Proverbs | Eliminating Envy (Proverbs 23 and Psalm 73)

This week we focus on envy. Envy is the awful feeling you have when you know you should celebrate someone’s good fortune but think it really should have happened to you instead. Envy makes it hard to rejoice with others. Soon it becomes hard to rejoice at all. The result is a complaining spirit that’s difficult to be around. In the series this week learn what Proverbs has to say about envy, how we eliminate it, and what will happen when we do.

Transcript

To kickstart our conversation about envy, I’m going to describe the movie character who is rated as the 6th most envious movie character in history according to IMDb. I think our kids especially will be able to figure it out! So this character constantly compared his life with his brother’s. He was consumed by how much he wanted that life it led him to sorrow, solitude, and sarcasm. He eventually murders his brother, but the life he thought he would have is anything but. Death, decay, destruction, disrespect, that’s all he experiences, and then the protagonist comes and saves the day and restores everything to how it should be. I’ll give you a hint. He’s a lion. Any guesses? Scar! Because he let his envy take over, he lost it all. That’s exactly what envy does. It takes over the controls of your heart so that your aim in life becomes self-justification according to what you think will give you a reason for existing. But if we’re going to eliminate the corrosive spiritual acid of envy from our hearts, we need to know what envy is, why it’s dangerous, how only Jesus can fully eliminate it, and from there we will see what the grace-enveloped enviousless life looks like.

First, what is envy? Asaph will help us with that. Asaph wrote a bunch of psalms and when wrote Psalm 73, he was reflecting on a time in his life when he was stuck in envy. Look at what he says, “But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” Notice how he’s not upset over the arrogance of the wicked, but he’s upset about their prosperity. He’s not angry because they’re dishonoring God. He’s angry that they have the life he wants for himself. That’s envy! Envy, boiled down, is really wanting someone else’s life. It’s the deadly spiritual disease of “comparisonitis.” It leads you to bitterness and discontent with what God has given you and it leads you to spitefully rejoice when others fall. It’s this desire within not only to have that person’s life, it’s resenting them for even having it.

Living in envy sucks the joy out of your life and it leads to a constant uneasiness. “Comparisonitis” just leads to a constant game of “Do I measure up?” But that’s not the life God has given you and me. It’s not a life of envy, but a life of steady. Look at how God steadies us in Psalm 73:23, “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.” Even as we slip, he continues to hold us. He continues to steady us. Why? Because that’s who he is. His love for you never leaves, looks elsewhere or lets you down. He holds you up. Such a thought is designed to capture every last mental inch of our imagination. To think the Lord of all is so intentional, so unashamed, so intent in keeping me as the apple of his eye?! It leads us to worship him, to stand in sheer wonder at his magnificently personal, enduring love, but what does envy do? Envy is the antonym of worship! Worship says, “Lord you are my life, I love you more than any other,” or as Asaph puts it, “Whom have I in heaven but you?” Envy says, “Not good enough, not fair,” and eventually, “You’re not enough for me, God.”

That’s where we find the existential danger of envy. It leads us to the spectrum of discontent, swinging between self-pity (reverse envy) and bitter happiness (forward envy) at another’s expense. How many of us deal with that self-pitying every day? True confession, that’s been a serious struggle for me. It’s looking at my circumstances compared to others and it seems like I can see God’s grace working in everyone else’s life much more clearly than in my own. It’s the constant “If I just had this…then I could enjoy life.” But that’s what envy masked as self-pity does. It is a vacuum pump on joy. It poisons you from being able to enjoy the life you have. Nothing is good enough: not your family life, not your love life, not your body, not your work, not your friends, because you feel like there is something always wrong, and you’re constantly comparing. On the flip side (forward envy), the bitter happiness angle is there too. And it’s not only when the rich and famous fall, but even with people we admire. Why do you think social media can be so toxic? We scroll endlessly looking for self-justification, to feel better about ourselves, but it never fills that hole. How many of our teens today are searching for validation about their beauty, intelligence, and value through likes, hearts, and followers? When we lose sight of the One who is steady in his love for us, we lose sight of true contentment and identity.

As I prepared this message for you, I knew part of my preparation had to be analyzing my own envy, and do you know what I found? Envy of other pastors, envy of the seeming ease of other’s lives, but even deeper than that, I found that what and who I envy truly reveals where I’m functionally looking to prove my existence at the everyday level of life. Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Lutheran philosopher says it well in his book, The Sickness Unto Death, “When a person simply does what 'the others' do; he or she is just one more ant in the anthill of human society. Such a person has a 'self' which is completely determined by the world, which means it is not a self before God.” So here’s our next big question: What are you living before? Whatever or whoever you are living before, if the face before you isn’t Jesus, you will be eaten up by envy, and even the good things you have will end up tainted with disappointment and discontent. Such is the envious life Satan has in mind for you: a constant comparison loop that disintegrates you. John Brug says it this way: “Envy is a corrosive acid that eats away at contentment and faith.”

Our envy reveals to us how incapable we truly are, how mightily insufficient we are, and how if left on our own we can never satisfy ourselves. Such has been our struggle since the fall. Adam and Eve had it all, and God gave them not simply a rule, but a way to say “I love you,” or to worship. But that wasn’t enough for them and ever since then we’ve tried and failed to recapture what once was. To experience justification, wholeness, and unfiltered joy. Impossible for envious sinners like us, but accomplished by our un-envious God, who considered his mission with pure joy even though once forsaken.

We know by faith what Asaph says is true, that despite our falling, through faith we are always with the LORD. When we reach out our hand in repentance, we realize our Heavenly Father’s hand has always been right there holding us up as his dear children. But there was one Son of his who reached out his hand and grasped nothing but air. The Son who faced our loneliness alone. The Son who was dogged every second he walked among us to give up his mission for the acclaim and admiration of this world. The temptation of comparisonitis all around him. But he is the Son who said from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and didn’t say, “That’s not fair, this should be him, this should be her.” Instead, he placed his hands willingly down on that cross, so that one day those same hands could embrace you and give you a joy that makes the endless social media scrolling cease, the consuming comparison game stop, and your envy fade away. That same hands that reached down through his Word and through water to hold Lincoln and London and call them his dearly loved children through baptism. 

We look at the once-forsaken Son and we see in Jesus our justification for existence. The need to prove is gone. The need to envy is no more. It’s the beautiful movie of faith, the thematic wonder of letting yourself be caught up in the climax of the greatest true story ever told, as Asaph put it, “Whom have I in heaven but you and earth has nothing I desire besides you!”
By faith, we no longer envy those who aren’t going through the suffering we are, instead grace radically shifts our view of pain. We see such moments when everything else seems to fade away as precious, because the more we lose in this life, the clearer Jesus becomes. As we age, as we bear our crosses, we look up to him and we look with confidence toward our certain future. Did you catch that in Proverbs 23:17-18? One Bible translation says it this way, “Don’t for a minute envy careless rebels; soak yourself in the Fear-of-God— That’s where your future lies. Then you won’t be left with an armload of nothing.” We see this fading away and we join with Asaph, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Envy gives way to grace, and our hearts become transfixed in worship.

It’s that worship, that awestruckness of Jesus and his grace that sets the tone for our parenting, for our texting, for even our thinking. By faith, we see what the Christ-justified life is all about. It’s worship. Envy leads to an embittered soul, we’re like brute beasts raging out of control, and destructive. But worship comes from a soul that finds its rest in God alone. Worship, not just in our home here, surrounded by our family in Jesus, a non-negotiable gathering that reorients us to who we are, and what Jesus has done, but worship also when we put milk in our carts, worship when in the doctor’s office, worship as we lay down for the night. Worship is our lifestyle, marveling that no matter where we go, no matter what task stands before us, it all is meaningful to the LORD. Our Heavenly Father delights in you and the work he’s called you to do. You may look at the callings he’s given you and think “What I’m doing isn’t nearly as important as what she’s doing,” but remember that what you’ve been called to was given to you, and when God sees you, he smiles widely. Such a thought destroys our envy! God loves me! God delights in me! And when we know the LORD’s delight in us, his children, when we know his constant steady love and forgiveness and his loving, yet at times painful discipline, you know how else we worship him? By praising him for the gifts he’s given others! We don’t live embittered, we live as encouragers. Praising those who have a gift we long to have, but praising the LORD that he gave such a gift! Can you imagine what social media would be like if such things were communicated there? Not endless comparison, but endless worship in who our God is and what he’s empowering his people to do? No more parent-shaming, self-pitying, or constant “measure-uping,” but pure astonishment at the measureless grace of Jesus.

This is the life Jesus won for you, free from envy by his incomparable love. Such love inspired a hymn that we didn’t sing today, but one that has long captured the joy of the enviousless heart of the Christian and it’s one that will be sung at my funeral one day: “Why Should Cross and Trial Grieve Me.” Paul Gerhardt was a pastor in 17th-century Germany, and if there was anyone who could have a right to be angry with God and envious of others it was him.
In a matter of a decade, he lost his wife and 4 out of his 5 children to death, but in all that, it wasn’t envy consuming his heart but joy-filled worship. “Why should cross and trial grieve me? Christ is near with his cheer, never will he leave me, who can rob me of the heaven that God’s Son for me won when his life was given?” Answer? No one. Amen.