Pride.

The following is about Pride.  It's taken directly from Beth Moore's book called:  So Long, Insecurity!

Enjoy!  :o)

I have come to the conclusion that we have no greater burden in all of life than our own inflated egos. No outside force has the power to betray and mislead us the way our own egos do. Pride talks us out of forgiving and steers us away from risking. Pride cheats us of intimacy, because intimacy requires transparency. Pride is a slave driver like no other, and if it can't drive us to destruction, it will drive us to distraction. Think about the madness this one little trait can cause:

If we can't be the most attractive, at least we can be the best at something. And if we can't be the best at something, we can at least be the hardest working. And if we can't be the hardest working, we can at lest be the most congenial. And if we can't be the most congenial, we can at least be the most noticeable. And if we can't be the most noticeable, we can at least be the most religious. And if we can't be the most religious, we can at least be the most exhausted.

And it never ends, because big egos insist on our being a "the." Not just an "a." We're that desperate for significance. We live our lives screaming, "Somebody notice me!" And do you want to hear something interesting? That's exactly how God made us.

That very need is built into our human hard drive to send us on a search for our Creator, who can assign us more significance than we can handle. He not only notices us, He never takes His eyes off us. Every now and then a moment of clarity hits us, and we feel known by something - Someone - of inestimable greatness. These words fell froma psalmist who experienced such a moment:

O LORD, You have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I'm far away. You see me wehn I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!
...You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous - how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!                                       Psalm 139:1-6, 13-17

In the radiance of His greatness, we are made great. Our search is over and our egos silenced. We no longer need pride to drive us, because we've found something infinitely more fulfilling; purpose. He is the reason we are here. And finally our souls are at rest...until once again we forget. Pride is a driver, and it invariably drives us in the opposite direction than it promised.

Pride lives on the defensive against anyone and anything that tries to subtract from its self-sustained worth. Confidence, on the other hand, is driven by the certainty of God-given identity and the conviction that nothing can take that identity away. That's what you and I are after, not an outbreak of bloated ego.

Humility is a crucial component in true security. It's teh very thing that calms the savage beast of pride. More importantly, humility is the heart of the great paradox: we find our lives when we lose them to something much larger.

Created in the image of God, we instinctively know that something enormous is within us. Pride is the result of mistaking eternal for the temporal. We end up looking up instead of looking up to look in. We get fixated on every self-gain and every self-loss until, in or inordinate self-protection, we end up licking our wounds to the point that they can't heal.

Pride. A root of insecurity if there ever was one. We will never feel better about ourselves by becoming more consumed with ourselves. Likewise, we will never feel better about ourselves by feeling worse about others. Superiority can't give birth to security. Neither, by the way, can the relentless pursuit of perfection. Perfectionism is perhaps our culture's biggest temptation. In his fascinating book Perfecting Ourselves to Death, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter offers this intriguing insight:

"Although perfectionists seem very insecure, doubting their decisions and actions, fearing mistakes and rejection, and having low opinions of themselves, at the same time, they have excessively high personal standards and an exaggerated emphasis on precision, order and organization, which suggests an aspiration to be better than others.

Most psychological explanations see the desire to be superior and in control as compenation for feelings of weakness, inferiority, and low self-esteem. But it could also be that the opposite is true; we feel bad about ourselves because we are not able to perform as well, or appear as good, as we really think we can. We believe we are better than others, but we keep discovering embarrassing flaws. Perfectionists' black-and-white thinking takes them on a roller coaster between feeling horribly inadequate and bad about themselves, and then, when things are going well, feeling proud to be so good. Low self-esteem and pride coexist in the same heart."
Dr. Winter then goes on to quote psychologist Terry Cooper in this vivid snapshot of the coexisting odd couple:
"If I search around long enough, I'll find insecurity beneath my grandiosity and arrogant expectations beneath my self-contempt."

We are complex people indeed. Perfect messes. Pridefully insecure. But let me tell you what isn't complex: owning our own pride problem and confessing it to God. That's when He'll move it out of the way so we can deal with the roots of our insecurity we didn't plant. Until we sort the pride out of our insecurity, we can't, in very sense of the saying, see the forest for the trees. Everybody's got a pride problem. Owning it is a relief. Every time I do, I sense the glorious God-given relese that follows repentance, and I wonder what took me so long. I don't feel ashamed. I feel freed.

Fortunately pride is not hard to spot. It's not emotionally complicated like the effects of instability in the hones, significant loss, or dramatic change. It's ego, and we know it. In that very moment, we can whisper the words, "That nothing but pride. God, forgive me. Self, get over it." If I'm by myself, I don't whisper. I say it out loud like I mean it. Pride is one of those roots God can jerk up in a second. We just have to pry our sweet little fingers loose. Our culture has done us no greater injustice than training us to avoid taking responsibility for our own issues. In trying to relieve us of the whole concept of presonal sin, our culture's reordered values have cheated us out of the right to repentance and sublime restoration. They have hijacked our healing. A clear heart and a clean path are still only one sincere confession away.