Short Circuit The Pride Cycle

The pride cycle, briefly, is when a person or group of people humble themselves and obey God's commandments, then the Lord blesses them because of their obedience, then because of their prosperity they grow prideful and disobedient, then God afflicts them to stir them up to remembrance, then they humble themselves and the cycle starts over. This happens to all of us over and over. However, the Savior showed us a way to short circuit this cycle. When Peter and some of his fellow apostles had gone fishing after the death of Christ, the Lord blessed them with miraculously fish filled nets after a night of not catching anything. As they began to eat the fish, Jesus asked Peter if he loved His Savior more than he loved those fish. The fish were a blessing to a faithful servant. There was nothing bad about the fish. The Lord gave Peter the fish because He wanted to, because He wanted to see His obedient servant prosper. But Jesus knew prosperity can lead to pride, which can lead to rebellion, which can lead to misery. But it doesn't have to. When we are blessed by the Lord because of our obedience, we just have to ask ourselves one simple question. Do we love the Lord more than we love our blessings? Do we love the Lord more than our new job or our new house or our new relationship? If we consistently ask ourselves this question with complete honesty and humility, then we do not need to get trapped in the pride cycle. Which is not to say that if we love the Lord we won't have hardship. But if we lose our blessings, the sting will be less because we have chosen to love the Lord more than the things that He has blessed us with. And if instead He blesses us more abundantly, we will have developed the habit of placing the Lord always above the things that He has blessed us with, so that we will not lose sight of the source of our prosperity nor will we be tempted to believe that we somehow deserve our blessings because of our own innate goodness instead of God's generosity.