So Proud

Have you given any thought to pride?
Here's the long and short of what I think. Please realize that in another six months or ten years I will likely have grown up at least a little, one would hope, and will have altered this theory.
I think pride is sin when it becomes a matter of taking credit for what God does. I think pride is good when it's a matter of celebrating what God has done in us. Am I proud of the good things He has made in me through his redemption of my life? Yes. Do I take the credit? No.
It's a little easier to understand pride when you consider the opposite; shame. The way I see it, it is a matter of one or the other in most things. If I am redeemed, I have no reason to be ashamed. It is redemption that erased my shame. And so today I take joy in what has been accomplished through Christ in me. Yes, I am proud.
When I graduated with honors I knew without a doubt that it was God that enabled me. I was proud of Him in me. What more wonderful thing is there in all of creation than God? If I cannot acknowledge pride in the King of Kings and his amazing work; I will have a hard time embracing what he wants to do in me. My marriage was saved through Christ, everything good my kids will do is because of him. As for my part, it is only my submission that allowed his redemption.
He is the redeemer of all the messes. He is the redeemer of all the failure. He is the redeemer of my shame.
Sin happens in us the same way it happened in satan. He considered himself the author of his own beauty and so he fell. Pride went before his fall. He gave himself the credit. It is only a fine line to look at ourselves and be driven to worshipping our beautiful Creator or to look into that same mirror and think ourselves our own creators. The sin of pride happens in that small switch of perception.
I am proud in the cross. Notice, I am not proud of it. I didn't do the work accomplished there so it is not mine to boast of. But in it, IN the cross, my redemption was written. And so my opportunity to celebrate the good things done IN me THROUGH Christ.
Yes, I am sometimes proud. I am proud in sinful ways when I take credit for myself. I want to be proud in sacred ways, ever aware of redemption. Ever being redeemed. Ever celebrating the redemption of all that I am into all that I will be.

Galatians 6:14
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.