"Pay Attention"

Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we come before you this morning and confess that we are a needy people. We need you to intervene into our lives. We need your grace to be at work in our lives. If we would truly be renewed into your image and live for your glory.

This morning as we look at this passage from Jeremiah, Father, we ask that you would fill us with your spirit and that what he has written would resonate in our hearts and change our lives as he indwells us and ever renews us into the image of your son Jesus Christ with whom you are well pleased.

It is our great hope in Christ that has brought us together here this morning. And I pray that you would give us a clear view of him so that as we look at him we will begin to look more like him in our lives.

I pray that you would help us to confess our sins that are exposed by the spirit's work in the text. And I pray that you would lead us in repentance and that you would cleanse us, that you would make us whole.

These are our great needs, Father. We look to you knowing that you know these needs more than we do. You have already made provision for them and we trust you. We trust you to do your work and your way in our lives.

We pray these things for the sake of Christ. Amen. I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 13. And we'll be reading verses 15 through 27 in just a moment. Jeremiah chapter 13 verses 15 through 27.

Last time we were together we were looking at the previous passage, a sermon that I entitled, Linen and Wine, because of the two images in the text that were used by God through his prophet to warn his people against spiritual presumption.

And we talked a lot about the disaster of spiritual presumption that in pride that we think because of this false reason or that false reason that we're halfway to heaven when in fact blinded to our true condition by pride we're honestly halfway to hell.

The disaster of spiritual presumption. We also said that presumption's night terminates on faith's horizon. We see this in the life of Jeremiah that he was not presumptuous, he did not trust in false assurances, but his focus was on, his faith was in, the word of God who came to him and spoke the words of God what God said and he spoke them as God and this cannot be anyone else other than Christ who is the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father who has explained him to every generation of the people of God.

So last week, verses 1 through 14, we were warned about spiritual presumption. This morning as we look at verses 15 through 27, the theme does not change a great deal as we will be thinking about pride and its connection or contradistinction to the scriptures, the word of God.

And the theme of our passage is simply this, pay attention, pay attention. Let's see if we can see why that is as we read. If you would stand with me please as I read the word of God beginning in chapter 13, verse 15 of Jeremiah.

Hear the word of the Lord. Listen and give heed. Do not be haughty. For the Lord has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God before he brings darkness and before your feet stumble on the dusky mountains and while you are hoping for light, he makes it into deep darkness and turns it into gloom.

But if you will not listen to it, my soul will sob in secret for such pride and my eyes will bitterly weep and flow down with tears because the flock of the Lord has been taken captive. Say to the king and the queen mother, take a lowly seat for your beautiful crown has come down off your head.

The cities of the Negev have been locked up and there is no one to open them. All Judah has been carried into exile, wholly carried into exile. Lift up your eyes and see those coming from the north. Where is the flock that was given you, your beautiful sheep?

What will you say when he appoints over you, and you yourself had taught them, former companions to be head over you? Will not pangs take hold of you like a woman in childbirth? If you say in your heart, why have these things happened to me?

Because of the magnitude of your iniquity, your skirts have been removed and your heels have been exposed. Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to doing evil.

Therefore I will scatter them like drifting straw to the desert wind. This is your lot. The portion measured to you from me, declares the Lord, because you have forgotten me and trusted in falsehood. So I myself have also stripped your skirts over your face, that your shame may be seen.

As for your adulteries and your lustful names, the lewdness of your prostitution on the hills and the field, I have seen your abominations. Woe to you, O Jerusalem! How long will you remain unclean? May those who have ears to hear, hear the word of the Lord.

You may be seated. Motorist who pays no attention to the traffic lights will soon be forced to pay attention to the police cruiser lights. A patient who pays no attention to his doctor's instructions will soon be forced to pay attention to the surgeon's pre-op disclaimers.

In our passage, I believe the message is fairly clear. If we refuse to pay attention to God's word, we are forced to pay attention to God's wrath. Jeremiah says, Listen! Give heed! He says, Lift up your eyes and see!

He's calling for the people to pay attention. Why do they not pay attention? Pride. It is pride that keeps them from paying attention. In pride, they ignore the message. In pride, they ignore the consequences.

Our passage this morning truly brings into focus the conflict between our pride and God's word, our sin, and God's wrath. The first point is this. God's word confronts our pride. God's word confronts our pride.

We see that in two ways in the passage. First, simply by contact. And secondly, by content. Simply by contact. I want you to see the oil and water-like incompatibility of pride and the word of God. Verse 15.

Listen and give heed! Do not be haughty, for the Lord has spoken. Do you see the incompatibility of haughtiness and hearing the scriptures, hearing the word of God? In verse 17, Jeremiah says, If you will not listen to it, if you will not hear the message from God, my soul will sob in secret for such pride.

Jeremiah identifies the refusal to even hear God's word, to even let it penetrate the nth degree into the soul. He says that is pride. Listen. Give heed. Hear. Receive. Submit to the message. Don't be haughty.

These two things cannot go together. Why is that? Proverbs 21 verse 4 says,. Haughty eyes and a proud heart, the lamp of the wicked is sin. Do you hear that? That the very lamp of the wicked, that which illuminates who they are, that which illuminates their pathway, is sin.

What kind of sin? Pride. That this is what they rely on. This is what gives what they believe to be clairvoyance to their life. Self-glory, and self-glory will suffer no rival light to eclipse its own.

And so, simply by contact, as soon as the authority of the scripture is brought even anywhere close to the proud heart, there is no more listening. Simply by contact, God's word confronts pride, exposes it, and immediately meets resistance.

It is as if the proud and the haughty are deathly allergic to the divine authority of God conveyed through the scriptures. Some folks, maybe some here today, walk around with an EpiPen nearby, for they are allergic to bee stings, or they're allergic to peanuts, and their nightmares are filled with peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

And they have an EpiPen just in case. And the proud heart, the haughty soul, has an EpiPen for situations in which the scriptures are brought into contact with their lives, and it's called this. They stop their ears.

This is exactly what happened in Acts, when Stephen was preaching. Stephen was preaching the gospel to those who had surrounded him and were putting him on trial. And it's surprising, perhaps not so surprising, that when, after Stephen goes through the entire story of Israel, as he's honing in on the arrival of the Messiah, as he begins to quote the Old Testament scriptures, pointing to Christ, they begin to be so angry that they begin gnashing their teeth at him, but he doesn't stop.

And then in this moment, when he is full of the Holy Spirit, he gazes intently into heaven, and he sees the glory of God, and he says, Behold, I see the heavens open, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.

And right when he preaches the glory of Christ, verse 57, but they cried out with a loud voice and covered their ears and rushed at him with one impulse. The proud heart, the haughty soul, cannot bear to have the divine authority and the glory of Christ make contact with them.

They cannot bear it. And with satanic impulse, they rush Stephen and they kill him. God's word confronts our pride merely by contact, but also by content. What are the things that God says to Judah through Jeremiah?

How does he confront the pride of the people? Well, you see there in verse 27, at the very end of our passage, God says, As for your adulteries and your lustful neighings, the lewdness of your prostitution on the hills in the field, I have seen your abominations.

Woe to you, O Jerusalem, how long will you remain unclean? God, through Jeremiah, says, I have seen it. Maybe you're not paying attention to me, Judah, but I am paying attention to you. And what God saw Judah doing on every green hill, on the mountainsides, and in the fields was idolatry.

Idolatry. They were worshipping false gods. They were worshipping the Canaanite pantheon of gods like Baal and Asherah. And they were worshipping the horrendous god, Molech, and offering up their children as burnt offerings to this false god.

They were worshipping the queen of heaven. And they were offering sacrifices at night, getting the whole family involved, worshipping the stars. This is what they were doing. All over the land, in the villages, in the capital city of Jerusalem, this is what they were doing.

And God says, that's adultery. He says, that's prostitution. That's immorality. Because not only were they practicing such things as part of the idolatry, but they were unfaithful to God. They were unfaithful to the one who had redeemed them, the one who had covenanted with them, the one who had brought them up out of Egypt and provided for them.

They were unfaithful to the one who loved them in his covenant love. God says, I see. I'm paying attention to what you're doing. And he exposes their sin as not merely the jilted husband, but as the judge of all creation.

Verse 16. Interesting phraseology in verse 16. Jeremiah addresses Judah. He says, listen and give heed. Do not be haughty. For the Lord has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God before he brings darkness.

What is Jeremiah saying here? Yes, of course, give glory to the Lord your God. He's the creator. He made you. He gave you life. He offers you salvation. What a wonderful God. Give him glory. Give him praise.

Yes, indeed. But there's something here in the phrase and something here in the context that tells us there's something else going on. These are the words. Give glory to the Lord your God. These are the words that Joshua said to Achan.

Joshua 7. Achan had heard the commandments. Achan had heard the instructions when they conquered Jericho. Everything in Jericho was under the ban. All of it was dedicated to God for destruction. Achan was to steal nothing.

No one was to take any of the spoils of war. But he saw a cloak and he saw some gold and he saw some silver and he took them. He coveted them. He took them. He stole them from God. They were all dedicated to God.

And he took it and he buried it under the floor of his tent. And then men died. Eighteen men died at Ai for Achan's sin. An eye for an eye. Tooth for tooth. Judgment day. Achan and his whole family die.

When his lot is cast and he is isolated and exposed before all the people, Joshua says to Achan, give glory to the Lord your God. Tell us what you did. Confess what you did. And in the same sense, here is Jeremiah speaking to Judah saying it's time to confess.

It's time to confess your sins before the judge of all the earth. Because he knows. He's seen. He sees what you do and he knows even who you are in your character and in your heart. Verse 23. This is what God says about their condition.

Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to doing evil. There's nothing wrong with an Ethiopian's brilliantly black skin. But it's part of his nature.

It's part of who he is. And he can't change it. And he shouldn't change it. And he won't change it. What about the leopard with the spots? Can you shave the spots off the leopard? The spots are there.

Down to the skin. And what God is saying here about Judah is your wickedness has become inherent to your nature. You can't even change it by this point even if you tried. Therefore, judgment falls. And God is explaining through Jeremiah that he is not being overly harsh.

He has been patient with them and he has called them to repentance time and time again. He has given them good king after good king and prophet after prophet calling them to repentance. But by now, their sin is so inherently entrenched in their lives.

They can't change it. They can't change it. They are beyond the point of no return. They are thoroughly corrupted. And so God is just in his thorough condemnation. How does this occur? By the continual poisoning of pride and refusal to repent.

Thomas Watson quotes Pliny. The doves take pride in their feathers and in their flying high. At last, they fly so high that they are prey to the hawk. And Thomas Watson says,. So also men fly so high in their pride that at last they are prey to the devil, the prince of the air.

It's a point of no return in sin. Jesus addressed this as the sin without forgiveness. The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Romans 1 talks about those who in their continual rebellion and in their continual perversion, God turns over to a reprobate mind and they say, We want sin.

We want sin. We want sin. And God says, Here you go. Have all the sin you want forever and ever. There's a point of no return. Satan is at first a parasite in temptation. But at the end, he is a tyrant in transgression.

And he holds his slaves in bonds through the opiate of pride. Scripture. Because Scripture is from God and it is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And because Scripture reveals Christ, Scripture reveals our pride.

The glory of Christ, the brilliance of Christ exposes our self-glorification for the poison that it is. Scripture exposes and condemns human pride by just simply making contact and then by the contents within.

Do you notice at the very end there of verse 27 it says, How long, O Jerusalem, how long will you remain unclean? I find this very interesting because in chapter 12 there is the expression of how long?

A question to God. How long, O Lord, until you judge? How long, O Lord, until you resolve this wickedness that runs rampant on the earth? How long, O Lord? And now God's asking the question, How long, O Jerusalem?

How long will you continue in your uncleanness? It is a question that we should often ask ourselves. How long will I continue in this sin? How long will I allow this to continue in my life? We need the grace of God.

We need the grace of God to penetrate. Just like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. We need the grace of God to intervene and interrupt our pride-bent lives. I hope you understand our predicament.

That our pride keeps us from hearing what would destroy our pride. That we put our hands over our ears, but we so desperately need to hear. So what does God do? Augustine said, Proud man would perish unless a lowly God found him.

He found us through Christ, God incarnate. We discover pride when we pay attention to God's word, which reveals Christ. We discover pride when we pay attention to God's word, which reveals Christ. And it is, if anything else, it is simply by the beholding of the glory of Christ, and the praise of Christ, and the worthiness of Christ, that we begin to feel the stirrings of pride in our own lives.

When we have to hand over parts of our spiritual confidence, parts of our spiritual presumption, and we have to discard it to hold to Christ and Christ alone, we begin to feel the resentment of that. We begin to feel the resistance of that.

Surely something here is pleasing to God in a way that makes a difference. Does it rankle us? Does it convict us when we see the brightness of his glory and the fullness of his humanity? Someone once said when a proud man hears another praised, he thinks himself injured.

How often have we had that experience? We hear someone else praised and we say, what about me? I mean, that's nothing compared to what I've done. We feel the stirrings of pride that's no less, certainly not less, when Christ is praised.

In his supremacy we have our sufficiency. What is lacking in Christ? What is lacking in his humanity? What is lacking in his divinity? What is lacking in his righteousness? What is lacking in his glory?

And the answer is nothing. Nothing. We discover pride when we pay attention to God's word which reveals Christ. And we destroy pride in the same way. We have to fight against pride. The old saying is true, be killing sin or it will be killing you.

Pride's killing us. Just killing us. Why are we angry? Why are we so angry with those we perceive to have wronged us? Why are we so angry? It's pride. Pride. Why are we upset that somebody else, somebody else's priorities and somebody else's schedule seems to always interrupt ours?

Why does it bother us that we have to do menial things for other people who should be doing it themselves? There's no end to the depths of the pride that we have to fight against. Yet there is an end.

There is an end. We are finally fully sanctified and glorified. There will be an end to our pride. But Jesus says this in Matthew 10, 24. He says, A disciple is not above his teacher and a slave is not above his master.

Makes sense, doesn't it? A disciple is not above his teacher and a slave is not above his master. And in the context, he's talking about discipleship. He's talking about the difficult times that his disciples would face.

And indeed, he suffers, he has suffered more than we will ever suffer. And so, whatever degree of opposition and suffering we ever find, we cannot say, Well, I didn't sign up for this. We signed up to follow Christ and we're not better than he is.

And he's suffered more than all of us. In the same sense, he shows us the life of humility. He says it again and again and again in the Gospel of John. Whatever I hear the Father say, this is what I say.

Right? Isn't that the polar opposite of that is pride. Whenever God speaks, I don't listen. And humility, humility is whatever God says I hear and I say too. That's humility. And whatever the Father commands me to do, I do, Jesus says.

Oh, that's humility. The opposite of that is pride. Isn't it? It's what Jeremiah weeps secretly in his, he's sobbing in his soul for such pride of the people who will not listen to the word of God and will not repent and will not turn back from their wicked ways.

But Jesus shows us humility. He is the second person of the Godhead. He's co-eternal, co-glorious with God the Father and God the Spirit. And yet he listens to the Father and obeys the Father. This is no detriment to his glory.

He is glorious in his submission, glorious in his listening, glorious in his humility that he would hear what the Father says and then follow in obedience to the Father's plan all the way to death on a cross.

Philippians 2 says, let this mind be also in you which is also in Christ Jesus. This mind of humility, see how he listened to the Father, see what he did. Follow him and you will destroy pride. Speaking according to the word, acting according to the word.

That's humility. That's humility. Something practical? We all have that tendency and we all have a skill set to some degree to be able to begin to turn conversations around back to ourselves so that we may deposit some brilliant bit of wisdom or share some amazing story or my experience will trump your experience and so on.

We have that in us. We have that innate skill set. And it is an evidence of pride. It is an evidence that we think ourselves superior in some sense to someone else. We all struggle with that. We're not immune to that.

It starts very early on. You hear children in their conversations, you can hear it. You can hear that they have that skill set as well. Boasting. What I have is better than what you have. I can do something more than you can do.

My bike is bigger than your bike. So on and so forth. C .H. Spurgeon says, the cure of boasting is to boast in the Lord all day long. The cure of boasting is to boast in the Lord all the day long. And this will help us in our pride to destroy pride.

Why boast in ourselves? We should boast in the Lord. Jeremiah has already said as much concerning the wise man and the mighty man. But not in the wealthy man. Not boast in their strength or their wealth or their wisdom, but let them boast in the Lord.

Well, God's word confronts our pride by contact and by content. We need that. We need that. Because pride is disastrous. We need to destroy pride. One of the cures for pride is to pay attention to the way in which God's wrath consumes our pride.

In verse 9 of chapter 13, we looked at this last time. Thus says the Lord, just so I will destroy the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem, God's wrath consumes our pride. Meaning, that whatever remains of pride at the end of all things, on the great day of judgment, God will utterly destroy.

There will be no more human pride left intact. There will only be the glory of God. Well, we find this illustrated for us in our passage by five images of exile. Verses 16 -21, verses 24 -25, we have five different images of exile.

Judah is on the verge of being fully and thoroughly exiled out of the land, taken captive by the Babylonian armies and taken away to a foreign land. They are on the verge of this. Jeremiah has been preaching this and warning them about it.

And here he gives us five images. Each one is a reversal of some kind. Each one is a surprising, radical reversal of some kind, talking in some way about exile. And the first we find in verse 16, darkness is the image.

Darkness on the mountains. Give glory to the Lord your God before he brings darkness and before your feet stumble on the dusky mountains. And while you are hoping for light, he makes it into deep darkness and turns it into gloom.

The image is that Judah often goes to the mountains. Why would you go to a mountain? Well, there's protection in the mountains. You can hide away. You can go up to the mountains as well to seek a different kind of light.

On the mountains they worshipped idols. And perhaps the idea is that you have these people from Judah, idolaters getting up early in the morning before it's just yet dawn and there they are traveling out into the higher portions of the mountains surrounding them.

And there they are on the mountains and they're waiting for the dawn of light. They're waiting for the sunrise to hit them and there they are, ready to practice their idolatry and receive the protection and the illumination they're hoping from Baal and Asherah and the Queen of Heaven.

And a surprising reversal occurs. Because they will not give glory to God. Because they will not repent. They wait for the light. They're anticipating the light. But what does God bring but darkness? Surprising reversal.

And this is an image of exile. They think they will be delivered, but they will stumble. They will not stand. They will fall and be taken away into exile. The second image is that of a lost crown. A lost kingdom.

Verses 18 and 19. Say to the king and the queen mother, take a lowly seat for your beautiful crown has come down from your head. The cities of the Negev have been locked up and there's no one to open them.

All Judah has been carried into exile. Holy carried into exile. The king and the queen mother. This time it's Jehoiakim and Nehushtah. You can read about that in 2 Kings 24, beginning in verse 8. Hezekiah begot Manasseh.

Manasseh begot Jehoiakim. And when Jehoiakim died in rebellion to the king of Babylon, his son Jehoiakim was put upon the throne. And Jehoiakim was 18 years old, verse 8, when he became king. And he reigned three months in Jerusalem.

And his mother's name was Nehushtah, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem. He did evil in the sight of the Lord according to all that his father had done. His father, Jehoiakim, and his grandfather, Manasseh.

Josiah was in there too. Well, the wickedness that he commits goes so far that at the time, verse 10, the servants of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, went up to Jerusalem and the city came under siege.

And Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, came to the city while his servants were besieging it. And Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, went out to the king of Babylon, he and his mother and his servants and his captains and his officials.

So the king of Babylon took him captive in the eighth year of his reign. He carried out from there all the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon, king of Israel, had made in the temple of the Lord just as the Lord had said.

He led away into exile all Jerusalem and all the captains and all the mighty men of valor, 10 ,000 captives and all the craftsmen and the smiths. None remained except the poorest people of the land. This is what Jeremiah is saying.

Get ready, King Jehoiakim. Get ready, Queen Mother Nahushta, because your crown is going to come off your head and you're not going to be sitting on your throne anymore and you're going to be in a very lowly place, that of captivity.

And along with Jehoiakim and Nahushta, I suppose, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael also went to Babylon and were renamed as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Daniel, obviously in the same group as well. Taken away into captivity.

They have a kingdom. They have a crown. But they lose it in a reversal in 597 B .C. Well, this is a great humbling to Judah, so much so that Jeremiah says all Judah is exiled. And he means by all the officials, all the talent, all the skill, all the people who made Judah Judah, they're gone.

A third image is that of sheep being stolen away. Verse 17, at the end it says that Jeremiah is weeping because of the flock of the Lord has been taken captive. Verses 20 and 21, lift up your eyes and see those coming from the north.

Where is the flock that was given you? Your beautiful sheep. Where's the flock? Where's the sheep? They're all gone. They had a large flock of people there in Jerusalem, but now where did they all go?

They're gone. Another image, verse 21. What will you say when he appoints over you and you yourself had taught them former companions to behead over you? Why not pangs take hold of you like a woman in childbirth?

This comment about what are you gonna say when those that you had educated, and those that you had taught to becoming your allies, now they are your masters. What will you say then? What a reversal, your allies conquer you.

That happened with Hezekiah. Hezekiah in his latter years took the envoy of Babylon throughout everything in Jerusalem, showed him his whole kingdom, showed him all the things that he had, all the people, all the armaments, the whole layout of the defenses of Jerusalem, and look here in the temple, and look at all of the treasures here in my treasury, and look here in my palace, and look at everything here.

Won't you be our ally? We are glorious and we are strong. You can be our ally. Envoy from Babylon. And now Babylon comes and says, yeah, we're gonna take all that stuff. Thank you very much. Just as God had warned Hezekiah that it would happen.

My last image, that of being scattered like chaff. Verses 24 and 25. Therefore I will scatter them like drifting straw to the desert wind. This is your lot, the portion measured to you from me, declares the Lord, because you have forgotten me and trusted in falsehood.

Literally, because you have trusted in the lie. You've trusted in the lie. You're scattered like chaff. They don't receive the portion of blessing. No, they're not gathered in into the Lord's barns. No, they are scattered like useless chaff, like straw in the blistering wind of the desert.

Five reversals, five images depicting some kind of exile. When our light is darkened, and our honor shamed, and our numbers disappeared, and our allies conquer us, and our inheritance disavowed, you know the wrath of God has come.

If we refuse to pay attention to God's word, we are forced to pay attention to God's wrath. That's what happened to Judah. They had no glory left, did they? Nothing left to crow about. They have no more glory.

They are totally shamed. Not only exile, but also exposure. In verse 22 we begin to hear, well actually before that, in verse 20, Jerusalem is addressed as a woman in feminine pronouns that you don't necessarily see here in the English.

But by the end, it's clear that God looks at her as a prostitute. A woman who has prostituted herself to the false gods. Some impact of her sin is the judgment that comes, and it will be like to her giving birth, but in a context of great judgment.

Indeed, in the end, if you read in verses 22 and 26, she is utterly exposed. She suffers the shame of her guilt, as well as suffering the lack of protection. This is the point of the language in verses 22 and 26, that God, by removing his protection from Jerusalem, leaves her exposed in her shame and her sin, and exposed to the enemies who would come and destroy her.

So the end result of the pride of Judah and Jerusalem is that they would be exiled and exposed. The wrath of God consumes the pride of Judah, consumes the pride of Jerusalem, until there's nothing left to crow about.

And so is the case with us as well. If we refuse to pay attention to God's word, we will be forced to pay attention to God's wrath. We need to know that pride is a special focus of God's judgment on the last day.

Ultimately, I'm glad that there will be no more pride in me. In glory. Because it makes my life miserable. It's killing me. I want to get rid of it. And one of these days it will be gotten rid of, thanks to the saving work of Jesus Christ.

But pride is a very special focus of God in the last day of judgment. For example, we can go over to Isaiah chapter 2, and we can read about the day of judgment, and how pride features so prominently.

We can read the same in Zephaniah 3 .11 or Isaiah 23 .9, but here in chapter 2, in verse 10, Isaiah says,. Again, verse 17,. And the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. Do you hear the most important points about the final day, the day of judgment, is that all human pride will be done away with, so that God and God alone is exalted.

We need to be sensitive to the presence of pride in our souls, the activity of pride in our lives, made aware of it by the scriptures, convicted by the Holy Spirit, that we would begin to have the same perspective on pride that God has, so that we will be in bitter battle to the death against pride.

To take God's side over and against our own pride, and say, I must destroy this, I must fight against it. It is deadly. It brings great disaster. We must get rid of pride, so that we can hear the scriptures.

We must hear the scriptures so we can get rid of pride, and so we are dependent on the grace of God to do this. Thomas Watson says, God never misses the mark. The last consideration, what is the portion and what is the lot that we receive for pride?

Exile and exposure. It's the end of pride. Exile from God. Exposure in our sin before the wrath of God. But what is our lot in Christ? Is it not the exact opposite? We're not exiled in Christ. We are reconciled to God in Christ, aren't we?

Never to be cast away again. And we are not exposed in Christ. We are covered in Christ, aren't we? Covered in His righteousness, and protected in His hand and in the Father's hand, and no one will snatch us out of His hand.

The exchange is very obvious, simple to say. Forsake pride, cling to Christ. Oh, what a lifetime of effort. And it's well worth the effort, beloved. Let's pray. Father, I thank You for the time that You've given us in Your Word.

I pray that You would be at work in our hearts to deliver us from any pride that we would have in ourselves or in anything else that we would truly glory in Christ alone. I pray that You would give us great joy in humbling ourselves and following after Christ.

We ask for Your grace to be at work. It is such an entangling sin. Help us to cast it aside and to walk humbly. May the mind of Christ, our Savior, the mind of humility be in us. And we look to You and depend on You for this grace.

We pray these things for Christ's sake.