For Father's Day, Pastor Devon Ortiz preached from Obadiah, a short book of twenty-one verses, on the danger of pride. He noted the play on the day's title: we celebrate a father's pride in his children, but the message is a warning about the pride that destroys. Obadiah is God's word of judgment against Edom, the descendants of Esau, who lived in fortified cliff cities by the Dead Sea and were close relatives of Israel. When Babylon came and sacked Jerusalem, Edom stood by, gloated, looted, and even handed over those who escaped. The key phrase, Pastor Ortiz said, is verse 3: "The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee." He stressed this is not only a word to fathers but to everyone, because pride, more than compromise or biblical illiteracy, is the church's deepest problem: "God resisteth the proud," so a life rooted in pride is a life lived against God, no matter how much we attend, read, and pray.

Pride tells you your position makes you safe. Edom trusted its impenetrable mountain capital, Petra, and said in its heart, "Who shall bring me down?" Pastor Ortiz applied it: a father thinks providing for the family buys him the right never to be questioned; a leader thinks what he built earns him freedom from accountability; a long-time member thinks his years grant him authority to say whatever he wants. That protection is an illusion. "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." The Hebrew idea behind pride is a swelling, and he warned that many Christians have swelled themselves until they lost all effect, even driving people away from church.

Pride takes family into competition. Edom and Israel were brothers by blood, yet when Israel fell, Edom watched and celebrated. Pastor Ortiz described how pride turns us against our own: secretly satisfied when a sibling struggles, refusing to be the first to reach out, a father becoming a spectator instead of a participant in his children's lives. Pride becomes a wedge between us and the very people God gave us as a gift.

Pride disguises itself as strength. In verse 8 God says He will destroy the wise men of Edom, targeting not their military but the judgment they trusted most. Every proud regime, Pastor Ortiz said, from Babylon onward, fell not by economy or army but by pride. He pointed to Daniel, whose true strength was humility: Daniel purposed not to defile himself, but he did it by asking where he could still do right rather than how far he could go before it was wrong. Our teenagers, and we, tend to ask "is it wrong if," measuring how close we can get to sin; the humble question is "where can I do what is right." He warned fathers especially that a genuinely wise and experienced man can use that as an excuse never to be taught and never to say sorry, when "the mind is always less humble than the heart."

Humility is not the end of strength; it is the beginning of restoration. Obadiah does not end in despair but in hope: deliverance on Mount Zion and the kingdom belonging to the Lord. God blesses humility, and none of our knowledge, position, or plans matter unless we humble ourselves before Him. Turning to James 4, Pastor Ortiz gave the path to staying humble: first, submit yourselves to God, which is the only true source of humility (and he pressed the unsaved to submit to Christ as a sinner in need of a Savior, recalling his own salvation as a four-year-old boy); second, resist the devil, fleeing the sins we are weak to rather than trying to out-fight them; and third, draw nigh to God, the relational hunger of a humble person who knows he can do nothing without Christ, just as Jesus, fully God, constantly drew away to the Father not because He had to but because He wanted to. He closed urging the church to recognize pride in their lives, forsake it, and draw near to God, since "he that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy."