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To feel envy is to have a gnawing, aching pain eating away at our insides. It leaves us no peace and takes away all pleasure in the things we might otherwise have enjoyed.
Advertisers use envy to lure us into desiring something that we don’t yet have. It’s crazy if you think about it what envy will make us do.
A key reason for buying a 60-inch, 3D capable, ultra thin LED TV is that it will become an object of envy for your friends. Really there’s no way to justify a TV that big especially for some of the small family rooms I’ve seen them in. When a TV takes up the entire wall space of the wall its on it looks terrible.
TV aside all envy is a selfish emotion that no one desires, but the ability to inspire it in others definitely is.
How do you curb the envy emotion when it stirs inside of you?
Out of all the sins we will be covering over the next several weeks,
envy is different. It is different because it is the one sin, out of
the 7 deadly sins that has no pleasure in it whatsoever. From the first
hint of envy to the last part of it, envy is no fun at all. It is the
most dismal of habits. For the most part, just about all the other sins
can be enjoyed at least for a while. The most prudent of persons has to
admit the pleasure of lust or the adrenaline rush one gets when you lash
out in anger at someone. Even gluttony, taste good for a while. But
no-one chooses to spend their time secretly delighting in covetousness.
Henry Fairlie said this about envy; “It’s appetite never ceases, yet
it’s only satisfaction is endless self-torment.”
Envy is like a leach, once it latches on it is extremely hard to lose.
Envy is self-harming and self-abusing. We beat ourselves up over
objects that we don’t have. Even the sound of the word envy sounds evil
and depressing. Yet many devote hours, weeks, and even years of their
lives to it. It is a sin to which people rarely admit, but many
struggle with on a daily basis.
Whatever happened to the punch that the word sin once had? Just the very mention of the word “sin” in the 19th century and earlier struck fear in the hearts of most people. Now today the word “sin” has lost its fear. We live in a culture that has made the word almost playful. We see the media use the word “sinful” as something that is naughty, but nice. We find ourselves saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t really, but it will be fun, and I’m sure it won’t hurt anyone’. Somehow in our twisted minds we have incorporated the word sin, with the word heavenly – two words in my opinion that are polar opposites. People make statements like ‘it is heavenly sinful.’ Please tell me how something can be heavenly and sinful at the same time. Given the sheer negativity the word had in the past it should not be surprising that people want to take the sting out of the word and make it a little more user friendly.
I believe we should be more like our ancestors at how we view sin. Sin describes a pattern of life that is simply destructive. Sin destroys people’s happiness, friends, and families – there’s nothing heavenly in that. Sin is destructive. We need to see sin not just as breaking the rules, but rather as something that kills and devours everything in it’s path. Life would have been a little easier if God made the things that were good for us beautiful and the things that were bad for us ugly, unfortunately He did not. Augustine said it well when he talked about his youth when he was a thief, ” It was foul, and I loved it”. Sin has a seductive way about it for some strange and twisted reason; the devil really knows how to push our buttons.
So how do we begin thinking about sin? One traditional way that dates back several hundred years is to categorize it into types of sin. They all knew that there is no sin greater than the other, but they were also shrewd enough to realize they needed to know their enemy. So the idea of the ‘seven deadly sins’ was born as a way of remembering some of the chief ways in which this deadly pattern of behavior can manifested itself. Then by the end of the middle ages it became a normal way of organizing sin – a useful classification of misconduct.
History shows us that every generation has a way of making sin unique for them. Graham Tomlin in his book The Seven Deadly Sins And How To Overcome Them, states it well; “at a glance through the traditional list of the seven deadly sins raises an obvious issue for anyone with any sense of contemporary life and morals: these are not the ones we would identify as the chief causes of evil in our world. If anything, our culture tends to admire these qualities, not avoid them. Lust is a sign of a healthy sexual appetite, pride a perfectly valid pleasure in our own achievements, and greed an essential motor for the economy.” What Tomlin said is sad, but very true our world says that a lot of what is bad is really good for us and should be strived for in life. Even many Christians have bought into this way of thinking hook, line, and sinker.
As is stated earlier, these seven are by no means the only sins we need to worry about, nor are they more severe than any other sin. It is just that these sins seem to come up quite a bit more and the culture that we live in has told us that some of them we should strive for and as for the others they are not all that bad. Here are the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ in no particular order pride, anger, gluttony, lust, greed, envy, and sloth.
Now my aim for all this is not to package a neat little list of heavy sins that we need to avoid. For that would just be useless and a stupid approach of ‘keeping the rules’. Rather my aim is to have these ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ as a reminder for us to build a better quality of life that enables us to weed out bad habits and build up good ones. In other words living a life that is pleasing to our Lord.
