A Reccuring Theme

It seems that the issue of pride/humility is following me! Yesterday, I went to CHBC because my church was closed, due to the snow. The sermon was entitled "Don't Flatter Yourself" and was about the dangers of pride, especially within the church, in our spirituality, in our ministry, and in our "chosen-ness." It was a really good sermon and very convicting! So then... this morning, I was listening to Ravi Zacharias, as I often do. He quoted a poem by Shelley about a an ancient king that was so powerful and full of himself, but whose kingdom no longer exists:

Ozymandias of Egypt

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The poem (especially the second half) made me think of one of the illustrations that the pastor used yesterday - an exerpt from an article in Forbes written two days after the WTC attack:

"Watching those 110-story towers crumble to the ground was a profoundly unsettling experience, casting into doubt our faith in modern man's ability to control and shape his world."

As Malcolm Muggeridge so aptly put it "all new news is old news happening to new people." Man is determined to erect his tall structures to attain some kind of immortality, but all in vain. Yet, when offered immortality, so many reject it because it requires humility. Why do we struggle so much with pride? If we could just live every day, conscious that we are in the presence of the One who is truly sovereign, Whose kingdom cannot be shaken! Would we not then react as Isaiah when he said: "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts." (Isaiah 6:5)?