My men's study/confessional group has been reading the Letter to the Hebrews for a couple of months. One of the topics we stumbled into this week was a discussion of obedience to God, and dutifulness. (Here's a recent post on obedience via Vanderleun.)
While we guys all seem to acknowledge the need for discipline for spiritual growth, many of us confessed our tendency to lazily and self-congratulatingly replace a life in the spirit with "Christian" dutifulness and "doing good." We more or less ended up thinking of moral and religious dutifulness, if lacking the Holy Spirit and the direction of God, as clanging cymbals - empty noise. Of course, that was one of Christ's teachings.
From a Christian standpoint, pride in one's Christian dutifulness and righteousness is a devil's snare - as is pride in one's humility. From Screwtape's Letter #14 with his advice to his apprentice Wormwood:
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please.
