10 More Ways to Spot Pride in Your Life (21-30)

In keeping with our current series on Humility, we've been posting practical ways to spot pride and cultivate humility in your life. Below you'll find 10 more ways to spot pride. If you've missed the previous two posts, you can find #1-10 here, and #11-20 here. 21. Do you have a hard time admitting you're wrong? Do you often find yourself covering up, excusing, or soft-selling your sin instead of admitting it?

22. Do you have a hard time receiving correction? Do you find yourself jabbing back, changing the subject, or joking to redirect attention after someone calls you out? Do you view correction as an invasion to your privacy and dismiss the person correcting you as being invasive?

23. Do you end up resenting people who correct you? Instead of responding with gratefulness whens someone helps you see sin in your life, do you often get bitter and withdraw from the relationship? Do you respond by dwelling on their faults, whether it's internally or verbally toward them?

24. Are you constantly finding yourself in conflicts with others? Do you have a hard time getting along with most people? Do people regularly tell you they "struggle" with you?

25. Do you have little esteem or respect for others? Do you think lowly of people? Do you have a hard time complimenting or honoring others?

26. Are you self-willed and/or stubborn? Do you have a hard time cooperating with others? Do you love your own way and insist on getting it?

27. Are books and sermons consistently "too shallow for you?" Do you regularly dismiss teaching through various mediums because you consider yourself too mature to learn from them?

28. Is it hard for you to learn from people different from you? Discernment is a good thing, but do you refuse to learn from anyone that isn't exactly like you, just because they're different?

29. Are you quick to speak? Is your voice always your favorite voice in the room?

30. Do you constantly find yourself wanting to impress people? Do you use clothes, possessions, money, talents, and the like to point to yourself and draw compliments from others?

10 More Ways to Spot Pride in Your Life (11-20)

Here's 10 more ways to spot pride in your life. If you missed the previous post, you can find it here. To follow along with our sermon series on Humility, find the podcasts here.

1. Are  you prayerless? If you are slow to pray, you're believing the lie that you are self-sufficient. You aren't moved to prayer because you believe you can handle whatever it is by taking matters into your own hands.
2. Do you hate asking for help? If you need help with something, but won't admit it or ask for it because you "don't want to be a burden." Often pride masks itself with fake selflessness.
3. Are you easily offended? If you're always offended, it screams of an "I deserve better" attitude. When people make fun of you, is your first instinct to jab back? When you are forgotten, neglected, or overlooked, do you sting back or respond with passive aggressive comebacks?
4. Do you fish for compliments? Again, sometimes pride wears a humility disguise. Do you go to people and say "I'm really not good at this," just hoping they'll disagree and pay you a compliment?
5. How much do you compare yourself to others? This can take all different forms: looks, possessions, abilities, talents, religious performance, morality, income, job performance, and most anything else. Most always, comparison is a way to puff up pride in yourself.
6. Do you use social media to draw attention to yourself? Fishing for laughs, retweets, 'likes,' pity, sympathy, argument, or love via Facebook and Twitter are easy ways to walk in pride and avoid walking in community.
7. Do you love expressing your opinion? Feeling like your required to give your opinion and answer for every question and every subject says "people can't survive without knowing what I think on this." My opinion is as valid, if not more valid than everyone else's (Proverbs 18:2).
8. Are you unkind or harsh? Being insensitive towards others often indicates an understanding that they aren't worth your time or effort.
9. Is it hard to admit you don't know something? If you consistently make up answers on the spot rather than saying "I don't know," it usually indicates a "must hold it all together" attitude, or pride.
10. How often do you interrupt? Do you regularly interrupt people before they finish a thought so that you can express yours?

10 Ways to Spot Pride in Your Life (1-10)

Following along with our Humility series, we thought it might be helpful to post some help identifying pride in your life so you know how to identify it. As we mentioned in the sermon Sunday, sometimes getting humans to discern pride in their life is like a fish trying to discern water--it's everywhere. In light of that, our hope is that by posting these "pride indicators," we can all press into Jesus, be amazed by his shocking humility, and put sin to death by the power of the Holy Spirit. So to kick us off, here's the first 10 ways to spot pride in your life:

1. Are you caught up in sin that nobody knows about? Do you avoid confession because of how you might be viewed?
2. Do you have a hard time rejoicing when God provides and blesses someone, because you feel like your needs are much greater and more desperate?
3. How much do you bring up yourself in conversation, or make yourself the center of the conversation? Do you always talk after somebody says something?  Do you always have a story to relate the conversation back to you?
4. Do you immediately defend yourself and attack people when they correct you?
5. At work, do you think more about how frustrating your job is and which aspects of it are beneath you? Do you have a hard time just being grateful for God providing a job for you?
6. Are you bitter?
7. Do you have low self-esteem? You've inflated yourself so much that God's voice has no room to speak truth into your life. When he says, "you're valuable because you're made in my image, and defined by what I did for you in the cross," you don't hear or don't believe it because you're so consumed with what you don't like about you.
8. Are you consistently angry? A short temper says "who do you think you are to talk to me like that or do that to me? Do you know who I am!? How dare you disrespect me?!"
9. Are you easily annoyed?
10. Are you sinfully competitive? Is your attitude and outlook on life significantly altered, even temporarily, when you don't win?