Green with Envy

Matthew 6:19 (NET) - Do not accumulate for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.


Exodus 20:17 (NET) - You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Scripture warns us about both worldliness and covetousness.

In reflecting on these conditions I realized that both the world and desire of another’s possessions often go hand in hand.

The world begins to influence us very early in life. It makes us desire the things others have which we do not.

I asked myself when did worldliness and covetousness first enter my life and the answer came both quickly and easily.

It happened when I started the first grade and involved, of all things, crayons!

Yes, even something as seemingly benign and innocent looking as a box of crayons can be used by the world in a negative way on young minds.

Before I started first grade, my mother took me to the store to get the supplies I would need according to the local school system.

One of the items on the list they provided was a box of eight crayons.

One day, shortly after school began, the teacher asked us to get out our crayons as she passed out a worksheet we were supposed to color.

As we got out our crayons, I quickly realized that not everyone was limited to eight crayons.

Many had sixteen, some had twenty four, a few had forty eight and two actually had sixty four.

Notice that I still remember that exactly two had sixty four crayons.

How I envied those two when I compared their boxes of sixty four to my paltry box of eight.

In the world of adults, this would be comparable to someone living in a modest home envying someone of their mansion.

For weeks, I remember pleading with my parents to get me a box of sixty four crayons but to no avail.

Eventually, they gave in and bought me a box of twenty four.

In our little world, that of first graders, it was the number of crayons one had that determined our social standing.

As a Christian adult and In hindsight, this was a silly thing. To a small child’s mind, it seemed like one of the most important things of all.

Yet, that is exactly the kind of hold the world can have on us throughout our lives.

If we permit it.

Without Jesus, the only thing that really changes is the price of our toys.

Jesus overcomes the grip the world has on our lives.

By the way, there is an additional lesson I have learned from all of this.

Back then, when a child with few crayons, like me, would ask to borrow a particular color from someone who had more the response was usually the same.

"My father (or mother) told me not to let anybody use them."

We are each blessed by our Heavenly Father in many ways.

Our Heavenly Father expects us to share our blessings with others and not keep them for ourselves.

He even gave us the greatest example of all when He shared His Only Son with us in order that we be saved.

We may have outgrown crayons, but we dare not let material wealth in the adult world have the same kind of hold.

Everyone needs to grow up sometime.

We do that when we mature as believers.

1 Corinthians 13:11 (NET) - When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways.


Blessings,
Jim Pokorny
The Other Brother Jim
Look for me at http://faithfulfeetteam.blogspot.com/ on Friday, May 17, 2013.
Please enjoy the contributions of my fellow Christian bloggers while you are there!
I’ll be back here on Friday, May 24, 2013.
Schedule subject to change.