Hey everyone. I hope everyone is having a great day and God is giving you great direction and you are within his will. So today, I have to ask you, have you ever wanted something that you didn’t have and that someone else had it? If you answered yes, you’ve experienced envy and possibly jealousy. It could be a car, job, academic success, house or even a relationship with someone that you were envious of and the Bible tells us that envying something is not good for love to be shown.
“Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited,” 1 Corinthians 13:4
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The reason why we need to avoid jealousy any envy in our lives and relationships is because they tend to show the ugliest sides of possible. It can be the source of our anger and resentment towards each other.
Some examples could be that your friend got a girlfriend/boyfriend and you didn’t or that they are succeeding in an area that you’re not. When this happens, we start thinking of ourselves more than the joy of the other person. The other person is succeeding and we are frustrated that we aren’t doing better than them. It then becomes a competition.
Once our relationship becomes a competition, our focus shifts off of the other person and what we could do to help or make the other person happier. The focus shifts not to the person, but rather to the persons accomplishments and possessions and our mind starts thinking of ways to get something better or worse, ways to take it from them. This is worse side of envy.
Since we talk about dating relationships when we’re thinking of how to Love someone then we’ll talk about a dating example.
When talking about relationships, a lot of people want someone that is protective of them, and even though that’s a great trait in moderation, it can be taken to the extreme when jealousy takes over. Sometimes when dating, the girl or guy will have friends of the opposite sex and the guy( stereotypically) will get jealous and try to forbid his girlfriend from being friends with her guy friends. This type of jealousy is too strong in some cases and is not an act of love and we should always try to be patient with our friends/significant other or family and be understanding.
In this instance, the guy in this scenario gets angry and becomes too possessive of his girlfriend. Then even further, once jealousy takes root, he starts to not trust his girlfriend at the time. At the center of any relationship is trust and if their isn’t trust, then misery and anger soon follows.
Now you may think, well he or she will grow out of it or that once you get married, that they won’t have a reason to be jealous since they have you as their spouse. Logically that makes sense but unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way always. In marriage, any faults or things that you don’t like about the person, will be magnified 10 fold since you will be living with them 24/7 and will see them at their worst and their best.
Before we go any further though, there can be times in any relationship where the person being protective is in the right because they know that the friend is not there for selfless reasons and wants to undermine your relationship or take advantage of the other person. Now is this always the case? No, but there are situations like this and so therefore we need to exercise discernment with each scenario.
So since we shouldn’t be envious and jealous of someone if we are going to love them, how can we better show love to them? Well at the root of jealousy and envy is that their focus is off. In order to get out of jealousy and envy, we need to shift our focus back onto God instead of the possessions of the persons we are trying to love.
If we shift our daily focus onto God and what he wants for our friend/significant other or family member, then we won’t be thinking about comparing their stuff to ours but rather if they are being joyful and living in Gods will.
This will be hard, especially if you are prone to jealousy but like Jesus says to pick up your cross and die to yourself, we also have to pick up our envy and jealousy and put it on the cross with all our other sins and leave them their and think of others selflessly. We can’t be thinking of our sins, which being covetous is one of, but rather think of the selfless act of Love that Jesus showed us on the cross.
Remember that everything that we receive, is a blessing from God and then we will be gracious and not entitled, which envy and jealousy shows in us. So at the end of the day, be patient, be kind, be humble and joyful for the person we are trying to love.
Thank you for reading this. I hope you have a great day and if you have any questions/comments or disagreements, just message me or comment down below and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
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