Pride Comes Before a Fall

Pride is the delusion that your achievements are primarily the results of our your own doing. If you are prideful you will esteem yourself above and beyond the condition and proportion that God has appointed for you. And not only esteem yourself, but you will desire to be esteemed by others and desire to be exalted above and beyond what God has given you. Pride will manifest itself in your life in many ways:

• Boasting about and taking credit for your wisdom, abilities, and gifts as though they were acquired primarily by self-effort.
• Selfishly using for your own glory and benefit the wisdom, abilities, and gifts that God has given you for His glory and the benefit of others.
• Viewing God in such a way as to think He was made for your pleasure rather than vice versa (making God as a means to an end rather than worshiping Him as the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe).
• Having a greater desire to be loved by others than for others to love God (wanting others to love you more than they love God).
• Having a greater dependence on self than on God’s grace and provision.
• Resorting to defensiveness, blame-shifting, justification, or anger when lawfully reproved by another.
• Having a censorious, critical, condemning, accusing, judgmental attitude toward others, especially those in position of authority.
• Being more prone to command than to obey, to teach than to be taught, to speak than to listen.
• Having little or no respect for authority in general.
• Becoming impatient or upset when contradicted in speech, especially publicly.
• When wronged, being unwilling to forgive an offender who has not demonstrated extreme submission or repentance.
• Investing more resources to establish your own honor than to establish God’s honor.
• Being unwilling to admit when you are wrong.
• Being inordinately curious about those things that you do not have a biblical need to know.
• Being discontented with your position in life.
• Being ungrateful for God’s mercies.
• Failing to pray.
• Being insensible to the dangers of temptation (being self-confident about handling temptation).
• Being oversensitive to correction.
• Having difficulty in being pleasing (because of excessively high expectations-aka perfectionism).

We are all very prideful people, whether we want to believe it or not. And pride, although it may sound contradictory, is the very source of our "people-pleasing" problems.

Lou Priolo, Pleasing People: How Not To Be An Approval Junkie (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 109-124.