Romans 12:16b

Don’t set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Don’t be wise in your own conceits.

Here we see that Christians are not to be proud people. We shouldn’t think that we are better than others. Remember the first verse of this 12th chapter of Romans where Paul says “therefore.” Remember, he said that we were given mercy from God and because of this we should act accordingly. A person who was given mercy, originally deserved to be punished. A person who deserves to be punished should have no room for pride at all.

I am told that in prison there are those who think of themselves as better prisoners than others because of the kind of crimes for which they are being punished. Evidently, some
crimes are better than others even in prison. Isn’t that exactly what we see outside of prison too? We are all sinners, and were all given mercy. We don’t have any grounds to be prideful. All of us deserved death.

We should be very willing to “associate with the humble” in the light of the fact that God was willing to associate with us. It is very wrong to start thinking that we have become wise apart from God. We still have nothing that God has not given to us and if we don’t acknowledge Him, as we learned in Romans 7 and 8, we will go back to sinning very quickly.

One thing to keep in mind is that in Christianity, we shouldn’t consider the amount of education people have, or if they were in prison in the past, or if they have a physical problem of some kind, or if they are rich. We are all in the same group for which God has had mercy and we are all members of one body now. God will help us to live like this if we trust in His power.