Are you glorifying yourself?

I read a good article at churchleaders.com that gives 10 warning signs that a person is glorifying themselves instead of God. Paul Paul Tripp serves as teaching pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and professor of Pastoral Life and Care at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas. Paul also is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a non-profit organization dedicated to “connecting the transforming power of Jesus to everyday life,” as well as Executive Director of the Center for Pastoral Life in Fort Worth, Texas. (source churchleaders.com)

In the article, it gives 10 signs:

Self-glory will cause you to:

1. Parade in public what should be kept in private. The Pharisees live for us as a primary example. Because they saw their lives as glorious, they were quick to parade that glory before watching eyes.The more you think you’ve arrived and the less you see yourself as daily needing rescuing grace, the more you will tend to be self-referencing and self-congratulating.
2. Be way too self referencing. We all know it, we’ve all seen it, we’ve all been uncomfortable with it and we’ve all done it.
3. Talk when you should be quiet. When you think you’ve arrived, you are quite proud of and confident in your opinions. You trust your opinions, so you are not as interested in the opinions of others as you should be.
4. Be quiet when you should speak. Self-glory can go the other way as well. Leaders who are too self-confident, who unwittingly attribute to themselves what could only have been accomplished by grace, often see meetings as a waste of time.
5. Care too much about what people think about you. When you have fallen into thinking you’re something, you want people to recognize the something. Again, you see this in the Pharisees: Personal assessments of self-glory always lead to glory-seeking behavior.
6. Care too little about what people think about you. If you think you’ve arrived, you are so self-assured you simply don’t think others should evaluate your thoughts, ideas, actions, words, plans, goals, attitudes or initiatives.
7. Resist facing and admitting your sins, weaknesses and failures. Why do any of us get upset or tense when we are being confronted? Why do any of us activate our inner lawyer and rise to our defense? Why do any of us turn the tables and remind the other person we are not the only sinner in the room? Why do we argue about the facts or dispute the other person’s interpretation?
8. Struggle with the blessings of others. Self-glory is always at the base of envy. You envy others’ blessings because you see them as less deserving than you. And because you see yourself as more deserving, it is hard for you not to be mad they get what you deserve, and it is nearly impossible for you not to crave and covet what they wrongfully enjoy.
9. Be more position-oriented than submission-oriented. Self-glory will always make you more oriented to place, power and position than in submission to the will of the King. You see this in the lives of the disciples. Jesus hadn’t called them to himself to make their little kingdom purposes come true, but to welcome them as recipients and instruments of a better kingdom. Yet in their pride, they missed the whole point. They were all too oriented to the question of who would be greatest in the kingdom.
10. Control ministry rather than delegate ministry. When you are full of yourself, when you are too self-assured, you will tend to think you’re the most capable person in the circle of your ministry. You will find it hard to recognize and esteem the God-given gifts of others, and because you do, you will find it hard to make ministry a community process. Thinking of yourself more highly than you ought always leads to looking down on others.

Read the article in full here - http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles

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