Things I keep.....My Own Life

There are a million invitations a day to act on our desire to have someone else's life. That other girl's skin. That guy's car. That family's house. That companies bottom line. Most of our existence is viewed as compared to another's, and what is clearly envy, covetousness and a longing after our neighbor's "stuff" is thought to be a benign way of life. But it's not. It's one of the key toxins in our world, and it poisons our mind, our relationships and reduces us to immature babies crying, "what about him!".

As a group, try and find a few key areas where envy and coveting are a reality and explore ways that happiness might be laying underneath.

Thaw

• What most impacted you from the message?
• Are there areas you sense God has been trying to get you to notice with regard to envy before?
• How has this message reinforced what God has already been dealing with you about?

Read

• Proverbs 14:30
• Thoughts?

Leader note: The world tranquil is more commonly translated "whole" or "healthy" or "healed". This may affect the sense that your group gets in reading this passage.

Read

• James 4:1-4
• Thoughts?
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• What does it mean, specific to the context that James is discussing, to be a friend of the world?

Leader note: Some people are confused about "the world" and how God views it. Bear in mind that "God so loved the world" (John 3:16) and that we're called to love people/enemies/strangers. Friendship with the world means running its race and getting caught up in its ways. It says nothing about living isolated from it and judging it like so many Christians have taken to doing in the name of "not befriending the world".

• Why does he use the world "adulteresses"?
• Other times in the Bible, idolatry is called adultery. What's the connection with envy or coveting?

Read

• Deut 5:7, Deut 5:21
• Thoughts?
• What is the connection between these two commands (these being numbers 1 and 10)?
• Why would God care about our longings for other people's life?
• What does it tell us about God that envy made the "top ten"?

• Respond as a group to this quote:

Be a first rate version of your self, rather than a second rate version of somebody else -Judy Garland

Apply

• What areas of your day-to-day existence are tainted with envy over someone else's life?
• How does the success of others affect you? Be specific about the areas of success that come to mind.
• How is envy slavery?
• How is envy and coveting distracted you from God?
• In what ways do you wish to be envied?
• How is this a toxin in your relationships?
• Do you envy anyone in this group, and are you willing to confess how it has served as a wall, if even very small, between the two of you and in your freedom with God?

Prayer

• As a group, pray that the grip of coveting and envy would lose it's strength, and that happiness and fulfillment can be found in trying not to find it in someone else's life. Pray that the members of the group would take responsibility for their own responsibilities, and that they would each follow Christ and not worry about the affairs, belongings and experiences of others.