This is going to be a short one - I think. It's just a couple of things I've noticed whilst thinking about envy.
Covetousness is the last one on the big ten, it's by no means the least but something had to go last and envy got it. I wonder if there's a subtle pun in there, or even an unsubtle one. My mind seems to think there is but I can't for the life of me figure it out.
Anyway, covetousness, or to put it another way, envy.
It really is a stinker isn't it? If you look at it in even the least way objectively you can see it is an insidious, pervasive cancer to the soul. Envy is a sort of cousin to another out and out sin, Pride, but Pride is one of those hard to pin down things. Pride gets everywhere and taints everything it touches but is rather woolly when one tries to confront it. Pride will hide behind even quite noble motives and aspirations using excuses to temporise and misdirect one's attempts at humility, Pride will suck the life out of your soul with surprising ease and you'll probably not notice it doing it. Envy on the other hand is much more up front and in your face about itself. You can't mistake a pang of envy for anything else, it just shows up and tries real hard to push your face right in the dirt in front of whatever it is you are envying. "Why haven't you got one of those you stupid loser?" is the general thrust of an envy attack. It'll use pride and whatever else as additional lines of attack too, usually hitting the self esteem pretty hard too. Relationships suffer out of all proportion too, how can you love a neighbour if you are envious of his success, his material prosperity, or perhaps his hot looking wife? (Lust, yet another running dog to this versatile sin's repertoire). You let envy loose in your heart at your peril.
The other thing that occurs to me is how easily a bit of envy can corrupt a church.
Some moderately famous (in Christian circles) speaker comes to talk at church and in the talk refers to his home church in some way. It's membership (more than you get on a Sunday), it's ministry (bigger miracles than you've ever seen) or some record of service (they have a soup kitchen, say) is mentioned as an example of how God is blessing that speaker. It is the work of a moment for the enemy to slip in a couple of envious thoughts and suddenly (if those thoughts get to grow) you are on some slippery slope abandoning the current God-given program of growth for a vast array of wasteful, time consuming ostensibly useful short term programmes to match or exceed the wonder church's level of committment in some way. They have monthly prayer meetings we have weekly half nights of prayer. They have 1000 members, we have a redoubled evangelistic effort aimed at getting new bums on seats - at the expense of the home groups' carefully devised and prayerfully implemented to encourage and disciple our existing brothers and sisters. Give it some thought and I'll bet you can see just such a correlation - it might even be happening right now in your church. Oh, yes I'm sure the originators of the ideas didn't for a minute think they might be proposing these schemes out of any motive as base as Envy, no-no-no, the reasons seem a million miles away from that. It's any number of things before something as vile as Envy is mentioned.
Envy teaches us to despise the gifts of God in favour of some other unrealistic or unrealisable other goal. Don't look at what you've got, says Envy, look at what they've got over there; you'd like that here wouldn't you? The moment you say "Yes" you are in trouble.
The only positive thing to say about Envy is that it doesn't diguise itself, or there isn't much subtlety to the disguise (if any). Envy doesn't show up as anything other than what it is, a sin. Once you are aware of it's presence it's a pretty easy to confront and defeat. The hardest part of it is when it shows up apparently promoting good things such as the extra Bible study, the more prayer and quiet times I mentioned. Then it becomes a hard enemy to defeat because it can feel as if you are giving up something good for no good reason. The thing to remember then is that these apparently good things are not motivated by good reasons they are not rooted in your faith they are rooted in one's perception of one's inadequacy. Paul in Romans 14:23 is pretty blunt about this, "anything that does not come from faith is sin".
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