The Lost Sin of Envy - What Envy Wants

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

Evangelicalism’s Got Talent, Part Two

In my last post, I mentioned that there are two issues that that cause me to think that evangelicalism is being duped when it comes to how we evaluate effective ministries and preaching. I discussed the first of those two in my most recent post: we make wrong assumptions about what it means to be a “gifted” preacher. 

In this post, I want to address how those faulty assumptions about giftedness lead to an errant view of expository preaching. 

Assumptions about Bible “Exposition”

This may step on a few toes, but I might as well say it plainly right up front: I just don’t think a number of the most widely-known preachers today are truly doing Bible exposition, even though they define their preaching by those terms.  Referring again to the panel discussion video I watched, all the men on the panel are considered expositors, yet only a few of them, in my view, are both surrendered to the text and preach its full intent and implications.

For a sermon to be classified as “expository,” it must derive its central message exclusively from the biblical author’s intended message.  The sermon’s principles, therefore, must rise naturally from the structure and force of the text in light of the surrounding context.  D.A. Carson’s explanation is important:  Keep Reading >>>