7 Deadly Sins: Envy

7 Deadly Sins: Envy

February 7th, 2010 (AM). By: Rod Earnshaw

I have a long history with Envy. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t say the same.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around temper tantrums because I wanted something and someone else had it!

I used to play with the boy down the road – Russell. Russ moved away when I was about 6 so my memories are a bit thin. But I can remember a pretty clear pattern to our games. Russ was always the leader. He had the toys, he made the rules. Didn’t seem to matter what we were playing with – toy cars, toy soldiers, whatever – Russ would introduce all of the characters and he’d split things more or less evenly.

But then there would always be one unbeatable weapon, one car that was faster than all the others. I have a very clear memory of setting up toy soldiers all over the room for a battle when Russ introduced the not very well known plastic cork ‘atom bomb’.

Apparently a plastic cork could wipe out my whole army in one fell swoop. Sadly there was only one, and Russell had it. Cue an envy tantrum. I wanted it. I wanted it now. No we could not play one round where Russell had it and then play another where I had it. Russell had to hand it over. When she came in to find out what the problem was, Russ’ mum agreed with me. So Russ handed over the atom bomb.

And then he produced out of his draw the even less well known Eveready Battery intercontinental ballistic missile – which was far more powerful than the atom bomb and could be launched after and explode before it so it would always win. You know what happened next. I wanted it. I wanted it now…

From what I can remember, whatever Russ had I always wanted it. Some days I got my way, some days I didn’t. But looking back I can’t remember actually playing all that much.

And I have seen that repeated almost every time I’ve seen more than one child playing. No matter how uninteresting a toy is, if someone else is playing with it, it becomes the most desirable thing here. And it’s no point tells us to share, if they’ve got it, I want it and I have to have it NOW! And the tears and the tantrums begin. No one can have any fun until I get that toy.

And that’s envy right there – it steals our joy and ruins our relationships. So this morning I want to talk about Envy as a great underminer – it gets in and digs out the foundations of all our joy and leaves us miserable and alone. And I want to talk about how to combat Envy by shoring up our foundations so that they can’t be easily undermined. But first I want to talk about Envy as the ever present urge to have what they’re having. So let’s take those three ideas as our main points this morning

And before we begin I’m told that philosophers like to distinguish between envy and jealousy. But for all practical purposes they’re more or less the same thing – we tend to use terms more loosly than philosophers do. So I’ll be talking about envy and jealousy , if you’re of a philosophical bent just translate jealousy into envy when you hear it…

So let’s start with Envy the ever present urge to have what they’re having.

Two weeks ago I told you that many medieval theologians considered that pride and sloth were the source of sin – all sin could be tracked back to one or the other – the pride that says ‘I can do it however I like’ and breaks the rules, or the sloth that says ‘it’s all too hard’ and fails to live up to the standard.
Well today I want to suggest that Envy could be considered even more fundamental. We could argue that Satan fell because he wanted what God had. And doing a bit of reading between the lines we could speculate that envy was the first thing that Adam and Eve got wrong in the garden: serpent sidles up to Eve and says ‘Did God really say you must not ear from any tree in the garden… you will not surely die for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become like God… ‘

And Eve looks at the fruit and wants it. What’s going on in her head? ‘God’s been holding back from us Adam. He’s keeping back the good stuff, he won’t share it with us. It’s not fair, how could he be so mean. Maybe we should take it for ourselves. Why shouldn’t we get some of what he’s having?’ So they reach out and take the fruit and the rest is history. That sets the course for the rest of human history.

Just following the story line of Genesis for a bit it’s not long before Adam and Eve’s two boys –Cain and Abel – are all grown up and they bring God an offering. And what happens when God accepts Abel’s offering but not Cain’s? Cain envies is brother so much that he kills him. Cain decides that if he can’t have God’s approval no one can, and he kills his own brother – the first murder, motivated by envy. And so the pattern continues throughout the OT – Abram lies and says Sarah is his sister because he’s afraid jealous locals will kill him to get to her; Jacob envies his brother’s birth right and tricks him into selling it to him; Jacob envies the blessing of the first born and tricks his Father into giving it to him; Jacob’s wife Leah envies her sister Rachel and Rachel envies Leah and they become bitter rivals; His uncle envies his success and tries to rip him off by changing his wages seven times; His other son’s are jealous of his favourite Joseph with his spectacular coat, so they sell him off into slavery. And so it goes on.
The story of Genesis is driven by envy leading to all kinds of strife. And so it goes on through out the OT and into the new – until Matt 27: 18 says that it was out of envy that they handed Jesus over to be crucified.

Envy is at the heart, or perhaps we should say the root, of all manner of evil throughout the Bible. It’s like a marauding army, rampaging across the history of the Bible, leaving carnage liberally scattered across it’s pages.

And when we lift our eyes from the pages of the Bible and turn our thoughts to our world we see it’s no different today. When we examine our past can’t help but see envy stamped on so many of our thoughts. So many little spats flow from envy. So often we find ourselves criticising others, not because they deserve it, but because we’re jealous. So often we resent others for what they have, for how they’re perceived, for their confidence, or their good looks, or their wealth or their fame, or their lack of suffering – we’re so good at envy we can just about find a reason to be jealous of anyone.

When we see someone else enjoying something, we want it, simply because they have it. You see it naked in little children – they might well have picked up and rejected a toy or book or whatever – but if someone else picks it up and starts playing with it, well suddenly their attitude towards it changes, and they must have it. What’s changed? Not the toy. It’s intrinsic worth is exactly the same as it was when it was rejected… What’s changed is the child’s attitude to the toy – now they want it. And why? Because they envy the fun someone else seems to be having with it. Envy is one of our basic human emotions – and while we may not be so obvious about it, it’s one that we never seem to grow out of.

How many times have you resented someone else’s success? When you walk out of church into the car park can you resist the urge to compare what others are driving with your car – and if yours isn’t the best car in the car park don’t you wish it was? Comparison is odious, or so I’m told, but isn’t it what we all automatically do all the time – who’s got the best clothes, hand bag, trophy wife, beautiful children, house, career, hair, body, shoes… And comparison always leads to desire for what others have.

In fact you could argue that our whole culture is based on envy, certainly our financial culture. Capitalism, or consumerism is based on the desire to get more stuff. And it’s not just simple greed that fuels that desire. Our desires are just as often fuelled by Envy as by Greed. We never knew we needed an iphone until people we knew started getting one and we saw them playing with their latest apps, and then suddenly we knew we had to have one. So often it’s not the advertising that lures us off the couch and into the shops, but the programs, because we see people using, wearing, driving, owning and whatever they’ve got, we want it.

Envy is so easy to fall into, so slippery and hard to avoid that it’s everywhere. It makes us want whatever someone else has no matter whether its good for us or not, if you’ve got it, I want it. Envy is the ever present urge to have what they’re having. But the problem is that envy robs us of our joy by undermining our satisfaction and thankfulness and ruining our relationships. So let’s have a look at that as point two.

Envy is the great underminer – it undermines our satisfaction and thankfulness, it robs our joy and it ruins our relationships.

Think about that parable Jesus told in Matthew chapter 20. I think it’s fair to imagine that those workers lived pretty much hand to mouth, as most of the world has done for most of history. If so, then here is a picture of a whole lot of needy men, hoping to pick up some work.

When the farmer comes out in the morning they’re probably all a bit edgy – what if there’s no work for me today? And along comes this landowner he’s got work on, and he’s paying. He picks a few guys to go to work. You can imagine the men he hires being pretty pleased to get the work – they don’t have to worry where the next meal is coming from. And those blokes who were left behind, unwanted at the start of the day? They were the unlucky ones, who knows if they’ll get paid today at all.

So verse 2, the lucky ones head off to the vineyard; happy to work for an honest days’ pay. That’s what a Denarius was, an average day’s pay for labourer.

But at the end of the day the situation is reversed. The blokes who worked the least got paid the same as the blokes who did the full day. And that does seem unfair – some of the blokes put in a twelve hour shift, some did only one!

But remember they agreed that a denarius was a fair wage for a days’ work. No one was getting ripped off; no one was paid less than he was worth. It was only when the others got paid the same for doing less that it began to appear unfair.

Let’s unpick that a little – a day’s wage is usually related to the cost of living – you pay someone enough for them to live on (or at least we used to calculate wages that way). And we presume these labourers needed money. So it appears the landowner has taken pity on the blokes who couldn’t get work and given them employment. No doubt more workers means more work for him, but it’s a life line for the workers. Now if he gives them an hour’s work and pays a 12th of a denarius we wouldn’t expect that to go far. So when he pays them the full day’s pay this appears to be a deliberate act of charity, looking after the working poor.

But see how envy works here to rob the workers who worked the whole day of their satisfaction in their pay – thought it was a fair day’s pay it suddenly seemed too small in the light of what others got paid. And envy robed them of thankfulness – how could they thank the landowner when they felt they’d been ripped off. And envy robbed them of relationship with each other – they can’t be happy for the other workmen, they’re too busy being jealous and resentful – as if the other blokes had somehow stolen their money. And envy robbed them of relationship with the landowner, now he was the enemy, and his wealth and generosity becomes a reason to despise him. His generosity to the other men is twisted in their minds to become stinginess towards them.

This is how envy works to steal our satisfaction, our joy, our thankfulness, our relationship with each other and our relationship with God. Envy works in our hearts to spoil our satisfaction of all God’s good gifts. Nothing can be taken on face value, everything has to be measured against how generous God has been to others. And because we’re in competition in our hearts, we learn to despise our competitors. And because we think others are doing better than we are we resent God’s goodness to them and twist it around in our hearts to become God’s stinginess towards us.

So think about the long term effects of living by this law of envy. Every time we play the comparison game we’re inviting disappointment into our lives. We value things on a relative scale – relative to what others have – rather than by what they’re really worth. So the value of things that we don’t have becomes inflated in our minds – it’s worth so much more because someone else is enjoying it.

The irony here is that we can never tell how much someone’s really enjoying something – and the truth is that most of the time the people with the best stuff are hardly enjoying it at all! We all have our private hurts and dissapointments and often the people with the most stuff carry the greatest disappointment. Think of poor old Michael Jackson. Blessed with enormous talent. In the right place at the right time to take advantage of that talent to become the most famous, highest selling, biggest earning, most idolised of all the pop stars of his generation.

In the 80’s he amassed a massive fortune then spent the next two decades trying to recapture the childhood he felt he’d missed out on. After his death we find out he’s been addicted to drugs for years and years. His life, so amazing from the outside, was so completely unbearable to him that he chose to insulate himself it by a fog of drugs.

And isn’t it hard to love a man like that? The person with more than me makes me feel like a failure. My focus is continually on what others seem to be enjoying that I’m not. So more and more I come to resent everyone else, because everyone has something that I don’t. Envy is a terribly lonely path.

And I’m constantly running to keep up with the Jones, but the Jones seem to be pulling further and further into the distance, making it impossible to keep up. It’s exhausting being governed by envy.

And so it goes on and as it does I can find less and less enjoyment and satisfaction in God’s good gifts to me, and I’m more and more alienated from the people around about me. I can’t enjoy the things I’ve got and I won’t be thanking God for them anytime soon, because all I can see is the great list of things that he’s forgotten to give me. And so envy robs me of my joy, my satisfaction, my thankfulness and my relationships, even my relationship with God.

Shakespeare said beware the green eyed monster jealousy that doth mock the meat it feeds upon. Shakespeare scholars say he was comparing envy to a cat, playing with a mouse, mocking it’s prey. We had a cat that used to do that. I can remember watching it play with a mouse in the back garden it would sit with the mouse between it’s front paws and pretend to look away… it would wait until the mouse was just out of reach – until the mouse thought it was safe, then she would pounce and catch them. She could play that game for hours, she never got tired of it. And it’s a fitting image isn’t it? Envy plays with us and drags us this way and that, but at the end of the day it makes fools of us – chasing shadows, phantom happiness, while all the while blinding us to the happiness that we could enjoy if we could appreciate what God has given us.
So what do we do about envy? If Envy undermines, then we need to combat it by building strong foundations. That’s point three:

We combat Envy by shoring up our foundations so that they won’t be easily undermined.

What do I mean by that? We need to learn to see through sins deception, and we do that by making sure that we have a clear vision of true reality. We need to fortify ourselves with a few home truths.

So let me remind you of the truth’s that we learn at the cross.

God is generous beyond our wildest imagination – he did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us… Envy wants us to believe that God’s holding out on us, he’s keeping the good stuff for Himself, or for someone else it tells us. But he gave his only son. What more could he give?

All that we have comes from God’s goodness – we can never say that we deserve it, no matter how hard we’ve worked, how much we’ve struggled, how impressive we are. All that we have comes from God’s hand, and we don’t deserve any of it. What we deserve is death. End of story. We do, we genuinely deserve death, and hell; we deserve punishment, everything else is a gift.

Through trust in Jesus we will inherit heaven itself – we will live with God forever. The things that we desire, even the greatest things, the most spectacular, worthwhile things, pale into insignificance beside this. I don’t mean possessions, of course they’re nothing next to heaven, I mean even relationships, even marriage, sex, children, grandchildren. Even the deepest friendship the strongest love. Those things are mere shadows of what God keeps in store for us. When we’re enjoying heaven with him we will not for a moment regret or resent the things that we didn’t have, as Romans 8:18 says our present sufferings – even our joys – are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us’.

We’re not in competition, we’re family, we’re brothers and sisters. There’s more than enough for everyone. And there is more joy in sharing than in hording. There is greater reward in love than in envy, envy mocks us even as it feeds on us, but love builds us up even as we build others up.

Sin is empty and deceitful and envy is no different. It takes us nowhere but down.

And let me suggest a few envy fighting exercises:

Count your blessings – that’s old skool, but there’s wisdom there. We enjoy so many privileges, so many gifts from God that we take them for granted. We need to cultivate thankfulness and to get there we need to recognise the great multitude of gifts that we have been given.
When you catch yourself envying someone else, especially when you catch yourself indulging in resentment and self pity – praise God for his goodness to the person you’re jealous of, and ask God to bless them even more, and to protect them from loving the gift and not the giver – cultivate love for others, not resentment
Don’t gossip – how often is gossip an expression of our jealousy of others success? When you’re invited to join in a gossip session, try and think of something good to say about the person!
Give your stuff and your time and your money away. Confront your fear of missing out by deliberately going without, and you’ll probably find that you really didn’t miss what you gave away at all. We need to cultivate generosity if we’re to grow into the likeness of Christ who gave his very self for us.

We need to finish. Envy really is a green eyed monster that makes a mockery of us, even as it devours us. It undermines our thankfulness, our satisfaction and our relationships and leaves us miserable alone and resentful. So beware. Fortify yourself by cultivating thankfulness, love, joy and generosity.

Let’s pray.