What To Do When Envy Steals Your JoySample

Diagnosing Envy

If you want to find the envy in your life, look first at the glories that you value or possess.

What is it that you most want people to know about you?

Is it that you’re smart? Competent? Fun to be around? Do you want them to know how great your husband and marriage is? That you’re an artist? That you’re attractive? Whatever glories you possess or want to possess, this is where you should look for envy.

Because here’s the painful thing about God’s world: glory isn’t distributed equally.

God gifts one person with great big dabs of beauty, another with brains. Someone else has an extra portion of charm. Someone else has wealth, talent, and an intact family. Sooner or later (if you haven’t already) you’re going to encounter somebody who has more of something than you have—more of something that you really, really care about.

Most likely, this person will be a peer. Envy thrives in close proximity. I don’t feel any envy for Beyoncé, who is far and away in a different category than myself, but my musical sisters who have just a bit more talent than I do—that’s a different story.

Envy also comes with a writhing, stinging feeling of inferiority. We don’t like inequality—not when we’re on the wrong side of it.

James lays this out for us, pointing to the source of much of the interpersonal sin we yield to over the course of our lives: “You desire and do not have, so you murder,” he says.

We desire, and do not have. So we murder. Envy is misery over another person’s good fortune. It comes in a variety of degrees, from a slight discomfort to the kind of passion that leads people to literal killing (think of Cain). But in any of its forms, envy derives pain from other people’s pleasure. This is a kind of hatred, a rooting against someone instead of rooting for them. It’s a kind of murder.

The passage here in James is calling us to back up and ask what we want so badly that we’re willing to sin to get it (or in the case of envy, to sin when we don’t get it). Then in verse 6 and 10, he gives us a hint about one of our paths out of envy.

Humility.

More on this tomorrow...