Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Genesis 37)
Date: September 22, 2024
Have you ever been around people who are just…content. They have things, but those things don’t have them. They never seem to be affected by what the people around them have…or what the people around them acquire. Hard circumstances might trouble them, but they don’t seem to overly burden them. There are certainly things they value, but they seem to be able to see a value in those things that goes beyond the things themselves such that if they suddenly didn’t have those things for some reason, they aren’t going to come unraveled over that. Now, on the one hand, these kinds of folks can be really hard to be around because they sometimes serve as a magnifying glass on all the places where we aren’t like that. We don’t like standing in front of mirrors that highlight our known flaws. At the same time, though, these are the kinds of people we want to be around because they carry with them a kind of promise that we can be better than we are. They give us an enacted vision of who we could be. They show us that a life free from the burdens and worries that so often drag us down really is a possibility. The truth is, though, that contentment like that is a hard mark to hit.
In the same vein, have you ever been around people who just aren’t content? With anything? They always want more. Enough doesn’t seem to enter their thinking. And while wanting more isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, they take it to the next level. They don’t ever seem to stop at the things they have. They want the things other people have. If someone else gets something they don’t have, they are looking for a way to get one for themselves, even if that happens to come at the other person’s expense. That is, they don’t just want what the other person has for themselves, they want the other person not to have it. And don’t even think about making them think you’re trying to get what they have decided is theirs. They’ll part with it about as quickly as a toddler with a new toy, and they’ll guard it just as jealously. In fact, jealousy is the right description for how these folks behave. Jealousy is never a good look on a person. More than just being a bad look, though, when jealousy makes its way into our relationships, it often makes an enormous mess. Those are not fun waters to navigate.
This morning we are in the second-to-last part of our teaching series, Stormy Waters. For the last several weeks, and with the help of the stories of some of the families we find in the collection of origin stories in the Scriptures called Genesis, we have been talking about how to navigate times of conflict in our families. Conflict is simply a fact of this life. It’s part of the burden of living in a world that is broken by sin. But conflict that happens within the context of a family can be especially troublesome because we so often can’t escape it. Because of that, we have to learn to navigate it. We have to learn to navigate it well because if we don’t, it is easy to get lost in those storms and find ourselves sinking beneath the waves.
So far on our journey, we have talked about family conflicts that come from differences between family members, from feeling like our rights have been denied us, and from playing favorites. A commitment to righteousness, trust in God, and pursuing the impartial love of God in our relationships is the way through these stormy waters. Differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide. And when we play favorites, nobody wins. Then, last week, rather than talking about another specific source of conflict, through the story of Jacob and Esau’s reconciliation after many years divided from each other we examined another sure pathway through the storms of conflict: humility. Humility on our part can allow for all kinds of potentially troublesome situations to be avoided almost entirely. Even when we find ourselves in the middle of a storm, humility can act like a lighthouse, showing us how to get safely back to the shore. Humble pie isn’t always easy to eat, but it will bring satisfaction that isn’t otherwise accessible. Or, as we put it then, after a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.
The letter Jesus’ brother, James, wrote and which we have preserved for us in the new covenant Scriptures is sometimes referred to as the Proverbs of the New Testament. His little letter is full of all kinds of practical wisdom. In what we have as the fourth chapter of the letter, he asks a question that resonates with the conversation we’ve been having over the course of this series. “What is the source of wars and fights among you?” If we knew the answer to that, it seems like we could sure avoid a bunch of them. Thankfully, James gives us the answer to the question. Differences in personality or temperament, denied rights, and favoritism may be the proximate cause of conflict in our families, but those things rarely really lie at the heart of the issue. James points us in that direction in what he says next which I’m going to read from the New Living Translation because it words things in a way that really helps us to understand James’ point: “What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.”
I submit to you that at the real heart of so many of our conflicts is this sense of discontent with what we have combined with a longing for what others have. Well, there’s a word for that: jealousy. Jealousy lies at the root of so many of the conflicts we face not only in our families, but of conflicts we face generally. In other words: James was right. So many of the conflicts we find ourselves in have to do with stuff in one form or fashion. We may have too much stuff, not enough stuff, the wrong stuff, or some other stuff problem. But stuff seems to be at the heart of it. Even where physical stuff isn’t at issue, intangible stuff like a parent’s affection can be the source of our fighting. To take things back around to their beginning, the reason for all of this is that we are so prone to jealousy.
Jealousy is more than simply wanting what someone else has. Actually, merely wanting what someone else has is envy. Jealousy covers some of the same ground as envy, but it goes further. We don’t simply want what they have, we want them not to have it. We hate them for having it. And we want to keep them from getting what we consider to be ours so they aren’t able to get more of it from us. Put a couple of people prone to jealousy in a room together—or in the same family as each other—and you really will have some potent conflicts. You’ll have conflicts the likes of which we find in yet another family from the Genesis narrative. If you have your copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to Genesis 37. Here, the narrative focus has shifted to Jacob’s family, and specifically the relationship his sons have with one another. And the son at the center of the story here is a young man named Joseph.
Check this out with me starting right at the beginning of the chapter: “Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. These are the family records of Jacob. At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers. The young man was working with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought a bad report about them to their father.”
You really don’t need to know much more than that to know this is going to be a story rife with conflict. For starters, Joseph’s father, Jacob, had multiple wives. That’s always a recipe for disaster in the Scriptures. What’s more, we know from the part of the story that comes before this when Jacob is still growing his family that the two women mentioned here were not really wives at all. They were the servant girls of his actual wives who were used as pawns in a horrible game in which each sister was trying to have more children than the other in order to demonstrate that she was the better wife. The whole situation was a mess. It was made messier by Joseph’s bad report about these half-brothers of his father’s concubines. What the content of this report was, we have no idea. Maybe they had legitimately done something wrong, maybe it was just Joseph’s being a tattletale. Either way, they weren’t thrilled about it.
Then things got even worse. “Now Israel [remember, that’s the name God gave Jacob after they wrestled just before he met up with Esau like we talked about last time] loved Joseph more than his other sons because Joseph was a son born to him in his old age, and he made a long-sleeved robe for him.” Jacob obviously didn’t learn the lesson that favoritism was bad from his parents. Instead, he internalized it and repeated it. There’s a parenting sermon in there somewhere, but we won’t dwell on that for now. Joseph was the favorite. He was also the baby of the family minus his own younger brother, Benjamin. They were the last two sons born to his favorite wife before her death during childbirth. Jacob doted so much on Joseph that he actually had a special—and very expensive—coat made for him. Some translations call it a “coat of many colors.” If you’ve been the oldest child in a family, perhaps you can imagine how this whole situation might have played out.
“When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceably to him.” What motivated this hatred? Jealousy. They were jealous for their father’s affections, and rather than even trying to even things out and help avoid the brewing conflict, Jacob just kept doubling down on it by doing more and more for his favorite son.
Then things got worse still. Joseph started having these dreams that seemed to suggest he was going to rule over his family someday. Guess how well his already jealous brothers took that? “Then Joseph had a dream. When he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, ‘Listen to this dream I had: There we were, binding sheaves of grain in the field. Suddenly my sheaf stood up, and your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.’ ‘Are you really going to reign over us?’ his brothers asked him. ‘Are you really going to rule us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dream and what he had said.” Yeah…they weren’t thrilled.
Joseph’s dreams were so pretentious, though, that even his dad was a little uncomfortable hearing them. “He told his father and brothers, and his father rebuked him. ‘What kind of dream is this that you have had?’ he said. ‘Am I and your mother and your brothers really going to come and bow down to the ground before you?’ His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.”
Now, if you were one of Joseph’s brothers or his father, how would you handle this situation? You might give the counsel that they just needed to ignore it. So he was having these crazy dreams. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. How could he possibly know the future, and why on earth would anyone think the future was going to go like that? (Of course, that’s exactly how the future would go because these dreams were from God to prepare them for what was coming down the road at them, but that’s a conversation for another time.) Just blow this stuff off, and move on to the next thing. If you or I were Jacob, we might have told Joseph to eat a bit of humble pie, and to otherwise stop sharing his dreams with his brothers. You’d probably have told his brothers that there’s no reason to get jealous. That won’t make anything better.
If only you had been there to give that advice. What actually happened was that the next time Jacob sent Joseph out to check on his brothers, they ambushed him and sold him into slavery to some passing traders, and then told their father that a wild animal had killed him. The slave traders took him to Egypt, and the rest is history for another time. Their jealousy led them to take a situation that was bad and make it infinitely worse. Joseph was a pain in the neck to them with his…informing…their father about their labor, and his pretentiousness, and his stupid dreams, and his being their father’s favorite. But they took this one problem, and made it many times worse by giving into their jealousy and letting it direct their actions rather than the other way around. Now they had committed a grievous crime against their brother and they had lied to their father about it. In giving into their jealousy rather than overcoming it, they didn’t navigate out of the family conflict that they were spinning around in, they fed the storm and got lost in it. This is just what jealousy does. Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships.
Okay, but if jealousy is such a big deal in our family conflicts, what exactly causes it, and how can we avoid it? Jealousy is primarily caused by two things. The first is a lack of contentment. People who are content with who they are and what they have aren’t prone to being jealous of the people around them. In seeking to understand why you might be dealing with jealousy in your heart, you’re going to need to probe a bit deeper and ask a harder question: are you content with your life? Are you content with what you have? Are you content with the state of your relationships? If not, why not? What is it that you want more of? What do you feel should be there that isn’t?
What would it take for you to feel more content? If the answer to that question is a thing of some kind—even an intangible one—why that thing? What about that thing do you think will solve this lack in your heart and mind? Is it possible that you could be seeking contentment in the wrong places? After all, if you are seeking contentment in a thing, you may not be able to get that thing. What then? Or, maybe you do get that thing, but then they come out with a newer and better thing…because they always come out with a newer and better thing. What do you think the chances are that you start to feel discontent again without this newer and better thing? If your discontentment is because of a relational issue, what would need to change in order for you to feel more content? Why that? What is it about that change that you think would make you feel more content with the status of your relationship? Is there a possibility the thing that needs to change in the relationship is in you first and not them? For instance, if you learned to see things differently, could that make a significant impact on your lack of contentment in the relationship? These aren’t terribly comfortable questions, but they are important ones to ask and answer honestly if you really want to understand the root of the problem here. Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships. If you don’t know the source of the mess, it’s hard to clean it up.
The other major factor in our jealousy is a lack of trust. The fact is, we can’t always get what we want on our own. This feeds that spirit of discontentment we just talked about. If there’s something we want that we can’t get on our own, we need to consider whether this thing is a need or merely a desire. If it’s just a desire, then we need to get over it. We can’t have everything we want in this world and that’s just part of life. Some things we can have if we are willing to work hard for them and make the necessary sacrifices, but some things will be forever off the table. If this thing we want is really something we need, though, being jealous of another person for having it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Such an emotional posture betrays a lack of trust in God to provide it. Now, His provision may well come through the hard work you do using the gift He’s given you to do that, but however He provides it, isn’t that better than getting all emotional turned in knots simply because someone else has it before you do? What good does that accomplish? Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships.
If that’s all where jealousy comes from, though, what can we actually do about it? Three things. Two of these are internal things that directly counter the most common inputs for jealousy. The third takes these more internal attitudes and intentionally extends them outward. Let’s start here. Jealousy is often caused by a lack of contentment in our hearts and minds. Okay, so then, does countering jealousy just mean being more content. That seems a bit too obvious. Well, while that’s certainly the goal, greater contentment isn’t something we can just will ourselves into. It is an attitude developed over time and with lots of intentionality. And the way to develop contentment is by pursuing a path of gratitude.
Becoming a person of gratitude is about more than saying “thank you” more often. It is about learning to engage with our entire lives through a lens of gratefulness. In every circumstance we face, we begin to find something for which we can be grateful. Sometimes this is fairly easy as when everything is going pretty well. Sometimes it’s harder and takes a lot of creativity. Either way, there’s always something for which we can be grateful. We need to train ourselves to be on the lookout for these things rather than things we don’t have but still want. This takes effort. Some days it takes a lot of effort. Over time, though, we can get ourselves to the point where looking for points of gratitude is our first instinct in every circumstance we face. Well, when we are focused on gratitude, discontentment won’t be something that registers very quickly or easily in our hearts and minds any longer. We’ll be too caught up in finding reasons for gratitude to give much attention to what we don’t have. Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships. Well, when you’re grateful, you’re far less likely to be jealous.
The second counter to jealousy in our hearts is a direct response to the other jealousy trigger we talked about. If you are jealous of other people—including and especially people in your family—because of a lack of trust that God is going to provide you everything you need, then the solution is simple: learn to trust Him more. Of course, like with becoming more content, we can’t simply will ourselves into that. So, how do we do it? By getting to know Him more. Okay…but how do we do that? The same way you’d get to know any other person better. By spending time with Him. By listening to what He has to say. By talking to Him. By being around other people who already know and trust Him.
And if those sound at all familiar, it’s because those are the same things I tell you all the time will help you grow in your faith. When you engage regularly and intentionally with God through the Scriptures, when you engage regularly and intentionally with God through prayer, and when you engage regularly and consistently with God through His people in His church, you are going to grow in your faith. You are going to grow in your knowledge of God. You are going to grow in your ability to trust in God. And when you grow in that trust, you don’t have to bother with being jealous. Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships. A person of trust doesn’t have to walk that path.
One last thing. While becoming a person of gratitude and learning to trust God more fully in your day-to-day life will make you a more pleasant person to be around, they are mostly internal changes to combat the storm of jealousy. The fact nonetheless remains that people around you are going to get things you don’t have. They’ll get things you want. They’ll get things you thought should have been yours. Those experiences can still trigger jealousy in our hearts. Rather than sitting back and waiting for the storm to swamp us, a better approach is to go and meet the challenge head-on. When someone around you experiences something good, get into the habit of celebrating them for it. Rather than begrudging them for it, be intentional about sharing in their enjoyment of the moment. Be excited for them. Be excited with them. Let yourself get caught up in their emotional lift and experience one yourself.
And if this sounds like a strange thing to experience, it shouldn’t. If you are a sports fan, you experience this every time your team scores a dramatic win. When that happens, you are happy about it. Now, did you have anything in even the remotest sense to do with that victory? Of course not. You don’t get anything for it. None of the financial windfall those players are going to receive will land in your bank account. There’s no actual benefit to you in that win at all. And yet, in celebrating with them, you are excited too. Strive to enjoy that with all the people around you, not just your sports heroes. Jealousy always makes a mess in our relationships. When you are celebrating with the people around you in the moments you might be tempted toward jealousy, you won’t have any time for such petty pursuits. You’ll be too busy celebrating. And celebrating is better than being jealous.
Okay, so we have talked about how to navigate the storm of differences in personality and temperament. We’ve sailed through the seas of the perception of denied rights. We’ve worked our way through the whirlpool of favoritism. We have seen how humility can provide us a steady foundation when the waves of conflict grow large. Now we have learned how to combat our natural tendency toward jealousy. With all of these things in place, you can navigate family conflicts in a way perhaps you never have. There’s just one more piece of the puzzle here. Come back next week to hear from special guest, Mark Mabry, as he talks about the power of forgiveness.