I was reading back through Ray Ortlund’s blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I’d read something, when I came across this post that I’d missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:
Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.
Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.
He’s dead right. I’d actually go a little further and say that what he’s talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that’s a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we’re already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren’t; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.
I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to “put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit” (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I’m becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.