I was recently reading St. Augustine’s treatise on the city of God and this one sentence really stood out to me. Sure there was plenty that I was able to glean from this magnificent writing, but the point that strikes me is that sin begins with pride.

John Owens, in his book The Mortification Of Sin, makes the statement, “be killing sin daily or sin will be killing you.” So as I read the works of our early church fathers and look at the scriptures that God has provided for our guidance and wisdom then I find it safe to assume that we must kill pride, the root of all sin, or it will destroy us.

I heard a preacher talking the other day and he made the statement that God has a way of exposing us through shameful sin to destroy our pride. He certainly could allow us to sin in other ways and get our attention through it, but the sins that are exposed to the people around us are the ones that cause us to humble ourselves before God in order to get right with him and the people we encounter.

I can totally relate to this in my own life. I am by no means a member on the public stage and I have very few people that I expose my life to outside of the church and my work, but there have been times that God has used simple public sin to put me into a place of humility in my life. One recently gave me the opportunity to reflect on my need to increase the humility in my life and after a couple of days of reflection in this area I felt like God had changed my heart. I spent many hours during this time of correction from the Lord reading through Psalm 51.