Besides public ordinances, we should give ourselves to spiritual exercises in secret.
All the time we can spare from our necessary, civil, and natural actions should be employed in calling to mind what we have seen, heard, or felt of God.
You can never part with sin soon enough; it is a cursed inmate, that will surely bring mischief upon the soul that harbours it. It will set its own dwelling on fire.Works 7:147
God will have nothing to do with proud persons, he will never dwell with them, he will never keep house with them.
He that dwells in the highest heavens, will never dwell in a haughty heart.
4 Types of Pride: first is when someone attributes to himself the good which he has; the second, when he believes that the good is given by God, and yet for his own merits; the third, when he boasts that he has what he does not have; the fourth, when he has contempt for all others and wishes to seem unique.Moralia, bk 2, c6, n13
Pride has its root and strength in a spiritual power, outside of us as well as within us; as needful as it is that we confess and deplore it, it is satanic in origin.Humility
To own and stand up for a hated and despised truth will bring more comfort to our souls than all the pleasure the wicked have in their sensual delights.
To humble us in our converses with God. He is good, but we are evil; he is heaven, but we are hell; he is perfect, but we are poor defective creatures. Therefore in all our approaches to him we should come the more humbly to him, and go the more holy from him; for it is sad when we come to the good God, and are never the better. If we go to the fire, we expect to be warm. Oh! when you come to the fountain of goodness, we should come away better.https://www.monergism.com/rich-young-ruler-exposition-mark-1017-27-ebook
As the excellency of his nature giveth him a fitness and a sufficiency for the government of mankind, his creation, preservation, and other benefits give him a full right to make what laws he pleaseth, and to call man to an account whether he hath kept them, yea or no.Works, Volume 10
Pride makes a man incapable of receiving counsel. Nebuchadnezzar's mind is said to be "hardened in pride" (Dan. 5:20). There is no reasoning with a proud man; he castles himself in his own opinion of himself and there stands upon his defense against all arguments that are brought.
Be humble when thou art most holy. Which way soever pride works (as thou shalt find it like the wind, sometimes at one door and sometimes at another), resist it. Nothing more baneful to thy holiness. It turns righteousness into hemlock, holiness into sin. Never art thou less holy than when puffed up with the conceit of it.
A man may be so very zealous in prayer and painstaking in preaching, and all the while pride is the master whom he serves, though in God's livery. It can take sanctuary in the holiest actions and hide itself under the skirt of virtue itself. Thus, while a man is exercising his charity, pride may be the idol in secret for which he lavished out his gold so freely. It is hard starving this sin; there is nothing almost but it can live on.