So, the other night, I got an update from a friend that I haven't heard anything from
in a while, an old friend, and turns out he and his family are celebrating a major opportunity
that has come into life for their… come into their lives as a family.
It's going to be a fantastic experience for them.
And I read this update, and I really wanted to be happy for him because I really like
this guy, and I really wanted to feel happy, but I felt something actually very different.
As I read the details of the update, I felt my stomach start to turn sour, and I felt
this kind of tightness in my chest, and I realized that I kind of stopped breathing for probably
several seconds, and all of… at once, all of the, you know, satisfaction and contentment
that I normally feel in my life just sort of evaporated.
You know, that's how quickly envy can set in.
I felt like I was just kind of going along, feeling pretty good about things, and then
envy blindsided me.
It's like getting jumped from a dark alley.
And all at once, all of that contentment was gone.
And I struggled to feel happy for this friend that I really care about.
And I don't know if that's ever happened to you.
Probably has.
I think envy is something that happens to everybody if you live long enough, and many
of us struggle with it, especially now in the age of social media.
This is what we're going to be talking about this morning.
And we're going to be talking about envy as a part of a series that we've been doing all
summer in Psalm 106.
We read a snippet of that earlier.
Psalm 106 was written down during Israel's time of exile in Babylon.
And they wrote this psalm as a song that recounts all of the formative experiences that Israel
faced during their time wandering in the wilderness after being set free from slavery in Egypt.
And you say, well, why would somebody write a song to remember all of these formative experiences?
And it's because they wanted to remember them and to teach them to their children.
This is what life is like in the wilderness.
And, you know, the story of Israel is really, if you understand the Bible and kind of how to read
the story, it's really a microcosm of the world.
The story of Israel is really the story of the world.
It's the story of human beings in the world in the sense that we're all wandering in the
wilderness.
All human beings, according to Scripture, are spiritually homeless.
We're like pilgrims searching for home.
And the reason is because we were made to live with God.
That's our home, and yet that relationship has been broken.
And so, we're all like pilgrims trying to find our way home.
And there are certain challenges that are kind of like marks of wilderness life.
There are symptoms that remind us that we are spiritually homeless and that this isn't our
home and that we're merely pilgrims passing through.
And so, Psalm 106 recounts these symptoms of spiritual homelessness.
These are the things you're going to face on the road as pilgrims.
And so, a couple of weeks ago, we looked at unbelief as one of the challenges of wilderness
life.
Last week, Jeff preached on discontent, and that's a marker of life in the wilderness.
And this week, we're going to look at envy.
And Psalm 106, verses 16 through 18, they refer to an incident in the wilderness that we read
about in…we just heard read a moment ago in Numbers chapter 16.
Now, there's a lot going on in Numbers 16, and we don't have time to get into all of it.
We're really going to focus on this theme of envy.
And we're going to see a couple of things.
We're going to see the problem of envy, and then we're going to see the way out of envy.
Let's pray.
Lord, we thank You for Your Word, and I thank You that we get to come around Your Word every
week together as a family.
And we thank You that we don't do that alone, that You're here with us.
We pray that Your Holy Spirit would illuminate Your Word, that these words would become flesh.
Lord, we're here to do more than just hear human wisdom or insights.
We're here to encounter the living Word, Jesus Christ.
And I pray that through Your Word now, and then in a little while through the sacrament of the
Eucharist, that in both ways, Lord, we would encounter and receive Christ and be changed by
Him.
We pray this in Your Son's holy name.
Amen.
So, first of all, we're going to look at the problem of envy.
Numbers 16 begins with a dramatic public confrontation.
By the way, I think this is the most dramatic chapter in Numbers, which, believe it or not,
is a fairly dramatic book.
It doesn't sound like it, but it's a fairly dramatic book.
Actually, the original, the Hebrew title for Numbers is not Numbers, it's in the wilderness.
So, a lot of Numbers is about life in the wilderness.
So, we begin with a very dramatic public confrontation.
Four men, we have Korah, we have Dathan, we have Abiram, and we have On.
They recruit 250 other men.
These are chiefs.
These are well-known, well-respected influencers from among the community.
And they all come together to publicly confront Moses and Aaron.
You say, well, what's the issue?
Verse 3, you have gone too far, they say to Moses, for all in the congregation are holy,
every one of them, and the Lord is among them.
Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?
So, it sounds like a theological critique.
It sounds like they are legitimate in their complaint.
They're challenging the legitimacy of Moses as their leader.
They're saying, who do you think you are?
How dare you exalt yourself above the rest of us as though you're somehow superior?
Now, the truth is, if you understand the context, Moses has done nothing wrong.
God Himself had appointed Moses to this position, not Moses.
And if you know anything about how that went down, Moses originally didn't want the job.
He was resistant, and God had to say, well, okay, we'll send Aaron along to help you.
Does that make it better?
And Moses said, okay, I'll do it.
So, what's the real issue here?
Moses is not exalting himself.
He's just responding to God's call.
And Psalm 106 gives us insight into the real issue here.
It seems like a legitimate critique, but in fact, the real issue is envy.
It's envy.
Now, envy means coveting something that somebody else has and wanting it for yourself.
So, in this case, Korah and his associates, they covet the job that Moses and Aaron have
in the congregation.
They covet that job.
They covet the status that seems to come with it.
Now, here's the thing we need to understand.
Korah already has a great job.
He already has a respectable job.
We hear Moses refer to this in verses 8 through 10.
Korah was a descendant of Levi, and all of Levi's descendants had been given special roles
in the tabernacle.
He had already been set apart and given a very important role, but that wasn't enough.
All Korah can think about is the job that Moses has, the job that Aaron has, which seems in
his mind to be more important, higher status.
That's what he wants for himself.
And, you know, it's easy to read this and to kind of write Korah and these guys off as
bad guys.
But I think that if we're honest, probably most of us can identify with this on some level.
You know, this is like finding out that someone from your grad school program who finished
the same year you did has landed a much more prestigious position than you.
You know, you have a great job at a Fortune 500 company, and you find out that they're
a VP at a Fortune 100 company.
And it just kind of burns you up because you've got the same MBA at the same time.
It's like struggling to get pregnant and then watching people around you get pregnant seemingly
without even trying.
You have friends on their third kid, their fourth kid, and you're still trying to have
your first.
It's like swiping through online dating profiles and then switching over to Instagram and seeing
the latest batch of wedding photos from one of your friends who got married in Bora Bora.
It just burns you up, right?
And we all know how it feels when envy sets in.
Proverbs 14.30 says, envy makes the bones rot.
And I think there's a…it's going to be hard to find a more accurate description of how
envy feels on the inside.
It feels like you're rotting.
It feels like your bones are rotting.
So then we need to ask ourselves, what's going on here?
You know, why can't we simply love and be happy for and celebrate with our friends?
When good things happen in their lives, why is it so hard to do that?
And you know, in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago says of Cassio, he hath a daily beauty in his
life that makes me ugly.
He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.
You know, I think that really shows us how envy works.
Someone else has something in their life, something that I believe I should have, and by having
it, simply by having it, they expose my inadequacy for not having it.
Right?
Simply by having that really great job or that really nice big house, they expose the fact
that I don't.
They expose my inadequacy.
They expose my lack of that thing.
And the thing is, we don't tend to envy people for having things that we don't really care
about.
You know, growing up, I never really envied people who are good at shuffleboard because
I never really cared about being good at shuffleboard.
What I wanted for a long time when I was growing up, I really wanted to be in a band.
I wanted to be in like a rock band.
And that was kind of one of my core dreams as a kid.
But no matter how hard I tried, I was just honestly never really that good.
My younger brother is just a naturally talented musician.
He can just pick up instruments and play them, and he has a fantastic singing voice.
So when I would play and sing for people, I would get the polite clap.
When he would play and sing for people, he would get the genuine applause.
And I knew deep down that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good as my brother.
And so when he would play and when he would sing and when everybody else would say, isn't
he so great?
Isn't he so talented?
It would just burn me up inside.
I couldn't ever really be happy for him.
I couldn't really ever clap wholeheartedly because that's what I wanted.
That's what I craved as a part of my own identity.
So this is what envy does.
It sets in when somebody has something that we want, that we think we need, that we think
we lack.
And so this is how Korah feels.
Every time Korah sees Moses, every time Korah sees Aaron, and everybody else is kind of looking
around saying, hey, I love those guys.
They're doing such a good job.
Korah, it burns him up.
And, you know, the rabbinic tradition says that Korah and Dathan, that these guys have
been grumbling all the way back since the time at the Red Sea, that whenever you read
about the grumbling in the wilderness, that Korah and Dathan and these guys are always a
part of it.
You know, they can never really join in the celebration.
They're always grumbling.
And this would suggest that a lot of that's motivated by envy, you know.
Because when that happens, when you envy somebody and they're excelling or getting a thing that
you think you want, you feel diminished by that.
You feel smaller somehow.
And nobody likes to feel diminished.
And so what do we do?
What's the kind of easiest way to deal with it when you're feeling diminished by the goodness
in somebody else's life?
Well, it's very tempting to deal with envy by tearing down the people that we envy.
Right?
That's kind of like the quickest solution is to tear down the people that we envy.
Because we mistakenly think, if I make that person smaller, it's going to make me feel
taller.
Right?
If I can make them seem a little smaller, it's going to make me seem a little taller.
And so this is what Korah's doing.
He's saying, Moses doesn't deserve to be a leader.
Moses doesn't deserve this position.
Moses is a self-promoter.
Clearly, he's exalting himself.
Can't you all see it?
He's trying to build himself up.
And what's really going on is Korah's trying to build himself up by tearing Moses down,
by tearing Aaron down.
But that never works.
But, you know, this is no different than the way people talk about one of their colleagues
when you're all peers and then one of you gets promoted.
And just the way the kind of behind-the-scenes, behind-closed-doors conversations about the
person that all of a sudden is now promoted over the rest of you.
And all the ways people say, oh, well, he doesn't deserve that.
He only got it because he's a kiss-up.
He's not qualified for that.
And what's the subtext of that?
I could do a much better job.
I deserve that more than he ever did.
And, you know, I hate to say it, but you hear this kind of talk among pastors sometimes
as well, and maybe some of you have heard this kind of talk before.
You know, it's always interesting to hear kind of smaller church pastors talk about the
larger, more successful church down the road.
And they'll have kind of on the service some biblical, legitimate-sounding critiques.
Oh, well, the only reason they're that way is because they compromise the gospel.
You know, it's because they're too numbers-focused.
It's because they're too corporate, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But behind those legitimate critiques, if we're really honest, there's a whole lot of
envy going on, deriving that kind of talk.
So envy is a major problem, you know.
It's destructive to us.
It rots the bones.
It's also destructive to the people around us.
We can't celebrate the good things that happen in the lives of our friends.
So then we have to ask, if this is such a problem, what's the way out?
What's the way out?
Now, this text doesn't seem to offer a whole lot of hope for those of us who feel envy,
but I think there's more hope than we see at first pass.
So what's the way out of envy?
Well, Moses responds to these accusations with amazing grace.
He doesn't respond by puffing out his chest, by saying, how dare you?
All I've done for you, and this is how you repay me.
He responds in a characteristic way of humility and prayerfulness.
He falls to his face.
And then he does what we've needed someone to do since the beginning of the chapter.
He turns the whole focus back to God.
His first response is to say, this is above my pay grade.
This is something only the Lord can sort out.
And so the way out of envy starts by recognizing that envy happens when we take our eyes off God
and we begin to focus on the people around us.
When we take our eyes off God as the primary source of meaning in our lives,
and we start to focus on other people around us.
In other words, comparison feeds envy.
The more we focus on and compare ourselves to others around us, the more that feeds envy.
And Moses says, you've taken your eyes off the Lord.
We need to look back to the Lord.
Because envy can't exist in our hearts when we are focused on the Lord.
And then look what Moses says.
He says, starting in verse 8, it says,
This response really shows us the next thing that we need to understand.
If we're going to climb out of envy.
The next step is recognizing that whenever we feel envy,
it means that we're ignoring God's goodness to us,
and we're resenting God's goodness to others.
Moses is saying, look, look at all that God has done in your life.
Look at all the amazing opportunities that God has given you,
and all of your family, and all of your descendants.
Everybody descended from Levi.
You have all of this amazing honor that God has given you.
In our common life together.
And you're completely ignoring that.
And then you're resenting the good things that God has done in Moses' life,
and in Aaron's life.
Right?
You're ignoring God's goodness in your life,
and you're resenting God's goodness to others.
You know, whenever envy sets in,
one of the first things that we can do as a way to respond in faith
is to stop when you feel that sour stomach,
rotting bone feeling,
to stop and to think,
what are the blessings?
Where is the goodness of God in my life
that at this moment I am ignoring,
I'm willfully blind to?
Because I'm so focused on this other goodness
that I don't have.
What are the things that I'm willfully blind to at this moment?
What blessings or provisions am I overlooking?
So that's the second thing,
recognizing that envy means ignoring God's goodness to us
and resenting God's goodness to others.
Then Moses really gets to the heart of the issue in verse 11.
He says,
therefore it is against the Lord
that you and all your company have gathered together.
What is Aaron that you grumble against him?
The third step in walking out of envy
is recognizing that envy is not really about the other person.
Right?
The envy I felt for my brother's musical ability,
that's not really about my brother.
He has nothing to do with it.
It's really a grievance that I have against God.
That's the core issue.
Because the core belief that drives envy
is that God has somehow made a mistake.
That God has not given me something that I deserve.
And in fact, even worse than that,
God gave it to someone else
who doesn't deserve it nearly as much as I do.
I really want to be a musician.
I would do so much more with that gift.
I would do so much more with those talents.
I deserve them so much more.
Why don't you give it to Him?
Why not me?
God made a mistake.
And so along with that,
there come all kinds of assumptions about God.
Either God doesn't know me,
either God doesn't love me,
doesn't care about me,
or God's powerless to give me these things.
Right?
Either He doesn't know me and doesn't love me,
or He doesn't care,
or He's powerless.
But in one way or another,
envy becomes a barrier between us and God,
because envy is really a theological position
that you're adopting about God
and God's character and God's power.
And so it becomes this wall between us and God.
And at the end of the day,
who do we really resent?
It's not the person with the nice job
or the big house or the big family
or the amazing opportunities or whatever.
The person we really resent is God.
How could you let this happen?
And so that's why Moses says,
your grievance,
the issue here is really,
you've gathered against God.
You're opposing God in your envy.
And so ultimately,
that can only go in one of two directions.
The first is what happens to Korah
and Dathan and the rest.
Moses challenges them and says,
well, if you think that you deserve to be a priest,
if you think that that is a part of God's plan
for your life,
then why don't you act like a priest?
Why don't you go and get a censer
and put some incense in it
and light the censer in the presence of the Lord,
burn it before the Lord like a priest would.
Do a priestly offering to the Lord.
And if the Lord is with you
and you're reading the Lord's intentions
correctly for your life,
then nothing will happen.
God will honor your offering.
But if you are doing this
in defiance of God's plan for your life,
in defiance of the way that God has ordered
this community to function,
then God's going to make that known.
And of course, we know what happens.
The ground opens up
and swallows Korah
in all of those with him.
And you know, we read things like this
in the Old Testament,
and we think,
how in the world are we supposed to make sense
of something like that?
But the thing that we need to understand is
this kind of response from God
is not the norm.
It's very much an exception.
And when God does things like this,
God sometimes does these dramatic acts of judgment
as a form of poetic justice.
It's almost always a form of poetic justice
that's meant to teach the broader community,
including us,
something about the nature
and the consequences of sin.
It's meant to be a dramatic act
that makes such an impression
that everybody's going to keep talking about it
for generations.
And it's a job mission complete, right?
We're still talking about it
all this time later.
And what we need to understand
is this connects to how envy works.
Envy is like a pit that you fall into, right?
Envy separates us.
It cuts us off from the love of God.
And in many ways,
the trap of envy is like a little foretaste of hell.
It's a little foretaste of hell.
In the preface to the Screwtape Letters,
C.S. Lewis talks about
the way he portrays hell in this book.
And he says, you know,
hell is not really a place of pitchforks
and lava pools.
You know, it's more like a bureaucracy.
And he says,
we need to picture hell
as a state where everyone
is perpetually concerned
about his own dignity and advancement,
where everyone has a grievance,
and where everyone lives
with the deadly serious passions
of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
For Lewis,
living in a place like that for eternity
was a much more biblical way
of thinking about hell.
In other words,
hell is a place where God gives people over
to the things that they have chosen
over Him.
Right?
So he's saying,
if we choose to hold on to envy
and resentment,
if I choose to resent this other person
and to resent God
because I don't have the thing
and they do,
if I choose to hold on to that,
one day God's going to say,
have it your way.
And God will withdraw His presence,
and then we will be left
spending eternity
with nothing to hold on to
except our envy,
except our resentment.
You see this portrayed also
in his book,
The Great Divorce,
where people have just become
entirely defined
by things like envy,
self-important,
resentment.
Right?
And at any point
during this whole exercise,
Korah could have repented,
but Korah refuses to repent
and he digs in his heels,
he doubles down.
So in other words,
by clinging to envy,
Korah was already living
in a kind of self-imposed hell
long before the ground
opened up under his feet.
God was simply saying,
have it your way.
So the fourth step
out of envy
is to recognize
that ultimately envy
is rooted in sin,
and it's something
that we need to repent from.
And so we ask,
well, how can we possibly do that?
It strikes like a thief
in the night, right?
It jumps us from the shadows.
How do we repent?
And this is really
why we need the gospel.
You know, as we said before,
envy is rooted in a lie.
It's rooted in the lie
that God has not given me
what I think I deserve,
and instead He gave it
to someone else
who doesn't deserve it
nearly as much as I do.
And so what repentance means
is repentance means
admitting the hard truth
that we don't actually deserve
anything from God
when it comes to blessing
and provision.
And who am I to think
that I deserve anything, right?
Least of all,
this thing that I'm coveting.
And this is the thing
that Korah never seems
to understand.
Korah and Dathan and Abiram
and On and all of these
compatriots,
they don't ever seem
to really get the fact
that God's choice
to use people
like Moses and Aaron
has nothing to do
with their inherent merit.
Right?
God's choice to use
someone like Moses,
if anything,
is meant to highlight
God's goodness.
Right?
Moses was a murderer
who then left and went
and lived in hiding.
Moses had a speech impediment.
He was terrified
of public speaking.
And God says,
that's the guy I'm going to use.
Why?
Because then there'll be
no doubt that I'm the one
leading and providing
for my people.
And they never seem
to understand that.
They never seem
to understand the principle
that runs all the way
through Scripture,
from Genesis to Revelation,
that no one is worthy
on their own merit
to stand in the presence
of God and offer worship.
That none of us are worthy
of that honor on our own.
And the gospel says
that if we try to have
a relationship with God
based on our own merit,
if I try to stand
before the Lord
and say,
look how great I am,
aren't you glad I'm here?
You're lucky to have
somebody like me,
that we are standing
on shaky ground.
We're standing
on very thin ground
and there's no foundation
under us.
There's just a big,
empty cavern.
And at some point,
that ground under our feet
is going to give way.
That merit that we think
makes us so impressive
is going to crumble
right under our feet.
So, God's choice to use
people like Moses and Aaron
is based entirely on His grace,
on His willingness to give people
what they didn't earn,
don't deserve,
and can never repay.
And we see a little preview
of grace in action
in this passage.
You know,
these guys have been
a thorn in Moses' side
probably all along.
They've been grumbling.
Now they've recruited
250 influencers
to basically bring about
an insurrection.
And Moses turns to God
and says,
God, could you please
deal with these people?
They're causing havoc
in the community.
I'm at my wit's end.
I don't know what to do with them.
And then God literally says,
you might want to back up.
Like, I read that
and I cracked up
because I thought,
well, I laughed
for like 10 minutes
because I thought,
I mean,
how many times
are you having
a really hard time
with somebody
who's just making
your life miserable?
And you say,
God, could you please
take care of this person?
Could you please
solve this problem?
And God says,
you might want to back up.
I would be utterly thrilled.
I would get a fold-out chair
and a cooler of beer
and I would sit down
in the front row
and be like,
this is going to be awesome.
I don't know
what God's going to do.
But that's not
how Moses responds, right?
Moses immediately
falls on his face
and he intercedes
on behalf of these men.
And he intercedes
on behalf of the community.
And he says,
God, remember
in your judgment,
remember,
these are all human beings
of your spirit, right?
Your spirit is in all
of these people.
Remember that.
He intercedes.
And so God says,
okay,
separate the congregation out.
I just want the ringleaders, right?
And we see in Moses'
response of grace
and intercession
this preview
of someone else
who would come
who would embody
this grace
in a way
that even Moses
never could have imagined.
The gospel actually says
there's only one person
ever to have lived
who is worthy
to stand in the presence
of Jesus Christ,
presence of God,
and that's Jesus Christ.
And the gospel says
that even though
we've all rebelled
against God,
even though none of us
deserves to stand
in God's presence
as a worshiper,
that we all deserve
to go down
into the pit ourselves,
it says that Jesus
loves us so much
that He threw Himself
into the pit
of God's judgment.
Right?
Before we could go in,
He threw Himself in.
Right?
He took on the pit
of judgment,
the fires of judgment,
and He gave His life
on the cross
to save us.
And that means
that when we are standing
on that shaky ground,
when the ground
is about to give way
under our feet,
Jesus falls to His face
and He intercedes for us
before the Father.
and He says,
this is one
that I gave my life for.
This is one
who belongs to me.
Right?
And that His invitation,
His invitation,
and we see an echo
of this in His Sermon
on the Mount,
is stop standing
on that thin soil
of your own merit
and build your house,
build your life
on the rock,
on the foundation
of my righteousness,
on the rock
and the foundation
of everything
that I've done for you.
And then you're never
going to have to worry
about the ground
giving out under your feet.
You're going to be
on solid ground
for all of eternity.
Right?
So if we're ever tempted
to doubt God's love for us,
we have only to look
to the cross.
We have only to look
to Jesus' intercession
for us,
of which Moses' intercession
is a small echo.
But in this way,
the gospel sets us free
from slavery
to feelings of envy
because honestly,
you know,
the Bible talks about
being slaves to sin.
That's how I feel
whenever I feel envious.
I feel like a slave.
I feel like this taskmaster
is making me feel
and think
and say
and do things
that I don't want to do.
And there's a part of me
inside that's saying,
no, no, no.
Don't feel that.
Don't respond that way.
You should be happy
for this person.
But envy is like
a taskmaster.
And I say,
no, you will resent them.
You will take no joy in this.
I order you.
You will resent them.
But the gospel sets us free
from that kind of slavery
because if envy means
believing that God
doesn't give me
what I think I deserve,
the gospel says,
that's right.
You know,
what we deserve is judgment.
What I deserve is the pit.
But God hasn't given me
what I deserve.
Instead,
even though I don't deserve it,
God is pouring His love
and grace
and presence
into my life
every moment of the day.
So instead of resentment,
when you begin to focus on that,
instead of resentment,
the gospel produces gratitude.
And there is no better
antidote to envy
than gratitude.
Right?
And gratitude sets us free
to celebrate with our friends,
to celebrate when good things
happen in their lives,
to like the wedding photos
in Bora Bora,
to throw a housewarming party
for the person
who just moved in
to the big,
to throw a baby shower
for the person
who's having their fourth baby,
to do things
that feel so unnatural
when you're sitting there
doom scrolling
at night on your phone.
Well, all of a sudden,
your heart begins to shift
because instead of resentment,
there's gratitude.
Right?
Which is a…
and the wellspring
of which is the gospel.
And it sets us free
not just to celebrate
God's goodness
in other people's lives,
but to pray for God's goodness
in other people's lives.
And that's one of the best things
that we can do
when we envy someone,
is to stop
and to not only pray
and give thanks
for God's goodness
in their life,
but then to pray
for more of it,
to pray for more
of God's goodness.
And you'll be amazed
at how prayer begins
to shift your heart.
And then there's
these great promises
for those who put
their faith in Jesus.
The Bible promises
that every spiritual blessing
is ours.
Ephesians 1.
And that one day
we'll experience
the full truth of that.
So it says,
whatever you think
you lack in this life,
in whatever ways
you think you're deficient,
in whatever ways
you're focused
on your inadequacy,
through Jesus,
you will gain
infinitely more,
not only in this life,
but in the life to come.
Let's pray.
Lord, we thank You
for the great promises
of Scripture.
Lord, and we thank You
that even as we recognize
that the ground
probably should open up
under us right now,
Lord,
that it doesn't.
Lord, that we woke up
this morning
with breath in our lungs.
Lord, with the ability
to get out of bed
and to come here
to worship You, Lord,
and that those are all
great gifts
of Your grace to us.
Lord, we thank You
for being the kind of God
who is constantly giving us,
continually giving us,
far more than we could ever earn,
far more than we deserve,
far more than we could ever repay.
Lord, I pray that Your grace
and not things like envy
and resentment,
I pray that Your grace
would sit at the center
of our hearts,
at the center of our community,
and that we would be marked
by the gratitude
that flows out of that, Lord,
and that we would be
a community that is able
not only to support
and care for those
who are struggling
and who lack,
but, Lord,
that we're able
to be a community
full of celebration
for God's goodness
in the lives
of Your people, Lord.
And we pray this,
in this way,
we would bring glory
and honor to You.
And we pray this
in Jesus' name.
Amen.