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

9 Lessons From God Concerning Sickness

Sickness is Meant...

1. To make us think—to remind us that we have a soul as well as a body—an immortal soul—a soul that will live forever in happiness or in misery—and that if this soul is not saved we had better never have been born.

2. To teach us that there is a world beyond the grave—and that the world we now live in is only a training-place for another dwelling, where there will be no decay, no sorrow, no tears, no misery, and no sin.

3. To make us look at our past lives honestly, fairly, and conscientiously. Am I ready for my great change if I should not get better? Do I repent truly of my sins? Are my sins forgiven and washed away in Christ’s blood? Am I prepared to meet God?

4. To make us see the emptiness of the world and its utter inability to satisfy the highest and deepest needs of the soul.

5. To send us to our Bibles. That blessed Book, in the days of health, is too often left on the shelf, becomes the safest place in which to put a bank-note, and is never opened from January to December. But sickness often brings it down from the shelf and throws new light on its pages. Keep Reading...

Weakness or Sickness? A Look at James 5:14

Love in a Time of Swine Flu

"A man's spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?" Proverbs 18:14

The history of humanity is the history of sickness, disease, and death. When sin came, death came, and sickness remains the leading agent of death. The horseman of pestilence has visited plagues and pandemics upon humanity throughout the centuries. Even in the age of modern medicine and the conquest of so many diseases, the very real risk of pandemic remains -- and we feel it in our souls.

The outbreak of swine flu now dominates the headlines and news programs, with at least 150 deaths in Mexico already recorded even as the disease is now confirmed around the world. For many years medical authorities have warned of a coming influenza pandemic -- a modern plague -- that could kill on a magnitude similar to the 1918 outbreak that killed over 100 million persons worldwide. (Read the rest HERE)