Of Avoiding The Sin Of Envy.

 

Admonition 8.     The Apostle affirms that “no man can say the Lord Jesus but by the Holy Ghost,”1   And “there is none that doth good, no not one.”2   Whosoever, therefore, envies his brother on account of the good which the Lord says or does in him, commits a sin akin to blasphemy, because he envies the Most High Himself who says and does all that is good.

Of Avoiding the sin of Envy,     of the spiteful words we associate with it when someone has done something we wanted to do or something was given to someone other than to ourselves.   Avoiding being envious or jealous of or spiteful towards seems a passive act to me, rather I hope I would act by shunning such emotions by actively pushing them away from me.   Francis records that St. Paul wrote that unless one possessed the holy Spirit one could not confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.   The Psalmist wrote that no one can do good deeds by themselves.   So, two things here - belonging to, acknowledging, the Lordship of Christ, happens only when we have God’s Spirit within us.   When we have God’s Spirit within us we understand that God is responsible for any good we do because God uses our body’s to work through because God has no physical form.   Since we can do nothing good it is a sin to envy what God does through another because that is envying God.

1 I Cor. 12 : 3 2 Ps 52: 4