LAW HOMILY - The Anatomy of Envy

Every week we look at God's law because we want to understand what he has to say to his people.

We want to understand God's heart. We want to understand how we can obey this great God that we worship and serve.

I say it many times, but I think it's a good analogy. Our salvation is not the finish line.

It is the starting line. It is where the Holy Spirit now comes into us and now equips us and empowers us and grows us and strengthens us to obey

God. And that's why every week we look at God's law and we look at the various aspects of his law.

I think that there's no deeper statements in all of the world than the Ten Commandments. They have application in so many different directions.

You can preach on them for a lifetime and still never exhaust them. So that's what we're doing, or at least that's what we're attempting to do.

Today we're on the Tenth Commandment, which is the final commandment in the set of ten, and it starts in verse 17.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The Tenth Commandment stands as the end of the decalogue, like a searchlight piercing through the darkness of our heart.

And it illuminates what we thought that we could hide even from God himself. Where the other commandments address our hands and our tongues and our behavior, this final command from Sinai penetrates deeper still down to the cisterns of our own desires, the underground river of our internal wanting, the secret garden where ambitions grow like weeds in the night.

You shall not covet, which is kind of like a verbal scalpel. It's a divine x -ray that reveals the cancer that eats away at our souls when we gaze upon someone else's success, and we feel like our hearts shrivel like salted slugs.

It's a good analogy. The anatomy of envy. What is it?

What is coveting? It is admiration that has curdled into bitterness.

It is appreciation that has soured into resentment. It is the peculiar misery of seeing another person's happiness and experiencing it as if it is your own diminishment, as though your joy were a finite commodity and their abundance means your poverty.

When your colleague receives the promotion that you desired and their assent feels like your descent, that is the undertow of a covetous heart.

When your neighbor's business flourishes while yours struggles and their prosperity feels like an indictment upon your value and worth, that's envy's venom.

When another person's giftedness shines more than yours and their light becomes the kind of shadow that casts a darkness on your contributions, well, that's coveting, wearing the mask of wounded pride.

Envy is the strange mathematics of a fallen heart. It believes that subtracting from another's happiness will somehow add to your own.

It's the poisonous paradox that we can feel impoverished while possessing much simply because someone else possesses more.

And we live in an age that is perfectly designed for manufacturing this kind of covetousness.

Our entire marketing campaigns are built upon the fact that you don't have it and you need it, trying to churn those desires in you to purchase it.

Social media has become a vast exposition of everyone else's highlight reel while we sit in the editing room of our own blooper footage.

Instagram is the digital fence over which we peer to see the veneer of someone else's special day or existence or whatever else.

LinkedIn is the modern Roman triumph, an endless parade of promotions and ad nauseam.

Look at what I did and look at what I said. The comparison trap is everywhere in our society.

They have a nicer house, they have a better car, their living room looks like something that I wish

I had, and on and on and on it goes until it sucks away all of the happiness out of your heart and the joy that you should be having in Christ.

And here's sort of the point. If you have anything other than hell, then you have been greatly blessed.

If you have anything other than eternal torment for the sins that you've perpetrated, you are rich.

And yet we quibble over trinkets and gadgets and gizmos and bank account statuses.

Let us care nothing for these things, brothers and sisters. Let us remember that if we have

Christ, we have everything. And if we don't have Christ, we have nothing.

That's the cure. That's the antidote. Let us not fall into the comparison trap.

And let us repent when we do. Amen? Let's pray. We'll pray silently, and then we'll pray together.

Lord, it feels like the engine underneath our society is a society built on envy, a society that weaponizes it and uses it to sell their next product or peddle the next subscription plan or just to band -aid a fragile ego.

Lord, I pray that in your church that envy and covetousness would no longer be named, that we would have a kind of holy happiness in the things of God, and that we would look at our external circumstances not as ways of measuring our worth and our value, but we would look at them as gifts.

You've scattered all of us in this room in various different circumstances and settings and situations, and you've placed us in different points upon the continuum of what the world would consider successful.

And yet, Lord, all of us in this room are infinitely wealthy because of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Lord, would you help us to not live in a poverty mindset or a comparison trap mentality.

But Lord, would you help us to remember that in Christ we have everything.

Lord, help that make us happy. Help that make us joyful. Help that make us have a kind of fulfillment that covetousness and envy cannot steal away.

And Lord, forgive us when we fall short and we peddle in the puddles of envy, and we return back to the pig pods of covetousness.

Lord, forgive us when we do this in Jesus' name. Amen. For all of us who sin, for all of us who fall short, for all of us who every week have probably envied something or been covetous of something, every week we give

God a reason to cut us out of the covenant. If not for the grace of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness that he purchased and God's persistent commitment to him, we would be doomed.

Thank God for that persistent commitment of the Father to the Son through the

Spirit that we are not consumed. Every week we read of this persistent commitment in the scriptures.

Today we're in Acts 2 .38. Peter said to them, repent and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the

Holy Spirit. It's a gift. And it's a gift that God is not an Indian giver and will not take away.

He gave it to you on the basis of his Son and he will keep you in the basis of his

Son forever. And in that we rejoice. And in that we're thankful. And if you think about it, that's what kills covetousness and envy and pride and every other deadly sin because we know

Jesus and his love changes everything about us. Amen? Let us stand joyfully.