The Green-Eyed Monster
Diagnosing discontent: envy and coveting
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. - Iago (from Othello, not from Aladdin)
In 2015, I changed career paths and left professional ministry. That was the track I’d been on since graduating college: four years of grad school, internships, a residency, and a full-time ministry job had filled my twenties. So when I stepped out of ministry into a different career track, I started at the bottom. My new job paid less than my church job had.
That was when I began really struggling with envy.
Most of my friends were nearly a decade into professional tracks, with the salaries, vacation times, and positions to match. Many were double-income, where we had always been a single-income family (with three kids at the time). I, at nearly thirty, was an entry-level grunt.
Relative poverty is kind of part of the deal when you’re in ministry (in non-prosperity-gospel churches at least). But now that I had a “regular job” like everyone else, I suddenly found myself comparing my life to my friends’ lives in a new, ugly-blue-fluorescent light. When they described their vacation plans, I felt a little wounded. When I heard where they went on dates, it irked. I had the slimy, slithering feeling that their happiness was an affront to mine.
Joseph Epstein wrote, “Of all the seven deadly sins, only Envy is no fun at all.” Boy, is he right. Envy sours the soul. And it’s one of the chief causes of discontentment, which for the purposes of this project we’re calling the Foul Five.1 If we want to fight for contentment, one of the parasites we need to check our souls for is envy.
What is envy?
Envy is grieving the happiness of others. Instead of rejoicing at others’ good or even just accepting it, envy feels provoked or belittled over it. As Os Guinness puts it:
Envy enters when, seeing someone else’s happiness or success, we feel ourselves called into question. Then, out of the hurt of our wounded self-esteem, we seek to bring the other person down to our level by word or deed. They belittle us by their success, we feel; we should bring them down to their deserved level.2
In envy, I imagine that someone’s happiness was essentially stolen from me. Their gain is my loss. When I see them receiving a good or enjoying a blessing, I think things like:
You don’t deserve that, I do.
Why don’t I get to have that?
Why are you rubbing that in my face?
You’re just showing off.
Envy is the flipside of pride. CS Lewis describes pride as inherently comparative; it’s not about having something, but just about having more of it than someone else.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.3
We could say that pride is an ego inflated by comparison, and envy is an ego deflated by comparison. Either way, as Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
The evil of envy
Envy is miserable, and it’s miserable to be around. Proverbs 14:30 says that envy makes the bones rot. But it’s not just miserable: envy is evil. It’s a state, not just of foolishness, but of sin.
David has a whole psalm where he confesses his envy of people who seem successful despite being wicked. He tells God,
When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you. (Psalm 73:21-22)
Envy desensitizes us to God. It makes us so absorbed by the thing we lack or the people who have it that we lose focus on God. Instead of being captivated by his glory, we’re consumed by wanting. Instead of rationally, joyfully following his will, we have a slavish obsession with stuff. Coveting, which is envy’s bestie, is described as idolatry (Colossians 3:5) because it tries to put the existential weight of our meaning and value on a created thing instead of on the Creator. If we live in envy, we won’t hear or see God.
Envy also prevents us from loving others. Paul says starkly, “Love … does not envy or boast” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Love doesn’t play the comparison game, either toward pride or envy. It can’t, because love cheers when a beloved experiences good, and envy grieves. Love wants what’s best for another, and envy wants something better than the other. We can pretend to love those we envy, but we can’t really love them.
Dealing with envy
If we realize that we have envy in our hearts, how do we begin to deal with it?
When dealing with any sin, the first step is to confess it, both to God and to someone else. Bringing a sin into the light, without excusing or minimizing it, is a step toward seeing its power diminish. Acknowledge to God your covetousness or comparison, and apologize for giving a created thing the worship he alone deserves. Ask him for help in turning from it.
Beyond that, here are some specific strategies for dealing with envy and coveting:
Worship your way toward contentment in Christ. Envy is born out of worshipping a wrong thing; healing begins by worshipping the right one. Practice worshipping God. Meditate on his goodness. Memorize his Word. Sing songs about his glory, by yourself and with others. Like the apostle Paul recommends,
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)
Practicing worship will train our hearts toward feeling worshipful. Celebrating God’s goodness will lead you to seeing and feeling that goodness, to where your envy and coveting will diminish.
Confront your envy or coveting. Sin works best when we don’t stare at it directly or rationally. It’s like stage makeup: persuasive from a distance, but up close obviously fake and kind of alarming. Naming the object of your envy and comparing its empty promises to God’s real ones can help you see that it can’t offer the satisfaction it whispers that it can. Martin Luther, who was tempted to idolize “Law” (the false belief that we justify ourselves before God by how much we obey), wrote this mini-sermon confronting his idol:
O Law! You would climb up into the kingdom of my conscience, and there reign and condemn me for sin, and would take from me the joy of my heart which I have by faith in Christ, and drive me to desperation, that I might be without hope. … I will not allow you, so intolerable a tyrant and tormentor, to reign in my heart and conscience – for they are the seat and temple of Christ the Son of God, who is the king of righteousness and peace, and my most sweet savior and mediator. He shall keep my conscience joyful and quiet in the sound and pure doctrine of the gospel, through the knowledge of this passive and heavenly righteousness.4
Practice gratitude. Envy and coveting take our eyes off of the blessings God has given us. Practicing gratitude – deliberately naming the good things in our lives and thanking God for them – reminds us of how good he’s been to us. As often as possible, thank God for your present blessings and his promises of future ones, and you’ll find your soul more satisfied and less envious.
Give away the thing you crave. This will look different depending on the occasion for your envy or coveting, but choosing to let go of it will help you see that you don’t need it as much as you think. If it’s money, find ways to give to others. If it’s a relationship, spend more time investing in the good relationships you already have. If it’s status or position, “lower” yourself by serving others. Mortifying your desire in that way will help you see that you can find satisfaction without it.
Pray God’s blessings on others. Envy wishes others to suffer because we think we’re suffering. Coveting sees others as rivals for something we think we should have. But praying for others – praying that God would bless them, that God would shower their lives with good – is an act of love that has the power to shift our hearts toward them.
When it comes to contentment, the Foul Five are envy, bitterness/grumbling, despair, fretting/anxiety, and selfish ambition.
From The Call; quoted in Tim Challies, “The Cure for Envy,” https://www.challies.com/personal/the-cure-for-envy/
From Mere Christianity. Also quoted in the Challies piece.
Found at https://www.atlantawestside.org/preaching-the-gospel-to-yourself/