What To Do When Envy Steals Your JoyНамуна

Fighting Envy with Humility

Envy doesn’t feel like the sin of pride because it is so often the affliction of the underdog. The envious woman at first glance has an inferiority complex, not a superiority complex. She sees the envied person as having an advantage over her—this is one of the reasons why envy is so difficult to confess.

But envy is not actually a humble sin. It is a sin of pride—pride that has been thwarted. The envious woman believes that all glory and honor should go to herself. She can’t stand to see the glory of another human being because she quite simply wants it all. When she doesn’t get it, her thwarted pride gives birth to envy.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” writes Paul to the Philippians, “but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:3-4).

But how? we ask. Obviously being unselfish is good—everybody agrees on that—but how do we manage it? Considering others as more important than ourselves goes against every grain in us.

If we keep reading, the passage answers all these doubts. This mind CAN be found among brothers and sisters in Christ, as it is actually ours already “in Christ Jesus.” We’re being transformed into the image of our Lord, and our Lord—despite the glory he came from—was the picture of humility. He didn’t grasp at equality with the Father, his peer. Instead, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming a man. Then he humbled himself further by giving himself up to humiliation and death.

So how can we do this simple but seemingly impossible thing of putting off prideful envy and putting on humility? We must look to Christ. He is our own king, and he is a king who humbled himself unto death. He was a lion who laid down and let a witch cut him open. He was, in fact, a lamb. What can we say in the face of such humility except “Lord, [wash] not my feet only, but also my hands and my head” (John 13:9)!

And in the end, what happened to Christ and what is promised to us—glory following humility—is a principle echoed in Proverbs 29:23:

One’s pride will bring him low,
But he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.