Acts 27:21 “After the men had gone a long time without food, Paul stood up before them and said: ‘Men, you should have taken my advice not to sail from Crete; then you would have spared yourselves this damage and loss.”

Before the big storm, winds had been blowing against the ship, making it hard for them to make any headway. It was late in the year for sailing on the Mediterranean. Winter storms are treacherous. Paul had advised that they stop and winter where they were, near the southern point of Crete. Going on meant risking cargo and lives. The ship’s captain and owner were eager to get to their destination, however. The majority wanted to keep going. So the decision was made to set sail.

It is typical of human pride to underestimate our opposition and overestimate our own ability, like the sailors here. So the Titanic sets out across the Atlantic Ocean at an unreasonable speed through iceberg infested waters because its operators consider it unsinkable. A Persian force of hundreds of thousands of soldiers meets Alexander the Great and 40,000 Greeks at Issus, Turkey, in 333 B.C. expecting to slaughter the Greeks. But they fail to take into account the terrain on which they are fighting, and how it favors the smaller force. They end up going down in a defeat from which the Persian Empire never recovered.

We could go on with stories from politics, business, and law. “Pride goeth before a fall,” Proverbs says. Christians are no less susceptible than the overconfident world in which we live.

No place is this a bigger problem than in the battles and storms of faith. It is a foolish thing to face temptation as a do-it-yourself project. Our own sinful nature is stronger than we think. We are setting ourselves up for despair and everlasting defeat if we think we will handle our guilt and dispose of our sins with a self-made system of payments and time off for good behavior. “The ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough–that he should live on forever and not see decay,” God reminds us in Psalm 49.

So the Lord will even let our sins have their way with us, and he will let our guilt overwhelm us. Many Christians have experienced these kinds of spiritual storms until he has confronted our pride and made it impossible for us to pretend that we are enough without him. Then we are ripe for his deliverance and ready for the grace he gives to those who are humble enough to receive it (James 4:6).