Pride will destroy you. Pride is an ugly ministry companion that doesn’t let go easily. Pride will undo years of ministry and preaching and leading. If a friend has the courage to say, I think you’ve become proud, listen to that loving correction. Let God break that chain before it breaks you. Let us daily immerse ourselves in the humbling grace of God in Christ, that we might avoid the route taken by Uzziah and instead walk the one taken by the Lord Jesus 

You may be familiar with this famous saying, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall”. It comes from the Bible, Proverbs 16:18.
We have mixed feelings about pride in Australia. On the one hand, we like to run over any tall poppy with the lawnmower. And yet pride is splashed across Instagram and Facebook pages all the time: pride in achievement and success,  pride in people, pride about identity.  Pride has become an idea or slogan to embrace and celebrate.
We have a discombobulated relationship with pride.
To quote Pride and Prejudice,
“[Mr. Darcy’s] pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, every thing in his favor, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”
“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
I think Australians are selective about the pride we denounce and the pride we embrace.
As a Church last Sunday we looked at the reign of King Uzziah from 2 Chronicles 26. In the account, the theme of power and pride rears its ugly head in devastating form.
Uzziah comes to the throne at the age of 16 and he starts well. While most teenage boys are gaming and playing cricket and using their testosterone for all manner of quick fulfilment pursuits, Uzziah was ruling a nation. He begins well,
4 He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father Amaziah had done. 5 He sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God. As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success.
Uzziah rebuilds military towers and rebuilds towns. He organises and leads the army well. He brings people together. He led the army in battle against the Philistines, verse 7, ‘and the Lord helped him’. It’s not difficult to imagine the excitement surrounding this positive beginning. Uzziah is doing what pleases God and he’s looking after the people and protecting them. He oversees State run building projects that run on time and to budget.
Then it goes horribly wrong. Verse 16 spells out the downward progression,
 But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall.
Power – pride – downfall.
While power is usually spoken in negative and abusive ways today, power isn’t inherently bad or wrong. God is all-powerful. By his powerful word, God created the universe and he made you. By his powerful word God exercises justice and administers mercy. In this strength, he stops nations and cares for the hungry. God also gives people strength – physical, mental, and spiritual strength.
Power can achieve much good and also much sin. In the hands of sinful people, which is all of us, power and strength is a present temptation. We have the creative ability to twist and misuse power in all kinds of ways.
Power doesn’t inevitably lead to pride but when it swims in the bathtub of humanity, it’s like putting an egg in boiling water for 6 minutes; the outcome is pretty likely.
1. Pride grows in all kinds of soil
We mustn’t think of pride in a one-dimensional way. Pride can grow in all kinds of soil: in success, in power, in failure, in suffering. Pride is adaptable and fits snuggly in all different sizes.
Pride is having that concern for yourself and your reputation over and above God and his glory and the good of others. Pride is a belief that I am better or that I deserve better.
Pride includes but isn’t limited to boasting and feeling big about yourself.
John Piper is right when he observes,
Boasting is the response of pride to success.Self-pity is the response of pride to suffering.
Boasting says, “I deserve admiration because I have achieved so much.”Self-pity says, “I deserve admiration because I have suffered so much.”
Boasting is the voice of pride in the heart of the strong.Self-pity is the voice of pride in the heart of the weak.
2. Pride redefines reality, defining identity and worth against other people.
In Uzziah’s case, his pride is fed by power. He came to believe that power justifies freedom to live on one’s own terms. Uzziah comes to believe that power is a road to autonomy and freedom for defining life’s norms. He no longer felt the necessity to follow God’s laws. He had the liberty to take licence. He thought, I can even enter the Temple ignore the law and relate to God as I decide.
This pride exhibits itself in a shameful act in God’s Temple.
16 But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the Lord his God, and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. 
Of course, the reality is Uzziah was never independent. All the good he achieved only came about because of God’s help. As verse 5 reminds, “As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success” The Lord blessed his endeavours. The Lord was his helper. Not only that, the people he serves are God’s people. And this is God’s Temple and yet Uzziah’s self-confidence persuades him to strut about on his terms.
It’s here that I think it’s worth seeing how the story plays out and in doing so displays the stupid stubbornness of pride and its ability to destroy.
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Many people can dread a pastoral visit because they don’t know what they will talk about. If the visitor is their regularly preaching Pastor they may fear that the visit will be a kind of doctrinal or scriptural test that they are doomed to fail. They may fear that the conversation will be abstract or academic, or solely about spiritual things. A good pastoral visitor will not bring this dynamic into your home. Small talk is a common grace, a kind of hallway that can ultimately lead into the heart of matters, and is often a powerful way of building a bridge between people.

Pastoral visitation is a powerful means of spiritual encouragement and a tangible demonstration of the love of Christ to his people. It is a ministry which can reap slow but rich dividends in the lives of individuals and the life of the church and provides an opportunity for genuine fellowship between Christians. While I have written before about the benefits of visitation to the life and work of a Pastor, this post will seek to lay bare some of the basic principles of visitation which could be of help to those on the receiving end of it. Not everyone who is engaged in pastoral visitation is an ordained Pastor, and so this post shares more widely about those men and women gifted for and engaged in caring for God’s people (as well as those in full time Pastoral ministry).
Below are five things to bear in mind if and when you receive a pastoral visit:
1. We Want to Be There
Of all of the opening phrases that I have ever heard in conversation during a pastoral visit, one of the most common is an apology that my time is being used in this way. Pastoral visiting is an unusual thing in many ways, especially given the isolation and individualism of our wider society. As the person being visited it is easy to feel that you are asking something out of the ordinary or unreasonable to have someone come to your home and hear your story. If you are an empathetic and caring person yourself you may fear that a largely one way conversation is in some way selfish, or that it reflects badly on you in some way. None of these things are true. Your visitor, be they your Pastor or a valued member of a visitation team, have chosen to make this ministry part of their life. They are glad to be with you, and these kinds of conversations are not strange to them or an inconvenience. In actual fact, even as you share about your life and faith – be it struggle or joy – they will be blessed and challenged to grow in their own Christian life. Your visitor wants to be with you, and recognising this might just allow you to share more freely and with less fear.
2. We Won’t Inspect Your Home
If having people in our homes is not a regular occurrence then we may feel self-conscious about the condition of the place we are bringing a relative stranger into. Many of us feel that an untidy house, a shelf of unwashed dishes, or decor that is not ‘show-house ready’ is a bad reflection on us as people. The truth is that most of the pictures of people’s homes on Facebook are carefully curated, and the homes we go to for entertainment are often sparkling in the wake of a day’s anticipatory cleaning. Your visitor is there to see you, not to inspect the condition or tidiness of your home. I once met someone the day after a visit to their home who highlighted something they were embarrassed about in the condition of their home. I had to inform them that if they hadn’t mentioned I would never have known!
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The danger of legalism lurks wherever we would relax God’s law from its high-as-heaven standard, dragging it down to a standard low enough for us to keep. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees! The painful truth is that none of us can reach God’s perfect standard. Rather, before his standard, we must tremble, crying out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24).

In every age, the church must be vigilant to avoid legalism. We must never be like the Pharisees, who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger” (Matt. 23:24). God tells us that his commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3), but to add to God’s commandments would indeed be burdensome.
The danger of legalism is one that all true ministers of the gospel of Christ must take with the utmost seriousness. Nevertheless, do we really understand what Christ was condemning when he warned us to “Watch and beware the leaven of the Pharisees” (Matt. 16:6)?
In this article, I want to raise the question of whether we understand the spirit and nature of legalism correctly, and to explore whether this misunderstanding may seriously skew our gospel ministry.
The Legalism of the Pharisees: Not too Strict, but too Lax
What exactly was the legalism that the Pharisees were teaching? A common thought is that the Pharisees were legalistic by being overly strict about the law, while the Sadducees were overly lax about the law. That is, the Pharisees are commonly characterized as legalists, and the Sadducees as libertines. While this view is both common and convenient as a way of categorizing the two groups, it does not match either the historical records or the biblical records, especially regarding the Pharisees.
Both Jewish and Christian historians have recognized that the Pharisees were trying to simplify the law, rather than complicating it. So, the Jewish scholar Alexander Guttmann writes:
Emerging from the ranks of the people, the rabbis spoke in terms intelligible to the populace and were therefore able to lead the people in accordance with their teachings, a feat the Prophets had been unable to accomplish. Uncompromising idealists, the Prophets demanded perfection and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth in their own time; therefore, they were doomed to failure. Prophetic Judaism never became a reality but remained only an ideal, a goal, like Plato’s Republic. The rabbis were idealists, too, but they were at the same time pedagogues. In guiding their people, they took the realities of life (among them the weakness of human beings) into consideration. They upheld the Torah as the divine code, but at the same time they recognized the need for harmonizing the Torah with the ever-changing realities of life.1
The mission of the Pharisees was not to create a set of extra rules to prop themselves up—even if this may have been the eventual result. Rather, the mission of the Pharisees was to boil down the law to principles, practices, and techniques that normal people could understand and keep.
To be sure, the Pharisees were legalists. Their legalism, however, was the result of trying to reduce the law down to something manageable in the lives of the people. This did not leave them to become too strict, but, far too lax in comparison to the fullness of what God required. 
The Bare Text of the Law vs. The Full Ethics of the Moral Law
Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham helps to see this point by observing that the text of the law does not give us a complete accounting for the fullness of what the moral law actually requires. Or, as Wenham puts it, there is a “gap” between the bare text of the law in the Bible and the fullness of the ethics (moral law) required by the Bible.2 So, the bare text of the law “sets a minimum standard of behaviour, which if transgressed attracts sanction,” but the “ethical ceiling is as high as heaven itself, for a key principle of biblical ethics is the imitation of God. Man made in God’s image must act in a godlike way: ‘Be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy’ (Lev. 19:2).”3
From this, we can see that the legalism of the Pharisees manifested itself in two ways: (1) they sought to keep the bare text of the law, rather than the fullness of the biblical ethic (moral law) of what it means to imitate God; and (2) they boiled down the full biblical ethic of the law into manageable principles that seemed to make the law possible to keep.
New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen makes this point powerfully:
The legalism of the Pharisees, with its regulation of the minute details of life, was not really making the Law too hard to keep; it was really making it too easy. Jesus said to His disciples, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The truth is, it is easier to cleanse the outside of the cup than it is to cleanse the heart. If the Pharisees had recognized that the Law demands not only the observance of external rules but also and primarily mercy and justice and love for God and men, they would not have been so readily satisfied with the measure of their obedience, and the Law would then have fulfilled its great function of being a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. A low view of law leads to legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.4
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1 Alexander Guttmann, Rabbinic Judaism in the Making: A Chapter in the History of the Halakhah from Ezra to Judah I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), xii. Cited in Moisés Silva, “The Place of Historical Reconstruction in New Testament Criticism,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986), 120. I am indebted to Silva’s article for much of what I have written about the nature of legalism here.
2 Gordon J. Wenham, “The Gap between Law and Ethics in the Bible,” Journal of Jewish Studies 48, no. 1 (1997): 17–29.
3 Wenham, “The Gap Between Law and Ethics in the Bible,” 18, 26.
4 J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 179.