His story 6: Pride

Pride can manifest itself in different ways in people that seem quite opposite, but the root is always that you resist God and put yourself above Him.
Often we are not even aware of doing that.
To think you can deserve anything from Him, even when you never made a mistake, is pride.
You put yourself above God denying that He is the source of your live.
You cannot earn anything from Him because all your ability comes from him.
And that is very freeing, because it means you do not have to strive all the time to receive his love and acceptance or the approval of people.
Our value does not come from what we do but what we do flows from who we are. We were made with value.
This means that if we do not perform well it does not prove we are worthless.
Rather we often only start having successes after we came to the realisation that we already have worth.
And of course many things take time to learn. But our ability to do that was given to us.
It actually takes humility to believe this because now we cannot take credit for our accomplishments anymore. Not when we go to the root of who we are.
Of course there are still countless decisions we get to make that determine whether we influence the world around us in a good way and have value for others through our behavior. In that sense we can still gain merits.
Yet in our core we already are valuable and our ability to be of worth through our actions comes from the value we already have.
What we do or do not do cannot influence this.
We cannot ad to our core value by our successes, nor can we diminish it by our mistakes. Our value is constant.
And so is God’s love for us.
We can neither mess up his love nor can we increase it.
It is already more than what we need or deserve…
Because love cannot be earned.
It is given freely.
Otherwise it would not be love but a reward.
Payment for our behavior and achievements.
But no one loves their children like that.
You love them because they are yours.
And that is how God loves us.
Because we are his creatures.
Not because we performed well.