What happens when someone else gets what you’ve been hoping and praying for?
You may genuinely want to be happy for them, but somewhere deep inside, their good fortune leaves you feeling disappointed, overlooked, or even resentful. That’s the sneaky power of jealousy and envy. They can turn a perfectly good day into one filled with discontentment and rob you of the joy you once had.
In this convicting episode of our ongoing series, Uncovering Your Hidden Motives, Shay Roush, M.Div., takes a close look at the ways envy, jealousy, and coveting show up in our everyday lives. From scrolling through social media to watching someone else succeed at work or experience something you long for, comparison can change how you see yourself, others, and even God.
He’ll explore what the Bible has to say about envy and the damage it can do to our relationships. Through the stories of King Saul and David, Adam and Eve, and the teachings of Paul and James, you’ll see how jealousy can grow into resentment, conflict, and a loss of gratitude. More importantly, you’ll begin to recognize how envy affects the way you love your neighbors and trust God’s goodness in your own life.
Ultimately, this episode invites you to do some honest heart work. What is it about someone else’s life that makes you feel discontent with your own? What might those feelings reveal about what you value most and where you’ve placed your trust? As the first of a two-part conversation, this episode will help you uncover what’s driving your envy and jealousy, setting the stage for the next episode’s practical steps toward overcoming them.
Highlights from this Episode
This is Shay flying solo today. It’s good to be with you back on the podcast in the middle of our Uncovering Your Hidden Motives series. Today we’re going to talk about the topic of jealousy. You can also call it envy or coveting. They’re all related biblically. They’re all sins that cause conflict in relationships and drive a lot of our behavior. They can also impact our work and career and drive us towards materialism.
Who we are on the inside usually comes out in how we live and how we act. That’s why it’s so important that we guard our hearts. If my face could reveal the sin that I struggle with the most—well, my face would be green with envy or jealousy of others. Jealousy has always been a problem, but with social media, it’s been amplified.
What I want to do is talk a little bit about jealousy and envy and they ways they can affect our choices and our relationship with God and others. But first, let’s start with some definitions:
Envy: This is when you want something that belongs to someone else; either tangible, like a house, car, or job, or intangible, like power, prestige, or reputation.
Jealousy: While similar to envy, it involves the fear of losing someone or something and can lead you to act in selfish, manipulative ways in order to keep it.
Coveting: An amped-up version of envy; an obsessive desire and restless craving to possess something that belongs to someone else. Specifically prohibited in the 10th Commandment.
With those definitions set up, let’s take a look at the ways that these sins show up in our lives.
When Discontentment Takes Over
You can be having a perfect day. Things are going well. And suddenly the day falls apart in just a few minutes when you glance at your phone. You catch a glimpse of someone else’s life, possessions, relationships, career, their platform or influence, or their seemingly easy way of moving through life. And your heart just sinks.
You may think, Why them? Why not me? Just moments earlier, you had felt content. Maybe even grateful for your life. All of a sudden, moments later, you feel smaller and less than and not enough and wondering why the grass always looks greener in somebody else’s yard. When you compare your life with other people, it robs you of all joy in your own life.
Let me share a personal story about how we can go from being happy and content to envious, miserable, and ungrateful. My family went on vacation a couple of summers ago to Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO. I hadn’t been there in 30 years. We’re standing in line waiting for the best roller coaster. There was a long wait and it was really hot.
We get to the very front and saw what had been holding us up: the fast pass lane. As I stood there watching the fast pass people, I began to think, what must their lives be like? Surely they don’t have the troubles the rest of us have. I could sense a growing discontentment inside of me. The reality was, it had been a great day. I had gotten some fudge. I was in this beautiful park with my family. But a switch was flipped in my heart where I felt unhappy after comparing myself to others.
The author Arthur Brooks said, “Envy, in short, is the happiness killer.” In other words, if we could overcome the need to compare ourselves to other people, we’d be a lot happier in life. Easier said than done. How do we do that and learn to be content with the lives that God has given us?
In this first episode in a two-part series on jealousy and envy, we’ll look at what it is and get to the heart of why we struggle with it. In the next episode, we’ll focus on how to kill jealousy and envy in our life. If these sins go unchecked in our souls, they will destroy us. Because ultimately our struggle with jealousy is about our relationship with God.
The Spiritual Cost of Envy
Envy, jealousy, and coveting are addressed many times in the Bible. For example, in Romans 7, the Apostle Paul talks about how recognizing envy in his heart led him to understand that he was a sinner who needed a savior. When he looked at the list of the Ten Commandments he thought he was doing really well. But then he came to Do not covet. He was struck in his heart at how often he violates that law of God.
James, speaking about how envy can destroy our relationships with other people, says in chapter 4 verses 1-3, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something, but you don’t get it. So you kill and covet because you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and you fight. And you do not have because you do not ask God. And when you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your own pleasures.”
One of the best examples of this is that of King Saul and David. David had gone out and fought on behalf of his nation and killed Goliath. He won a victory for his people. In some sense, David is a Christ-figure in that story. Christ fights a victory for us and wins a battle for us against sin. We benefit from the blessings of what Christ has done for us on the cross and in his resurrection. But Saul didn’t see it that way!
After David defeats Goliath, it says in Samuel 18: 6-9, “Then the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul, with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with tambourines and lutes. And they danced and they sang, Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands! And Saul thought, ‘They have credited David with tens of thousands, but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?’ And from that time on, Saul kept a jealous eye on David.”
Saul’s jealousy and envy of David actually drives Saul insane. His jealousy leads him to anger and then to even try to commit murder. He tries to kill David by throwing spears because he was so jealous of David. His jealousy led him to the dark side. He ends up killing himself as a result. It’s a really sad story.
We can all see a little bit of King Saul in ourselves. Envy is the thing in all of us that says, Look at this other person’s success. Look at their beauty. Look at their accomplishments. Look at their happiness. That should be mine! On the outside, we may seem happy for them. But deep down, we resent them because we think we deserve what they have, and that God is withholding something good from our lives. That’s a really dangerous place to be spiritually.
Why Envy Makes Us Miserable
Why are envy and jealousy so bad for us? Peter Kreeft, a Catholic theologian, makes three excellent points about envy. First, he says that envy, more than any other sin, is the one you don’t want to admit is true of you. I agree with this. In all my years as a pastor, I’ve never had somebody come up to me and say, I’m just really struggling with jealousy or envy of another person.
Secondly, Kreeft points out that envy sucks all the joy out of life. It keeps us from enjoying and being grateful for the things God has given us in life. We become unhappy with our house and our spouse and our kids and how we look and what we have.
Third, Kreeft says that envy is the only sin that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction. We are always fixated on the half-empty glass. Our lives are finite, never fully filled, but never fully empty. We could be grateful for the half-filled glass but instead we choose to envy those whose glass seems more full.
Envy kills gratitude because it’s ultimately telling God, You haven’t been good. You haven’t been faithful to me. This means it violates the two greatest commandments: it violates the first commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind; and it violates the second commandment, to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Remember in 1 Corinthians 13:4, Paul tells us that love doesn’t envy. This means that envy is the enemy of love. In Romans 12:15, we’re told to “Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” But an envious or a jealous person weeps when other people are rejoicing. And they rejoice when other people are weeping. That’s the exact opposite of love.
The Consequences of Choosing Envy
Let me give you a couple of examples. You may want to be married. And then a friend gets engaged or gets married. On the outside, you act like you’re happy for them. But on the inside, you can’t truly rejoice with them. You spend the whole time focusing on what they have that you don’t have. That’s the plot line of countless movies!
Or you want to be promoted in your company. And someone else has been promoted instead. You can’t rejoice with them in that. Why? Because you think you deserve it as much as they do. You think to yourself, Why am I down here and they’re up there?
Do you see how self-absorbed envy is? With this mindset, everything that happens to others is always about you. You’re always seeing it through the lens of your jealousy or envy of other people.
Do you see how self-absorbed envy is? With this mindset, everything that happens to others is always about you. You’re always seeing it through the lens of your jealousy or envy of other people.
Why is politics so volatile today? Not just because there’s disagreement or a difference in ideas. In politics, someone gets to the top, they get power and money, and then everyone else wants to bring them down. Why? Because people envy people who have power and money. The ugly truth is that we even envy people who get something in life that we already have, but we feel like they didn’t deserve it. As a result, we feel angry and bitter.
Never underestimate the power of envy and jealousy in your life. Minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards, in his famous sermon on envy, points out that Adam and Eve had everything that they needed in the Garden of Eden: paradise, eternal life, beauty, a relationship with God, no disease, no hunger. The only thing they were commanded was to not touch the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the one thing they were told not to do made them feel jealous and left out, and all hell broke loose on earth as a result. Envy turned the garden of Eden into the sinful, fallen world we live in today.
Envy Reveals Our Idols
Let me close our session here by mentioning one thing that you can be thinking about until the next episode. I’d like you to think about the fact that envy reveals things our lives that have become more important to us than God. If you follow your envies and jealousies, you will find out what you worship.
We don’t envy everyone and everything. We only envy people who are successful in their careers, are beautiful, or who have money or fame. We envy people who have what we want. In that way, envy shows what it is we really worship as our gods.
The first step to battling the roots of envy and jealousy is to recognize that when we build our lives on other things than God, we are building on shifting sand. Those things aren’t going to last. Looks and health are going to fade. You can’t take your money and possessions with you. Only the things of God will last, which is why those things should be the focus of our love and attention.
Before the next episode, do some heart examination and think about what makes you envious and jealous. What idol is driving your heart? Where are you putting your trust and your significance? Maybe your discontentment and bitterness and depression is caused by envy and jealousy. In the next episode, I’m going to take a look at how to kill envy in our lives so it doesn’t kill us.