Well, how do I kill the pride inside me? Pride is a nefarious enemy, one of our great enemies, and one of God's ancient enemies. And yet, when the Lord gifts someone with natural skills and abilities beyond the norm, that struggle with pride can become even more intense. As we begin a new week on Ask Pastor John, our next question arises from a young woman who listens to the podcast.

A pleasant good day to you, Pastor John. I'm so grateful for your ministry. It has immensely contributed to my spiritual development. I am a law student from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. I love the Lord with all my heart and desire to do many exploits for the kingdom of God.

However, I have one big problem, and I think it's hindering my effectiveness as a disciple of Christ. I have a deep-rooted issue with pride. I know it is a sin, and I've tried many times to deal with this problem, but it always seems to hide and then resurface. I have been called condescending by my peers and family.

I am verbally aggressive. What steps can I take daily to kill the sin of my expressive pride? I wish I knew you better. I don't even know your name. I sure love your candor, and I think it's a great work of grace that you can even see and identify those things about pride, because you're certainly not the only one.

If I knew you better, I would try to tailor this response to your particular kind of pride, if I understood it better. Everybody deals with pride. Not everybody knows it, because pride takes such subtle forms, but we all do. So I wish I knew better. But you give me some clues, so let me make a stab at what might be helpful.

I pray, God, that it will help you and others, because pride is universal. Let me commend this way of battling pride, namely, a close look at the way God saved you. A close look, a repeated, regular attention to the way God saved you. He saved you in a way that no matter how you look at it, if you look at it biblically, it was designed to humble you and destroy your pride.

That's the way you were saved. So what you need, and all of us need, is not some teaching that comes later, like at a mature stage of Christianity. What you need is to know and to feel the implications of how God saved you. Millions of Christians do not know how God saved them.

That may sound strange, like you could be saved and not know how. That's right. Many people don't—they haven't been taught accurately what the Bible says about what God did to save them, either in history or by the Spirit in their lives. And therefore, they have been deprived of the power of this truth to work a deep humility and great boldness—deep humility, great boldness—in their lives.

Many Christians think they themselves were the decisive cause of their own conversion to Christ. They've been taught that. And that God was merely a responder, not sovereign, not a sovereign Savior. Let's look at reality. First, there's the reality of sin that we have to be saved from. It's more profound and more terrible than anyone realizes.

I mean anyone. The entire Old Testament is written to show us the dreadful power of sin and the utter hopelessness of even the people of God without the omnipotence of God's saving grace to convert them to Christ. So here's Romans 3:19. Now we know that whatever the law says—and I think he's referring to the whole Old Testament, not just the first five books.

You can read why in the context. Whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth in the universe may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. We were utterly helpless to free ourselves from the blindness and the bondage of sin.

And Paul says we could not see it. We couldn't see the glory of Christ. We could not bring ourselves to life from death. Romans 8, 5-7, 1 Corinthians 2, 14, 2 Corinthians 4, 4. God appointed faith as a way, the only way of salvation. And this way, namely the way of faith, excludes pride.

It does so in two ways. One is that faith by nature looks away from ourselves to God. That's what faith is, a looking away from ourselves to God. And the other way is that faith itself is a gift of God. So here's the first, Romans 3:27. Then what becomes of our boasting?

It is excluded, Paul says. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No. By the law of faith. Faith excludes boasting. You are not trusting God when you are boasting. And you are not boasting when you are trusting God. Faith is what a child does when it is happy to be helpless and safe in daddy's arms.

Let me say that again. Faith is what a child has or does when it is happy to be helpless and safe in daddy's arms. It does not boast. The child doesn't boast in its self-sufficiency. "Oh, look how smart I am to be in daddy's arms." It boasts in daddy.

Look at his arms. Look at his smile. And on top of that, faith is a gift. For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast. There's a principle here that Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians 4:7.

What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as though it were not a gift? So God appointed faith as the way of salvation to doubly exclude boasting. Its nature is like a child to call attention to daddy's strength, not its own.

And even that is a gift of God. Now why does God save us in this way, choosing to give faith to one person and not to another? Because if it's a gift, some have it and some don't, and you see election. God is choosing. He gives it to one.

He doesn't give it to all. Why? Is it because he chooses us on the basis of some admirable quality so that we can boast in being chosen? No, he doesn't. And Paul says—I mean, this is probably the clearest text in the Bible about the relationship between election and humility, or election and the destruction of pride.

Listen to 1 Corinthians 1:26, "For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose"—here's the key word—"God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are." And here's the purpose for all those choosings. "So that no human being might boast in the presence of God. It is slain by election." Free, sovereign, God-willed, not man-determined election.

God chose, God chose, God chose. So that no human being might boast. And then it continues like this, "And because of Him," because of God, "you are in Christ Jesus." You didn't do that. You didn't jump into Christ. You didn't raise yourself from the dead. Because of God, you are in Christ Jesus, "who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption." One more time.

"So that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'" First Corinthians 1, 26-31. So the entire method of saving us is designed for this. Negatively, that no human being might boast in the presence of the Lord. Simply, "Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord." So let this sink in.

Let us all pray that it would sink in. We are saved in such a way that it makes God's sovereign grace shine as glorious and makes us look utterly helpless in ourselves, utterly dependent on God. We were dead, blind, helpless, which means that we were no more worthy of salvation than anyone else.

Everybody, everybody that you would boast over, you're like them or worse than them, except for one thing, grace, grace, grace. All self-exaltation is a recrucifixion of Christ, because he died to kill pride. Every boast, therefore, mocks the suffering of Jesus, and—I end on this—and every humble attitude, every humble act of faith glorifies the grace of God in Christ.

That's very helpful, Counselor. Pastor John, thank you. And, well, for anything that you need to know about this podcast, to ask a question, to listen to old episodes, find links, to subscribe to the podcast, whatever you need, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday.

Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.