Today I want to wrap up my short series on the sin of Envy. Yesterday I looked at How Envy Behaves and
this morning I want to show what Envy wants from you and then to give
some instruction on putting him to death. There are at least four things
Envy wants from you.
Envy Wants to Destroy Your Joy
Envy
is unique among the sins in that you never, ever enjoy it. Envy never
brings any satisfaction. If you commit the sin of adultery, you enjoy
the fleeting pleasures of the flesh; if you commit the sin of gluttony
you get to enjoy the taste of food while it slides down your throat.
These are very fleeting and fleshly pleasures, but they are pleasures
still. Envy only, ever makes you more miserable than you were before.
Envy
also bring misery by making you unwilling or even unable to confess the
sin. He cuts so deep, he exposes so much of what you really want that
confessing that he exists requires a true baring of the deepest, darkest
recesses of the soul. You may not know just how ugly and dark your sin
is until you look into your soul and see Envy and then go digging around
to try to get him out of there, to find the source and to uproot it.
When
I am walking with Envy and allowing him to influence me, I cannot enjoy
anything in itself because I only see what I have and what I am in
comparison to someone else. I am not popular, I am less popular than he is. I don’t sell books, I sell fewer books than he does. In every case, I can never be joyful, because everything the other person has calls me into question.
Proverbs
says that Envy is rottenness to the bones (14:30). Envy makes you sick
with grief and dissatisfaction, rotting you from the inside out. Continue at Tim Challies
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