Attitudes on Pride — Jim Logan

I've always wanted to come up here and look around, and to see the place. Our daughter was here. The people in the daytime probably know her. Our daughter was here a couple of years ago. She and her girlfriend, her roommate, are working with children with another mission down in Miami with Cubans.

And she was out here, and she said, oh, Dad, it's such a wonderful place. You ought to see it. And I said, well, I hope to. I think I'd like to tell you just a little bit about who I am, and that may help you to listen a little bit.

Sometimes you try to figure out where's this guy coming from, and maybe if I can help you, you don't have to think about that so much. But I was a pastor, in fact. Many, many years ago, I stumbled in a camp.

And I was young, and so was the camp direction. It was called Camp Goodness. And the fellow on the platform with gray hair didn't have gray hair then. And I don't know how many years ago it was, but it was about 20 years ago, I guess.

And I told Ryder Kellen at that time I was out of college and wasn't sure what to do with my life. And he really almost, almost persuaded me to go into child evangelism. But the Lord didn't lead that way, although we've always had a real burden for children.

But I pastored for a number of years. And then, in pastoring, I was asked if I would leave the pastorate and go and work with college students, just basically be a counselor and helping college students in their Christian life at a Christian college.

And that seemed to be the leading of the Lord. So the past five years, I was chaplain of Calvary Bible College in Kansas City, Missouri. And while there, the Lord has spoke to our hearts. In fact, I met Wilma down at her mother's church.

And as I would go out from the college and minister in churches, I was being pulled. I had a tremendous ministry with these college students, that age group. And yet, I'd go off to these churches, and it was so hard for me that I was being torn.

And I knew that God had given me a pastor's heart. And it just wasn't being totally fulfilled in a ministry with 20 to 25. And so I asked permission of the president of the college if I might leave and go back to the pastorate.

So I just recently returned to the pastorate. And I would like to share some things with you that we found very, very important in our school. And it'll be in the area of, first of all, understanding your own self.

I think if we can understand ourselves, it helps us to understand those that we work with. And so I trust that these nights, that as we go into some of the difficulties and some of the major struggles that the people you want to work with are having, and you know that someone can have a real desire to serve the Lord, and yet they can have certain hang-ups in their life that are not really under the control of the Holy Spirit, and it diminishes their effectiveness.

Have you ever had a club in someone's home that when you were in the home, you wondered if the children would get some kind of a disease? And yet, the mother is so busy, and she's so gone all the time, and she can't clean the place up, and it's kind of like a dump, and you're saying, there's got to be a balance here.

And then you go to someone else's house, and you're afraid the kids are going to bend the rug. You know? And so I just hope that as we go through all of these attitudes, that, first of all, you identify yourself, and maybe it will help you to realize that maybe you could pull some of these key people aside and share some insights with them, what helped them, because a lot of people want help, but they don't know where to go.

We found this at Kansas City. We could not believe it was my weakness, is that if people want help, I just keep, like, right, or he'll go anywhere and speak, and someone says, I need to talk to you. I was available, and finally, we trained students to help, and we run a 24-hour call-in line, and they didn't think it would work, and you can't believe the Christians that called that 24-hour line for help in Kansas City that just didn't know where to turn, members of churches that they were struggling.

And so I just trust that, as we share with you, we share this with our students, because we felt for them to serve the Lord, if they didn't have the right attitudes, then it was going to affect their ministry, and as I shared it there every summer, I go to the Green Mission here in St. Louis, and I work with the missionary candidates, and we share the same attitudes to these missionary candidates, and say it's imperative that you build these Christ-like attitudes in your life for your effectiveness.

So we're going to start with the negative, you know, what is hindering this attitude from being in my life as God has really wanted it to be, and all of us have struggled. There's not a person here that's perfect, because when you're perfect, we won't find you.

You know, Enoch walked with God, and they just found his shoes, you know, and he was gone, and God took him, and as long as you and I are here, we're not perfect, but yet we want to move on towards perfection, and if there's things in our life that are hindering the ministry, our ministry, what a tragedy.

Isn't that a tragedy? You know, if we have obvious defects, and some of the people have a struggle working with us, it ought not be, and so we'll try to do the best we can to point out these basic attitudes.

I turn to, did we ever, did they ever pray here? We were, our brother took me out to a lovely dinner, because I was late. Did you have prayer already? Would it hurt if we prayed again, you suppose? Okay.

There you have it, another prayer in Ask God, and in the afternoon, I'm doing something different in the after, or in the mornings, and we're going to try and take a new approach to spiritual gifts. Now, I'm not here as a big Bible teacher, you know, some theologian that's come in.

That's not my, what I want to do is to share with you the different gifts, and then the personalities of people that have that gift, and I am sure that's really going to help you is, if you have a number of people that you're working with, to be able to understand why you have some conflict between certain people, let's say, well, if you're going to do it, you do it this way, and someone else, if you're going to do it, you do it this way.

You have people that are, in child evangelism, I'm sure you're going to see the certain gifts, I think, that lends itself to child evangelism. There's just certain people that God has gifted in a certain way, and they go in, they have just what to offer, but then you get the bulldozers in there.

You know, you'll have these tender-hearted women that have such a burden for children, but then you get that bulldozer in there, and she's like a bull in a Chinese closet, and she does so, and you're trying to, you know, go around putting Band-Aids in all the hearts, and so I just hope that this week will be an understanding of not only ourselves, but those God has called us to work with in the ministry, and maybe if we can see them in ourselves, it will help see where they fit in, because I am sure there are certain Christians that you would rather not be around.

There's just certain Christians, they just automatically, you just react to them, inwardly. You don't outwardly, because, you know, that's all, you're leaders, and leaders can't react outwardly, but inwardly, you kind of react to that person saying, you know, they just kind of rub me the wrong way, and if I was going to have a special friend, they would not be, you know, they just wouldn't be, and we're going to find out why.

Why is it that you have a certain affinity to certain people, and then other people you just kind of pull back on, and yet they're God's children, and they may be very talented, but there's something about their basic personality that causes you to pull back, so we trust that that will be a help in the afternoons.

Oh, he wants me to see if it works. Okay, let's see here. Well, drop it down, and it's very, very tiny, but what we can do is we'll take, this is the overhead, just to get some basic notes, otherwise you take other notes.

In the college, I used this one overhead for ten weeks. You guys had ten weeks? You know, so it's just to give you an idea of what we're looking at. We're going to, the top is attitudes. The attitudes that God wants us to develop.

The Mind of Christ and the Pursuit of Wisdom

Remember it says in Philippians chapter two, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. We are commanded to have the mind of Christ. God doesn't say it's a good idea that we have the mind of Christ.

We ought to have the mind of Christ. Now the one thing I wondered, if I'm commanded to have the mind of Christ, how do I know when I have it? And how do you know when you have the mind of Christ? And this is my results of thinking this thing through.

How I know I have the mind of Christ is when I would do, in any given situation, the very same thing that he would do. See, when I can think as he thinks, and I know as he knows in that situation, then I know what to do, and that's wisdom.

Proverbs 4 .7 says, Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. So the goal of every Christian is wisdom, not knowledge. And that's the trouble about a lot of Bible schools today. They're knowledge centers.

And knowledge pops up. But you want to turn out, because you can be knowledgeable and very unwise. You can turn out, in fact it's a tragedy today, that you can turn out Magna Cum Laude seminary students whose lives are spiritually bankrupt.

That should not be in a Christian school. And so brains and spirituality may not go together. And so we don't want knowledge to be our goal, and God never says knowledge to be the goal, but wisdom. What is wisdom?

Wisdom is being able to see as God sees. That's what wisdom is. That you and I can see as God sees. Then he says with wisdom, get understanding. What is understanding? Understanding is the ability, now I know what to do and to do it.

So understanding has to do with my response to a situation. Wisdom has to do with my seeing it from the right perspective. My son got a puzzle for Christmas. It was one of these ice cream cone puzzles.

And it's just a puzzle of ice cream cones. And the same flavors repeated. And so we would start making that puzzle and we'd take a piece and it didn't fit. Now we could have taken that piece and said, well if it doesn't fit, let's throw it away.

You know, and throw the pieces away because it didn't fit. But you know, it maybe didn't fit in that section, but it fit in the overall picture. And you and I have a struggle. We make decisions on the basis of our immediate situation that God looks at it how?

The whole picture. And sometimes you and I make the very wrong decision because we make it on the right now instead of the whole picture. I remember one time I went to see the Rose Parade. And that's an experience.

I stood on the street corner. We got there about 4 o 'clock in the morning and I still wasn't the first one. You know, and if you've ever been there, it's a beautiful thing to see. I don't know if our brother ever went to see it.

When you live down there, you know, you don't go. You have to move away and then you go back to see it, you know. It's too close. But it's just, it's one of those things you cannot describe. It's a float.

They're just so beautiful. And the way they've done it, you just have to see them in person to see all those flowers. It's unbelievable. But I remember standing there and all of a sudden nothing would happen.

I mean, you're just standing there on the street corner, you know, doing this and there's nothing. And, you know, you only see the section of the parade that goes by. But those at home watching, they used to do this.

They put a, in a helicopter, they put one of those cameras, you know, and the helicopter would show you the parade from the beginning to the end from that perspective. And you'd see where a float broke down.

And they're getting a tow truck to tow that float. That's why right now nothing seems to be happening in my parade. And so it's so important that you and I realize that God sees the whole parade. And that we've got to be very careful about making decisions, especially life-changing decisions, just on the basis of something that's happening right now.

Unless we're sure that we've got the mind of Christ or wisdom. And so in Philippians 2 there, we can have the mind to find. Let's just look at that. Philippians 2 .5. And this would be our goal. Having the mind of Christ.

And let this mind be in you, which is also in Christ Jesus. And he went on and shared how that mind didn't elevate him, but it caused him to be what? A servant. It caused him to be a servant. And, you know, a servant is someone that gets excited about making someone else successful.

That's important. And, you know, we all need to develop a servant's heart. You know, you may want... You're teachers. I realize that. You teach. You may teach so that these people will make you successful.

You don't have a servant's heart, do you? No, you should teach to make them what? Successful. That everyone that you teach and all the people you work with, that you will make them successful. Then you'll be a real servant.

And I don't know if we have any employees right now here from the institute, but the employees sitting here, your one job is to make this man the most successful man in all of the United States in Christian work.

That's what God has called you to make. Because he's the president. Not because who he is, but because of his position. And if he was someone else, I'm just saying the position. And so, as a servant, my job when I was at Calvary Bible College was to make that school the most effective, successful school that I could.

And we need to develop that today. We need to have a servant's heart today. And that's the kind of heart and mind that Christ had. Now, we want to develop... We want to talk about specific attitudes. And we're going to do it three things.

We're going to look at the negative attitude, which would be the spirit. We have the spirit, which would be the wrong spirit. This would be a negative spirit. Then we have the character deficiency. And then we have God's solution.

What should be the solution? Because a person's attitude is absolutely essential. Attitude. The scripture says, "...are the fullness of the heart.". What? The mouth speaks. He says, "...as a man, what, thinketh in his heart, so is he.".

Attitudes, Parenting, and Honor

And you know that when we wanted to be successful parents, we have four children and we still have one teenager at home, just going into it. It's the first boy to take the teen years. And I remember when I was pastoring in my church and we had a daughter that was 15.

And we had a man in the church to every one of his girls because it's a total washout. And he says, He says, "...you just wait till your girl gets to be 16.". You just wait. I thought, oh, I could wait and wait and wait.

Something horrible is going to happen. When she gets to be 16, she's going to turn out a terrible girl. Well, she got 16. He says, "...you just wait till she gets 17.". And she got 17, 18, and so on, and she's serving the Lord today.

The second one went through, and she's serving the Lord today. The third one is in Bible school today, and we've got a boy going through. But one thing my wife and I learned in working with our children, that if you discipline for wrong actions, it's too late.

You need to discipline for bad attitudes. Because attitudes is nipping it in the bud. And you need to deal with your children, with their attitudes, because when the attitude is bad, then it's going to be what?

An action. It's going to come. And so you want to be very, very much aware of your children's attitudes. What are their attitudes? And you know, and I'm sure you're aware of this, that there's one attitude that's so important with children.

If you want to help a child, you must have, that child must have the right attitude towards his mom and dad. The child must have a right attitude towards their mom and dad. And we worked with a kid in the college, you know that's one of the main things we did with the freshmen, is to get the freshmen, Christian freshmen, back with right attitudes towards their mother and father.

Remember it says, the eye that mocketh his father and despises to obey the mother, that the ravens of the valley shall pluck it and the young eagle shall eat it. Just the eye that mocks the father. It doesn't say anything.

Just the eye that mocks the parents. The attitude, that mocking attitude towards mom and dad is beginning destruction in that child's life. Look what it says in Ephesians 6 here. Whenever we'd have children in trouble, I'd get telephone calls from Christian parents at the Christian schools in Kansas City saying, would you talk to this teenager and the parents?

Can we work them in? I said, well, I'll work them in during my lunch hour. You bring them over to the college during lunch hour and I'll work with these kids. I knew when any Christian teenager was having problems, a Christian teenager struggling, I knew what their problem was.

Their problem was that attitude towards their mom and dad. I have never dealt with a Christian teenager yet and I counseled in the Christian high schools. I go and I put on seminars and teach in the Christian high schools in Kansas City.

I'll be going again and teach dating seminars and all these kind of things to these Christian kids and counsel the seniors in these different schools. I've never found a teenager yet that was in trouble that had the right attitude towards their mother and dad and that fulfills the scripture here in Ephesians 6.

It says, children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Every kid knows that verse. I know that verse. My folks quote it all the time. They've got it written on the wall. I've been raised on that verse and I'm sick of it up to here.

The kids don't see the benefit of that verse. Why should they obey their parents? Why should they do it? It says, honor thy father and mother which is the first commandment with promise. You ask people, what's the promise?

You know what they say? That you live long. That's half the promise. What's the first half of the promise? Why people don't know it, I don't know. That things will go well with you. God said, if you will obey your parents and honor them, things will go well with you.

That's God's responsibility to say things go well with that child. Things go well with that teenager. Or an adult, if you've got parents. There's a lot of adults that are having a lot of troubles because they have bad attitudes towards their mothers and fathers which are older mothers and fathers.

Now, look at this, it's important. I had a girl, just to explain this, come in and sit down one time and she said, I knew she didn't want to be there. You know, she huffed in her seat and her mom was out in the outer office and she was sitting in the inner sanctum with me and I looked at this girl and I sort of knew her.

We went to about the same churches about 800 -900 people in that church and so she knew I knew who she was. But she didn't know that I knew more about the situation than what I knew. And so I asked this girl and I said, you're having struggles at home.

She said, oh I really am. And I don't like it. She said, I go to Christian school and I'm a Christian girl. She went to an outstanding church in Kansas City and she said, well I don't like it. And she said, I don't know what to do.

And I said, well let me ask you a couple of questions, may I? And she said, sure. I said, do you obey your parents? And she said, yes. Now I knew she did obey them. Then I said, do you honor your parents?

And she said, yes. And I knew she didn't even know what honor was. And her mother would tell her to pick up her clothes and she, okay. And do the dishes. You know, I know how kids do. You know, all of this.

A lot of manners. It's all over the place. So I asked this girl, since I knew she didn't know what honor was, she did obey, but she didn't honor her parents. I said, would you talk to your Christian teachers at school the way you talk to your mother?

Oh no. I said, would you talk to the pastor the way you talk to your mother? Oh no. I said, would you talk to me the way you talk to your mother? She said, oh no. I said, you know another word for honor, a more modern day word?

She said, what? I said, it's called respect. Oh, I guess I don't do that. Say she was obedient. Obedient is an action. Honor is what? An attitude. There are many wives that say, oh, I'm submissive. They're not submissive.

They're obedient, but they're not submissive. And it's very important the scripture deals with what? Not only our actions, but our attitudes. God's more concerned about our attitudes than He is our actions.

Because I don't care how you try to carve it over. You can sugar coat it, can't you? You can sugar, oh, I'm not mad. When your wife looks right at you, and has fire, sometimes you're like, oh, I'm not mad.

Oh, you're not mad. You're about ready to, looks could kill, I'd be mad. I know you're mad. No, I'm not mad. You know, it's just these inner attitudes that we struggle with. So, let's look at these inner attitudes.

The Critical Spirit in Christian Leadership

We want to look at one that's devastating. This one, well, it'll annihilate you as a leader. It just annihilates you as a leader. Do you ever share somewhere, maybe you just really poured your heart out in teaching teachers, and someone comes up to really clue you in on how you could do a much better job.

You ever had that happen to you? You know, you're really feeling good about, oh, it was a wonderful day. We did, I don't know how much you do, whatever you do, but you did it, you know. And you just really feel, you're rejoicing in the Lord.

And this person comes up and they're going to say, you know what was wrong with your presentation. And you're going to say, I can hardly wait to hear it. And that's that critical spirit. A critical spirit.

So, that's the first thing we want to look at. And that's what we're going to look at tonight. We're going to look at these different attitudes, one of them, but this critical spirit that will just destroy any organization.

And I know, I was involved in a, I mean, a church is one thing and a Christian organization is another thing. And I'm thankful that God has put me both. I've worked as a pastor in a church and I've also been involved in a Christian organization similar to this one.

And I know what that murmuring, complaining, and critical spirit can do. It just destroys it, doesn't it? Doesn't it just destroy it? It's like someone that just opened the icebox on a cold day or something.

You know, it just, and you see them coming and you're like, oh no. In fact, we had a lady one time that had such a terrible critical spirit in our first church and I just really didn't understand all these attitudes and I had some bad ones myself but a critical spirit wasn't one of mine.

And when she would come to the front door, I'd go out the back door. And my wife would say, Jim, you're a chicken. Oh, I just, this lady, whenever she comes, everything was wrong and why did she do this and why did she do that and oh, oh, it's just, you know, she just, she just, I think it's Twin Dollars, somebody says it.

No, I don't know who it is. It's, Jay Adams says, you know, it rained on my parade. No, that other guy, that Dr. Dodgson. It rained on my parade. This lady always rained on my parade. I don't know, if I could just avoid her when I can, she ruins a picnic, you know.

She'd go to the picnic and she'd see the ants or whatever. That kind of person. Well, what causes, what's the, the inner deficiency that causes a person to be critical outwardly? See, that's just the symptom, isn't it?

We know that they're critical but why are they critical? What's the, the deeper problem? The deeper problem is they have committed the worst sin in all the Bible. I believe that there's one sin that is worse than all the sins that you can find in the Bible.

And if you could write down, make a list of sins and put them in the order of, of bad, what would you put first? What do you think would be a bad sin? It's pride. God listed some things He hated in Proverbs chapter 4.

Let's look at this. If you could put here pride, a character deficiency of pride. Now, I won't use it over here probably the rest of tonight and we'll just use that Bible. But look at Proverbs chapter 6.

These six things does the Lord hate? God says, I'm going to give you a list of things I hate. You know what we need to do? We need to hate the things God hates. We should hate the very same things God hates.

God says, these are six things I hate, yet seven are abomination to me. And the very first thing is pride on the countenance. Pride reflected in the countenance. You want to do an interesting study sometime.

Study countenances in Scripture. Psalm says, David says, thou art the health of my countenance. As a chaplain and as a counselor my job was to read countenances like that. When people would walk in I'd read the countenances to try to figure out what was wrong so I could immediately help them.

Because we had such a backlog of people. When we went to school the students had to wait six weeks to get an appointment. Well I just couldn't wait six weeks to find out what someone's problem was. I had to nail it like that.

Because there were so many people to work with and so many people to help. And we began to look at certain problems people have are reflected in certain ways in their countenance. And it's interesting.

Certain studies. Now it's easy to pick bitterness. Isn't it easy to pick bitterness when someone says, you know Dr. McGee described the lady that came to one time to set him straight on some Bible issue at some conference ground and he described what she looked like.

He said this. She looked like she was weaned on a dill pickle. You know that kind of gives you a you know you get the picture. You know bitterness it's just entrenched in their face. Guilt will show in a person's face.

Anxiety will show in a person's face. And just all these different things show. Immorality shows in a person's face. In fact it says in Peter how fellows go looking for girls whose eyes beam forth immorality.

And fellows learn to pick girls that are immoral. I'd ask our freshman girls I said you know some of you girls will walk down the street here and fellows will honk at you in their cars because we were right in the heart of town at Kansas City.

Other girls will walk down the street and they won't honk at them. Why? Is it because one girl is ugly or another girl is pretty? No. It's because some girls are still struggling with sensuality. And these fellows will honk, pick it up.

And they know by looking at that girl that that girl is struggling with sensual struggles inside. She's beaming out of her eyes and they can just tell the way she walks. You know just her mannerisms and everything shows that this girl is still struggling with problems.

Haven't you seen that in your clubs? Doesn't that make you sick? Doesn't that make you sick? Do you know in Kansas City the health director of Kansas City public health director was on the board of the college and one of our personal friends and he wrote a two page thing in the Kansas City newspaper that two years ago he did it in the summertime they did a research that the increase of premarital pregnancies in Kansas City was between the 5th and 6th grade girls.

5th and 6th grade girls. Some of those girls look like they're going to a bar not grammar school. You seen those girls? It's unbelievable. You guys have a job. You've got to get those kids to live it.

Boy, 5th grade some of those girls are already involved. It's unbelievable what's going on. I'm sure you're aware of it. All I'll say is I go to these schools these Christian schools and I notice what's going on in some of these Christian schools.

Struggles they're having in reality in the Christian schools. In Kansas City last year we had more teenage girls pregnant in the Christian schools in Kansas City than were in my public high school. Because times have changed.

Haven't changed. There are more girls going to Christian high school that were pregnant out of wedlock in Kansas City that I know about than were pregnant that I knew about when I was going to high school back in the end of the 40s.

This is a real struggle today. And you guys are called you've got a tremendous responsibility. Don't you have a tremendous responsibility? I'll tell you I don't think there's ever been a time that they needed your workers in this work ever in our nation as they do today.

If we don't reach the children you know what Kim will hate me? That a boy will not get through school public school in San Diego through high school without either the witnessing of being approached to be involved in homosexual activity.

That's Kim Lennon. I'm just going to give the kids the training so that they'll say no to those temptations and to the struggles that kids are facing today. You guys have a tremendous responsibility. Well let's look at this thing of pride.

Pride and accountants. Why is pride so bad? Why is pride so devastating? Why did God put it first? Let's go and look at two portions of scripture and then we'll go back and we'll go through the book of Proverbs to look at the judgment that God puts on the proud.

Pride, Satan, and the Desire to Rule One's Own Life

That's just one book. We want to look at pride. Let's turn to Ezekiel and see if we can see pride and all of its ugliness. And we say well pride just doesn't seem so bad to be proud. It's devastating.

Why was Satan cast out of heaven? Why was he cast out of heaven? What did he do that was so bad that God cast him from his presence? It must have been awful. It really must have been awful if God cast him out of heaven.

It must have been something terrible. Probably won't be able to read it in public if it was so awful. Let's look in Ezekiel 28 and he's describing this one. He says in the last part of verse 12 Thou sealest up the thumb full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

If you have any old flannel ground that has Satan looking ugly throw it away and put something else in there. He is not ugly. He's very attractive. You know he wasn't something that came out of a swamp.

You know and he's in the garden alone as this thing comes you know dripping towards her. Now if you want to see the perfection of beauty you look at him. You want to see the perfection of God's creative beauty you look at Satan.

He's very, very attractive. Isn't sin attractive? Isn't it? It sure is and so is the origin of it. He's very attractive. Now let's look at this one. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God. Every precious stone was thy covering and then it names all the coverings that he had over them.

I don't understand a lot about Satan but I know this. There are some interesting things about him and I don't know if you've ever studied it before. It names these different things. The sapphire, the emerald, the carbuncle, those are Hebrew words for musical instruments.

Satan was probably the chief musician in heaven. You know Magee said when he fell out of heaven he fell in the fire lock. I'm not sure if that's where he lived or not but anyway that's what Dr. Magee said.

But Satan was the chief musician in heaven. Out of his being, if you can see him, here he's covered with these precious stones. From his body flowed out light. And light went through these stones that covered him.

And music flowed out from his being. Can you imagine Eve in the garden and this fellow walked up to her with lights and music and let us put that together today. The lights and music. That was all as Satan.

Because he was light and music in the garden. And he walked up to her and said thou with the anointed chair of the covering I have set thee so. Thou was upon the holy mountain of God. Thou has walked up and down in the midst of the fire.