Grace is for losers.
Some of the advent hymns speak very clearly to our need to swallow our sinful pride and come to Christ humbly. Indeed, there is no other way to come to Christ, except humbly, because all pride is excluded. We have nothing to show for ourselves. We ruin everything.
We love to be proud. We want to be the winner, the king or queen, the shining example of love and devotion. We want to be spoken well of and admired by everyone, hardly daring to put our foot down when needed, just to please others. And even in the "honest" hard word, pride lurks. Pride is everywhere. We can't seem to escape it.
But at the cross we see how bad it is and how it gets us nowhere. We must leave it behind and struggle to brush it off. We cannot have both Christ and pride. It is mutually exclusive. And then we can't be proud of being humble. It is a vicious circle. It is only in the unmerited grace of the Lord that we can glimpse the life that is not focused on self.
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