Who, me?#1. “Not yours to want.”

Soap operas thrive on envy and jealousy. They are indeed the stuff of drama.

But unlike soap operas, the lives, families, and businesses crushed under the sins of envy and jealousy, cannot be written into the following plotlines as if no real evil was intended.

The sin of wanting that which is “Not yours to want” is called coveting in the 10 Commandments. God did not put it in last place as if to be a soft-landing from an otherwise hard-hitting list of “Thou Shalt Nots!”

Instead, knowing man’s propensity to ignore the obvious when seeking to get-away-with-a-sin, God attached an easily recognisable shortlist:
“You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbour” (Exodus 20:17).

Pilate instantly saw through the Sanhedrin’s false religious indignation. He was being forced to judge a man arrested over hurt feelings; they were filled with petty jealousy over Jesus’ popularity (Matthew 27:18). However, those envious thoughts grew until they were violently enacted in real-life.

There is a myriad of ways to justify feelings of jealousy. The most common is to feel yourself above it. “Surely,” one reasons, “any comment I make about the advantages he has is only to highlight them as potently unfair to all.” Which begs the question, “How many churches have flung apart under that logic?”

Too many men begin their spiritual walks full of such petty jealousies. Initially, they are ignored in the hope that growth in Christ will eliminate them; it often doesn’t happen.

Instead, they gather around themselves others of similar mindset and undermined all that they cannot take.

God will judge the end of those stories, but in the meantime, we must see envy for what it is, and for what it will become if not stopped.

Some things are “Not yours to want.”

John Staiger