Hi Folks:
We have a
neat God story this week. I am involved in a leadersip
program called Arrow Leadership. My last seminar is in November in
We continue to look at David in the On Fire series. This week we look at jealousy.
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1 Samuel 18:1-9 Green-Eyed Tar Monster
Last night Jan and I watched a movie called "Monster-In-Law." When
her surgeon son Kevin (Michael Varton) becomes
engaged to beautiful and talented temp worker Charlotte (Jennifer Lopez), Viola
(Jane Fonda) decides that
At the heart of her character, Viola is jealous - jealous of Charlotte’s tug on her son’s heart, jealous of her youthfulness and beauty, jealous of the young couple’s love and joy. Her jealousy affected their relationship.
We see jealousy at work in the interaction between Saul and David in 1 Samuel 18:1-9. Success followed David after he defeated Goliath on the battlefield. He gained the favour of officers and rose in military rank (v.5). David’s reputation in battle spread throughout the land so that they praised him more than Saul, who was king. This made Saul so angry (v.8) that he later tried to kill David many times.
Verse 9 reveals the motivation behind Saul’s anger. "...From that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David."*
"Jealous eye" is an interesting phrase. A jealous eye sees people as competition. There are only so many good things in life, and so we have to grab all we can before someone else does. A jealous eye has tunnel vision. It becomes hard to focus on anything other than the success of the other person until, like a magnifying glass over a piece of paper on a sunny day, pin pricks of fire burn the heart. A jealous eye infects relationships. Even the friendliest of gestures are taken as attacks in the campaign of competition.
I hope Saul’s expression of jealousy and rage is more extreme than what happens in our own lives. Even still, I know from my own experience that jealousy is very powerful. We can become jealous over the smallest of things - a child’s success in school or sports, a friend’s promotion, the neighbour’s new car, a skill we wished we had, another person’s opportunities. As a pastor, it can be hard to hear about the success of another church. Ministerial associations can become competitive. In the best ones, pastors know better than to talk about attendance, budgets or salaries.
There are many sources of jealousy, but they all have one source - the desires of our hearts. Whether we realize it, we all carry around in us a picture of what we want for the future. We encounter problems when someone else gets something we want for ourselves. That’s when jealousy rises like a green-eyed monster out of the tar ponds of a bad movie. Saul wanted the people’s hearts and so he couldn’t stand it when David received the praise of the people.
The issue here is not the desires of our hearts (assuming they fall in line with the teaching of scripture). The issue is what happens within us when we feel jealousy rising. Will we nurture it, feed it, and turn it lose in anger and rage? Or will we rejoice that God is blessing someone and wants to bless us too? The blessing pool is not limited to only a certain, small number of favours from God. God is more than capable of blessing each and everyone of us in ways which are beyond our comprehension or imagination. So we don’t need to compete with each other. We can rejoice that God is good.
I hope this helps. Be On Fire.
ON FIRE is a weekly letter of encouragement by
*Unless translated directly, all scripture references from the New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978 by the International Bible Society.