Arrogance
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 596 aired on January 29, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes, as always every time we show up on this station, I’m asking you please give me about
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shows, any books you need, order them, any DVDs you need, order them. It’s all available free
of charge. Today we want to talk to you about arrogance.
Arrogance is the number one enemy
of most Christians.
If you’re going to understand arrogance you have to understand the protocol
plan of God and how it works and how it functions. God has a plan. If you’re going to live in this
plan, you must follow protocol. So here’s a thought I would like to give you. God gave you two
ends. That’s right, look in the mirror. There’s two ends, one to think with, one to sit with. Here’s
the little funny that goes with this. It’s heads you win, tails you lose. You have to live by the
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heads part, not the tails part. You have to learn to think and that’s what’s critical. Arrogance starts
with not thinking. Where does it all start? If you want to go all the way back, if you think about
the most arrogant person you know, if you go all the way back, here’s where it starts and
fortunately some people are able to override these circumstances by positive volition to God’s
Word. It starts in Ephesians 6:1-2. Here we have a mandate in the original Greek manuscript
called the present active imperative of
hupakouo,
H.U.P.A.K.O.U.O., and it says,
“Children
[the
Greek word
teknon
]
obey
[
hupakouo,
the present active imperative]
your parents in the Lord for
this is right.”
So the first mandate that a child runs up on is this word,
“Obey your parents.”
The
active voice says the subject produces the action of the verb and that’s the child. The present
tense is the durative, there never is a time when they’re not suppose to obey their parents. As long
as they live under their roof they are to obey their parents, and the imperative mood is the mood
of command. This is not a request from God. This is a command from God. So write this down.
If a child disobeys their parental authority, they’ve sinned because here is a mandate,
“Obey your
parents.”
Disobedience to parents is a sin.
And get this, then it says
“In the Lord.”
“
In the
Lord” shows where the mandate and power to obey come from. There is the power under
the filling of the Holy Spirit to obey your parents even if they may be wrong.
Now let me
clarify this. The Bible is not telling you to do something unlawful. If your parents command you
to do something unlawful, then that’s not correct, you do not have to obey this command. If your
parents are wrong, and sometimes parents are wrong, we parents have sin natures just like
everyone else and parents make mistakes. If your parents make a decision that’s not fair, should
you disobey them then? The answer is no.
You have to learn how to handle unfair authority.
If you have a brother or a sister, some sibling you’re living with, decisions have to be made as
parents that are not always correct. Parents are human, they make mistakes. So if you get angry
and if you rebel against your parents because they made a mistake, then you’re at the beginning
stages of arrogance. What you have to learn as a young person is to handle authority whether it’s
fair or whether it’s unfair and trust the justice of God to take up the slack. He always does, He
always handles this. We must learn not to rebel against the authority of our parents, even when
they make mistakes, even when they ask you to do something that’s not fair, you do it anyhow. If
you don’t like this, join the military and find out what they do there. They’ll ask you to do a lot of
things that are not fair and if you don’t learn to do them, you will quickly be in trouble. Life is
like this. The only way you can be a well-adjusted person in life and business, as a family, or as a
parent yourself is to learn how to handle unfair authority. Verse two says,
“Children honor,”
and
the Greek verb there is
timao,
T.I.M.A.O., honor or value,
“Your father and your mother.”
Notice
right away, the first verse used the word parents. The second verse used the word father and
mother. Now they’re still your parents but it is possible, and I’m assuming here, I don’t know that
Paul intended for this to be this but I’m going to throw this in for you, parents get divorced.
When parents get divorced, if one parent tries to convince the child that the other parent is a
tyrant, then that’s a form of child abuse. God does not authorize any parent to run down the other
parent. If parents get a divorce you are still to honor or value your father and your mother even
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though you may be living with one or the other. You might not be under the authority of one or
the other. You may change roofs, you may change whose roof you live under, a child is still to
honor both parents, to value both parents, to revere both parents. Why? Becomes the Bible says
in verse two,
“This is the first mandate with a promise,”
and the promise is that you will live a
very long and fruitful and wonderful life if you orient to authority. If you do not orient to
authority, you disobey the word
hupakouo,
you don’t obey the authority of your parents and you
disobey,
timao,
you don’t honor your parents, then you’re setting yourself up for an early death
because of your own arrogance. You know there’s a television show, I think I’ve seen it a few
times called
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
Here’s the question I often ask teenagers,
“Are you smarter than your parents?” Of course they all think they are.
Note Ephesians 6:1-2
says “
obey and honor”
and Ephesians 6:3 says,
“So that it may be well with you and you may
live long on the earth.”
Here’s the principle, a well-adjusted person stands a chance of living
a full, meaningful, wonderful life.
A maladjusted person, a person that can’t handle authority,
stands a chance of self-destructing in their life. Arrogance is an enemy of all believers. It is the
very sin that got Satan kicked out of heaven. Arrogance is demonstrated in the Bible in Luke
15:25 through the prodigal son and his older brother. You may remember the prodigal son went
off to waste his subsidence on riotous living but he came home. He asked his father to forgive
him and his father restored him, full membership of the family. The older son was all upset about
it. Listen to Luke 15:25,
“The older son was in the field when the younger son came home and as
he came near to the house he heard music and dancing.”
He figured out there was something
going on in there, he didn’t know what. Here’s a principle about arrogance.
Arrogance has an
exaggerated opinion of one’s own importance, one’s own merit, one’s own ability.
In his eyes
he was the most important of the two children. He comes near the house, he hears music and
dancing, and in Luke 15:28,
“He was angry, he would not go in and his father came out and his
father pleaded with him.”
Here’s what happened. He called one of the servants and he said,
“What’s going on? What’s happening in the house? Why is there a party?” And he said,
“Well
your brother came home. Your father received him safe and sound and your father killed the
fatted calf to have a party,”
and what does the Bible say?
“He was angry, he would not go in. So
his father came out to talk to him,”
and say something to him. In Luke 15:29, here is what he
told his father.
“He said to his father, ‘All these years I served you, I never transgressed any of
your commandments at any time. You never even gave me a billy goat so I could have a party
with my friends.’”
This is Mr. Self-Pity, Mr. Feel Sorry for Yourself. This is one of the traits of
arrogance. If you find yourself feeling sorry for yourself, if you find yourself having a little pity
party because you were treated unfairly, you are getting arrogant. You’re forgetting that the
justice of God is always on the job. He’s always overseeing what is going on. He hasn’t forgotten
about you. Sometimes we go through tests to train us, to teach us and when you get full of self-
pity, you are sinning.
“As soon as this son of yours came home
[Luke 15:30]
the one that
devoured his money with those harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.”
Now, how would he
know what this other brother did? How does he know he wasted his money with harlots? Could
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it possibly mean that he knew where he was all along and he never told the father? Have you
ever wondered why the father never went looking for him? I mean as a father, it’s a wonderful
thing to pray but to try to go and drag that boy back home would have been a waste of time. See
this boy was like a lot of sons. He had to learn the hard way, that’s called enforced humility. If
you don’t have genuine humility in your life and you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, then you’re
going to go through enforced humility. God will discipline you and God will take you down a
notch or two with an attitude adjustment until you have genuine humility.
Genuine humility
may need to come through the enforced humility of God’s discipline.
This older brother
knew where his younger brother was. He knew what was going on and he was probably glad he
was gone. The Bible says in
Proverbs 29:3,
“Whoever loves wisdom makes his father rejoice
but the companion of a harlot wastes his wealth.”
Now there’s no doubt what the younger son
did, he blew everything he inherited from his father with harlots, but he recovered. None of us
are perfect. All of us have weaknesses. All of us have trends. What you have in this story is a
trend toward lasciviousness with the younger son and you have a trend toward asceticism with
the older son. The older son was a self-righteous legalist. The younger son, well he was just
lascivious. I mean if you wanted to find him, you’ll find him at the prostitute’s house. The older
son, if you want to find him, you’ll find him looking in the mirror saying, “What a wonderful
person I am.” Dad said to him,
“Son,”
this is the older one,
“you’re always with me. Everything I
have is yours. I’ve already given it to you.”
He divided his inheritance with the boys already, it
was right, it was the right thing to do.
“We should be happy and be glad, because your brother
who was dead is alive and the one that was lost is now found.”
When you get out of fellowship
with God you’re not spiritually dead. You’re spiritually dead before you receive Jesus Christ as
your Savior and then when you believe in Christ you’re made spiritually alive. With the second
birthday you’re born again. When you’re out of fellowship with God, you’re in temporal death,
temporal death in time. You’re out of fellowship, under control of your sin nature. The Holy
Spirit has been quenched and grieved, you’re on the My Way Highway as this young man was,
and through your own arrogance you’re on the way to self-destruction. There is only one way out
of it. Either you respond to the discipline that God gives you and come to a humility profile or
you react to the discipline that God gives you and you continue in your arrogance until you
destroy yourself. This older son had all the money. What he wanted was all the attention. The
enemy that he had in his soul may be the enemy you have in your soul, bitterness. He was bitter
at his younger brother, bitter about this because he took attention away from him. “Look what
I’ve been doing. Look, I’ve been the faithful one. I’ve always done what you told me to do and
now Mr. Unfaithful son comes home broke with no money, wasted everything you gave him and
you’re giving him a party.” I’m quoting now what the older son might have said.
Arrogance
always comes in three stages. The first stage is self-justification.
The older son justified why
he should have had the party, not the younger son.
The second stage is self-deception.
The older
brother deceived himself into thinking that he was the better of the two because he stayed home.
The third stage of arrogance is self-absorption.
Self-absorption is identified by self-pity. He
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was having a pity party and he was angry and bitter at his dad, at his brother, at the world,
because all that he had done was not recognized, he thought.
The final stage of arrogance, the
end result, is self-destruction.
So self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption lead to self-
destruction. There are several ways that I can describe arrogance to you. I could say that it’s
vanity. Vanity is when you have self-admiration. You have excessive desire to be admired by
other people. You love attention, you have this arrogance that desires attention. You live off of
this, you feed off of this. That’s the vanity. That’s like the old lady that puts the flowers in the
church every Sunday morning just so she can hear the preacher call her name and tell her what a
wonderful person she is. That’s this arrogance that desires to be noticed and desires to have
attention. Then there’s pride. Some people mix up pride with a personality. Some people have a
very strong personality, very forthright, but they’re not proud.
Pride is when you assume that
you’re superior to other people.
This older brother assumed he was superior to his younger
brother because of the things that he had done. If you get full of assumptions of superiority in
your life, you are in arrogance. Vanity, you admire yourself excessively, and you have the lust to
be admired by other people. You assume that you’re superior to other people. This happen
sometimes because of wealth, because of finances. Sometimes it’s bad in churches because you
have the blue-collar people in churches and you have the wealthy people. You have the plumber
over here and you have the attorney over here and maybe the attorney thinks he’s better than the
plumber because he makes more money. Neither one is better than the other and this assumption
of superiority because of education, because of finances, because of pedigree, is a wrong
assumption. It’s nothing but pride and it’s a sin, it’s a sin of arrogance. Arrogance can also be
called conceit.
Conceit is where you have an exaggerated estimate of your abilities.
In other
words, you look in the mirror and you see something that’s not there. You think you’re something
you’re not. If you have an unrealistic self-image, then obviously you’re going to have unrealistic
expectations also. Conceit, vanity, pride, and arrogance can be excessive egotism, excessive
preoccupation with yourself. How many times did you mention self in that last conversation?
Using the personal word I, “I this,” “I that,” “If it wasn’t for me,” “Me and I,” excessive
preoccupation with self. You’ve got to learn something. God was in business before you got here
and God will be in business when you’re gone. It doesn’t all depend on you and to the extent that
you think everything depends on you and you’re excessively preoccupied with yourself, then
that’s all you’re going to talk about. What you did, what you did, what you did, “Look at me, look
what I did.” You’re conceited, you think your ability was better than anyone else’s ability and
your pride, you’re full of assumptions of your superiority. Does this sound like any politicians
you may know? It sort of does to me. You know, arrogance is highly contagious. It’s the only
disease known to mankind which makes everybody sick except the person that has it. I hope that
you’re not an arrogance carrier. I hope you’re not making people sick around you because of your
arrogance. Proverbs 29:23 says,
“A man’s pride will bring him low, but the humble in spirit will
retain honor.”
Humility is the opposite of arrogance. Humility is what the Bible tells you is
the profile you should have. In Philippians 2:5 the Bible says,
“Let this mind be in you that
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was also in Christ Jesus, who thought it not robbery to be equal with God but humbled
Himself and made Himself of no reputation.”
Humility is absolutely critical in the believer’s
life. This doesn’t mean weakness, that’s not what it means. It means that you assume the role of a
servant. Paul called himself a servant on many occasions. Our Lord Jesus Christ in Philippians
2:5-9 identified as a servant, even when He washed the feet of the disciples. Peter was blown
away that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God would want to wash his feet and He was
teaching him a lesson in humility. You see, the arrogant person rejects authority, divorces from
reality, and gets distracted from his Christian growth. He’s not ever going to grow because he’s
not listening to God and you want to know what the worst type of arrogance in the world is? I
mean, there are some people that I don’t like to be around. I don’t like to be around arrogant
people. I cannot stand to be around religious arrogant people. Religious arrogant people are the
ones who crucified our Lord Jesus Christ. They are the ones that think they’re doing God a favor
by showing up on Sunday. I want you to make a note of this thought. Organized religion is not
Christianity. Organized religion thrives on artificial intelligence which is a combination of
arrogance plus ignorance. A.I., arrogance and ignorance equals artificial intelligence. This is not
Christianity. Christianity is a personal relationship with the God of this universe living in you,
Jesus Christ. In Luke 18:9-14 you see religious arrogance. Jesus gave a parable about certain
ones which trusted in themselves. He talked about two men going up to the temple to pray, the
one a Pharisee, the other a publican.
“The Pharisee stood and prayed with himself and said,
‘Thank you God, I’m not like other men. I’m not an extortioner, I’m not unjust, I am not an
adulterer like that publican over there. I fast twice every week. I give a tithe of all that I possess.’
And then Jesus said, the publican standing afar off would not lift up his eyes unto heaven but
beat upon his breast and said, ‘God have mercy on me a sinner.’ Jesus said, ‘I’ll tell you, this is
the man that went down to his house justified, not the other. For everyone that exalts himself will
be abased, but he that humbles himself shall be exalted.’”
It’s critical that you remember this. In
1 John 1:8 the Bible says,
“We who say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not
in us.”
We all have sin, mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue, overt sins, and the solution to that
is 1 Peter 5:6.
“Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God so that He can exalt you in due
time.”
Humble yourself, the aorist passive imperative of
tapeinoo
. The passive voice says the
subject receives the action of the verb. This means that God the Holy Spirit does it for you. If
you’re filled with the Spirit, you can fulfill this mandate of having a humility profile. Lower the
assessment of yourself. Realize God was in business before you got here. Your job is to grow and
re-present Jesus Christ, not strut around like you are Christ but to re-present His image of
humility and faithfulness. That’s the chore you have in front of you. You’ve got to remember this.
I pray you’re listening. I pray you’re paying attention. I pray this is challenging to you and
encouraging to you. That’s why we do these radio shows and as always if you should ever have a
question, you can feel free to email me Until next week I’m your host Rick Hughes saying thank
you so much for giving me a few moments of your time this morning. I pray this lesson has been
a challenge to you