Nine years ago, I wrote a short post with a simple title: Pride Leads to Arguments. I still believe it. A teachable spirit brings peace. A proud spirit brings strife. Every argument I’ve ever regretted had the same fingerprint. I was more interested in being right than being taught.
I used to think that was a personal lesson. A marriage lesson. A friendship lesson. I still think it’s all of those things.
However, lately I’ve been reflecting on a teaching from Dr. Tony Evans, and it stretched that same truth further than I’d ever taken it.
Dr. Evans says the world has an entire workforce devoted to discipling our children, and it never clocks out. Culture is teaching your son what a man is. Culture is teaching your daughter what she’s worth. Culture is teaching both of them that truth is just a feeling, and feelings don’t answer to anybody.
He traces it back to Moses and Deuteronomy 6. Israel was standing at the edge of the Promised Land, and Moses told the parents plainly:
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
This has to be built in your house, or it won’t survive the culture at all. Not the school. Not even the church. The church was only ever meant to supplement a father and mother who have already taken responsibility for their children’s souls.
Dr. Evans calls it what it is. We’ve outsourced our kids. We hand the job to the classroom, the screen, the culture, because we’re tired, because we’re busy. After all, it feels easier to let somebody else handle it. He doesn’t let us off the hook for that. Neither should we.
I believe him, but I want to ask a question he did not ask: Why do so many of us hand off this responsibility in the first place?
I think it’s the same reason arguments start: pride.
Pride says I already know enough. Pride says I don’t have time to be corrected, so I certainly don’t have time to sit my kids down and teach them something I haven’t bothered to learn myself. Pride will let a man or woman show up to church every Sunday and never once open the Word at their own kitchen table, because being taught, even by God, feels like losing.
Look closely at Deuteronomy 6, and you’ll notice the order matters. “These commandments … are to be on your hearts” comes before “impress them on your children” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). God never asked fathers or mothers to hand off a curriculum they’d never opened for themselves. He asked them to be taught first, humbled first, and fed first. Only then could they feed anyone else.
Proverbs said it long before either Dr. Evans or I ever did: “Where there is strife, there is pride, but wisdom is found in those who take advice” (Proverbs 13:10). Pride doesn’t just start arguments at the dinner table. Left alone long enough, it empties the seat at the head of it.
Feed the Good Wolf
So here’s the wolf standing in front of you tonight. One wolf is proud: busy, certain, unteachable, and content to let someone else feed your children while you handle everything else on your list. The other wolf is humble: willing to be corrected by God’s Word first, and only then to open it at the table for the people who are watching you closest.
You cannot lead a family you refuse to be taught by.
Start small. Fifteen minutes. Pick a chair, pick a morning, and open the Good Book before you open anything else.
If you need a place to begin, The Family Wins Devotional was built for exactly this. Please accept it as my gift to you to help your family start where Deuteronomy 6 starts: at home, together, in the Word. Request your copy at MindWolves: The Family Wins Devotional.
Feed the Good Wolf. Your family’s “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” depends on it.
May God bless you. May God bless your marriage. May God bless your family. May God bless America.
However, those blessings are conditional. He is waiting for you to lean into Him first, before anything else. Love God first. Love others second. Love yourself last.
Adapted from the original MindWolves post “Pride Leads to Arguments” (July 16, 2017), in reflection with a teaching by Dr. Tony Evans called, Cultivating a Family-Based Faith.