If you look at the Scripture and the virtues and vices that are figuring prominently in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, you will see that envy is a cardinal sin, and that God regards envy and jealousy and covetousness as extraordinarily destructive to human society and to human relationships. The Apostle Paul memorably describes love for us in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient and kind, as we learned about yesterday.
But Paul continues, love does not envy, and it's the destructive nature of envy that we'll be considering today. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Thanks for joining us. Today's message is one of 20 in R.C. Sproul's series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit, and this entire series can be yours when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to digital access to the series, we'll send you a newly released 90-day devotional from Ligonier Ministries titled, How Great Salvation.
Request both resources at renewingyourmind.org while there's still time. To help us cultivate a love that is defined by the Bible and not by the world, here's Dr. Sproul. As we continue with our study now of growing in the Christian life and developing a Christian character, we're going to continue our study of 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul gives us this marvelous exposition of the character traits of godly love. We've seen already that Paul puts a premium of importance on love, teaching that if we have all kinds of gifts and abilities and achievements but lack love, we are without profit and we are nothing. And in verse 4 of chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, he begins to describe for us what this love looks like, and we've already looked at the first part where he said that love suffers long and is kind.
Now that's a strange conjunction. Again, we notice that kindness is also one of the fruits of the Spirit that Paul lists in Galatians, but notice he couples longsuffering with kindness because they do belong together. It's one thing for us to suffer injury or the hostility of other people for a long time, the very passive act of suffering it, and we can suffer it while at the same time being hostile and seeking revenge and being harsh in our response to those people who are provoking that suffering. Well, that's not what the Bible means by long suffering.
Long suffering does not simply mean that we are called to endure suffering for a long period of time, but long suffering includes within it the virtue of a response to the cause of that suffering of kindness. Do you know people who are kind people? They're not rude.
They're not severe. They're not mean people. A kind person has a generous heart. They are caring.
They are concerned. They are sensitive and tender to other people. When I think back in my own life, I think of my father, who I looked to and did look to as a very strong individual. He was a type of a male leader. And in his strength, there was a certain aggressiveness and boldness to him. But the two things that stand out in my memory of my own father were that he was, first of all, the most generous person I ever knew. And he was kind. And I always thought, wow, how do you combine strength with kindness, power with gentleness? God does it.
And there's a certain sense in which the more powerful you are, the stronger you are, really the easier it is to be kind, because you're not going to be threatened and have to feel like you have to be retaliating against people, being mean to them or nasty to them or harsh to them. But in my own life, my earthly father demonstrated to me the kindness of God. My dad would rebuke me and my dad would admonish me. And I hated it when I came home from school and I was in trouble and my mother said, your father wants to have a session with you.
I mean, I dreaded those sessions because I'd have to go into my dad's office and close the door. And he would sit there and he'd say, well, son, we have to have a talk. And he would take me apart without ever raising his voice, without ever manifesting anger to me. And somehow after he took me apart, he was able very gently to put me back together again.
And I'd walk out of there walking on air feeling like, wow, I've got to do better the next time. And he inspired me in that way, but his manner was so kind. Now, I know there are lots of people in this world and lots of people who hear my voice right now who would say just the opposite of how they were treated by their parents with anything but kindness. But we love to be treated with kindness and a truly kind person is a rarity, I'm afraid. But kindness is linked with patience and long suffering together as a manifestation of love. Kindness is a corollary of love. Love is not unkind.
Love is not mean. Recently at one of our conferences after I had given this message, this woman came up to me and I could tell by the way she approached me that she was upset about something. And she came up to me and she said, I want to tell you something in love.
And I listened to her and she was not very kind. And I thought afterwards, how many times in my life I've had people preface remarks to me that were not kind by saying, I want to tell you something in love. It's almost like they knew they weren't going to be kind and that they were trying to excuse their harshness by pretending it was given in love. Now, there is criticism that is given in love and I don't mean to suggest that there isn't.
But those things that are said in love are said kindly or they're not said in love. And kindness is the opposite of meanness. And the last thing we want to be manifesting as Christians is meanness.
Now, I know that if a Christian takes a stand on a moral issue or something like that, they can easily be accused. Of being mean when they're not being mean, and I understand that. But at the same time, what real meanness is, is something that ought not to be a part of our makeup and of our personalities, because it's not a manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit.
It's not a manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit. Well, let's go on then with this. Love suffers long and is kind.
Love does not envy. You know, I can't wait to get to heaven and be able to sit down with the Apostle Paul and ask him a ton of theological questions. Why did you say this or why in this order? Explain your thinking process to me.
Well, let me put it together for me. I mean, that's what we do as we study the Scriptures. We're trying to understand the whys and the wherefores of this instruction. But it strikes me as a little bit jarring, as a little bit strange that so early in his exposition of the nature of love that he moves so quickly from long suffering and kindness, I think are very plainly and clearly manifestations of love, that the next thing he moves to is envy. I think I have an idea why he does that. I think it has something to do with Paul's being immersed in a whole different perspective of reality and of virtue from our own culture. I've said this before.
I'll say it again. Sometimes I'll play a game with my students at the seminary and say to them, suppose the government of the United States fell and you were given the task of writing a new constitution and you were limited in your bill of rights to list only ten laws, ten moral norms upon which the whole nation would be constructed. What ten laws would you choose?
Probably you'd have a law against murder, just as they did in the Ten Commandments of Israel, and probably you'd have a law to protect private property, a law against theft and so on. But who would waste one of the ten by having a commandment against covetousness? How many sermons have you heard in your life on covetousness?
The only time I've ever heard a sermon on covetousness was when the minister went through all ten of the Ten Commandments and he had to preach on covetousness or just skip the last commandment. But if you look at the Scripture and the virtues and vices that are figuring prominently in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, you will see that envy is a cardinal sin and that God regards envy and jealousy and covetousness as extraordinarily destructive to human society and to human relationships. I don't think we have any idea how much destruction takes place every day in the world that is motivated simply by envy. One person envying another person's position or reputation or possession, one group envying another group's position or possessions, one nation envying another nation, this is what produces wars where hundreds of thousands of people are killed because the hatred that drives people to kill and to steal is born of envy and jealousy. I once read an essay on vandalism and how much damage vandalism does in the United States every year and how much it costs the community to repair the work of vandals. And the author in that made a distinction between theft and vandalism but argued that both theft and vandalism often have the same motive of envy. I envy what you possess, and so I appropriate it for myself. I take it. I mean, think about that. Think about how evil stealing is, where you see your neighbor work and labor and toil to earn some money, and then he uses part of his income to go out and buy something for his family's enjoyment or whatever, and you who have not worked for a minute to secure that money want to possess what your neighbor possesses, and so you just go and take it.
You take it. You take something that belongs to another person and use it yourself. How can a person who does that look at themselves in the mirror in a day and see anything but the world's most selfish person? How can a person have anything but contempt for themselves when they know that they are stealing other people's property? But what's the justification? Well, I have a right to this. They don't have a right to it. They got it wrong, and really what's driving it is envy. I'm jealous that you have something that I don't possess, and so instead of saving my own money to buy it for myself, I take it from you.
I remember before I was a Christian, I would be in the locker room on the basketball team, and you'd go in the locker room, and you'd get ready for practice or something. You'd come back in the locker room afterwards, and somebody's gone through the lockers and taken the guy's wallet. You know, what kind of person does that that would just take somebody else's property? But what about the link with vandalism? In one sense, vandalism is worse.
What the vandal does is this. He says, I can't steal what you have. I can't get what you own, but if I can't enjoy it, I'm not going to allow you to enjoy it either. So when I walk in the parking lot and I see a nice car, somebody has parked there in the parking lot, I'll take out my key, and I'll just go right down the side of that car and mar somebody else's car.
Why? What possible pleasure can a person get out of breaking somebody else's property or destroying somebody else's property? What drives people to that kind of destructive behavior? Envy. If I can't enjoy it, you're not going to enjoy it either. Instead, the Christian ethic, the biblical ethic, is that I am to rejoice if you get a promotion, and I don't. I am to rejoice if you get a windfall of prosperity, and I don't.
I am to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice and to will your prosperity above my own. You see, Jesus, as our supreme example here, was willing to make Himself of no reputation, to empty Himself of His glory, of all of His possessions, of all of His treasures for our sake. Do you think there was anything in us that Jesus had to envy? Is there anything I've ever done that would make Jesus jealous of me? He didn't need to be envious. He didn't need to be jealous of me in that regard. And God's not, even though the Bible speaks of God being a jealous God, we'll talk about that sometime, about what that means. What it doesn't mean, that God is envious of us, or that God selfishly wants something that belongs to us. Now, Paul is saying that love does not envy because envy is loveless.
How can I love you and envy your property or your position and want to rob you of it for my own gratification? That is not love. So that envy is utterly incompatible with love.
So notice that Paul is doing here, what he is doing is he's alternating between what we call the way of affirmation and the way of negation. He's describing what Christian love looks like by first of all telling us the positive things that it does, and then also using the way of negation says, if you want to make sure you understand love, here's what love is not. Love is long suffering, love is kind, but love does not envy. And so it's important for us to learn any concept to be able to differentiate that concept from other things.
And so we look for similarities with other things and dissimilarities from other things. And that's what he's doing as he gives us this exposition of the nature of love. And love does not envy. Love does not parade itself and is not puffed up. When we parade ourselves giving an ostentatious display of our power, of our beauty, of our wealth, or if we are puffed up in the sense of being conceited, how is that loving?
Who are we loving? We're loving ourselves. We want to be the center of attention. Again, envy and conceit and an ostentatious display of pride, all of these things are expressions of selfishness.
They are not other-oriented. They are self-oriented. And when we love other people, we will not seek to exalt ourselves, but rather we will seek the edification of the other person. That's what love is about.
I mean, we can fake that. I mean, sometimes I get tired of hearing, you know, after a basketball team wins a big game, you know, it's expected in the interview for the athlete to say, well, I didn't do anything, you know, it was all the team. Well, that's nice to hear, and I'm glad that that's still at least a token virtue in our culture that we're supposed to say that sort of thing. I would just once hear an athlete get on there and say, you know, obviously this was a team effort and I didn't do it all, but I am so excited.
This is probably the best game I ever played. And it's very gratifying and satisfying because I don't want to be by myself, but I do want to be able to make a contribution and I do want to perform. I mean, I think that that's a legitimate spirit, to want to make a significant contribution. But if you want to hog the parade and you don't care about the other person's recognition, that's not loving. And so again, what Paul is doing here is briefly telling us what love is like and what it is not like.
And he has more to say about this, and we'll continue our study of 1 Corinthians 13 in our next meeting. In the newspaper, almost every day we read a phrase that you almost never saw before in American history, and that phrase is the politics of envy. More has been said in the last few years about class warfare in America than any time I think previously in our history. And so much of it is being articulated in terms of envy. I want what you have. I want what you have. I want what you have. I want what you have. I want what you have.
I want what you have. And I've said for a long, long time that one of the most important things for a nation is to never allow economics to be politicized. As soon as you have a different tax structure for one group from another, whether it's for the rich or for the poor or whoever it is, you set people against people. As long as I can vote for a tax on you that's not upon me, I am now encouraged to exercise envy or greed, whichever is the case. Because envy is simply not limited to the poor, nor is greed limited to the rich. Greed is a human sin, and envy is a human sin, and it cuts across every class and every group of people. And it is fundamentally a denial of love. Envy, covetousness, they are much more destructive than we might first think.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, helping us understand Paul's description of love as found in 1 Corinthians 13. This series is 20 messages on the Christian life and growing Christian character, more messages than you'll hear this week on Renewing Your Mind. So I encourage you to request the entire series when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343. Your generosity keeps Renewing Your Mind on hundreds of stations and signals around the world and on countless devices as people listen to the podcast edition. To thank you for your support, we'll also send you a new 90 day devotional on the Christian life, reflecting on the character of God, his blessings in salvation, our privilege of worship, and our pursuit of holiness.
Visit renewingyourmind.org or click the link in the podcast show notes today to get both resources. Thank you. Biblical love does not envy as we heard today, but it's also humble. It's not arrogant or rude. And that's our theme tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. You.
