Beguiling Webs of Pride

December 20, 2014

Beguiling Webs of Pride

December 20, 2014

This is a good one. It's kind of funny - it's called "Beguiling Webs of Pride." It begins as I'm working on one of the teachings for the identity of the Bride of Christ, especially her humility and meekness. Who is she? What does she look and sound like? It's just in the formative stages right now, but the Lord is helping me along with lessons in my own life.

Today, I had a very conceited and arrogant thought. I didn't recognize the thought for what it was, but the Lord did! In fact, He humbled me immediately, in not even more than three minutes. I was getting ready to leave, and my partial dental work fell out of my hand, onto the floor. When I picked it up and examined it, the most important, prominent front tooth had broken off. Try as I could, no tooth. I looked everywhere! The thought occurred to me that I might never find it. The Lord knows I couldn't replace it for a very long time. And in less than the blink of an eye, I recognized my pride and arrogance. I had slipped out from under His protection by my sin of pride. And the devils, who are always standing in line to get a shot at us, managed to get a good one off. He stole my smile.

Here in New Mexico, the locals work a great deal with irrigation and drain off ditches. We had just had a horrendous downpour from the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and my neighbor was having to drain puddles out of his yard. Now, when we moved into this house, I made a picturesque little drainage ditch and built two bridges over it for exactly this purpose. Our street and my driveway in particular caught the brunt of the drain off from the main street. I had seen this yard before - it was a lake of mud! So, we laid rock and gravel, built a meandering rock stream to route the rain from spreading in the yard, out into the pasture.

Now in New Mexico, there's just a little bit of prejudice against Anglos. As I watched my Native New Mexican neighbor cleaning his yard, I thought smugly, "Huh, I ought to invite him over here to see my little stream." (which was running swiftly as he was managing his huge puddles all over his yard.) Of course, I didn't say anything to him, but the Lord let me know what He thought right away! Depriving me of my smile was very humiliating.

I ended up making the food pick-ups for our little food pantry toothless (laughs). After I'd spent some time repenting, I asked the Lord, "Please, may I have my tooth back?" I went into the kitchen, and dropped a hard plastic salsa cup right where my partial had fallen. I noticed it bounced back against the stove. So, I got on my hands and knees with a flashlight and looked everywhere on the floor, around the stove, under the stove. Uhhhhhh. When I looked in back of the stove, nothing was on the floor.

But I did notice a spider web. And in it was something small and white. I thought, 'Could that be my tooth?' Sure enough, it had landed in the spider web!

In one of my songs, (in fact I've just found it now, it's "Eyes So True" - I'm not sure what I've titled it on my YouTube). In one of my songs the verse reads, "beguiling webs, spun in the dark". I believe that well describes the dark nature of pride and how it entangles the soul and thoughts that, in the end, will paralyze it. The Lord opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. (Proverbs 3:34, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5)

Let me just read the line in the song here, it says:

"Keep your eyes on Me, My Bride,

And let your gaze be purified,

From beguiling webs spun in the dark,

So you'll forever miss the mark."

OK, so there have been many times that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get my voice to sing a line of my song the way I wanted it to sound. I can't help but think that in those times, the Lord was holding back from me, because I didn't have the humility He was looking to bless.

So, let my toothless grin be a reminder to all, the Lord hates pride. He will faithfully work with you as long as you have any. The catch: pride can't enter Heaven, so sooner or later, it has got to go.

I hope and pray you can keep your smile, as He faithfully cleans away the webs in your life. The Lord bless you!