It Was Through Pride That the devil Became the devil

I was scrolling through my twitter feed the other day and came across a great quote from C.S. Lewis, “It was through pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” I don’t know about you but that completely blew my mind.  Pride is what made the devil the devil, wow.  To me that brings a whole new meaning to the old saying, “pride is the root of all evil.”  If all the above is true then I think it’s safe to say, “The root of the devil is pride, and the root of pride is evil.”We have to be careful with pride though.  It can be as sly and unassuming as anything else we deal with.  God actually brought this to attention in my own life just this past week.Before I dive into that I need to take a moment and be completely transparent with you.  My family and I have been really struggling lately.  My wife and I have dealt with a job loss, someone performing a hit and run on our car, fierce battles with fibromyalgia and bouts of depression.  And that’s just within the past 3 weeks!  But as my wife and I were driving back from a family function we had the iPod going and worship music blasting through the speakers.I don’t know about you but God loves to speak to me through music and I absolutely love it.  As we were driving the song “I exalt thee” by Jesus Culture came on.  I hadn’t heard that song in a long time and had kind of forgotten about it.  At one point in the song they sang over and over, “I will exalt thee, I will exalt thee.”  The Holy Spirit jumped right in and spoke directly at me with the simple phrase, “Surrender.”  He then showed me the pride in my heart that was causing a rift between He and I and I was instantly humbled.Over the past couple weeks I have been on the job search with every intent to be obedient to God.  I continually prayed that He would guide my family and me into the next chapter of our life.  But deep down I was forming my own agenda and trying to formulate a “real and practical” plan that we (God and I) were going to use.  I was at my wits end with the onslaught of terrible things my family and I were going through.  I felt like I needed to step in and take control so I could protect us from anymore bad things happening.  I feel really stupid for typing that but it was the truth.  The scary part is is that I didn’t even realize I was doing it.Every day was a roller coaster of emotions.  One hour I would be asking God to take over, and the next hour I would try to take the control back.  This was causing a huge power struggle inside my heart and driving me insane.  I’m so thankful Jesus stepped in and saved me from myself!Is Jesus calling you to surrender?  Is there a struggle deep within yourself that you can’t explain?  I wrote a little prayer to use whenever you have these feelings/issues creep into your heart.Dear Father, I’m sorry for any pride that may have driven a wedge between you and me.  I want to take this time to fully surrender to You.  Take control of my heart and help me prevent any further pride and sin to enter in.  I am so blessed that You have forgiven me more times than there are drops in the ocean.  I pray that I will never take that for granted and show You nothing but gratitude and love with my life.  Amen!