The Sin God Opposes: Why Pride Blocks Revival

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0:01:18 – (Steve Gray): It’s time to be and experience more.

0:01:23 – (Steve Gray): Hello everyone. Welcome to another More Faith, More Life podcast, your voice of revival. Today we’re going to talk about one of your favorite subjects, Pride. Proud people. And how. How what damage that does to relationships and our country and everything. We’re going to talk about it all. And of course, since I talk about revival, pride is a great enemy of revival. Because pride says I don’t need to change.

0:01:49 – (Steve Gray): They need to change. So here we got people on the networks, on news, I hear it on news, the word revival. And then of course, a lot of podcasts and preachers and they say the word revival and you can just kind of think about, okay, what do you mean by revival? Because you mean somebody else needs to do something or something’s going to happen to somebody else, but nothing’s going to happen to me. Cause I don’t need it.

0:02:13 – (Steve Gray): And so it slows down, it becomes an enemy of revival because it says, I don’t need to change. But boy, the nation does. I always kind of chuckle a little bit when I say America needs revival. Well, we are America. And the way God works and wants to work is if you just read your Bible, if there was to be A real revival, a move of God where the tangible presence of God, unmistakable, unmistakable, tangible presence of God fills a room or a place, comes over a city, whatever is. When that happens, then how’s that going to come about?

0:02:50 – (Steve Gray): He does it through people. Which people? His people. Not America, generic. Like we see things happening in the streets or a riot or crime or whatever you think, whoa, we need revival because they have a lot of crime in that city. Well, how’s it going to happen? It’s have to go through some people. And the reason it doesn’t go through is because people recognize the problem, but they don’t recognize it needs to come through people.

0:03:18 – (Steve Gray): But they don’t want to change because they don’t think they need to change. It’s those people in the streets or the criminals, they need to all change, you know, or politicians, they need to change or whatever. But I don’t need to change. So I just want God to do something better, do something bigger than do something. Whatever revival is to me, to people, whatever they think it is. And a lot of people have a lot of different ideas on it and they don’t get the right ideas of what exactly it is. It’s just God comes down and displays himself and grace becomes greater grace.

0:03:51 – (Steve Gray): So that people that maybe struggled here and struggled there, boy, grab it. Because now’s going to be the easiest time for you to grab the power of God and really get a transformation. And the tangible, unmistakable power of God is among us. But anyway, but if you don’t think you need that, then you become an enemy of revival. And you can still say we need revival or you can still report on revival. So people say, well, over here, on this campus, over here, it’s, I think they’re having revival, you know, and it’s, in my opinion, it’s not, it’s not real. It’s. It’s a form of revival. It’s a level of revival, but it’s not full blown revival.

0:04:28 – (Steve Gray): What we would need to see to change, you’re not going to change a nation on this great service that they had on that level. But still it’s good. But when people report on it, oh, this is so good, look, they got. But they’re not a part, they weren’t there, they didn’t participate. They’re just glad, oh, this is so good. It’s happening to other people. And so pride is a subject we all need to really look at. And pride really is a self-sufficiency. I don’t need this. I said this a little bit ago to a friend. I Said pride does not shout. I don’t need God.

0:05:02 – (Steve Gray): It doesn’t shout, I need God. It whispers, I got this. It whispers, I got this. I don’t need it. Self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency. I’m okay. I know what I’m doing. I see everything clearly. People think they, you know, I was talking about humility. And like here people, everybody thinks they’re humble. And, you know, and so if you think you’re humble, you’re probably prideful. So if you and or they get humbled by circumstances, things go wrong, they get embarrassed, they get divorced, they’re embarrassed, whatever. And now they’re a little lower than they were. Their opinion of themselves or other people’s opinion of them is lower. That’s not what humility is. Humility is a choice. And pride is something we need to understand how detrimental it really is. Cause the Bible says God opposes the proud.

0:05:53 – (Steve Gray): God opposes the proud. And so while you’re trying to walk by faith, cause by impossible to please God without faith. But if you have faith and pride, you got a collision here. What’s God going to do? Is he supposed to honor your faith or oppose your proud? Well, it says he opposes the proud. So you’re going to just be spinning. You’re kind of locked in the middle, spinning your wheels. You’re on a merry go round. How about that one?

0:06:15 – (Steve Gray): Or as we know, Samson got his eyes gouged out when he lost his strength. They cut his hair, lost his strength, and they put him on a, you know, pushing the grain, you know, and that big old stone, you know, you have to put. And he’s just walking in circles, walking in circles. And if you’re trying to live by faith, but you’re also full of pride, you’re going to walk in circles. It’s not going to get you anywhere.

0:06:40 – (Steve Gray): And so I want to talk a minute about something else, though, that is more common to what’s going on in our country right now. And still on pride. But pride happened in 1920. Well, way before that, in the late 1800s. And there were those that I know for me to talk about opposing this sounds funny, but they began to oppose alcohol drinking. You know, back then they didn’t say, don’t do drugs. They said, don’t do alcohol, don’t do beer.

0:07:11 – (Steve Gray): Okay. And there were. People rose up. A lot of them were women. And there’s a reason for that, because underlying the prohibition was for women to be able to vote. So women came up, and then women started coming against alcohol. Carrie Nation was the most famous. She Was a character, Carrie Nation, the character. She didn’t really stop drinking or alcohol, but she would go into a saloon and take her ax and chop up stuff and knock things and knock bottles over. Well, in that day, men would just stand and watch her because they didn’t think like, what do you. You know, you don’t hit a woman back then. You know, it was really there. And so they would just watch her do it. And she made headlines. She was more of a headliner than really doing anything. But it began to, you know, for that movement began to grow and grow and grow.

0:08:00 – (Steve Gray): And so pride came in almost little before the 1920s. And it began to infect states, different states and legislatures. And I think by into 1900, there were, like, at least nine states or something like that, governors or senators, I don’t know which were on board with prohibition, which means it’s against the law to sell or distribute alcohol. It really wasn’t against the law to drink it when they passed it, but to sell it and distribute it. And so they got this idea, well, you know, families are being torn.

0:08:33 – (Steve Gray): This is how they promoted it. And I’m going to tell you the root of it in a minute. But they promoted it like, well, families are torn up, people lose their jobs. We got drunks on the street. Did you know in. In that year, right before 1920, do you ever think. Feel like. For instance, I’ve heard like, there’s Starbucks everywhere. Well, in our town, there’s coffee places everywhere, more than Starbucks. But it used to be Starbucks kind of led the way, you know. And so you’d see Starbucks and a Starbucks. I even saw Starbucks across the street from each other once it went down.

0:09:05 – (Steve Gray): But get this. And by today’s statistics, to every one Starbucks then, there were 23 saloons to one. They didn’t have Starbucks then, but if it was, today, we’d have one Starbucks, but we’d have 23 saloons to one Starbucks. That’s how many saloons were everywhere. And they were packed, okay? And so they got the idea that if we could get rid of alcohol, we could get rid of our problems. It’s going to help our country clean it up. Jobs will be better.

0:09:36 – (Steve Gray): Everything will get better. If we pass the law, make it a law that you cannot really not drink, but you cannot produce alcohol. And if you can’t produce it, then they think they’ll stop people from drinking. And so they passed the law and said no. And it happened. And the day before and the night before the law came into effect, everybody got drunk. You Know, I don’t know. Everybody but the nation kind of got drunk and celebrated.

0:10:02 – (Steve Gray): And then it happened, okay? And it didn’t work. Because what it did, instead of passing the law where it was, people didn’t drink. It went underground. Now, get this. They’re trying to pass a law to correct behavior, Right? To correct behavior. We’re going to pass a law. And that’s what’s happening in our country today. I’ll jump ahead a little bit. We have people in different parties in different states.

0:10:28 – (Steve Gray): They’re trying to legislate, to clean it up, to make it more fair to other people, to make it more easy to other people, to try to get other people to behave or live this way. And you can’t do it. You cannot legislate morality or change a heart. That’s the church’s job. The church’s job is to go beyond just people coping with problems, but transform them in their problems. Okay? But instead they wanted to solve the problem, the alcohol problem, and all the saloons, by passing a law. And all of a sudden it’s against the law to drink alcohol or to have alcohol, not to drink it. Like I said, I guess I never heard anybody being arrested for drinking it. They may have, but drunkenness they could.

0:11:13 – (Steve Gray): But anyway, so they passed the law. Now it all looks like we’re going to pass a law. And who are these people so prideful that they want to control your behavior and pass laws that control and change the nation? Right now we have people that want to. Are trying to bring in revolutionary laws, ideas from other countries that change our behavior, that change the way we do government, to change the way we get a paycheck, to change the way people buy groceries. See, they want to bring all this in. They know better. They’re going to solve our problems by laws.

0:11:51 – (Steve Gray): Well, prohibition is a good example. It didn’t work. Instead of saloons, they had something called a speakeasy. In other words, you speak easy about it, be careful, don’t say anything about it. And they go down and alcohol exploded. And then the criminals took care of it and decided. And that’s where famous criminals like Al Capone and all those names. Baby Face Nelson. Al Capone. No, wait. Baby Face Nelson rob banks. Al Capone was in alcohol and famous people. And they, they made themselves so, so rich.

0:12:24 – (Steve Gray): And people went underground and it didn’t stop anybody. I read an article on it that said everybody drank. Well, that’s probably an exaggeration. Everybody. But you get the point. It didn’t stop. It actually grew because they were Told not to do it. Now they can go down and do it and hide it and sneak it, you know, and it didn’t work. And so that went for 13 years. 13 years. People made a fortune off of. And it did not take alcohol away at all. And then they repealed it. And if I’m right, I think it’s the only amendment that has been repealed in our nation’s history. But I have to check on that. But I think that’s true.

0:13:02 – (Steve Gray): But anyway, it didn’t work. In fact, it created what they call the Roaring Twenties. And morality got worse. Alcohol got worse. Crime got worse. Murdering got worse. Everything got worse. But the idea is worse. Well, we’ll legislate this to clean up America. We’ll pass a law that cleans up America. And it didn’t work because you can’t change the heart. You can’t change the appetite. Everybody still had an appetite to drink, but now they had to do it a different way, and they had to go underground to do it.

0:13:34 – (Steve Gray): Now, here’s what I want you to understand, though, how prideful this really was. So we think it did have to do with. What is it called? Women’s suffrage, I think that’s what it’s called. Where women were. Came out of that and voted, ended up voting. And so this was part of the movement of that women’s suffrage and Prohibition before it was made a law. Guess what else? It absolutely hits us today, and it’s a prideful thing, and that is Prohibition.

0:14:02 – (Steve Gray): I don’t know if you’re going to be able to handle this. Prohibition was rooted in immigration, just like it is today. There were people coming into our country and they would go to their saloons and drink and drink and drink and drink from their cultures that they had in Europe. And then they would stay in their own societies, own groups, and they weren’t assimilating into America like people wanted them to. So they had the Italians and they had the Jewish people and they.

0:14:33 – (Steve Gray): And, you know, all the different cultures and they lived in their neighborhoods and the Polish, and. And so they were. And people got afraid then of immigration and they didn’t want the immigrants. So part of Prohibition was to come against immigration, to cause people to not want to live here, to not immigrate here, and to shut them down in these saloons. So you read for it for yourself. It’s very. Not very well known how women’s suffrage, about voting was in there, but it’s not really in there. How people wanted to legislate immigration and assimilate people by Passing and prohibition, so you can read about that.

0:15:19 – (Steve Gray): And so today we have the same problem that we have people. And I think immigration is important to have laws. You know, if it’s illegal, illegal means illegal to me. But I don’t know how else to describe the word illegal, but anyway. But what’s the real problem? The real problem is we don’t have the spirit. We’re trying to pass laws, we’re trying to be lawful. We’re trying to deport. Okay, I get all that.

0:15:48 – (Steve Gray): But what we really need is something spiritual to happen so that immigrants or whoever they are, if we want to lower crime, we don’t lower crime just by deporting people, which I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. But what about changing the heart of people? Where’s the change of heart? Where’s the spirit of God rushing over our nation that is now changing the attitudes of people rather than we’re relying totally on politics to solve our problems.

0:16:15 – (Steve Gray): But we’re not changing the heart. They still do it. You can, you know, guess what? You can pass more gun laws, but criminals are still going to have guns. Criminals who are felons are not supposed to have guns. People who have been convicted of a felony are not supposed to have guns. But they do. They don’t care because they’re criminals. Get it? They’re crime. Crime. And so we could pass gun laws, but it’s not going to change anything. People are still going to get guns.

0:16:41 – (Steve Gray): Okay? And so when we get that. The root of it is, though, is that people are prideful thinking. I know what’s best. And so this is how we’re going to change this. But we’re not changing the heart. In the 1920s, they didn’t change the appetite to drink. They just put a law that says we’re going to control what they do. I’m not saying I’m not promoting drinking. I’m not promoting crime, obviously. I’m just saying think of the pride that thinks. I know. We know how to. We know how to change this nation.

0:17:11 – (Steve Gray): We’re going to change its laws. We’re going to bring in ideas from other countries. We’re going to bring in. We’re going to change how people shop and how we vote, and just on and on it goes. And so what’s going to happen? It’s going to fail. We have a successful system now, and it’ll fail. But just like Prohibition fails, you cannot legislate people’s appetites or people’s behavior. You’ve got to have something much, much stronger and so the pride comes in. And pride was in then, okay? So we don’t like the immigrants.

0:17:43 – (Steve Gray): We want women to vote. And I think the root of it was pride. So they passed a law and, and got people on board. So pride is so important to us that we understand that it’s self-sufficiency. It knows it. I’ve got this, I’ve got it, I got it. I know. And most people who are prideful don’t think they’re prideful. So I said to somebody, when I talked about doing this, I said, you know what? Today’s talk probably won’t work because everybody that needs to hear it thinks they don’t need it, right?

0:18:15 – (Steve Gray): Just like revival. So, you know, and people, pride is so, you know, it’s so slippery. Cause some people can even do an act of kindness and then it builds their pride. Pride comes up because, you know, they gave some money to somebody that needed it. And so you think, oh, that’s. So they really help. They wanted to help a person. No, they wanted to build their pride. They’re feeding their pride. They’re feeding their ego by saying, I’m such a kind person.

0:18:44 – (Steve Gray): So when we talk about pride, understand, God is not going to negotiate with pride. He opposes it. He doesn’t negotiate. He doesn’t talk it over. He doesn’t say, I understand. He says, no, we’re not going to have this. We have to humble ourselves. Like Jesus. He humbled himself. He could have been prideful, but he chose to humble himself. And so this resistance, you know, I know it resists. Correction. I’m self-sufficient.

0:19:11 – (Steve Gray): I’m pretty humble, you know, I’m pretty humble. But then we don’t see, you know, one of the scriptures that says having a form of godliness, right, but denying the power. Well, some people thought that the form of godliness is like you go to church, it’s a form. I guess you go to church and go through the motions and deny the power. They think, oh, well, that person doesn’t believe that God has power today.

0:19:36 – (Steve Gray): No, it doesn’t mean that you say, God’s not powerful. You have a form of godliness, but you deny the power, access to. You see, revival, that’s what revival is. It’s allowing the power of God access to me. And I get revived, or we get revived, or a church gets revived. And hopefully a nation can be revived if we can get enough voices to speak out and to say it, right? And so pride defends its position.

0:20:05 – (Steve Gray): Now listen to this. I have people talk to me and they say, you know, the devil’s after me. The devil’s after my money. The devil’s hurting my marriage. And okay, the devil made me do it. It was popular in the seventies. That phrase was. Now you know how old I am. But anyway. And yet, what. Okay, we know what pride does to you because it’s no good. But imagine what pride does to the devil. See, the devil was thrown. Satan, who was Lucifer, was thrown out of heaven because of pride.

0:20:38 – (Steve Gray): Every time you do, you react in pride. You react in a wrong way. You react in an angry way. Your pride rises up and you react. What does it do? It feeds his pride. It feeds his pride. Especially if he set you up to do it. You know, sometimes he hinders us and sets us up. Like one thing that just really ticks you off, and then it keeps happening, whatever it is. Well, you know, and you’re getting angry all the time over the same thing. Cause it really. That’s really what gets you.

0:21:09 – (Steve Gray): That’s your pet peeve, or whatever it is. And so every time you respond that way, it feeds his pride because there, I got him. There I got him. Rather than God saying, hey, they get in situations, they humble themselves. They. They don’t judge other people. They don’t think everybody else needs a change. But don’t worry, I got it. I see. I see. You know, there’s a scripture that says if you were blind, if you said, I’m blind, realize you’re blind means spiritually, then you would be innocent.

0:21:42 – (Steve Gray): It’s because you say you see, your guilt remains. In other words, you’re guilty. Because you say, I got this. I see. I see everything.

0:21:50 – (Steve Gray): I see.

0:21:50 – (Steve Gray): I know what’s going on. I can’t be deceived. I don’t need to worry about it. I understand. I know who those people are. That’s pride. And so you humble yourself and your ability to see people as they really are and keep your position where you are, who you are. You see yourself in a way that you’re satisfied the position God has given you. You’re not trying to. You’re not angry because God didn’t make you the prophet of the world, or you don’t have a big healing ministry, or you’re not holding the microphone in church.

0:22:18 – (Steve Gray): You’re satisfied with where you are, and God can promote you. God gives favor to the humble, but you’re satisfied with the position you are, where you are. Your talents, your ability, your wisdom. All right, this is who I am. I’m not the smartest person, and I need friends, and I need people. But you know, I have some good that I can do too. I can serve too. So anyway, pride is a terrible thing. God opposes pride and he’s not going to change his mind.

0:22:46 – (Steve Gray): So it’s really difficult, like I said, to talk about pride because most people don’t think they have it. And so you have to realize pride says, I got this. I see is self-sufficient, makes all the decisions and doesn’t need help and defends itself. You’re just going in circles. You’re not going to go anywhere when you’re supposed to live by faith. But pride is really behind it all. I just want to help you with this. Maybe you’ll get it.

0:23:12 – (Steve Gray): You can probably preach it to somebody else and say, well, your problem is you’re just full of pride. But the idea in the biblical sense is we see ourselves and we humble ourselves because we don’t want to feed our pride, neither do we want to feed the pride of the devil. To say, there. You say, there, I got this. And then he says, well, there, I got you. So we want to realize that we need to humble ourselves, not be humbled, but by our circumstances, but choose to walk in humility, see ourselves as though we really are and really see God as he really is. The creator God. And I’m here to serve him.

0:23:48 – (Steve Gray): I’m here to lower myself on purpose underneath the great hand and mighty arm of the Lord. So I hope that helps you today. Go to our website, https://stevegrayministries.com, see all the stuff we have. There’ll be a new book soon and all the other things that we have there, like subscribe, tell other people about this podcast. I think it helps people a lot and I hope it’s helping you. Till next time, bye-bye.