Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety

[Note: this is a four part series based on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, looking at the way sin affects our relationships in the family and how the presence of God can bring redemption to them. You can read the first part, looking at anxiety here]

Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. We can’t solve what people will do or how they might treat us. We can’t ensure that people will think well of us. We can’t ensure that we will have enough. We can’t ensure that we will know everything or see everything we need to. We can’t ensure that we will be able to get done all things we need to get done.

All these issues become a basis for anxiety. I call anxiety an awareness of the gap between our ability to see problems and our inability to do anything about them.

What do we do when we have this awareness? We can exalt ourselves thinking we can get a handle on all these problems; or we can accept our limits, work where we can, and trust God with the rest.

In the last article, we considered how anxiety becomes the occasion for sin. In this article, I want to consider the shape and form of sin, which is pride. Our pride is where we take that which is good and significant about us and make it much bigger than it is. The result of this is the common dissolutions, destructions, addictions, and injustices of life. There is really no limit to pride or the temtpation to pride. No matter how much we solve, there are still new problems. Greater heights; greater falls.

In the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, we have three anxious people who also believe that they can solve their own problems. They take good things about themselves and make them much bigger than they are. This is the tragedy of the story and the sin of the story. Let’s look at Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in turn to see how pride is a response to anxiety.

Hagar’s Pride
The pride of Hagar is rather obvious. “And [Abraham] went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). Hagar conceived the first child of Master Abraham, and she let it go to her head. She does what we often do when we have success. She looked down on others.

Let’s look at her pride a little more closely. When I was in Louisiana at the Evergreen Plantation, the tour guide gave us an explanation of how those eating dinner would keep cool. A slave boy would wave a giant fan during the supper. I thought that would be strange to have someone standing right next to you like that, but then I realized something. They would not see the slave. He would just be part of the scenery. He would be virtually invisible. That’s how slaves are: unseen. They are just part of the machinery of the household.

But Hagar was still a human. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to be noticed. She wanted to have significance. That yearning for significance, meaning, and recognition beats in the heart of every human being.

Then, all of a sudden, she was seen. She was noticed. She was given to the master. Then, she conceived his first son. She went from totally unseen to one of the most significant players in the house. It would be difficult for anyone in that situation to know how to appreciate that blessing in exactly the right way, in exactly the right degree, and in exactly the right relationship to everyone else. It’s like a poor person getting a million dollars.

That is the challenge we all have. As soon as we do something well, we value it more than we should. If we are always on time, we look down on those who aren’t. If we are patient, we look down on those who aren’t. If we are good at relating to people, we look down on those who are more socially awkward. We all want to be noticed, so when we do something well, we play it up for all it’s worth. We don’t always say it, but that’s where our heart readily goes.

Pride is the true endemic. We all want to be the star of the show. It manifests itself in all sorts of situations in human life. We will see this a bit more as we look at Sarah and then Abaraham.

Sarah’s Pride
Where do we see pride in Sarah?

I imagine that Sarah was pretty good at solving problems. She was probably quite smart. She could probably find solutions that others could not. They probably often worked out.

She was probably thinking and thinking and thinking about how to solve the “childlessness” problem. Finally, she came up with a solution. It was a reasonable but not a good solution. It was a solution that would totally disrupt the family.

So, what was her pride? That she could solve everything. That her solutions would always work painlessly. She took her ability to find solutions to problems and made this ability bigger than it was.

You can see this based on her reaction to Hagar’s pride. This wasn’t working out like she planned. Did that cause her to reflect on her own limits in finding solutions? No. She blamed Abraham. The New International Version captures the sense of this well. Sarah said, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering!” (Gen. 16:5). She could not accept her own inability to control the situation and find a solution, so she blamed Abraham.

Now, notice. She was partly right. Abraham was partially to blame here. He should not have gone along with her suggestion. But, it was her suggestion!

When pride is operative, we cannot accept our limits or pain. So, we blame them on others. Nothing is more common in human life. Things aren’t working out right, so we want to blame someone. It’s what Sarah did. It’s what we do.

The problem is we never confront the basic issues of life: life is hard. Life involves struggle. Things don’t always work out. The drill won’t always be in the right place. The house won’t always be clean. The screw won’t always come out clean. Life is full of hard things. It is only our pride that says otherwise.

Abraham
And what about Abraham? He is not exactly the common picture of pride here. But I do think Abraham’s pride is evident, and it is a very common pride.

I imagine that Abraham was very good at relating to people. He seemed to make friends everywhere he went. He knew how to manage relationships. He probably related well to Sarah and knew how to live well with her.

What was his pride, then? He imagined that he could get along with everybody all the time. He thought that his relationships would always go well.

This is the pride of the compliant. They go along, even at the cost of the good, even when it is harmful. Whomever they have chosen to make happy will feel affirmed, even in their sin.

Abraham’s pride was to think that he could solve someone else’s fundamental issues. He could solve Sarah’s problems, he thought. He could make her happy all the time. To do this, he would refuse to take a stand about what was right, engage in what was actually an affair, and acquiesce in the mistreatment of others. As long as Sarah was happy in the moment, everything would be sacrificed. This was Abraham’s pride, that he could make someone happy all the time.

It’s easier to see the pride of Sarah. It’s harder to see the pride of the compliant. We often rebuke the person who is actively prideful, but we miss the pride in the passive. We see the person who wants to control everything, but we miss the person who sits passively by and refuses to control the things that they should. Both are rooted in pride, pride that is also rooted in our specific characteristics, backgrounds, and personalities.

Conclusion and Application
What is really wrong with making ourselves bigger than we are? What is wrong with pride?

1. We are not living according to reality. This sets up for frustration and greater anxiety. It robs us of peace because we are basing our lives on something that does not actually exist.

2. We are not living according to God. We miss the One who is actually above our problems. We compensate for our own weaknesses by exalting ourselves because we are missing the One who is able to solve every problem, God Himself.

3. We are not living according to our real human relationships. When we exalt ourselves, how we see others becomes distorted. We see them as less than us than they are in reality. This leads to injustice, as we shall see in the next section.

In other words, all of our sins against God, others, and ourselves and the effects that flow out of them are rooted in this exalatation of ourselves.

In light of how common this is, it is astonishing that there is one man who did it completely differently. Consider Jesus. Read about His life carefully. You will find that He showed compassion to people. However, he never refused to take responsibility for what was His. He did not let others deter Him from the path the Father had set for Him. He was willing to speak His mind, though He did it with great wisdom. He trusted His Father, even when His Father said to go to the cross.

And it is the Spirit of Christ that is working in us, if we have trusted Him and invited Him into our lives. He can help us to see what is our real obligation and what is not. He can help us see our significant but limited role in this life. He can help us to take responsibility for what is our responsibility and let go of what is not. “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (Rom. 6:11–12). The goal is that we would live out of the life of Christ. This will empower us to live a life of joy and peace in loving service to others instead of the disruption and dissolution that is all around us. This is the grace and the gift that is abundantly ours in Jesus Christ. This is seeing the problems of life but seeing the God who is above them, the God who sees us.