9 Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. He boasted that he was someone great,
I always have problems with people who claim they are something great. And not just politicians make these kinds of claims. The old saying “toot your own horn” that comes to my mind. Anyone who has to boast about their own accomplishments is suspect in my book. A person’s deeds should boast for themselves. If we are doing the right thing then other’s will know. We won’t have to tell everyone how great we are and what wonderful things we are doing. In fact, the reality is that if someone is boasting about what they have done, chances are, what they did was not nearly as great as they suppose. Boasting implies some puffing up, some exaggeration. We live in an era of boasting. Every advertisement is a boasting. They hide the defects and emphasize the positives. They put the magnifying glass on the gem and ignore the pile of manure the gem is sitting in. I remember years ago when I was doing construction a friend helped me write a resume. When we wrote it, it sounded as though I had high-powered supervisory experience when in reality I just build houses. I couldn’t use the resume. It exaggerated the level of expertise. Everything in the resume was true, but it was worded in a way the made more of my experience than I thought matched reality. Besides, that was not part of God’s design for my life. He wanted me in fulltime pastoral ministry, not as a construction foreman building earthly dwellings. Stretching the truth would have taken me off God’s path. Are there areas in your public persona that are exaggerations of the truth? Do you claim something that overemphasizes one trait or accomplishment in order to hide a deficit? Are you boasting?
The Arnold Journey 