Daily devotion 2: Run From Pride

"The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
    and perverted speech I hate." - Proverbs 8:13

"Run from pride, for it is a passion more treacherous than any other. Covetousness and love for wealth spring from it as well as hatred, wars, and fights. For those who want more than they have will never be able to stop. Their desires come from nothing other than their love of displaying their accomplishments….  If we cut off pride (the head of all evil), we would kill all the other members of wickedness with it. Then nothing could keep us from living on earth as though it were heaven. Pride doesn’t just thrust its captives into wickedness, but even co-exists with their righteousness. When it can’t get rid of all their virtues, it severely damages their ability to exercise them. It forces us to work hard and deprives us of the fruit. . . . Therefore, if we want to earn glory, we must flee from human glory and only desire glory from God. Then we will obtain and enjoy both through the grace and loving-kindness of our Lord Jesus Christ." - Chrysostom 

How many times today have guarded your pride? Maybe you have guarded your position. Maybe you have strived for wealth far beyond what you need so that someone else might look at you as being better off than the next person. As God's Word says, and Chrysostom describes so eloquently, a believer's pride can be one of the most devastating of sins, yet it can be the one sin that we so easily do not see. May God guard us from our pride and humble us in the Spirit.

Daily Reading: Leave Your Children Virtuous Not Rich

"Let us then not consider how to leave our children rich, but how to leave them virtuous. For if they have the confidence of riches, they will not mind aught besides, in that they have the means screening the wickedness of their ways in their abundant riches. But, if they find themselves devoid of the comfort to be got from that source, they will do all so as by virtue to find themselves abundant consolation for their poverty. Leave them then no riches that you may leave them virtue. For it is unreasonable in the extreme, not to make them, whilst we are alive, lords of all our goods, yet after we are dead to give the easy nature of youth full exemption from fear. And yet while we are alive we shall have power to call them to good account, and to sober them, if they make an ill use of their goods. But if after we are dead we afford them, at the time of the loss of ourselves, and their own youthfulness, that power which wealth gives, endless are the  precipices into which we shall thrust those unfortunate and miserable creatures, so heaping fuel upon flame, and letting oil drop into a fierce furnace. And so, if you would leave them rich and safe whial, leave God a debtor to them, and deliver the bequest to them into his hands. For if they receive the month themselves, they will not know even who to give it to, but will meet with many designing and unfeeling people." (St. Chrysostom, Homily VII). 

May we as parents always remember today the importance of what we leave with are children is much more than riches or successes. But that we would wish on our children virtue as they grow up into the knowledge of the Lord. 

Grace and peace to you today as you teach your children to be virtuous.