Alcantara on Dealing with Pride in Music Leading

Good post Dan. A good rule of thumb is that when someone praises your abilities, just say “thank you”. This avoids the temptation to downplay one’s abilities in order to show humility. As we all know, false humility can be another form of pride. Also, saying “thank you” avoids our other temptation to say that it’s “all God”. While this may be true in the ultimate sense, sometimes it can be another way we’re trying to show humility by spiritualizing it. But we don’t need to spiritualize it, since this implies a false distinction between the spiritual and the material, which is a modern form of Gnosticism. God created everything: all matter and spirit, as well as all our talents and gifts. Thus, we don’t need to spiritualize our talents in order to show true humility. All we need to do is say “thank you”. And there’s no harm in saying that we’re thankful to God for giving us a particular gift or talent. After all, it was God who gave it to us. He gave it to us to use and to share, in order to show His glory and demonstrate that He’s a giver of good gifts to His people.