Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post. Not too long ago she wrote an article titled "America's Ugly Epidemic of Social Media Envy." Interesting title, at least it caught my attention. She begins with a provocative question. "When did envy become okay?" She went on to write, "I’m constantly hearing or seeing not-very-guilty admissions of being jealous of a friend for, say, something seen on Instagram. Whether it’s eye-rolling at a friend’s exotic trip, snarking on someone’s great seats at the ballgame or commenting about an acquaintance’s restaurant-every-night life, jealousy is in. Have we become a culture of green-eyed monsters who (in the parlance of hip-hop) 'hate on' our friends and acquaintances for all they have and we don’t? Maybe it’s social media," she says. "Study after study shows that our jealousy spikes with our use of social sharing sites." Interesting, isn't it?

0:01:27.2 

She goes on to cite two university studies that suggest this is true. According to a study at the University of Michigan, get this, the more people that use Facebook, the worse they feel about their own lives. Does any of that ring true? And then there was another study by Oxford University across the pond in England there.  "Instagram is the most envy-inducing social media platform." Interesting studies. My question and my reaction to this was, why are two esteemed universities even doing studies like this? But it's interesting the glimpse they give us into our culture today.

0:02:09.8

Markowicz concludes with this insightful and somewhat damning observation of our culture and our social media practices. She says, " Never before have so many had so much while still wanting more." Let that sink in just for a moment, and then ask yourself this question. Does that describe me? Am I among those that she describes as never before having so much and have had so much while still wanting more? Moya Sarner is a columnist for another periodical called The Guardian, and she agrees with Karol Markowicz. She says, "We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy," whatever that is, "holiday envy." She says, "You name it, there's an envy for it. Human beings have always felt what Aristotle defined in the 4^th century B.C. as pain at the sight of another's good fortune stirred by 'those who have what we ought to have,'" she says, "thought it would be another thousand years before it would make it on to Pope Gregory's list of the seven deadly sins."

0:03:28.7

We're in a series of messages called "Undefeated: Overcoming the Deadly Sins that Drag You Down." And we're talking about, yeah, a list of vicious vices that appeared back in the 6^th century. Pope Gregory was the one who first put the list out there- pride, anger, lust, laziness, gluttony, envy and greed. Today we're talking about defeating envy, what is sometimes called the green-eyed monster. Have you ever heard that phrase? Is the green-eyed monster alive and well in you? That phrase probably started with, of all people, Shakespeare back in 1603 when he wrote one of his tragedies called Othello. "O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock." Great words from Shakespeare.

0:04:23.4

But you may be wondering, what is envy? Let's insert a definition here from the dictionary. Envy is a "feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, successes or possessions." Think about that. Envy, that green-eyed monster, rears its ugly head in our lives when we look around and compare ourselves to one another and say, "You have a greater advantage than I do. You have more privilege than I do. You've achieved more success than I do. You have more stuff than I do. You go on better vacations than I do. I want what I should get, and I want yours." You hear it in our culture today. Some of what is happening in our culture, the way we're spinning out of control in so many different ways…and I understand there are deeper issues and legitimate issues we need to discuss at this stage in our history, and we want to make more progress on the "all men are created equal" and all of that. But some of it is driven by envy. Some of it is driven by the kind of jealousy that says, "You have an advantage I don’t have. You have a privilege I don't have. You have stuff that I don't have."

0:05:43.3 

Listen, friends. America is a place of equal opportunity. It's not a place of equal outcomes. It never has been. Equal opportunity? Yes. And we need to make progress while making sure there is equal opportunity for all. But there will always be somebody who has more than you. There will always be somebody who has more than me. And guess what? Somebody is looking at you and the stuff that you have, and they're full of envy and jealousy. They may peek in on your social media feeds and see a vacation that you took or a new this or a new that that you bought. You know how we position ourselves. We always look our best, don't we? Is it to evoke jealousy and envy in our friends, in our neighbors? According to Karol Markowicz, it's working. When did envy become okay?

0:06:40.7

But here's the thing. Equal opportunity? Yes. Not equal outcome. There will always be somebody who has more. That green-eyed monster, if we let him run loose in our hearts, it'll just create a dark place there that we've got to get after and defeat. In fact, long before Pope Gregory or Shakespeare or even Aristotle the philosopher put their fingers on envy and called it a deadly sin or a vicious vice, there was a guy named Moses who came down the slope of Mount Sinai with two plate tablets in his hands. We know it as the Ten Commandments, written upon by nothing less than the finger of almighty God.

0:07:34.3

Do you remember what the tenth commandment says? Let me remind you. Exodus 20:17, "you shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant or his female servant, or his ox or his donkey or anything,"—say the word "anything" with me—"anything that is your neighbor's." Don't covet it. Don't let the green-eyed monster get the best of you and you have envy toward what your neighbor has.

0:08:10.8

The renowned theologian J.I. Packer calls covetousness "the first cousin to envy." That word "covet" may seem a little bit strange to our modern ears. You may not use it in your everyday language. You may prefer the word envy or jealousy. But covetousness just seems strange to us. But more than 3000 years ago from God's perspective, He felt it was one of the top ten things He wanted to communicate to His people for their ordering not only of the human heart, but the proper ordering of society as they lived in that theocracy in the Old Testament. The Lord said, "Listen, you're not going to do well with me or with one another if your heart is full of covetousness and envy."

0:09:02.0

In some sense, when you're reading the Ten Commandments and you're studying them…remember those commandments that we took down from the walls and we said wasn't important to the ordering of our society or the ordering of our human hearts? Those Ten Commandments. It's easy to underestimate the tenth one. It's easy to read through those ones that we know. You know, "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Honor your father and your mother." All those kinds of things. But we forget the one about covetousness. We almost say the Ten Commandments end with a whimper, not a bang. Until you realize the interconnectedness between this tenth commandment and all the others. Again. J.I. Packer notes the way covetousness, for example, was at the root of King David's greatest sin. Listen to this. He says, " David took Bathsheba (thus, by theft breaking the Eighth Commandment) and got her pregnant (thus breaking the Seventh) and then to avoid scandal arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed (thus breaking the Sixth), and it all began with David coveting his neighbor’s wife, in breach of the 10^th."

0:10:13.5

You see, back when the deadly sins were first before us and emerging, they called them gateway sins. Why was envy and jealousy and covetousness a deadly sin? Because it could become a gateway to murder, to adultery, to a breaking of all of the commandments. I'll take Packer's words and go a little bit further. According to Colossians 3:5, covetousness…I'm trying to help you understand just how serious this matter is. Covetousness is idolatry, which breaks the first and second commandments about worshipping God exclusively. So, in summary, what we could say about King David…and I'm sorry to pick on David, but he's the example in scripture here. King David violated the first, second, seventh, eight, ninth and tenth commandments in a single act of envy-driven, jealous-driven self-indulgence. I was thinking all along this was going to be one of the easier ones to tackle. No, that green-eyed monster, it threatens every one of us.

0:11:25.8

Before we get on to some ways that we can defeat envy, let's look at some other example. Not only David, who coveted Uriah's wife…and that story is found in 2 Samuel 11. Let's go all the way back to the beginning. Let's go back to the book of Genesis. Let's just stop off in Genesis 4. Remember the story of Cain and Abel? Envy and covetousness were all over it, because they both made an offering to God, but God preferred Abel's offering over Cain's. And Cain grew jealous of that. He grew envious of Abel's offering. And that gateway sin led to what? The first murder. The first murder in the Bible started with envy and covetousness.

0:12:20.8

Genesis 37 you have the story of Joseph. Joseph was a young boy, 17 years old. He was the apple of his daddy's eye, right? So fond of Joseph was Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons, but he kind of preferred Joseph and gave Joseph a coat of many colors. And Joseph, a young boy, prances around like a peacock in his multicolored jacket and stirred and evoked the jealousy of his brothers. What do they do? They threw him in a pit and then sold him into slavery. Yeah, we could tell Joseph he could have handled the fondness of his father with a little bit more maturity. But still, no excuse for the jealous, envious rage of his own brothers.

0:13:08.7

Then probably the most infamous story of jealousy and envy in the Bible is the relationship between King Saul and young King David. Long before the David and Bathsheba scene, Israel wanted a king. Israel looked around, and they saw the other nations. "We want a king too." They went to the prophet Samuel and said, "Get us a king." Samuel said, "No, God is your king." It started with envy. They envied the other nations that had kings. Finally, the prophet Samuel goes to the Lord and says, "What am I supposed to do with this?" And the Lord says, "Listen, they've already rejected Me as king, so give them a king." Saul became king. Saul started out well, but he ended poorly. The rise and fall of King Saul is one of the great tragedies in the Bible. And when the Lord had taken the kingdom away from Saul, He told Samuel to go find the king amongst Jesse's sons. This is where David was, the young little shepherd boy. David went out, and he slayed the giant Goliath. And his fame just rocketed to the moon. And the cheerleaders used to say as David came back from his military escapades, "Saul has slain his thousands, but David is ten thousands." You know what it did in the heart of Saul? It stirred up the green-eyed monster, and he grew jealous of David. He pursued David. He hunted him down. He threw a spear and David was out to get David until finally Saul dies and David assumed the throne. It is a story dripping in envy and jealousy and covetousness.

0:14:56.2

Even the apostle Paul struggled with covetousness and envy. If you were to put the seven deadly sins in front of the apostle Paul and say, "Which one do you struggle with the most?", you know what he would say? Envy. And he'd point us to Romans 7:7-8. He says, "If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin." The law he's talking about is the Ten Commandments, the moral law of God. "For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.' But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness, for apart from the law sin lies dead."

0:15:39.1

What's Paul saying here? He's saying, "Before I even heard that coveting was wrong, I didn't even know I had the green-eyed monster in me. But as soon as I read the law, 'You shall not covet anything of your neighbor's,' suddenly I became aware I was a sinner. I was a sinner who had violated the holy standard of God, and I needed the grace of God."

0:16:05.9

We could go on in scripture to many other places where envy is singled out as something we must defeat. Job 5:2, "Surely vexation kills the fool, and jealousy slays the simple." Psalm 37:1-2, "Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb." Proverbs gives us wise words about living in the horizontal world in which we live. Chapter 14 and verse 30, "A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot." What a picture there. Jealousy, envy, covetousness, it'll rot you from the inside out. Chapter 23 and verse 17, "Let not your heart envy sinners, but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day."

0:17:04.5

Let's step into the New Testament. Let's go to that great love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13, the one that says, "Love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy." It'll destroy a marriage. It'll destroy a relationship. Then I've got to toss in James. James 4:16, "But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but it earthly, unspiritual, demonic," James says. "For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice." That ought to get every one of our attentions.

0:17:58.5

That little green monster inside of us known as envy will destroy. And it has nothing to do with the wisdom from above. In fact, James says it's of the devil. It is demonic. And where there is jealousy and all that goes with it, there is disorder. There is chaos. And every vile practice can be linked directly back to envy and jealousy and covetousness in the heart. You can even go back further to the Garden of Eden and the first sin, and Adam and Eve wanted to be like God. They coveted knowledge that was forbidden.

0:18:46.7

And so, this is a huge issue, not just thousands of years ago in biblical history and through the precepts of scripture. You see it on the streets of America today. (0:19:00.1) "You have an advantage that I don't. You have a privilege that I don't. You have stuff that I want." And maybe, at least according to the columnists, maybe our social media practices are just stirring this up, and in the quietness of our own hearts as we scroll through our media feeds, the green-eyed monster is being fed jealousy and envy and covetousness.

0:19:25.8

Well, so much for raising the issue, right? How do we defeat this thing? How do we live an undefeated life? How do we overcome the deadly sins that drag us down, like the green-eyed monster called envy? I want to suggest just two things. Let me just say this ahead of time. There was a point in my sermon preparation this week when I said, "Really, Lord? That just seems too simple. There's got to be more to this than this. People are going to say, 'Oh, no duh, Pastor. Come on, give us something a little more than that.'" And upon further quiet (0:20:00.1) mediation and prayer, the Lord just kind of thumped in the chest and said, "No, this is exactly the antidote needed to get after envy." Are you ready for this?

0:20:09.4

Number one, give thanks. Give thanks. Where envy and jealousy and covetousness are present, you know what's absent? Gratitude. Gratitude for what God has given to you. But when your heart is full of thanksgiving…I mean, it's overflowing with a thankful heart and with gratitude for what God has given to you…you don't have time and you don't have the capacity in your heart to be jealous of what somebody else has had given to them by the grace of God.

0:20:50.6

But here is the problem. You know, gratitude is probably one of the most underrated virtues on any list of virtues. I know we have a national holiday called Thanksgiving, but herein is part of the problem. We've reduced the cultivation of this virtue to a single day. And we all become very full of gratitude and Thanksgiving on the holiday, and we give thanks for this. We pray prayers of thanksgiving, and we read psalms of thanksgiving. And then we move on, don't we? We move on the Christmas and then on to the rest of the life. No, what I'm suggesting, and I believe the Lord is suggesting to us, by the plethora of teaching in the scripture about the importance of thanksgiving, even entering His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise…you know that's how you come into the presence of the Lord, with a heart full of gratitude. Otherwise, the ungrateful heart comes before the Lord and says, "Why haven't You given me this? You gave this person that." And comparison becomes the enemy of gratitude and makes way for envy and jealousy and covetousness. No, give thanks. As simple as it is, verbalize your thanksgiving to God. Become so overwhelmed with a heart of gratitude and thanksgiving for what God has given you. Yes, there is always somebody who has more. There always will be. But there is always somebody who is looking at what you've got and saying, "I wish I had that." So just stay where you are for the moment and give thanks. Grow in the grace of gratitude.

0:22:39.6

1 Chronicles 16:34, "O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever." Has the Lord been good to you today? Tell Him that. Spend some time in your prayer life just thanking God for all that He's given to you and be specific about it. Spend some time there, because it's going to take some time to retrain the heart and to fill up that place in your heart with gratitude and thanksgiving. Because when it's vacated, there's a vacuum there. And you know what moves in? The green-eyed monster. So, fill it up with thanksgiving.

0:23:22.3

1 Thessalonians 5:18, "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." As a pastor, I often have people ask me, "Pastor, can you help me discover the will of God for my life?" That's always a fascinating question and an interesting one to pursue. But the first place to go is to those specific places in scripture that tell us this is the will of God. And you know what the will of God is? I know you're in a mess right now. Your circumstances are not what you want them to be. Find a way to give thanks. It says, "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God." Find a way to give thanks, even in the messy circumstances that you're in right now and fill up that place in your heart that the green-eyed monster wants to occupy. You've got to fill it up with thanksgiving and fill it up with gratitude.

0:24:23.1

Number two. Are you still with me? Number two, learn contentment. Learn contentment. You know, back when the seven deadly sins came out and back from the 6^th century on, they would work them into plays and poetry and different ways of talking about them. I mentioned earlier in the series that they would always work in the corresponding heavenly virtues. The most often corresponding heavenly virtue to envy was gratitude, but I got to add another one there. It's contentment. They're kind of in the same field. They're in a related family.

0:25:09.3

You say, what is contentment? Bill Gotthard says, "Contentment is realizing that God has already given me everything I need for my present happiness." The heart that is full of discontent, and thus full of envy and covetousness and greed, doesn't believe that God has already provided me everything I need for my present happiness. No, because I'm comparing myself to my neighbor over here, and he or she has something that I want and need for my present happiness. That's not a contented heart. It's not a heart that trusts in God to provide everything I need for my present happiness. Gotthard goes on to say, "Contentment is understanding that if I am not satisfied with what I have, I'll never be satisfied with what I want." And that's the lie and the deception of the green-eyed monster, right? Just desire this and want this and go after this and cover this and when you get this, you'll be satisfied. No, you won't. He'll come back bigger and stronger than before.

0:26:12.1

So, we have to learn contentment. John Steinbeck was a wonderful author, and he wrote a book called The Winter of Our Discontent. I always wondered why it was The Summer of Our Discontent or The Spring of Our Discontent, even The Fall of Our Discontent. I think Steinbeck understood the discontentment in the heart and the absence of content. There's coldness that comes over the human heart and our relationship to God. There is a bitterness that arises when envy and jealousy and covetousness come in, because we grow bitter that God has not given us what we ought to have. And our relationship with Him becomes frost, as it were.

0:26:57.6

So, we need to learn contentment. Hebrews 13:5 tells us, "Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, 'I will never leave you, and I'll never forsake you.'" The apostle Paul, in writing his letter to the Philippians, chapter 4 and verse 11, he says, "For I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances." If contentment is the antidote, along with gratitude, to envy and jealousy and covetousness, well, according to Paul, we have some learning to do. The fact that he says, "I have learned to be content," suggests that contentment isn't natural to us. No, you know what's natural to the sinful, human heart is envy, jealousy, covetousness. It's the green-eyed monster. He feels very comfortable in the human heart. What we have to learn, what is not natural to us, is contentment. Paul goes on to say, "I've learned to be content in times of plenty, in times of lack, times when I've had much, and times when I've had very little."

0:28:14.0

It kind of reminds me of the way I had to learn chemistry in high school. Mr. Buzzard was my chemistry teacher. That really was his name, and his profile even proved it. He had quite a beak on him. But he was a great chemistry teacher. He would lecture Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You'd never want to miss one of Mr. Buzzard's lectures. They were just rich. Tuesday and Thursday, we had lab. While we had lab, he was looking at his stocks in The Wall Street Journal. That was just Mr. Buzzard. But that's the way you learn chemistry. You had a lecture, but you've got to be in the laboratory as well. What Paul is saying is, "I didn't learn contentment so much through a lecture. I learned it through the laboratory of life, through the circumstances God brought me through. Sometimes I didn't have much, and everybody around me seems like they had more than me. But I learned contentment. Sometimes I had an abundance, but there was always somebody who had more than me. But in all the seasons of life," Paul says, "I learned contentment." What is God teaching you right now about contentment? What is God teaching you as you scroll through your social media feed, and you look at somebody who has more than you or more advantage than you or more privilege than you or more stuff than you or more of whatever you want? What is He teaching you right now about contentment? We have to learn that.

0:29:42.1

Other scriptures in the New Testament. I think of a time when John the Baptizer…I love this character. John the Baptizer actually had the audacity one time to say to a group of Roman soldiers this. He says, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation." He knew that's the way they did business. You know, they got paid a certain wage, but to make a little bit more, the threats, the false accusations, the extortion. He says, "Don't do that way." He says, "Be content with your wages." Can you imagine John confronting these Roman soldiers with such teaching?

0:30:22.8

2 Corinthians 12:10, the apostle Paul talks about some things that you and I probably wouldn't put on a list of things we've grown content with. He says, "I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong." As we're learning contentment, is it possible that God would bring us through a time characterized by weakness and distress and difficulty? Nobody wants to sign up for that. Nobody scrolls through their social media feed and sees somebody who is going through a really hard time, and then becomes envious of that, right? No. But God may be using those times to teach you and to learn contentment.

0:31:11.4

1 Timothy 6:6-8, just one more. "But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that." I'll be honest with you. I don't meet too many Americans who are content with just food and clothing. Because back to what Karol Markowicz said, "Never before have so many had so much while still wanting more," stoked by envy and greed and jealousy and coveting our neighbor's this, that or the other thing. You're not going to hear any of this from the culture. The culture is deep into this thing called envy. I don't even think the columnist from the New York Post…I have no reason to believe she is a believer in Jesus Christ and no reason to believe she's not. She doesn't write the column from a religious perspective. She just says, "When did envy become okay?" She even sees in our culture today the green-eyed monster on the loose.

0:32:35.0

We as believers in Jesus Christ are called to a higher order, are we not? We're called to be followers of Jesus Christ. We're more than conquerors, the Bible tells us. How do we defeat this enemy? Well, again, just give thanks. Get back to the simple practice of filling your heart with gratitude. Name your blessings. Yes, name them one by one, the song says. Learn contentment.

0:33:05.6

One other thing that I'll just share that I've learned is to set my affections on things above and not on things of this earth. Paul writes that in one of his New Testament letters. Because the more I have my eyes on the stuff, the advantages, the privileges of this life, the more I scroll through my social media feeds and see what you've got and I don't have, the more the green-eyed monster just gets stirred up inside of me. But if I lift my eyes, if I stop putting so much stock into this world and expecting out a fallen world what only my Savior can fill in terms of the desires of my heart, when I lift my eyes and start setting the affections of my heart on things above and not what I see in my social media feed, then I'm on my way to defeating envy.

0:34:02.8

My prayer today is that you and I will hear this like we've never heard it before. That we'll take the truth, the warnings of scripture that even date back more than 3000 years ago, something we've ripped off the walls of our classrooms and said, "No, we don't need that,"…a generation later, oh, how we need it. Because we unleashed the green-eyed monster and a lot else when we rejected the moral law of God and chose not to order our lives or our hearts by it, or even to take the warnings of scripture. Now is the time to get back to it and to say the only antidote for this uncontrollable desire for what somebody else has and I want is to get back to the teachings of scripture. Put into practice the tenth commandment. Give thanks. Learn contentment. Set your affections of things above and not on things on the earth. And live like the "more than" conqueror in Christ that we are. Amen?

0:35:38.4