“The chief end of man,” the Westminster Shorter Catechism declares, “is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” I believe that is true, but how does one glorify God? It’s a phrase we throw around without much understanding. I would suggest that people glorify God chiefly by enjoying him. If I’m right, then it is critical that the Church identify and combat those things which harm our ability to enjoy him. Here, I want to uncover how pride does that. I also want to propose that the twin doctrines of human depravity and God’s sovereign grace can help combat a significant source of that pride.
Pride harms our ability to enjoy God by crowding out our vision of God’s all-satisfying, joy-giving beauty. It replaces that with a vision of our own profoundly unsatisfying beauty. So even though were created to savor the pleasures abundant at God’s right hand and to experience fullness of joy in his presence (Psa. 16:11), many try to satisfy their hearts with the inferior joys found in pride and self-reliance. The well-worn quote from St. Augustine’s Confessions is apropos: our hearts are indeed restless until they rest their affections on God. Pride makes that impossible; we cannot enjoy God fully when any of our attention is on ourselves. To glorify God as we ought, then, we must identify and combat every source of pride.
A common source of pride is the belief that the human heart is able to desire and pursue God. It is easy to see why many Christians believe this. We all, to some degree, want a sense of agency in our lives. It’s natural. But natural and healthy are not synonymous. “God, and God alone, is fit to take the universe his throne,” Steve Green sang, and all God’s people said amen. But it’s easier said (or sang) than understood. We’re happy to affirm that God is sovereign over suffering. We’re happy to affirm that God is sovereign over whom we marry. But our salvation often isn’t considered when we work out the implications of God’s sovereignty. In our pride, we would rather maintain agency there. But when our pride places any of the agency for our salvation in ourselves, it strips from God the glory that is rightly his.
To combat this source of pride, I offer two complementary doctrines. The first is the doctrine of human depravity. This doctrine is, unsurprisingly, avoided by most of us. It is deeply unsettling to be told that apart from Christ we are “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). Our hearts rebel against the idea that “there is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God” (Rom. 3:10). Who wants to confess that they are by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3)? To avoid this, we misconstrue Ephesians’ language of being dead in sin to mean that we can desire and pursue God, even if only a little, without being already resurrected by the Spirit. But we can’t avoid it if we’re to effectively minimize our pride. The more clearly we see the vast expanse between our depravity and God’s holiness, the more awe-inspiring will be his act of salvation. Understanding our depravity will produce a heart with no room for pride.
The second doctrine is that of God’s sovereign grace. This is the teaching that no one can come to Christ unless the Father draws them (John 6:44). We contributed nothing to our regeneration. The Spirit gives us rebirth according to the good pleasure of the Father and we cannot affect it (John 3:8). The Spirit alone can make the glory of God in the face of Christ appear so attractive that we can’t help but place our faith in him. This leaves no room for our own agency in salvation. The more we understand this doctrine, the less our pride will limit our ability to glorify God.
Together, these two truths – human depravity and sovereign grace – undermine our pride. We often minimize these doctrines because they can cause discomfort or fear. But they shouldn’t. Rather, they should be one of the deepest sources of all-pervading joy, which in turn will enable us to glorify God by enjoying him forever.
David is a sophomore majoring in intercultural studies with concentrations in Linguistics and PreMed.