Day 7 - Week 42 - 2 Chronices 7:14 "If my people who are called by name will humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their evil ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin and heal their land."

The first thing that God calls His people to do when they seek to return to Him is to humble themselves.  Indicates to me that one of the major problems that has infiltrated His people is the seed of all sinfulness....pride.  Has pride become a problem to us individually?  Has pride become a problem to Christians in America as a whole?

How do you define pride?  There really are good and negative connotations to this word, aren't there?

Webster's tells us that the two major definitions are:
1. the quality or state of being proud: as
a : inordinate self-esteem: conceit
b : a reasonable or justifiable self-respect
c : delight or elation arising from some act, possession, or relationship <parental pride>

2. proud or disdainful behavior or treatment 

You can see that the negative form results in conceit, while the positive is self-respect.  Also, there is the relational pride, as that which we have for our children or for our countries.  The second listed definition is also a negative form - the condescending attitude that results from pridefulness.

OK - now that we've got pride defined - where does the sinfulness stem from that God is calling us out of?  It has to be that state of  "inordinate self-esteem", where we have felt so self-sufficient and capable that we have shut God out of our lives and have not turned to Him for His divine guidance.  When God's people of old, Israel, would be on one of their worldly highs ---everything going well, kingdoms conquered, plenty of food, the people were happy --- they often forgot about God's laws and His call to them for obedience and to stand out among the nations of the world as a different people so that the world could see God's power in their lives.  They become prideful, thinking ,"we did this...we built this nation into what it is today...we are strong in our own right...we are wise in our own minds."   God would have to remind them by stripping away from their place of power, that He was the only One who brought blessing to them.  And they would humbly repent and come back into a state of obedience.

Can you see parallels in that cycle with your life?  Can we see parallels in that cycle with our society?  We do become prideful when we feel that we've got things pretty well under control...when all the pieces are fitting together and the answers are coming to us easily. We think we've finally got this life figured out, when out of the blue, the pieces fall apart...there are no answers to the questions of the day...and we then humbly admit, in retrospect, that we never even knew what the questions really were, let alone the answers.  We are brought to our knees in humility before God in prayer, seeking His face, asking for His forgiveness for...our pride, our foolish pride that had put ourselves in a position of authority in our life where we should have never been.

Our society today tells us that we are in control.  That this planet can be mastered if we will do the right things.  That we can solve all the world's problems if we will come together and formulate programs to answer each troublesome scenario.  That wars can go away if we can just bring the right words together in documents of peace.  I am not saying that we should abandon these efforts, but I am saying that if we, pridefully, think that we can accomplish these things without asking for God's divine guidance and blessing, we are mistaken, and we will fail.  Until we come and lay before God any and all of our plans, and ask Him to walk with us, we may see success on a short-term basis, but the ultimate outcome will never be successful.  God is asking us to admit to Him that we do not have the wisdom that He has, that we do not have the knowledge of the future that He has.  That we are so very limited in comparison to His completely unlimited nature. 

That is what, I believe, He is asking us to turn from...both individually and as Christians as a whole.  Our independence from Him, our pridefulness of thinking that we are capable on our own.  We are not.  And we will be humbled.