Seeing Green: Don't Let Envy Color Your Joy

by Tilly Dillehay

It’s impossible to pull our adoring eyes off one thing without placing them firmly on something else.

The Lord makes poor, and the Lord makes rich. Therefore, when you envy your prosperous neighbor, you are, at one level, begrudging God’s generosity. When you feel resentful at your own financial lot, you are failing to trust the sovereign God. At such times, God’s question for you is the same as that of the vineyard master in the parable: “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (Matt. 20:15 NIV). Money envy, like all envy, must be confronted with the goodness and sovereignty of God.

We say, “God, use the tool, however blunt it is. Help me to take responsibility to work with what you have given me. Let me not cower in the fight, and let me never think that my talent does anything for the kingdom but what you ordain.”

If we can’t rejoice at genuine strokes of beauty wielded against our satanic enemies, then we are obviously blind to the battle. We obviously don’t love the General or the thing he fights for, if we begrudge points scored by people on our own team.

To love sacrificially means to examine the parts of yourself that you are least willing to give and then to practice, practice, practice giving them.

To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. C.S. LEWIS, The Weight of Glory