

Then, third, I would suggest giving to a cause greater than you. Certainly give of your time and skills; that’s what service is about. But what I’m talking about here is giving of your material resources. In our culture, there is not much more that builds up pride than having a lot of stuff, a lot of money, a lot of things. When we give what we have away to something that is important to us, it causes us to lessen the hold that money has over us and it causes us to be more dependent on and thankful for God’s provision. Now I’m your pastor and I happen to think there is no greater cause than the kingdom of God that he is working out through the church—and for me, that means this church in particular. God is doing a great thing here—we’ll talk more about that next week—and I want to be involved in what he is doing. I don’t want my life to be about my stuff. I want my life to be about God’s work.

Matthew West is a singer and a songwriter who also happened to grow up as a pastor’s kid. In the church where he grew up, there was a single mom named Barb. Listen to Matthew tell Barb’s story: “She was an avid tither who kept a notebook with 3 columns: one tracked her giving, the next she used to make a list of things she needed, and in the last column, she recorded all of the blessings God had given her. If she needed a new sofa, she would price it and then add it to her needs list. When God provided an almost-new sofa at half the price, she would credit ‘God’s column’ with the full amount the sofa would have cost her. At the end of the year, she would tally each column and excitedly report that God had outgiven her once again…She never hesitated to give with abandon even though her needs were great. She understood the importance of remembering the blessings of the Lord and being thankful” (My Story, Your Glory, pgs. 89-90). Remembering the blessings. Being thankful. Giving with abandon. Sounds like a pretty good antidote to the obstacle of pride. Sounds a lot like Jesus, actually.

God is the high and exalted one. The one who lives forever. The one whose name is holy. The one who lives in a high and holy place. The one who is with the contrite and lowly in spirit. The one who will help us remove the obstacles to getting to him if we but ask. So will you ask? Will you cooperate with God in removing pride from your life? Pride goes before destruction, but gratitude leads us to life. Let’s pray.