The biggest enemy of love is envy. Proverbs 14.30 tells us that envy rots the bones! If you have envy in your heart, it can literally make you sick. Satan hates you and wants you sick, he wants you to have rotting bones, so one of the things he really wants to do is make you envious. Satan hates you walking in love, walking in the fruit of the spirit, walking in victory – so he will constantly try and trap you with envy.
We need to listen to Paul who says “let us not be desiring empty glory, provoking one another, envying one another” (Galatians 5.26).
Satan is right now trying to get you to look at a situation and get envy in your heart. Envy is the biggest enemy of love.
God’s nature is love, He is love. And as we yield to love, we yield to God, we yield to life and success and abundance. Satan’s nature is envy. He envied God, envied the angels, envied Adam and Eve, and if you yield to envy satan can “steal your lunch and pop the bag”. This is really serious. Envy is not something we treat as serious, but it is deadly serious for every Christian and we must be aware of it.
What is envy? It is you feeling angry and negative towards another person because you perceive they have an advantage or an item or a victory that you presume should be yours and not theirs. Now, we can say very clearly according to Scripture that LOVE NEVER ENVIES (1 Cor. 13.4).
What does love do when someone else wins? When someone else gets a victory, gets a new car, a new house, a new jet, a new job, a new friend? Love rejoices when others succeed. Envy gets depressed and angry when others succeed. Love has a party when someone else wins, envy gets sad.
Envy says things like why on earth would he have a new car, he doesn’t work as hard as I do, he isn’t as smart as me. I should have a new car. Look at his wife, so pretty, and I am still single, I should be getting married. Look at my family living in this house we don’t even fit into and that single person is living in that huge house all alone.
As a pastor, I see professional envy far too much. Ministers envious of the size of your church, the money you earn, the pulpits you are invited to speak at, the guest speakers you have, all of it, I have seen over and over, it is the nature of satan.
Now all of us will be tempted to have these thoughts at a some point because satan is trying to get us to walk out of love. The thoughts come to us all. But we have to deal with it seriously – we have to say loudly “This thought is not God, I rebuke you envy, I walk in love, I am a child of God, and God is love”. You have to deal with this strongly. You cannot let these thoughts build a little house in your head and start making you an envious person! You cannot and you must not!
Envy won’t just stop you walking in love and seeing all the benefits and abundance of that, it will actually rot your bones. I don’t want rotten bones, I want strong bones!
I have heard someone recently say envy is not that bad, but it is the worst thing we can do. It’s a work of the flesh according to Galatians 5, it’s part of having a reprobate mind according to Romans 1. It is something we must engage with and defeat.
James 3.16 actually says where there is envying and strife there is every evil work. Envy opens the door to every evil work. I mean all of it, every single bit of it. So you deal with it and refuse to receive it. When it enters your mind, when you start to feel down, you force yourself to rejoice that someone is being blessed and has opportunities and increase!
Tree of Life Blog 