Pride
Pride is a double-edged sword; it is both good and evil. According to freedictionary.com, pride is “A sense of one's own proper dignity or value; self-respect.” One would say that pride can be both good is some situations and bad in others. If someone were to have pride for serving in the army, I would say that this is an expectable form of pride because being in the army is not selfish and it is for the greater good of our country. On the other hand, if one were to take pride in all of their positions and they brag about them a lot, then this would be a bad kind of pride because it is selfish and all you are trying to do is make yourself look better than everyone else. With pride being both good and bad it can be hard to distinguish which kind of pride you have. If one were to distinguish these two kinds of pride, one could say that the exemptible kind would not be selfish but rather to do with something bigger than yourself. The corrupt kind of pride would be greedy and only focused on oneself.
Looking back on history, pride seems to be the root of all evil. In C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, he states “Pride is the reason the devil became the devil.” Many people believe that pride is the greatest sin because it was the one sin that allowed us to keep sinning as humans. Without the devil being cast down to earth, there would have been no one to tempt Adam and Eve. So one might assume that if there were no such thing as pride then we would be living in a perfect world to this very day. One could say that if someone was prideful it was because they accomplished something great, but in reality it was not that person that accomplished something but rather God. He just chose us to work through that person. From a Christian’s perspective we need take less pride in our good actions and instead give the glory back to God because He was the one who created us. Without Him we would not even be able to do good things. Pride is a sin that can be easy to get caught up in but Christians need to stay away from being to prideful because it is the core of all evil.
