Spiritual dashboards

"Dashboards" are important.  In cars, they tell us when things are right, and not so right.  They synthesize a lot of data—engine temperature, coolant, pressure, rpms, etc.—then spit out a warning if things are heading south.  Of late, these visual displays have been supplemented with audio warnings.  In planes, the system barks "pull up!" when the approach is too low...or "stall" if the air speed too slow.

What I really need, though, is a spiritual dashboard.  I'm got enough gizmos to keep me safe in the air, well positioned on the highway.  I need some indicator dials and warning lights to be going off in the everyday business of life as a fallen, Christian man.

So we took the bull by the horns and set out to design one.  Right here at APC.  We're proud to announce the beta release of SpirDash1.0, now ready for trial.  You can be one of our lab rats.  Just read on.

You can appreciate the development challenge we faced.  Think about it.  There's such a wide bandwidth of our sin, our fallenness.  Yet each man's categories vary to some extent.  "Pornography?  Not an issue, brother...but anger, now that's where I need the Spirit's intervention!"  And so on.  In reality, the SpirDash needed an individual calibration—a handicap, for you golfers—to customize it for each man.

After a number of false starts, the Holy Spirit intervened, using Sonship, Lesson 11, The Great Sin reading assignment...an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  Here's a snippet:

"It is a terrible thing that the worst of all vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life...the Devil laughs.  He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride...for Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love..."

That fact simplified the design of our spiritual dashboard.  Instead of lots of dials, indicator lights, bells, whistles...we need just one display panel.  It's the key performance indicator for all else: Pride.  We all have it...it comes with the territory, so to speak, of our human form and nature.  It's incurable.  We'll all take some measure of Pride with us to our earthly grave.  That's the bad news.

The good news is that, while incurable, it is treatable.  Some have even been known to get their Pride quotient reduced to a trace level...unnoticeable to the human eye.  That therapy is called the gospel.  The treatment plan is administered by the Holy Spirit.  It's called Humility Therapy—a lifetime regime of humbling experiences, supplemented by prayer and study of God's word, all enabled by Christ.

It starts, as Lewis points out, with admitting we are "capital P" Proud.  Today, as you encounter your own Pride—as the indicator panel of that spiritual dashboard starts flashing—acknowledge it.  Don't blow it off, excuse it, or blame-shift.  Then hand it over to God.  Take a strong dose of humility therapy by carrying your Pride to the foot of the cross.  And leave it there.

And as you leave it there, thank God that He gave you this remedy.

Chris Joyce

Comments

[Tim]

Chris,
Thanks for reminding all of us to not neglect the "flashing light" of Pride that keeps us focusing on the idol of self! May the Holy Spirit be our treatment plan.

[David Swinson]

Chris, I often need to be reminded of this as I do experience those "prideful moments" more than I care to admit. It is odd, but pride is revealed in so many different ways.

Speaking of C.S. Lewis, I have been reading and Anthology of readings edited by Lewis on one of his great influences, George MacDonald. There is a quote by MacDonald, that I think is a good follow-up to your wonderful blog.

"Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self - God's idea of us when He devised us - the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud."

Thank you for this blog, Chris.