Hands up who has NEVER experienced a feeling of jealousy?
:) It’s a pretty common human emotion isn’t it?
I was reading through Proverbs this morning and came across this verse:
Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy? Proverbs 27:4
Jealousy is a very distructive emotion. Destructive for ourselves and destructive for our relationships.
I remember in High School a horrible incident with my best friend. To this day I still don’t understand her thinking. I happened to get a higher mark than her on a Science test. She was quite intelligent and studied hard and for the most part would get higher grades than me. Had I known that that one grade on a test was going to destroy what was to me a very important friendship, I might have “dumbed down” on the test.
She chose to end our friendship there and then with the reasoning “I can handle it if you get all the guys but not if you beat me in tests as well”. What? For a start, I had no idea where she got the notion that I “got all the guys”.
To say I was devastated is probably not descriptive enough. To this day, the pain of that experience is still very real. I was bewildered that something like that could destroy a friendship. I’d not once even tried to beat her on a test. I still don’t really “get it”.
I’ve seen the destructive force of jealousy in more recent friendships as well. I have a friend that lives not far from here and a while back we got into a very destructive pattern of actually *trying* to make one another jealous. It wasn’t deliberate but after many visits and trying to analyse why I always felt so ghastly whenever we visited them, I realised what was happening.
I was absolutely as guilty as she was in this exchange. And it was wrong!!! For a while I had to work hard to avoid certain conversations until I could find the peace of contentment in my own heart. Now we don’t seem to get entangled in that trap. But I shudder to think how that *might* have ended up.
Jealousy destroys our very souls. It eats away at us from the inside. While it is a human emotion, we need to stop it in it’s tracks. That’s easier said than done sometimes. Cultivating an attitude of gratitude and contentment is a constant task. One that Satan doesn’t want us to achieve. Therefore we’re having a constant battle against the forces of evil to ward off those feelings of jealousy and our own feelings of inadequacy.
Paul speaks about Contentment in his first letter to Timothy:
But godliness with contentment is great gain. 1 Timothy 6:6
How do we fight those jealousy demons? By focusing on God. By cultivating a thankful heart for all He has done and all He has given us. And by reminding ourselves that it’s not about who WE are. It’s about who GOD is.
I pray for each one that reads this, the blessing that contentment brings. Oh, and I pray it for me too because this is a struggle that we all face.
Dear Lord, Please help us all to fight the demons of jealousy and discontent. Help us to remember that possessions are simply a passing in the wind and not so important in the scheme of things. Help us to remember that who WE are has everything to do with YOU. You made us and love us just as we are. Bless each person that reads these words and touch their hearts today. Amen.