You have seen the bumper sticker. Proud Parent of an Honor Student. It rides on the back of a minivan in the school pickup line, a little faded from the sun, and somewhere inside that van is a kid who worked hard for a report card and a parent who wanted the whole highway to know it. I have never once looked at one of those stickers and thought less of the person who put it there. Somebody loves that kid.
Church is no different. I have sat through more than one Sunday when the youth came home from a mission trip and the pastor stood at the pulpit and said, “I am so proud of these young people.” The congregation applauded. The kids, lined up across the front, ducked their heads and grinned at their shoes. Glory was moving all over that room: from the pulpit to the kids, from the pews to the platform, and down into the chest of every parent in the place. I remember wondering, even then, which way it was supposed to go.
Here is how it works, as plainly as I can put it. A person sets out to do something. The work gets done. The result is good. And something settles in the chest, warm and quiet. Satisfaction. Anyone who has finished a fence line, paid off a truck, or watched a child walk across a stage knows the feeling. It feels like a gift. I believe it is one.
Then there is the other thing we know. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Most of us learned that proverb before we could spell destruction. Christians say proud all week without a second thought, and we have heard pride preached against all our lives. We carry both. We almost never stop to ask how they fit.
Let me tell you a story, so you know what I mean.
Dale had read the parable twice, slowly, the way he read everything, leaning on the words that kept coming back. My crops. My barns. My grain and my goods. My soul.
After that, everyone had something to say. Kevin thought the farmer was just being smart; you plan for a bad year. Ray said smart men don’t die the night the barns are finished. Somebody brought up Joseph and the storehouses in Egypt, somebody else brought up the camel and the needle, and for a while the talk went wherever it wanted.
Then Dale closed the book on his finger and looked around the table. “So. What have we learned?”
Joanne had been quiet all evening. She sat with both hands around her cup though the coffee had gone cold an hour ago.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she said.
Dale waited. The room waited with him.
“When he says my barns, my grain, my soul.” She stopped. Started again. “I say my all the time. My kids. My girls. I put their pictures up at work. I tell people.” She pressed her lips together. “I tell people a lot.”
Nobody said anything.
“So does that mean,” and here she almost laughed, a short, dry sound with nothing funny in it, “I shouldn’t be proud of my children?”
Across the table, Harold, who hadn’t said ten words all evening, pushed his Bible toward her. It was already open.
“You ever read Psalm 127?”
Joanne loves her girls. Nobody in that room doubted it, least of all Joanne. What unsettled her was hearing her own voice in the farmer’s mouth. My barns. My girls. Is the feeling the problem? Is the word? Every one of us has asked some version of that question. It is harder than it sounds. Let’s see what Scripture has to say.
Moses saw it coming a long time before she asked it.
Israel was standing at the edge of the promised land, and Moses was an old man who knew he would not cross over with them. So he told them what was going to happen when they did. “When you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses in which to dwell, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all that you have is multiplied…”
Satisfied. Moses uses the word. He sets the full table in front of them, and the good houses, and the growing flocks, and he does not scold a single plate. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says the same thing from the other end of a long life: to enjoy what God has given, “to accept his lot, and to rejoice in his labor. This is a gift from God.” Even the rich farmer’s harvest was good. Jesus says the land produced it. Whatever went wrong with that man went wrong after the harvest came in.
Moses tells us where. “Then your heart will become proud, and you will forget the LORD your God.”
There is our word, in Moses’ mouth. The Hebrew paints it as a picture: the heart is lifted up. It rises. The satisfaction stays where it was, warm and quiet, and the heart climbs up and sits on top of it.
The Hebrew word for glory grows out of a word for heaviness. Glory has weight. Anything with weight has to be carried by somebody, and it belongs to somebody. A heart that rises has picked up something it was never asked to hold. And the forgetting that comes with it makes no sound at all. Nobody at the table can hear it happen.
Then Moses gives the forgetting its words. “You might say in your heart, ‘The power and strength of my hands have made this wealth for me.’”
In Moses’ own language that sentence begins my power. My power, my hands, my wealth. Said in the heart, where no one else can hear it.
That is the moment. Satisfaction becomes pride when the heart quietly takes title to what it was given. Nothing on the outside has to change. The houses look the same. The flocks graze in the same fields. The children’s pictures hang on the same office wall. The farmer only said it to his own soul, and nobody else was in that conversation.
Moses does not leave it there. “But remember that it is the LORD your God who gives you the power to gain wealth.” Forget, he said a few sentences earlier. Remember, he says now. And he uses the same word for power the boaster used. The strength the heart claimed for itself is handed back by the One who gave it.
What does remembering sound like? I know of no clearer answer than an old king standing in front of a pile of gold.
David had wanted to build a house for God, and God had told him no; his son would build it. So David did what he could. He gathered gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and precious stones, more than Israel had ever seen in one place. And then he stood before the whole assembly and said, “Now with all my ability I have made provision for the house of my God.”
With all my ability. It is the very word Moses put in the boaster’s mouth, my power, and David says it out loud, in front of everyone, and there is nothing wrong with it. He did the work. He says so. Then the leaders gave, and the people gave, and they rejoiced because they had given willingly, and King David rejoiced right along with them. Satisfaction, in the open, with the whole nation looking on.
And then David prayed. “For everything comes from You, and from Your own hand we have given to You.”
There is the hand again. The power and strength of my hands have made this wealth for me. From Your own hand we have given to You. The same hand, with the owner turned around. David never stopped saying my. What changed was where the sentence came to rest.
I have raised more questions here than I have answered, and I know it. Where exactly the line runs in my own heart on a given afternoon, I cannot always tell you. I do not think I am meant to settle it by asking myself. That was the farmer’s trouble: he took counsel with his own soul, and his soul agreed with him. My answers, and yours, are only one side of the conversation. Scripture brings the other voice into the room, the one the farmer never stopped to hear. So when the question comes, the way it came to Joanne over a cold cup of coffee, open the book.
David stood before more gold than Israel had ever seen and blessed the LORD in front of them all: “Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the splendor and the majesty, for everything in heaven and on earth belongs to You.”
A thousand years later, a girl from Nazareth stood in her cousin’s doorway, carrying the greatest gift anyone has ever been given. “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
Have you read Psalm 127?
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