Pride

Success, Pride, and Sorrow –Thomas Aquinas

Grant, O Lord my God, that I may never fall away in success or in failure; that I may not be prideful in prosperity nor dejected in adversity. Let me rejoice only in what unites us and sorrow only in what separates us. May I strive to please no one or fear to displease anyone except Yourself. May I seek always the things that are eternal and never those that are only temporal. May I shun any joy that is without You and never seek any that is beside You. O Lord, may I delight in any work I do for You and tire of any rest that is apart from You. My God, let me direct my heart towards You, and in my failings, always repent with a purpose of amendment.

– Thomas Aquinas –

Self-Love is Self-Hatred – Thomas Watson

Exercise great self-denial: “Let him deny himself” (Matthew 16:24). Self-ease, self-ends, whatever comes in competition with (or stand in opposition to) Christ’s glory and interest must be denied. Self is the great snare; self-love undermines the power of godliness. The young man in the Gospel might have followed Christ, but something of self-hindered (Matthew 19:20-22). Self-love is self-hatred. The man who cannot get beyond himself will never get to heaven.

– Thomas Watson –
from The Godly Man’s Picture, 1666

Absolutely Abandoned to Jesus Christ – Oswald Chambers

Whenever our Lord talked about the relation of a disciple to Himself it was in terms of mystical union: “I am the vine [not the root of the vine, but the vine itself], ye are the branches.” We have not paid enough attention to the illustrations Jesus uses. This is the picture of sanctification in the individual, a completeness of relationship between Jesus Christ and myself. Pharisaic holiness means that my eyes are set on my own whiteness and I become a separate individual. I have the notion that I have to be something; I have not, I have to be absolutely abandoned to Jesus Christ, so one with Him that I never think of myself apart from Him. Love is never self-conscious.

– Oswald Chambers –
from Biblical Ethics

Don’t Invent New Sins – William Gurnall

Think twice before you use your intelligence to invent new sins! You may provoke God to new punishments. Sodom devised a new way to sin, so God devised a new way to discipline them: He sent hell from above upon them.

– William Gurnall –

The Importance of Humility – Charles Spurgeon

It is of the utmost importance to us to be kept humble. Consciousness of self-importance is a hateful delusion, but one into which we fall as naturally as weeds grow on a dunghill. We cannot be used of the Lord but that we also dream of personal greatness, we think ourselves almost indispensable to the church, pillars of the cause, and foundations of the temple of God. We are nothings and nobodies, but that we do not think so is very evident, for as soon as we are put on the shelf we begin anxiously to enquire, “How will the work go on without me?” As well might the fly on the coach wheel enquire, “How will the mails be carried without me?” Far better men have been laid in the grave without having brought the Lord’s work to a standstill, and shall we fume and fret because for a little season we must lie upon the bed of languishing? God sometimes weakens our strength in a way at the precise juncture when our presence seems most needed to teach us that we are not necessary to God’s work, and that when we are most useful, He can easily do without us. If this be the practical lesson, the rough schooling may be easily endured for assuredly it is beyond all things desirable that self should be kept low and the Lord alone be magnified.

– Charles Spurgeon –
from “Laid Aside, Why?,” The Sword and Trowel, May, 1876