Sunday 02 • 24 • 19

The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. — Genesis 4:1-10

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in prayer? Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. You are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. We pray these things in the strong name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

The Seven Deadly Sins

The seven deadly sins. This has been the stuff of movies for years. There was a movie—maybe you remember from the nineties starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman called Seven—that went through each of the seven deadly sins in very grizzly fashion. There was an anime movie about the seven deadly sins. There's a PS4 game about the seven deadly sins. There have been numerous series of paintings and fine art in museums all around the world on the seven deadly sins. I even found a Spotify playlist this past week. If you want to find a link to that, message me and I'll help you.

We're going to take up the seven deadly sins between now and Easter, but to be transparent, the seven deadly sins is not a list that you will find in a passage in scripture. If you try to look this up in a Bible encyclopedia or concordance, it's just not there. This doesn't come from the Bible but from church history. Over centuries, this list has been compiled as a discipleship curriculum for the church.

The first version of this came from a desert father, a monk named Evagrius of Pontus, and he talked about the eight deadly thoughts—these thoughts that plagued the discipleship of young monks and he called them demons. They were the things that plagued young disciples and were really hard for them to overcome. Over the centuries, this list has been compiled and refined by people like Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas and Pope Gregory the Great.

So why should we consider these? I mean, they're not listed somewhere in the Bible. Well, the church throughout the centuries has identified these not as the most destructive sins in their impact. You don't have genocide on this list. You don't have murder. There are a lot of things you could think of that are probably more destructive sins, but they've defined them as the most deadly for this reason: they have the deepest roots in the human heart. They go deep, and they're behind a lot of other actions and attitudes and behaviors.

Let me give you an image of it this way. Think of sledding. We haven't had much snow this winter, so use your imagination. You remember how sledding works. The first couple runs down the hill are never the best ones. The first couple runs down the hill are actually kind of slow because you're cutting a new run. You're cutting a new pathway. And after you go down that same run over and over, it gets slicker and slicker, and you can go faster and further down the hill on that run. In many ways, virtues and vices work the same way. The first run down the hill isn't that fast or that easy, but over time, repetition builds a groove such that you don't even have to steer after a while, and it's hard to get out of the groove.

Virtues are excellencies of character—habits or dispositions of character that help us live well. Virtues and vices are gradually internalized patterns of living. The seven deadly sins are simply a list of the most common sledding runs of the human heart—things like sloth, and wrath, and gluttony, and lust, and greed, and vainglory, and for today, envy.

Cultivating virtues and trying to break the sledding run requires effort. I love the way that Dallas Willard writes this. He says:

We are saved by grace alone, of course, and not because we deserve it. That's the basis for God's acceptance of us, but grace doesn't mean sufficient strength is immediately infused into your being at the moment of need.

He gives an example of a baseball player. A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than a Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without appropriate exercise in godly living. It takes practice.

It takes going down a different run. Now why are we studying these now? Well, for two reasons. Why would we look at this list now? One is that during the time leading up to Easter—now, it's not quite Lent yet, but the church season of Lent—it's been the practice of the church to meditate on the cross and why we need it. It's been a time for the church to say, let's take a time out and look inward and remember why we needed this. Why did we need the nails? Why did we need the crown of thorns?

But the second reason is this: we've just finished a series on gender, and I think it's really important for us as a church to not just highlight a special group of people who have experienced sin or the effects of sin in their lives, but all of us in different ways. All of us come in the same way needing the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and his healing and restoration in so many different places in our lives. So it's really important for us to say, you know, scripture is an equal opportunity offender. I mean, there's just none of us who could come away and go like, "Yep, I don't really need this." No. We all need this. And so this is why we're doing this.

So today, we're doing envy. We're going to look at envy, and I want to look at Genesis chapter four as a case study in envy. If you take notes, here are my points for this morning. First is the sin of envy. Second is the mechanics of envy, and the third is killing envy. So let's look at this together.

The Sin of Envy

Now, if you were paying attention as we read, or if you pick up your bulletin right now, look at the passage. You'll notice envy doesn't appear as a word in this passage. It never says envy is what Genesis four is all about, but it's a great picture for us of sinful envy.

Let's remember what the background of this passage is. This passage takes place right after the fall and the curse, and we've studied this over the last few weeks. This is like what comes right after the first family—Adam and Eve and their two boys, Cain and Abel. What we find in the story is that as these boys grow, they begin to excel in different areas of farming. Cain becomes proficient in agriculture and presents to God an offering of his farming to the Lord—something from the field. Abel becomes proficient in animal husbandry and raising sheep and offers a sheep to the Lord as an offering. And it says here that God had regard for Abel's offering over Cain's.

Now, the passage doesn't tell us why. There's been a lot of speculation about this—like, maybe it's because Abel offered sheep, and later in the tabernacle and temple period, sheep were an offering for sin. Maybe that's why. But that's just guesswork. I think what's more helpful is in First John chapter three, over in the New Testament. It refers back to the story, and it says here:

Cain's own deeds were evil, and his brother's were righteous. — 1 John 3

See, what's in that passage is that God's preference for Abel's offering over that of Cain had nothing to do with what was being offered, but what happened on the inside. What was in the heart? The heart of the offerer. That's what that person was motivated by.

So something about this preferring of Abel's offering over Cain did something in Cain. Something began to grow in his heart, and it wasn't just a problem. It's not just a conflict. It's not just an issue for our relationships. It's—as verse seven says—it's sin. Sinful envy.

Now, a couple of observations for you about envy. First is this: of all of the seven deadly sins, this is the only one that's never any fun. Right? Sloth—fun. Gluttony—fun. Lust can be fun. Anger could be really fun, right? Like, all those can be fun, but nobody's like, "I love envy." Envy is miserable.

We can relate to this. You know, like, you're eating your bowl of ramen, scrolling through Facebook, and looking at pictures of your friends eating at farm-to-fork restaurants in exotic locations. Or hypothetically, you go to the gym and you're surrounded by lots of very fit people and you have a dad bod—hypothetically, right? Cain didn't enjoy this. We know what that's like. Envy is not ever enjoyable. It says his face was fallen. He was angry. He was frustrated. Envy is an emotion even our smallest kids know. They know what that feels like.

But even though we know what it feels like, I want to ask this question: do we really know what it is? In our English language, we use envy as a synonym for several other words that don't mean exactly the same thing. So let me contrast envy with greed, jealousy, and covetousness. Well, think about this: similar to each of these, but it's not the same thing. Envy is not equal—math sign, right?—covetousness.

Both involve wanting something the other person has, but that we lack. Yet this is the difference. Envy is different from covetousness in this way. Covetousness says, I want one like that. I want one like she has. Envy says, I want the one that she has instead of her. See, envy wants to own it, and not just one of the same, but the very one.

Envy is different from greed. Greed involves intense desire to acquire something. Envy is consumed with the distribution of advantages. It's like if all of us can't have it, none of us should have it. Equal suffering for everyone.

Douglas Coupland, in his book Shampoo Planet, one of his characters says this. I like this. He says, "I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof overnight because then we'd all be back in the same boat. Life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be horrible? The worst? I mean, if we're all down on Earth and we're wearing rags and we're raising pigs in former Baskin Robbins franchises, and I look up in the sky and I see a jet airplane, and I know there's just one person—one person inside there who has it better than me—I'd go berserk."

Right? I go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the dark ages or no one does. See, envy wants, if I'm going to suffer, I want everybody to suffer.

And envy is also not equal to jealousy. Jealousy is about loving something or someone and being afraid of losing it. This is why we read in Deuteronomy that God is a jealous God. He has these feelings of possessiveness, of love over his people. And it's not the same thing as envy.

So if envy is not those things, what is it? Envy, for our purposes, I want to highlight this. Envy as we see in Genesis 4 is comparative and it's exclusive. There are winners and losers. It's not, I want one of those—that's covetousness. It's not, I'm afraid I can lose this thing or person that I love—that's jealousy. Or I must have the precious—that's greed. It's comparative and exclusive.

Notice Genesis 4. Cain is angry because his sacrifice compared to Abel's. There's a winner and there's gotta be a loser. Francis Bacon said it this way: "Envy is ever joined to the comparing of a man's self. Where there's no comparison, there's no envy."

Envy wants to excel. Envy looks at the world and says there's a hierarchy, and there's somebody who's higher than me and I want to be higher than them. There's always a chart. There's always a ranking. There's always a who's up here and who's down here.

Envy is comparative and it's also a zero sum game. See, one of the other things about comparison is that we don't compare ourselves usually to someone who's radically above us in skills, abilities, or gifting. We compare ourselves to people who are on the same level. This is why in this passage, Cain's not comparing himself to Adam. It's not like, hey, me and dad. It's like me and my brother. We're about the same level. We compare ourselves to people who are sort of on our same level and have the same sort of gifts and abilities but are just a little bit ahead of us.

I don't compare myself—this is the pastor's sin at General Assembly every year. I go sometimes to General Assembly with the other pastors in our denomination. And it's funny. I don't compare myself to Tim Keller or JD Greer or John Piper. But this is what happens at GA. You meet other people and you're like sniffing them out. How big is your church? My youth ministry—I think my youth ministry is bigger than your youth ministry. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Like, none of us are like killing it, but we're all just like, I just want to be a little better. Like, I went to seminary with him and I want to know that I'm just a little ahead. Right?

See, envy's view of the world is essentially antagonistic. Me versus you. My good or your good, but never both at the same time. So this is the stuff of our movies. Right? This is Scar in The Lion King. This is Commodus in Gladiator. This is Obadiah Stane in Iron Man. It's, I want to undermine the person who's at my level. I want to be ahead.

Frederick Buechner says it this way: "Envy is the consuming desire to have everyone be as unsuccessful as you are." It's really helpful. I agree.

Do you see this? Envy is a love problem. It's not just I want one of those, but I don't want you to have it. That's the desire. This is why, after the murder, when God comes and seeks out Cain, Cain indicts himself with a question. What's his question?

Am I my brother's keeper?

And of course, the answer is yes. Yeah. You are. I mean, that's the question. But he wants to answer that no, I'm not. Right? Like, for Cain, this is a love problem, and it's a serious one.

Envy is wanting someone else's life, and instead of rejoicing with the good they have, you're weeping at the bad, weeping at the good that you don't have. See how warped that is? Jesus told us to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We weep with those who rejoice, and we weep at our own lack of their rejoicing. It's a love problem. It's worse than a lack of love. It's resentment that they have it and we don't. It's begrudging a person their life. It's Cain begrudging Abel, God's preference, and God's delight in his sacrifice.

If you don't believe you're envious, then keep this in mind. What happens when people above you stumble—people in your office, people in your class, first chair in your band? When you watch those people who are normally crushing it, you watch them stumble and you just sort of laugh a little bit, that's envy. German has a word for this: Schadenfreude. It's from the German Schaden, which means damage, and Freude, which means joy. Douglas Copeland, in his book Generation X, coined the term celebrity Schadenfreude, where you enjoy the sufferings of celebrities. You love it when they crash.

That's why Dorothy Sayers says, envy is a great leveler. It can never pull you up, but it will always pull them down. At its best, envy is a climber and a snob. At its worst, it's a destroyer. Rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will seek to have us all be miserable together.

Here are some of the ways envy shows itself: feeling offended at the talents or successes or good fortunes of others, selfish or unnecessary rivalry and competition, pleasure at others' difficulties or distress, ill will, backbiting, slander—saying something bad even if it's true out in the open—gossip, fostering antagonism against another person, teasing or bullying, ridicule of persons or institutions, mocking. Have I got you yet? Should I stop?

How Envy Works

If that's what it is, how does it work? It's really important for us to understand how envy works. And again, this passage is helpful. It shows us the mechanics because we don't think envy is a big deal, and we so much need this story.

First, what we see here in verse seven: Sin is crouching at the door. This is one of the things that God tells Cain about his envy. Envy crouches. Think about that picture of crouching. That is an animal word. If you have cats, you've seen crouching. Crouching is getting low, ready to pounce. It's making yourself smaller and hiding and making yourself low in order to attack. And this is how sinful envy works. It looks smaller than it is. It looks like it's no big deal. It's easy to rationalize.

This is why Joseph Epstein writes that more than any of the other deadly sins, this is the sin that you don't want to believe is true about yourself. It's shameful. He says most of us could still sleep peaceably at night if accused of lust or pride or greed, but not envy. The stigma of envy is that it's petty. So if you're discovered, if your envious heart is revealed, it's humiliating. We don't want to believe it's true about ourselves. That's because it's crouching. It doesn't look dangerous.

I want you to think about some of your biggest problems right now, or your problem relationships. Could it be possible that at the bottom of some of those is envy? The person at work who just bugs you, the family member who just gets under your skin—could it be? Could it be you? Could it be envy? Do you enjoy seeing something wrong with that other person? Do you like to meditate on their faults or remember a time when they fell?

It's one thing when we see someone who's a celebrity or who's really bad or really powerful and we have that schadenfreude response. But we do this even with the people we like the most, with our friends, people that we really like. But we're like, just a little thing—bad things happen. I'm the only bad person who sometimes enjoys that? Who's like, wow, you know, it makes me feel a little better. Right? Because this is what envy is. It rejoices when others weep. It sours your life.

Your biggest sins will always look smaller to you than anybody else's sins. They crouch. They look small. One pastor says this: lust is adultery in a little ball. Envy is murder in a little tiny ball. It looks small. Sinful envy says, "I'll just stay in the corner. Don't worry about me. I'm not going to hurt you." Right?

When you detect some part of yourself that's wounded or lonely or insecure or afraid, envy turns your attention outward instead of inward to look at it. It says, "You know what? Look. You know what?"

If you only had a marriage like they do, you'd be great. If you only had—she makes more money than you do, and if you had that, you'd be great. It's really not in here. It's really out there. If you only had, envy crouches.

Envy Has Immense Power

Second, envy has immense power. Again, look at verse seven. Its desire, sinful envy—its desire is for you. Literally, it means its desire is against you. It's against you. Envy has a power. It's not done with you even if you're done with it. Envy takes on a life of its own that will chew and chew and chew like termites. It doesn't just—you don't just get rid of it.

Think about the sledding run. So the first time you feel envy toward that person, it may feel a little like you may be aware of it. You may be like, this isn't—I don't like this. It's slow. You go downhill, you're aware of it, but over time that becomes a sledding run that is so easy to go down, and it's hard. You feel like it's almost impossible to get out of.

When you see that person—when you experience that person in your band or in your math class or in your office or in your circle of friends—you know, I can't get out of this. It has an addictive power to it.

Now, let me just say this: not all addictions are sin, but all sins have an addictive quality to them. And it's like going down the same chute, the same run over and over again. It becomes a habit.

Envy Rearranges the Hierarchy

Third, the heart of envy rearranges the hierarchy. Now, notice what happens here in verse seven and eight. God speaks to Cain before the murder, and God cautions him.

He said, "Why are you so angry? Why is your face falling? If you do well, will you not be accepted? If you do not do well, sin is crouching at your door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it." — Genesis 4:6-7

Cain doesn't respond. Cain doesn't actually say anything. Instead, verse eight, he turns and talks to Abel. I think that's very fascinating.

See, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are some of the most dense writing in all of the Old Testament. There are no extra words. So what's fascinating is we have no idea what Cain says to Abel. What's important and highlighted by the writer here is that he doesn't talk to God. He talks to his brother.

What is he doing? He's rearranged the universe. God has not delivered. God was supposed to be his servant and give him what he wanted, and God hasn't delivered on that for him. So he has nothing to hear from God—don't want to hear what you have to say. He's rearranged the universe internally. He's rearranged the hierarchy. He has no God that he wants to hear from. And envy does this to us. God is absent. He's not on the radar. God has not delivered on my life, and so He is just sort of out of the picture in our relationships with one another.

The Progression of Envy

Fourth, there's a progression. Notice the progression here. Verse five, Cain's angry. Verses six and seven, God confronts Cain. Cain doesn't respond. Verse eight, he speaks to his brother. Again, we don't know what about. Then one day, he rises up in the field and kills his brother.

Now, this didn't happen the first morning. It didn't start out right after the offering. He doesn't just go in and kill him right then. There's a progression internally in his heart. There's something that happens over time.

Envy starts off in your heart as a whisper. It's very quiet. It's very subtle. And it grows. It takes on a life of its own. It starts off as, "I think I deserve better than this." Yeah, I do deserve better than this. It begins just very innocent, but then it turns into a deadly sin.

And obviously, like, can say, yeah, it's a deadly sin to Abel. No, that's not what I'm talking about. Yes, it's deadly to Abel, but it's deadly to Cain. It's deadly to Cain. What started off as a little thing has grown into a huge thing.

There's an old phrase. Have you heard this? An old phrase generations before that people used to describe envy. What did they say? It's a green-eyed monster. I have no idea why green-eyed, but monster is really helpful. There's something about envy—even though it starts off small with a whisper—it becomes a power. It becomes a monster. It takes over. It's deadly.

Envy Makes Your World Smaller

Finally, sixth, envy makes your world smaller and smaller. I mean, that's literally true for Cain. There were four people. Now there are three people. His universe has shrunk in the people who are part of it. Four people have become three.

The same is true of us. This is what happens internally in our hearts with envy. Imagine an elderly person who over time doesn't want to go out as much. It starts off with snow—hey, it's snowing out, I'm just gonna stay home today. It's just easier to stay in.

I don't want to risk it. And then it's raining out. I just don't want to get the car out. I don't want to deal with that. What happens with many folks who are elderly is their world begins to shrink. There are less people in it because they're not going out as much. They don't go out, so they're not exposed to other people. Their world begins to get smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer people. And this is the same thing that envy does. It limits. It shrinks your world. You're turning inside and you don't want to go out to engage other people, to love other people, to care about other people. You're only thinking of yourself. Over time, your interior world of envy is beginning to shrink.

So should we close in prayer right now? I mean, are you really encouraged at this point in the sermon? No. This is hard. But look, there's good news and hope in this passage. Can I show you this? Because I think we need to look to Christ every time we see our sin. I want to show you this in this passage. This is a tragic story, and yet there's tremendous hope for enviers like me, and like others of you in this room.

The Hope of Mastery Over Sin

Look at verse seven. What does God tell Cain about his sinful envy? He says, you must rule over it. You must rule it. There's hope for the defeat of sin. There's hope that this doesn't have to destroy you, that it doesn't have to take over. It can be contained. It can be mastered. It can be ruled.

And look at how this happens. When God appeals to Cain after the murder, he comes to Cain and asks him a question. What's the question? "Where's your brother? Where's Abel?"

I love this. When God asks questions in Scripture, it's not because God doesn't know the answer to those questions. Like, where's Abel? He was just here a second ago. What happened to that guy? No. God knows exactly what's going on here. God does this over and over in Scripture. Adam and Eve sin in the garden. God says, "Where are you?" He's not asking that because he doesn't know. He's asking them to respond. When God comes to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be so angry?" God's asking him—not because he doesn't know, but because he wants him to respond.

So when God comes and says, "Where's your brother?" what is God saying to him? Look, Cain, your brother wasn't your enemy. What's inside of you, that's your enemy. Your sinful envy is your enemy. This is true for you as well.

You're not miserable because of what is happening to you right now. You're miserable because of what's inside of you. Your response to it. Your envy. You're not a victim. In many cases, you're the cause of your own misery. And there's hope for you that you could take responsibility for that.

God says to us, "Why are you cast down and angry?" Yes, some bad things have happened to you. But you're miserable because of your response to what's happened in other people's lives and what's not happened in yours—your own envy. All the other things that flow from envy—like self-pity and bitterness and anger and refusal to forgive and pride and hurt feelings and insisting that certain things will fix it for you—none of those bring resolution. None of those things will make it better. Even getting the thing that you want won't make it better. The only thing that will make it better is repentance.

The Answer: Blood and Brotherhood

When God comes to Cain and says, "Where's your brother Abel?" he's inviting him to repentance. He's inviting him to come back. I want to show you the hopeful answer of repentance to envy. It's two things, very simple. You follow the blood and you own your brother. You follow the blood, and you own your brother.

God takes Cain to a pool of blood. He says, "Abel's blood is crying out to me. It's crying out to me from the ground." It's a statement of the ultimate value of every life. Every human life—the sanctity of every human life—it's precious to God. God is personally offended by the taking of a life. He's personally involved in that. And Abel's blood cries out to God for justice, because God is the just one. It cries out for some response. God can't just say, "Don't worry, Cain. We'll let this go. I'll make another brother. Just replace that model. This will be fine." There has to be some payment. There has to be some justice.

God also takes us in our envy. He can take us to a pool of blood—to the pool of blood, not Abel's blood. Yes, Abel in Genesis four was righteous when he offered the gift, when he offered the sacrifice. But there's a better Abel. There's a greater Abel who didn't just offer a better sacrifice, but became a sacrifice.

There's a better Abel who wasn't righteous one time in giving a gift to the Lord, but was righteous every time and all the time for you. And see, this is why God can be both just and justifier of the ungodly. God says every sin requires payment. There must be a pool of blood. And when we look at envy and think, "Hey, this is not that big deal because it's crouching," we don't see how damaging and destructive it is. All of our envy is murderous. All of it requires the shedding of blood. God cannot just pretend, "Don't worry about it this time. Not a big deal." If he did, he wouldn't be just. But he receives a better sacrifice than any of our best offerings. He receives in exchange for our envy the blood of his own son at the cross, Jesus Christ the righteous.

And his blood—Jesus' blood—therefore cries out on behalf of enviers. But it doesn't cry out like Abel's blood for the condemnation of a sinner. It doesn't cry out for justice to be paid. It cries out: justice has been paid. It's satisfied for you. And so Jesus' blood cries out for you and me, fellow enviers, and it cries out not for our condemnation but for our justification, not for God to zap us but for God to receive us because we've been forgiven through Jesus' blood.

Do you have ownership of how much your envy caused the cross? But look, we can't stop there. A lot of Christians stop there. We're like, "Okay, I've been forgiven." But the problem is there still runs down that sledding hill, and it's very easy for us to do that. Some Christians will say, "Okay, well, I'm going to stop envying. I'm just going to stop it right now. Never gonna do that again." The problem with that is that nature and the human heart abhor a vacuum. If there's a vacuum, something's going to go in there really fast. The same thing is true of our hearts. If we say "I'm gonna stop envy," we have to replace it with something else.

The Bible talks about this all the time in the dynamics in the New Testament letters where it talks about putting off patterns that are in keeping with our sinful nature and putting on what's in keeping with our nature in Christ. Putting off the old, putting on the new, putting off what is dead and lifeless, the sinful man, putting on what's in keeping with Christ.

Owning Your Brother

So if you can't just stop with the blood, you also have to take this other step: owning your brother. After you go to the blood, this is the question you have to ask again. Cain's question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" And what is the obvious answer? Yes. You are. Envy makes your brother into your enemy. So repenting means both looking to the blood and then owning your brother as his keeper, as her keeper.

Now that's a weird word for us. That word in Hebrew is shamar, which means to guard or to keep or to protect, to tend, to watch over, to save a life. It's actually used a little before this in Genesis chapter two verse 15, where God put the man in the garden for the purpose of keeping the garden, of cultivating it and tending it and guarding it.

Genesis 2:15

And God says, "This is your calling in the lives of your brothers and sisters. God's calling you to tend that person like you do a garden."

If envy is essentially a love problem—not being your brother's keeper—then the antidote to that is love. Now let me just say this real quickly. This isn't in our passage, but this is for free: envy is usually a secret sin. It doesn't help to go and confess that to someone you're envying. They don't know that. It's like the guys in my youth group when I was a youth pastor going to confess to the girls in the youth group they were lusting after. No. Bad. That just gives her a burden to carry. The same thing is true with envy. It's not helpful to go to someone you're envying and say, "I've really envied you." They're like, "I didn't know that and I feel really yucky now." Rather, this is work you do internally in you.

If you're putting on owning, tending, caring for your sister or brother—if envy has shrunk your world down till it's too small—putting on owning your brother or sister, loving them means to push that out. It means to make your world big again. To notice, to fixate on, to think about, to meditate on, to pray for the blessing of those people around you. That person in your office, that person in your class, that person in your RUF group, that person who just bugs you in your family. It's praying for and meditating on their blessing. And I've noticed this over years.

It is almost impossible to hate and envy a person for whom you're praying over and over for their blessing. It's like erosion on the beach—it does this amazing work of taking away the parts of you that just want to hold on to anger, a sinful envy of another person.

So I'm going to call you this morning to respond. You're not here in this sermon to take notes so you're an expert on envy and can hand this to that person in your life who you know has an envy problem. You're going to like, "Hey, read this, take these notes, you have a real problem, not me." Right? No. This is for us to repent, to come to the cross, and to not leave this place today the same. To not leave this place today without—just like, hey, forgiveness is great—but actually having a plan. If you don't have a plan to go love and own and shamar your brother, your sister, then it's just creating a vacuum. Something else is going to come right back in.

A Personal Story About Envy

I want to finish with this story, and this is a personal story. I'm not going to do this every week, but I want to tell you a story about myself and my struggle with envy—one of my struggles with envy.

Back in 2002, I was called to plant a church with another guy, who's a friend of mine, and we had been youth pastors at sister churches together. Over time, this vision for planting a church in Downtown Philadelphia grew out of our shared experience in youth ministry. We were sent out by these congregations, moved in, and began the work of planting this church.

But over the first two years of that church plant, I really struggled. The first two years just seemed to demonstrate over and over and highlight all of my friend's gifts and strengths and abilities, and highlight all my weaknesses and struggles.

A couple of examples: he had, and still is, a tremendous evangelist and can really connect with all kinds of people and talk about Jesus in ways that are winsome. And I would try to do the same thing and it just never went anywhere. He's a natural speaker, has funny and very great illustrations and is very engaging. And I look back over my sermons for the first two years of that church, I'm like, what was I talking about? I just hadn't found my voice yet. People would ask if he could preach more than me.

And my friend is like a pastor version of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. I mean, he's just funny and cool, and I was and am sort of not. And I admired him. I liked him. I wanted to be around him. He's my friend. But even though I didn't see it at the time, envy had come to take hold in my heart. And it was crouching. It was small. I didn't see it.

Fast forward a couple of years: we had to discipline this other pastor and set him out for ministry for nine months. I'm not going to tell his story, but I'm going to tell mine. That was hard on our baby church, but that was much harder on our friendship and our relationship because during that time, all the envy which had been crouching and been small in my heart began to come out.

Yes, there were real valid concerns for which we disciplined him, but in me, over that time, I began to build a case in my head. And I was judge and jury. Envy had taken root and what started off as a little whisper in my heart became something much larger. I was like, I'm kind of done working together. I don't want him to come back.

And when it came time to restore him, I had to face the monster that had become. I was not predisposed to do that. A friend asked me—another pastor—"Jeff, is there a pathway back for him? I mean, shouldn't there be a pathway back for him?" And it was a hard confrontation to me because I did not want to be my brother's keeper. I didn't want to.

I had to confront my envy. We had a reconciliation process which involved more than just a meeting. It involved me starting to pray for his good and trying to pray for longing in my heart for his blessing and his good, to wish for his restoration, to meditate on what would be the best way to bring him back into the church and ministry. And it was hard. And it meant not just confronting my envy, but proactively asking, how can I be my brother's keeper?

I don't tell you that story because I'm like, "Wait, look at me. Great pastor, did the right thing." It's a sad story. He and I are still friends today. He is in ministry. He's a gifted pastor. I love him. But I almost destroyed him or destroyed the opportunity for him to come back. And envy was very dangerous for me.

And I just want to invite you fellow sinners, I mean fellow enviers, I think there are a couple besides me in this room maybe, to repentance, to recognize like, this is dangerous. It doesn't look like it but it's very dangerous and I want to invite you to two things this morning. I want to invite you to the blood because we need the blood. And I wanna invite you to own your brother, own your sister.

I'm gonna give you a minute of silence because I don't want you to leave here with just sort of moving on to your day. Would you talk to God in the quietness of this moment before we go to the table together?