Quit Slipping Around

By John Stallings


My steps had well nigh slipped. Psalm 73:2

Having your feet to slip unexpectedly is no small matter.

Its happened to me many times. I’ve slipped on rocks in swiftly running mountain streams. I’ve slipped on frozen ground, I’ve slipped in fishing boats, & I’ve slipped going down a flight of stairs carrying a large turkey that had just been taken out of an oven. [It’s a long story.]

The above doesn’t count the bicycles I fell off, & the swings & other playground maiming machines I flew off of as a kid. Suffice to say-I’m well acquainted with “road rash.”

No, I’m not a klutz; I think I can say I’m sure-footed. I’ve just led a very active life. In none of these falls was I seriously injured, just shaken up a bit. Thank you Jesus! One thing I’ve never done is to slip on a banana peel. Have you ever noticed they aren’t all that slippery?

Slipping is an awful experience; mainly that first instant you realize your feet are no longer underneath you where they’re supposed to be. Now it just remains to see how bad a landing you’ll have & how long recovery will take. It’s a great feeling after we’ve slipped & fallen to realize that the only thing that’s really been hurt is our pride.

Most, if not all of my slips happened long ago. I say that in humility knowing it could always happen again, to me or to any of us unless we take great care. As we grow older slipping takes on a more serious nature. In the elderly sometimes even the smallest slip can be life threatening. Paul’s admonition to “take heed lest we fall” is apropos in many areas of life.

Slipping is frightful, even if it’s not followed by a crash landing because, to point out the obvious, when you slip & fall, there’s only one way to go. We all know which way that is, & it isn’t up. Slipping & the law of gravity have been very tightly woven together since the foundations of the earth were laid. I think it’s true that “the bigger you are, the harder you fall.”

The bottom line is; to slip & fall is dangerous, to slip & fall is painful, & sometimes to slip & fall can be catastrophic.

PSALM 73

Since I first found this wonderful Psalm as a young man it has fed me in so many ways. The writer came within an eyelash of having a tragic slip. He starts off by saying,-My feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped.
He’s telling us that he came close to slipping catastrophically.

When did he almost slip?

When ENVY invaded his heart.

“My steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

ENVY

A number of years ago I saw the movie Amadeus. Though I could hardly stand some of characters, I was captivated by the story & brilliance of the actors. I could easily see why the movie was an Academy Award winner.

The story revolved around the musical genius Mozart, & a man named Antonio Salieri, a court musician to Austria’s King. Salieri was envious of the rich talents of young Mozart; talents he fell far short of. Though he could compose music it was not great music; consequently he was consumed with envy of Mozart’s talents. This led him to scheme & plot against Mozart at every turn.

He stole Mozart’s compositions, bribed Mozart’s servants & informed the King about Mozart’s indiscretions. Salieri’s envy eventually drove him to insanity. The movie ends with Salieri cursing God for denying him the talent which He gave Mozart. The story line shows what happens when a good man like Salieri is filled with & finally destroyed by envy.


As a minister, I’ve heard people admit to things that would make a sailor blush but I’ve never heard a person admit they had a problem with envy. So the first thing we know about envy is- it always travels incognito. We’ll see some reasons for that in this article.

1. One reason we envy is we assume that anything anyone has, we too should have.

In all probability we never even wanted the thing that someone else has until we noticed that he/she has it. Suddenly the fact that they have it, & we don’t have it is intolerable.

Another reason we envy is we don’t like admitting there are people who have greater talent or intelligence or skill than we have. We think that to acknowledge someone else as more talented or intelligence or skilled is to declare ourselves failures, which is WRONG!

2. A world system encourages us to envy.

What is advertisement if not something to make us unhappy with what we have? Want, anger, & resentment blended together becomes envy.

A Danish proverb claims, “If envy were an illness all the world would have a fever.” One wonders when we look at the present financial condition of our nation & the world, how great a part envy has played & continues to play. On Main Street as well as Wall Street there seems to be an envious spirit that feels merely being a millionaire is humiliating.

Envy is the twin of jealousy, though they’re not quite the same. Jealousy is concerned with not losing what it has while envy makes a rival of anyone who has what it wants. Both envy & jealousy stem from pride & deep self-centeredness so one sin begets another.

3. Envy poisons relationships.

Gore Vidal, a humanist author said famously, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies.” How sad is that, when even the good fortune of a friend can conjure up envy? How small is the heart that has no room to celebrate another person’s happiness?

You & I don’t envy people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or The Queen of England. We envy our dear friend or relative. Is this not tragic? If we have a friend who makes the same amount of money as we do, & he suddenly is making several thousand a year more than we earn, or maybe someone dies & leaves him some money, he appears less dear. In fact now he displays faults we never saw before. As we began to castigate this friend, we remain unaware of what’s going on in our head & heart.

The 800 lb.Gorilla in the room is we feel we’ve been left behind by our friend. We feel he has belittled us. In truth, he never intended to belittle us & in truth his money didn’t belittle us. But non-the-less we are as certain as we are that the sun rises in the east that our friend is now belittling us. Then, we think that we can restore ourselves to our rightful size by knocking our friend down.

Now we’re slipping are we not? Envy is always bent on leveling. So, end of relationship! Right?

4. The equation—Envy, belittlement, anger, self-rejection.

Envy causes us to be downhearted. Someone else having something we lack has caused us to feel like losers & now we find ourselves caught up in self-loathing. We think “how could they do this to me?” The more anyone tries to love us out of the mullygrubs, the worse we feel.

The Psalmist cries out— “my feet had almost slipped. I nearly fractured both legs, plus my spine & skull. I was nearly immobile. I almost went insane when I became envious of the prosperous.”

You may think “insane” is a little too strong a word for the Psalmist but if you read what he says next you’ll see how absolutely irrational he’s getting. He says,

“These prosperous people have no pangs. They don’t suffer. They aren’t as finite & frail as we non-prosperous folk.”

See how silly he’s getting? But let’s be honest; when we’re envious of someone don’t we think of them as if they’ve “got it made?” Not only that, we think they can never be “unmade,” right? They can never suffer misfortune of any kind. Because they’re protected from financial loss, they are also protected from human loss of any kind. We go on in our foolishness to assume these prosperous folk are riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels.

5. Envy blinds us to so many things.

We have no compassion for the person we envy because they’ve “got it so good.” They are totally pain free & affliction proof. See how crazy envy can make us?

Envy poisons, envy embitters, envy blinds, envy turns us into self-pitying, self-righteous snivelers. It’s no wonder no one will admit to being envious. Who would brag that they are a poisonous, embittered, self-righteous whiner?

Listen to the Psalmist;

“All in vain have I kept my heart clean”, the Psalmist whines in his envy, “I have kept my heart clean & I received nothing for it.”
The truth is, he hasn’t kept his heart clean. He may have kept his hands clean in that as yet he has done nothing visibly wrong. But his heart? How can he pretend to have a clean heart when he is envious & his envy has turned him into a pitiless critic? No, he hasn’t kept his heart clean.

ENVY IS A LARGE SUBJECT IN THE BIBLE

Envy is listed as one of the lusts of the flesh in Gal.5:21.

When envy is compared to anger & wrath, it’s so ghastly that the question is raised, “who is able to stand before envy?” It’s possible to be envious of anything; the ability to hit a baseball, score a basket, or water-ski. You can envy someone’s intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, & ability to talk or pray in public. You can envy another person’s possessions, spouse, money, children, family, job or career. I heard a preacher say once that some folk can be envious of the very “shine on your shoes.”

Vine’s Expository Dictionary of the New Testament defines envy as “The feeling of displeasure produced by witnessing or hearing of the advantage or prosperity of others.”

Envy is one of the most subtle, & ugly sins of them all. Webster defines envy as;

“A chagrin or discontent at the excellence or good fortune of another.”

In other words, envy is feeling bad about another person doing well. When our neighbor gets a five bedroom house & we are upset because we only have four, that’s envy. Eventually the envious person will end up hating the person who is the object of their envy.

When someone you envy gets into trouble, it’s hard to suppress a feeling of satisfaction. The face of envy is never attractive. It is among some of the most debasing & degenerate sins that ever characterized sinful men mentioned in Romans chapter one (Rom.1:29.) In the Bible, envy is always in the worst of company.

PRAY TELL WHERE IS THE GRATIFICATION IN ENVY?

Envy is unique. Other sins are terribly destructive, but they at least have a few thrills & gratification, in the early stages.

Does envy, even for a minute ever make you feel better? As far as I can see, we gain nothing from envy. All you get from it is endless self-torment, yet its appetite is ravenous & ever increasing. The wise man said envy is “the rottenness of the bones.” Bone Cancer. (Prov.14:30.)

The awful bite of envy packs a double-whammy; for it causes you not only to feel bad because of someone else’s good fortune, at the same time it causes you to devalue your own good gifts. Isn’t that horrendous?

For example, I can hear another preacher who is outstanding, & if I’m envious, my first tendency is to think of myself as a very unskillful preacher. What I forget is-- that preacher didn’t steal his gifts from me. I’m just as good (or bad) a preacher as I ever was. That preacher hasn’t done one thing to devalue, or diminish my preaching. But that old devil envy has robbed me of the ability to appreciate what I have, & who I am in God.

Yet with this thing called envy, when you meet someone you think might have more gifts & skills than you, you start to see yourself as having fewer gifts. Such is the awesome power of envy to distort our thinking processes.

BUT YOU HAVEN’T HEARD THE WORST ABOUT ENVY

Just feeling bad because you don’t have something that the other person has isn’t the worst part. The worst part, the most tragic part is; you wish the other person didn’t have what they have so you wouldn’t have to suffer your “imaginary disadvantage.”

Jesus knew how harmful envy could be. Not only is He God, he was schooled in the Hebrew religion & its many illustrations of the destructive power of envy. The Bible abounds with examples of unchecked envy & its dire consequences. Envy has a very high mortality rate.

• The very first murder, the killing of Abel by his brother Cain, was sparked by envy.

• The 10th commandment is about envy-“You shall not covet.” If we’re not careful, envy will cause us to break the 8th commandment, “You shall not steal.”
• Envy is the big factor in the story Jesus told about the laborers in the vineyard, in Matt. 20. Look at the story. The owner of the vineyard, at the end of the day paid all the workers the same though some came early & some came later in the day. The workers who worked hard all day felt it wasn’t fair to be paid the same as the ones who only worked a short time. However, the owner reminded them that he hadn’t defrauded them in any way. They were paid what was agreed upon. The owner went on to say,

“Why are you envious because I am generous?”

The same thing was happening in the story of the prodigal son. The older brother said, “It isn’t fair for you to welcome this wayward brother home with a big party when I’ve stayed home all these years & worked hard. You never gave a party in my honor.”

• Joseph’s brothers were “moved with envy”& hated him so much they couldn’t speak a kind word to him, & finally they sold him into Egyptian slavery.

• The religious leaders were motivated by envy when they lead the Jews to crucify the Son of God. -Matt. 27:18.

• Rachel envied Leah because she was barren & Leah had children. Gen.30:1.

• The Philistines were envious of Isaac because of his large flocks & many servants. Gen. 26:14.

• James says envy is devilish. James 3:15.

All we have to do is look at the 73rd Psalm to see how unhappy envy can make a person.

One thing is for certain. We will never be able to find contentment in this life if we compare ourselves to others because there’ll always be things that won’t seem fair. Envy makes it impossible to be happy with another person’s good fortune. It makes sense that envy & depression are great traveling companions.

In the middle of Psalm 73 the Psalmist has a moment of clarity. He starts to realize how badly he’s gotten off the beam. He gets a revelation on what envy is doing to him & what it can do to those around him. The New English Bible puts it;

“Had I let myself talk on this fashion I would have betrayed the family of God.”

But the Psalmist needs more than he’s able to figure out on his own. He needs God. He says;

I went to the sanctuary of God & there I understood the situation the people I envy are really in.”
You will probably remember the death of John Kennedy Jr. in 1999. Kennedy was flying his wife & a friend of hers from New York to Massachusetts late one July afternoon. Not being cleared for flying on instruments, he made his plans to get to his destination before dark. However, because of delays he found himself flying over the ocean in darkness. The darkness made it impossible to keep his equilibrium by lining up with the horizon.

Expert pilots explained that Kennedy experienced disorientation or vertigo, a condition that allowed him to be flying upside down & not realize it. Then he lost airspeed & the plane stalled going into what pilots call the “graveyard spiral.” Kennedy lost his bearings in the darkness & kept saying, “where’s the ground?”

This is what insane envy did to the Psalmist. It caused him to lose orientation with “the ground.” He became spiritually disoriented. The only way you & I can keep from slipping & crashing is to re-orient ourselves constantly. For us that groundedness is God.

The only way we can avoid a crash is to stay in constant contact with God. As soon as that crazy thinking sets in, like the Psalmist, we must run to our heavenly Father for help. As the Psalmist enters the Sanctuary of God he is able to checkmate any further spin-offs & return to his “right mind.”

As we come to the end of Psalms 73, the Psalmist can scarcely believe how seriously absurd his thinking had became. He said,-I was stupid & ignorant,” he cries to God. “I was like a beast toward thee. I was insensitive to God & couldn’t see it.”

As his envy evaporates, sound thinking returns & he knows he’s been on the cusp of a catastrophe. He came within an eyelash of a “death-spiral.”

As Psalm 73 comes to a close, the Psalmist asks God,

“Whom have I in heaven but thee? God is the strength of my heart & my portion forever.
This Psalm is a study in the pathology of envy. It also shows us the way to be delivered from poisonous envy, which can be a fatal condition.

Listen to the Apostle Peter’s words;

Wherefore laying aside all malice & all guile & all hypocrisies & all envying & all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of The Word that ye may grow thereby, if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. 1 Peter 2:1-2

Envy is a product of our old fallen nature. For that reason we can’t fight it in our flesh. Envy at its core is grasping, & godliness at its core is emptying.

Envy tells us that there isn’t enough & what we have & isn’t adequate.

Paul said;

But my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Phil. 4:19

Instead of having a list of all the things you don’t possess, make a list of all you have. The writer of Proverbs reminds us;

……but he that is of a merry heart, has a continual feast.—Proverbs 15:15


Blessings,


John