Seeing Green: Don't Let Envy Color Your Joy

by Tilly Dillehay

What are you good at? Work to get better. What task do you see near you that needs doing? Do it.

God has put you in the field in a certain row and made agreements with you about the terms of your employment. Looking over into the next row is never going to do anybody any good. Keep to your task. Do it with all your might, and be joyful in your work. Be grateful for the reward that he’s promised. And don’t even begin to imagine that those tasks are somehow setting you up to be independent of the loving Taskmaster. This is yet another borrowed glory, friends. Even your obedience was given to you.

Every love that has ever existed between human beings is a facsimile love derived from that triad relationship. Love was invented here.

We May Be Called to Lose Some of Our Closest Relationships for the Sake of Christ

Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

If you are a Christian, be prepared for loss.

This is the work of loving. It is opening cans of beans and chopping vegetables. It is time spent in the prayer closet. It is attending a funeral and a graduation. Loving can put miles on your car and wear out your arms.

Perhaps we go around telling people that we are praying for them without spending the time to do so—or without being willing to do anything that will help them out of their difficulty when it lies in our power. 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.

Also, notice the commands to “never be wise in your own sight,” and to “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”

Sometimes our desire for relationship is really just a desire for honor—we want to be respected and we want to be connected with people who are respected.

But every person God has placed in our lives is there for a reason, and if he withholds another kind of person from our lives, then he has a reason for that too.

There is one relationship that we are promised as our right and heritage: we are children of God and siblings of Christ.

In Christ, we are friends and children of the Most High God.

Envy is the only sin I can think of that is really no fun at all. It begins in negative feelings of inferiority, progresses into nasty feelings of resentment, and then stagnates in a stewing, frothy mess of petty or belligerent offspring sins. Even when envy gets what it wants—the destruction or removal of another person’s borrowed glory—it is left with empty energy that must be redirected to a new object of hatred.

And slavery to sin is a merciless slavery. Envy is a perfect example of that—a sin that requires all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and delivers you nothing (not even a lighted pleasure center) in return.

God can see your envy and your fornication side by side as if they were two slugs lying next to each other in the sun. There are no secret sins.

The full passage here on love declares it the most important virtue there is. Even faith and hope will pass away, it says, but love is for both this world and the world to come.

If love and envy cannot coexist because love doesn’t envy, then love will surely be a great aid to us in banishing envy from our hearts and lives.

Yes, I’m recommending that you “fake it until you make it,” in the case of love.

Show love by thanking God for the success of the person you envy. Jesus commanded us to pray for our enemies as one way of doing good to them (Matthew 5:43-48). This is a great way to start showing love toward the person you envy.

That means that you can pray for your friend (whom you are thinking of as an enemy) and still be obedient to Jesus’s word here.

Show love by asking God for the further success of the person you envy. That’s right. Pray specifically for her continued success, especially in whichever borrowed glory it is you are envying her for.

Ask for things for your friends the way you would ask for things for yourself.

Show love by enjoying the borrowed glory of the person you envy. Most of the glories we’ve discussed in this book are not possessions but personal traits, such as beauty, talent, charm, and more. The wonderful thing about these gifts from the Father is that they can be possessed by one person and enjoyed by others simultaneously.

you’ve got a chance both to learn something and to worship the Father for making her so good at what she does.

Show love by praising the person you envy. Under normal circumstances, praising something is both a natural result of enjoying it and part of the process of enjoying it. This means that for you to silently, stoically sit and soak in the borrowed glory of a friend or acquaintance without expressing admiration would be unnatural. It would truncate the exercise of enjoyment. It would also waste a wonderful opportunity for you to do battle with envy.

So become a “fan” of the person you envy. Praise openly where praise is due. Don’t flatter, and don’t praise in such a way that you are taking a borrowed glory and treating it as ultimate. There is a way to tell a pretty girl that she is pretty without implying that to be pretty is the most important thing in her life or yours.

To acknowledge God as the source and author of it all and to see the glory as creaturely and derivative is the only way this can be done. This frees us up to praise our neighbor naturally and freely.

Envy and diligence have a hard time coexisting. Envy, you remember, is more destructive than it is productive.

Throw your whole mind and soul into loving God through your work: vocational work, housework, relational work, creative work, hospitality, physical exercise, spiritual exercise, and ministry. Keeping your hands busy with honest labor is a great way to drown out the idle, wasteful sin of envy.

Just as Scripture makes it clear that love and envy are diametrically opposed, Scripture also makes it clear that humility and envy are diametrically opposed.

But envy is not actually a humble sin. It is a sin of pride—pride that has been thwarted.

When she doesn’t get it, her thwarted pride gives birth to envy.