I believe my church will soon be doing a series on the Seven Deadly Sins. I am not sure if it will be the traditional list Lust, gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride or the recent updates: ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos, taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few”. abortion and paedophilia.
In the midst of this I am reading Boundaries with Kids which talks about dealing with envy in kids and moulding them to become thankful rather than envious. I happened to like this chapter as I am not sure I dealt well with this when I was younger.
I seem to remember one idea presented was that you can be envious of someone else’s marriage, job or position and thus when yours does not match up you look for something else. I think I had always thought of envy as the wanting and not the action that comes as a result of the wanting.
So if envy does make us want what we do not have how do we combat it? While the Boundaries authors (Cloud and Townsend) go to thankfulness in kids I wonder if that is enough for adults.
I would immediately say there needs to be perspective, see what you do have. Except this implies that those with truly little are allowed to be envious which I know is an incorrect statement.
The answer seems to me to be more biblical. Realise you came into this world with nothing and that everything you have, including the breath you breathe right now, is a gift from God. It is not perspective but an absolute truth that we are dependent creatures from the beginning of our days to the end of them. We are dependent on mothers, others, and God the Father for everything that we could be envious of and what we have truly is a gift.
So what have you been envious of that you need to let and go and be thankful to God for?
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
April 17, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Bec
Hi David,
Doh! Lost my original comment… and it was so profound too!!
I’m really glad to hear you say “my church” and talk yesterday of finding a small group. It’s awesome that you are settling in, and I really pray that you guys will find said church as much of a blessing as James & I have.
On the issue of envy, I was thinking that it really forms the centre of much modern evangelism technique. We talk about living a life that will draw people to Christ, that will make them ask the question, “What do they have that I don’t?” and then the corrolary response of, “I want whatever it is that they have”. It seems to me that this forms the centre of centripetal evangelism strategy, where we try to draw people to Christ, rather than going out and bringing Christ TO them. I’m not entirely sure that this is an entirely scriptural approach since the impetus after Christ is on us “to go out”, rather than the state of Israel approach of drawing the nations to them. But envy does seem to play a role in evangelism, so perhaps it isn’t all bad. Perhaps desiring things, or acknowledging want isn’t an issue. Perhaps it’s when desire for other things completely overshadows what we already have, and we cease to be thankful for what we do have. I think it might also be when we pin some hope on that desire, that in getting what we desire we will somehow be deeply satisfied to a point of no more desire. I think that’s when it becomes an issue, because ONLY God can satisfy in that way, and to place our hope for satisfaction in anything else is idolatry.
God bless,
Bec