“It is Easy Being Green!”
I Corinthians 13:4
December 8, 2002
Love of Another Kind – I Corinthians 13
Talk about romantic; it’s hard to envision a scene much more so. My wife and I met…in a pizza parlor…at the birthday party of a mutual friend…who loved the Muppets. There, staring up at me from my plate, was the one and only Kermit the Frog. Thus did love begin to bloom!
Kermit the Frog is a much-loved American icon, whose signature line is “It’s not easy being green!” I came across the following article, though, from the Winston-Salem Journal; it ran on Thanksgiving Day, and details Kermit’s current state of mind. Allow me to read excerpts:
“November has been a big month for a little frog. Earlier this month, Kermit the Frog got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Today, a new Kermit balloon is unveiled during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. And Friday, his latest project, It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, makes its debut on NBC. Not bad for Kermit, a 2-foot tall amphibian Muppet who is known for lamenting that it’s not easy being green. But he has been feeling more empowered lately.
"I’ve actually learned to embrace being green," Kermit said by telephone from Los Angeles. "Unfortunately, so has Miss Piggy, which can make it a little difficult." Kermit’s role in (his new) film wasn’t much of a stretch. "I basically play the part of Kermit the Frog," he said. "It’s a role I was born to play. I do feel a little typecast, but it’s easy to learn the dialogue."
“Although the movie The Muppets Take Manhattan ended with his marriage to the amorous Miss Piggy, Kermit is quick to point out that, in real life, he and the hammy actress are just friends. "I’ll admit, there was a time when there was a little spark between Miss Piggy and I, back in The Muppet Show days," he said. "But that was 25 years ago, and we still work together. We have a professional relationship."
“Miss Piggy may not feel the same way. "For the holidays afterwards, I’ve kind of heard a rumor that she’s planning this romantic getaway," Kermit said. "That’s where she tries to be romantic, and I try to get away. I get cold feet, and that’s not that atypical for a frog anyway."
“Above all else, Kermit tries to remain honest about himself and his career. "What you see is what you get," he said. "Short, green, and sort of moist."
“It’s not easy being green”, sighs Kermit. Ah, but I beg to differ; Shakespeare called jealousy “the green sickness”, and we speak of people being “green with envy”. In that vein, it is all too easy being green!
As we’ve begun our study of I Corinthians 13, asking what “love of another kind”, God’s kind, looks like, we’ve seen the absolutely indispensable nature of love. Paul has reminded us that things like conspicuous spirituality, limitless knowledge, extreme faith, and unbounded generosity are in and of themselves worthless without love. We would all do well to ponder with regularity that sobering truth! We then began to look at Paul’s description of what God’s kind of love looks like. Paul has told us that love is patient, that it withholds vengeance and retaliation, but that instead love acts with kindness, another fruit produced by the Holy Spirit in our lives as we yield ourselves to His control. Today, we continue to the next point in Paul’s description, the first in a serious of negative descriptions, which we find yet in verse 4: love “is not jealous”.
We see it in Eve, envious of God’s position and His knowledge, as she lustily reaches for the fruit from the forbidden tree. We see it in seething Cain, raising a crude implement above the head of his own brother, striking him again and again until Abel lay dead. We hear it in the words of Sarah, demanding that her handmaid Hagar, whom she had faithlessly given to her husband, be banished, having conceived a child. We see it again as eleven brothers devise an unthinkable plan to sell their own flesh and blood into slavery. Jesus paints us a picture of it in the person of an older brother who, instead of welcoming his little brother home with open arms, wonders why his father hasn’t feted him with such a lavish display. After all, he’s been faithful to his father, hasn’t he? He hasn’t gone out and wasted his life in riotous partying; he hasn’t made a mockery of the family name. What’s in it for him, if this scoundrel brother of his can get such a royal welcome back home from the pigpen? “It” is the green sickness, jealousy, envy.
We see it all around us today, do we not? How many world conflicts can be traced to jealousy? Palestinians are jealous of the Jews, and it likely cuts both ways. Militant Muslim cowards fueled in part by jealousy, no doubt, fly planes into tall buildings. Neighbors fight over boundaries of their land. And ironically, at this season of the year when we ought to be most cognizant of the importance of giving and sharing, Christmas, we find the sins of envy and jealousy being the driving forces behind 1001 ad campaigns. Here’s an interesting question; do you agree with me on this statement? “If we did away with the sins of jealousy and envy, the entire American economy would immediately collapse.” I believe that! Not that that makes these sins good, mind you!
The Greek word here is “zeloo”, which is a fairly neutral word, actually, meaning “to have a strong desire”. To be zealous, which we get from the same root word, can be a very good thing—if we are zealous for the things of God, that’s a good thing! God is spoken of as being a “jealous God”; He is jealous for His own glory, which is perfectly right, of course. We ought to be the same, filled with zeal to see the name of God glorified wherever it is not. Zeloo, then, depends upon the circumstances and its object as to whether this is a negative or a positive word.
In Paul’s context, of course, as it is most of the time when we think of the word “jealous”, the meaning is negative. It refers here to a strong desire toward an unworthy end. Love toward another, Paul is saying, does not act with a strong desire to seize from that person what he has; it does not act with a sinful possessiveness toward our own possessions in the face of the need of another. Proverbs 27:4 speaks of its seriousness: “Wrath is fierce, and anger is a flood, but who can stand before jealousy?"” Jealousy is described in Song of Solomon 8:6 as being “as cruel as the grave”. One of the Ten Commandments speaks to it; “you shall not covet”. One person described jealousy as the “jaundice of the soul”. A witches’ brew comes together to produce it!
The Witches’ Brew of Jealousy:
Take two cups of Self-Love .
We all love ourselves, without exception. I know I say this a lot, and maybe you get tired of hearing it, but unfortunately we live in such a psychobabble culture that even well-meaning Christian teachers buy into the unbiblical idea that we need to learn to love ourselves. That is completely antithetical to the teaching of Jesus and the Bible. Consistently, the Bible counsels us that our problem is that we love ourselves too much, and that we need to learn to love God and others more; Jesus said we need to love others as we love ourselves. This is the base ingredient in the brew—our prideful orientation is always to look out for our own best interests first and foremost. We prove this in a hundred and one ways every day.
Mix in a heaping tablespoon of Ingratitude.
I appreciate that we set aside one day a year for the practice of Thanksgiving—although as Chuck Colson pointed out in a recent BreakPoint commentary, we as Americans seem to have little grasp on Who it is to Whom we ought to be thankful!
“This Thanksgiving Day recalls another Thanksgiving years ago, spent in happy hours with my children and grandchildren. Over turkey and dressing, I decided to quiz my eight-year-old grandson, as proud grandparents often do on such occasions.
“I leaned over and said, "Charlie, why did the Pilgrims celebrate the first Thanksgiving?" Charlie resorted to the obvious answer, as grandchildren often do on such occasions. He said, "They wanted to give thanks."
"And to whom did the Pilgrims give thanks?"
“The boy’s face clouded and he squirmed a little. "I don’t know—I guess they were thanking the Indians," he said. "That’s what we learned at school."
Not only are we confused as a society about Who it is to Whom we ought to be thankful, we just don’t do enough of it, I’m afraid. And we as Christians are far from immune to this ingratitude. What percentage of our prayers are prayers of thanksgiving to God, instead of requests for things?
Add a teaspoon of Comparison. Shake vigorously.
It’s hard not to be envious of some people; they seem to have it all together, to be the people we aspire to being ourselves, and we can become jealous instead of loving. But we often build up a false image of those people; truth is that nobody actually lives a perfect Ward and June Cleaver existence; everyone has problems and struggles and temptations and faults. On the 1966 Sounds of Silence album, those great theologians Simon & Garfunkel set to music words inspired by a poem written by Edwin Arlington Robinson. The title of their song was “Richard Cory”:
They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker’s only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.
But I work in his factory, And I curse the life I’m living
And I curse my poverty, And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be, Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.
The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes:
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he’s got.
But I work in his factory, And I curse the life I’m living
And I curse my poverty, And I wish that I could be,
Richard Cory.
He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."
The Bible tells us that when we compare ourselves with ourselves, we are not wise, but oh, how this temptation gets to us! Jealousy takes comes to flower in the atmosphere of comparison. We see another person who is a little bit better or a little bit smarter or a little better looking (well, I don’t see many people better looking than myself, but…) or with a little more money or a bigger house or (and you fill in the blank from here). Our flesh, our sinful nature, wants those things for ourselves, and wishes that we were in that place with that stuff instead of the other person. Pastors are by no means immune to this; some of us are the most guilty of comparison. “Rev. _________’s church is bigger or growing faster than mine”, and so we feel an inadequacy, and begin to build resentment. Folks, there will always be someone who is a little better or has a little more. If we are the kind of people who are always looking for those things, who are always keeping score, then we set ourselves up for the sin of jealousy!
Fold in two teaspoons of Discontent.
When I compare myself with another, and find myself lacking, I then become discontent with what I have. For an American Christian to become discontent has to be one of the most grievous of all sins. For us not to recognize what we have first as believers, and then secondly as Americans; for us, instead of a grateful contentment, to be discontent, is to spit in the face of a God Who not only has dealt graciously with us in regard to our sin, but also of a God Who has privileged us to live in the richest nation on earth. There is not an American who has to legitimately wrestle with the issue of starving to death. I’m not fond of the welfare state in this country; I’d certainly scrap it and start over. But it exists, and the government will attempt to help people. Beyond this, there are charities and ministries and social programs which ensure that people’s basic needs are met. When we speak of poverty in this country, we have to do so with an asterisk, because our definition of poverty would qualify as middle or even upper class living in so much of the world! How can any of us be discontent? To do so is to be a stench in the nostrils of God!
Add a cup of Selfish Ambition.
James 3 speaks of “selfish ambition”; the Greek word eritheia speaks of the selfish desire we have for personal glory. Now, ambition can certainly be a good thing, if we are ambitious to do things that please and honor God. But if we harbor a desire for self-aggrandizement, in whatever form that takes, we sin against God and plant seeds of envy.
Resentment tends to add itself to the mixture.
Jealousy and envy do not begin when we admit that others have superior things, or talents, or treasure. Jealousy and envy begin when resentment comes over the fact that others have and we don’t. The jealous ear hears rumor and gossip, and thrills to pass them on. The jealous heart feeds upon suspicion and turns it into rage. The jealous, resentful person sees others as competition at best, and enemies at worst. Envy and jealousy are borne of resentment!
Simmer for a good length of time; eventually, mixture will come to a boil on its own. Yields a batch of rich, green Jealous Envy.
What a powerful, potent witches’ brew! Sadly, it’s far too easy to be green!
But love is not jealous. How am I going to allow God to produce in me the fruit of love in my life, a real love which does not envy?
The Antidote for Jealousy:
I. A Changed Focus – The Kingdom of God
Matthew 6:33
“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you.”
Where are you looking? What are you focusing on? If your focus is not the glory and the kingdom and the will of God, it will be on something else, and that something else is bound to lead ultimately to jealousy and envy. When my focus is wrong, I compare myself with others. When my focus is wrong, I am ungrateful for what I have. When my focus is wrong, I am discontent and I seek to gain more for myself. Where are you focused?
II. A Changed Attitude – Gratitude
I Thessalonians 5:18
“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
In my Top Ten Toughest Bible verses, this verse appears: in everything give thanks! You’re lying if you say that that is easy! And yet gratitude to God for everything will guard our hearts against the sin of jealousy. Bible commentator Matthew Henry, after being robbed, wrote in his diary the following: “Let me be thankful. First, because I was never robbed before. Second, because although they took my wallet, they did not take my life. Third, because although they took my all, it wasn’t much. Fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”
III. A Changed Perspective - Contentment
Philippians 4:11-13
"I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me." Here is what Paul says in another place in II Corinthians 11:
“24Five different times the Jews gave me thirty-nine lashes. 25Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. Once I spent a whole night and a day adrift at sea. 26I have traveled many weary miles. I have faced danger from flooded rivers and from robbers. I have faced danger from my own people, the Jews, as well as from the Gentiles. I have faced danger in the cities, in the deserts, and on the stormy seas. And I have faced danger from men who claim to be Christians but are not.[1] 27I have lived with weariness and pain and sleepless nights. Often I have been hungry and thirsty and have gone without food. Often I have shivered with cold, without enough clothing to keep me warm.”
Shipwrecked? “How ya doin’, Paul?” “Well, I’m freezing cold, and swimming for my life, but I’m content!”
Stoned? “How ya doin’, Paul?” “Well, I’m banged up and bruised, but I’m content!”
39 lashes? “How ya doin’, Paul?” “Well, I’ll be in bed for days recovering from this, but it happened for the sake of Jesus, so I’m content.”
Hungry? Thirsty? Freezing cold? “How ya doin’, Paul?” “Well, I’m mighty hungry, and I’m dying of thirst, but I’m content!”
Are you?
