What is worse than cancer? People talk about “the big C”. When we talk about cancer or somebody having cancer, we go into hushed tones and we talk quietly. We look worried when we think of cancer because cancer is still a mystery. The very word cancer can put a knot in our stomachs, but is it really the “big C”? Is cancer so bad? If cancer can only kill our bodies, what is an even bigger “C”? What is more dangerous for us eternally? I want to suggest something more deadly to your heart, soul and mind. It is something that can doom you even to an eternity without God in hell. It is something that can destroy you forever. It is the biggest “C” - it is covetousness.
Covetousness is what we are warned against in the ten commandments. As we look at the whole list of commandments, we are reminded that the tenth commandment gives us a clue to keep us from breaking the other nine. The tenth commandment is a key to unlock our understanding of why we fall into the danger of breaking the other nine commandments. God tells us that we are not to have any idols. We are not to misuse the Lord's name. We are to be faithful in our lives to Him. To honour Him. To rest on His day and to focus on Him. We're to honour our mother and father. We are to not murder. We are not to steal. We are not to commit adultery. We are not to steal and we are not to give false testimony.
In Exodus 20:17, we read the last of the ten commandments, which simply says: “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife. You shall not covet his manservant, or his maidservant, his servant, or his ox, his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” Here we see a reminder that this tenth commandment is the heart of the matter. Here we see why God gives us the other nine commandments, because it is a case of “the last shall be first.” If we can beat covetousness, we won't make other Gods. We won't compromise and go shopping on a Sunday. We won't steal or murder if we can know freedom from covetousness. We can know all the blessings that these ten commandments warn us to flee from. We talk about happiness, peace and contentment. However, very few people seem to have all of that because covetousness, is the cancer.
Firstly, what is covetousness? Covetousness is wrong desire. Covetousness's definition is “A desire for something you have no right to have or possess,” says William Barclay. Desires themselves are God-given. God makes us with the ability to have desires and desires can be good. The desire to provide for yourself is good. The desire to care for your family is good. The desire to do good, is good. We are designed to succeed, hence, we desire success. We are designed to produce and we desire to produce, as well as to work. Those are all good desires. However, wrong desires occur when we are willing to use dishonest means to steal or murder, to get what we want. When we use dishonourable means to attain that desire is wrong. We can think of the story in the Bible, of Joshua going into the Promised Land with the people of God and coming to the very first city; the City of Jericho. God said: “The first tenth, like in a tithe, belongs to Me. Set aside everything in that city as Mine. Give it to Me. Dedicate the spoils of war from that city to Me.” We are told that Joshua conquered the City of Jericho. One man by the name of Aiken saw a coat. He coveted that coat, he coveted the silver and gold that he found as they conquered that city. He hid it and took it for himself rather than giving it to God. His covetousness led to the death of many in Israel. It led to his own death and even the death of his family. His covetousness destroyed many lives. Covetousness is the sin that gives birth to all the other sins.
Covetousness is a very subtle sin. Covetousness comes in many different forms. There was a lady who came to me and she was a lovely Christian woman. She was a member of another church in the area and she told me that she had two problems with her church. There had been some sort of misunderstanding and she wanted to join our church. I must say, I was tempted to covet. Because she could be a lovely addition to our church. I wanted to welcome her into the church but as I sat listening to her story, and thinking and praying through the issues, it went against everything I believe. I believe that we as Christians should join a local Body of Christ and become members of that church. We must commit ourselves where we are. Through the local church we mature spiritually. We come into the church to be discipled and we go into grade one and we grow through grade one all the way to matric, and sometimes we even progress to teaching like a doctor in the church. We are meant to mature because it's mature people that reproduce. It's mature people who can make disciples of God's people and it's mature people that can reproduce mature believers that grow in faith. However, the problem is if we jump from church to church we don't mature. When we leave one church, we go all the way back to grade one again and we have to learn everything again. We have to once again, gain the trust and gain the privilege of serving in the Body of Christ. So, I gave the lady some biblical instruction on how to resolve the conflict and sort out the misunderstanding she had with her church. I sent her back to her church. Now we can all be tempted to covet many different things, even so-called spiritual things like more members in a church.
Covetousness really is a desire gone wrong. God created this world beautifully. He created this creation, and He filled this universe with His love, truth and all spiritual gifts. These are good gifts which come down from the Father above. He has given us good desires, but covetousness is a wrong desire. It's wanting what God does not want for us.
If there are wrong desires or covetousness, we need to secondly see that covetousness is not only a wrong desire, but it is a wrong desire in four different areas. It is firstly, desiring excessive material things. I'm sure you have seen that that the rich are not necessarily happier than the poor. They have all the luxuries they want and they have more than they need. All the stress, worries and insurance and the place to store everything they have accumulated, creates its own problems in and of itself. Money that buys material things doesn't solve our problems, as 1 Timothy 6:10 says that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” When our needs turn into “greeds,” that is when we need to turn back to God. That is why, we need to be very sensitive towards God and not to move out of the area of meeting genuine needs in our lives and change that genuine desire for an insistence on things that we do not need - our greed. We are to love God above all, and He promises to meet our needs but not our “greeds.” We must be careful of desiring excessive material things.
If we can also covet in the area of desiring status. Status is a more subtle covetousness. The Pharisees in Jesus’ day were condemned by Jesus. Matthew 23:5-7, tells us that they did everything for others to see them. Even the disciples, James and John desired status, we are told this in Mark 10:35-45, they wanted to sit on Jesus’ left and right in the Kingdom of Heaven. Desiring status gives birth to envy and jealousy as we see among the disciples after that incident. We sometimes want to be better than the Kardashians and we're keeping up with the conditions or trends, that places us in great danger. We want a bigger house, car, holiday, even a bigger church. We want to go where it's more comfortable, where we can be little babies on nursing milk all the time. Desiring status means that we want certain places within the church or some special position. We fall into great temptation. Just as we can desire material things, we can desire status.
We can also desire people, as that commandment says, in some relationships. However, God says, “No!” No to another man's wife or another woman's husband. God says that we are keep out of forbidden relationships. Don't look lustfully at another person. Don't desire another person either sexually or even for marriage. Do not desire what does not belong to you. In the Bible, the classic example of this desire was David. David was a man after God's own heart and did so many wonderful things. Yet, the Bible tells us that in his 50’s, when he should have been out at battle, he stayed back at home and looked out of his castle window and saw Bathsheba taking a bath. In that moment he not only coveted Bathsheba, another man's wife, but he then went on to commit adultery with her and even murdered her husband. God was going to take his life for that. In David's repentance he was forgiven. The consequences, however, remained after Uriah (Bathsheba’s husband) died. David and Bathsheba's first child died. The conflict that entered David's family remained for decades because David committed adultery, due to covetousness. Covetousness results in so much hurt for so many people. We can see that in our day and age, in a world is full of divorce and sexual infidelity, the pain for the children and the grandchildren goes on for generations. We need to remember not to desire people.
If there is desiring people falsely there is also desiring a substitute for God, an idol in other words. Colossians 3:5 is an insightful verse because it calls covetousness idolatry. It's when you put something or someone else in the position that God should have in your heart, that God alone can fill in your life. Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Christ Jesus.” Only God can fill and fit in that space in our lives. If we look for anything else in the place of God, that’s coveting. That thing we covet and put in our lives becomes an idol. We need to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind. When we desire a substitute for God, we end up worshiping an idol. It may be the idol of self-interest. Today we even have selfie sticks to see the bald patch in the back of our head that our predecessors never even saw. We end up worshiping at the shrine of personal gain, bowing down and compromising all our values for more and more. The monster of greed leads us down a road of dishonesty, lying, injustice, stealing and even murder. We see that in business, when profits become more important than a fair deal. When profits become more important than the welfare of the workers producing that product. We see the danger in which exploitation happens because of idolatry and greed. The idol of self-interest leads us down the road even to gambling. Gambling is a deadly disease because it's desiring an easy way to make money. Just like with a drug addict, needs more money his next fix, so gambling always needs a bigger and bigger “fix.” A little bit of gambling, becomes a lot of gambling and unfortunately gamblers do not know when to stop. Gambling destroys lives, families and whole generations. The same with drug addictions and substance abuse, the story goes on. When we desire anything in the place of God it becomes an idol.
If we can have wrong desires that lead to desiring material things, status, people and even substituting God. Then we need to know the roots of this covetousness. The roots lie in the idea that if we get what we want, it will bring us happiness. It's not more things that will bring us happiness but more God that will bring us lasting joy, peace and love. All of life proves the delusion of this belief; that the more things that we have will provide something to fill the vacancy in our heart. We've seen that with little children. When they want a new toy and they eventually get that new toy, they play with their new toy for an hour or two, sometimes a day or two, then it's discarded, it's tossed away. As little children covet, we as adults covet as well. The clue lies not in adding to our possessions but in taking away the wrong desires in our hearts.
If we can get around the lie of getting more will bring us happiness, we also need to get around the lie that things bringing happiness to us. Yes, things are necessary. Things have their place. We need food, clothes and a roof over our head. Despite having all these things, why are people not happy in the 21st century? People are better off than they have been for decades. In most contexts. If you think of your parents at your age, right now, they probably didn't have as much as you have. Yet today, so many people need a psychologist or a counsellor, because their hearts are still troubled and discontent. It's like a king who was dying of depression and called for the doctor. The doctor said that the cure for your depression lies in wearing the shirt of the happiest man in your kingdom. The king immediately sent for the happiest man, and he was brought a homeless man who didn't have a shirt on his back. The moral of the story is that things will not make you happy. It's not the different shirt but it's the heart that you need to put right. We can have more and more stuff yet, we can become more neurotic. In neurosis we spend more money on insurance, security bars and systems to guard our things. Even with more things we can be more dissatisfied and uneasy in ourselves. We must be aware of the lie that things will make us happy.
We also need to get to the root of another lie, the lie that a forbidden person will bring us happiness. The problem is that when we think we are in apparent ‘love’ (or rather lust) with someone else, there is the thrill of the moment. There is unfortunately no ultimate happiness as the secrets begin to poison the good things that God has given us. The guilt of hurting our family shames away all the happiness we have been trying to grasp. The roots of covetousness boil down to a dissatisfaction with what God has given you. It shows a lack of faith in His perfect love for you. Think back to Adam and Eve who had everything they needed in a perfect world, in a perfect garden that God Himself had prepared for them. Yet, they looked at that one fruit, as they were tempted by Satan, and desired it, because it looked good to eat. The Bible says in that moment their desire, their wrong desire, led them to disobedience. Their disobedience led to the disaster that is the world now. Not only do we all now sin because of our ancestors but we live in a broken world and even the environment is broken. We are no longer in Eden. We're in a world that is dying. Fortunately, Jesus is preparing a new heaven and a new earth for us. Covetousness got us into the mess that we're in.
What's the conclusion? What is the cure for covetousness? Well maybe we can look at the field of medicine and learn from the cures for cancer. What happens if you suspect you have cancer? Well you go for a diagnosis and when the doctor says, “You've got cancer.” You have to face that reality. You have to get treatment. You go to the doctor and perhaps another doctor for chemotherapy. You're tested and you're treated and ultimately, you need to keep healthy once that cancer has been rooted out of your body. In the same way, we need to deal with the cancer of covetousness. We need to firstly accept God's commandment, “Do not covet.” Don't let that desire to have more and more lead you to break all the other nine commandments.
Secondly, we need to search our hearts for any sign of covetousness. Am I perhaps greedy for possessions? Am I perhaps greedy for a position? Am I perhaps greedy for the praise of others or am I desiring prestige or some passion that we think will fill the emptiness that only God can fill? Is my ego so fragile that I need more and more to feel happy? Does self-interest primarily motivate me? Do I think that this world revolves around me? Well that's when we need to go to the doctor. Go to Doctor Jesus, the great physician of our souls. For Jesus alone can help us. Jesus can save us even from covetousness in our hearts and by His Holy Spirit give us the power to change. We then need to change our lifestyle. We need to change what is causing that covetousness. Perhaps we need to limit our extravagant lifestyle, that leads from one extravagance to another. We don't need the latest gadget or status symbol. We don't need more, because God gives us all that we need, when we need it. When we stop coveting more, we're able to give more to God and to His Kingdom. We’re able to make a difference in this broken world.
We can then enter into the disease maintenance stage where we keep ourselves from falling back into that deadly cancer, the cancer of covetousness. Where we perhaps don't take vitamins for our body, but we take good relationships to nurture our soul. People to hold us accountable, we can join small groups, cell groups, Bible studies and go to church. Which can allow us to mature as God's people. We can commit to a local body, even till we die. Where we are able to serve where God has put us and that manifests itself in our lives with obedience to God. We see that love and respect of our self is enough. We are able flee the compromising situations, and we seek to love others with a pure love and a faithful love. If we have the three loves: loving God, loving ourselves and loving our neighbour, we can be content knowing that we are loved. We feel that love as we share love with others. We don't have to covet anything. We don't have to possess everything because we realize that is not important. Godliness with contentment is a great gain. On the other hand, covetousness is the cancer of discontentment. Search your heart now.
Let us pray together. Lord Jesus, we come to You, and we thank you for Your word that warns us and commands us not to covet anything. Now there's so many different ways we can covet. We live in a world that specializes in encouraging us, marketing more and more things to covet. You have called us to a new way. A narrow way. A new path of joy, peace and contentment. We pray that You would forgive us of our covetousness. Help us to identify where we are coveting. What we are desiring that is wrong and to turn from that and to turn to You and ask You Lord Jesus, forgive me of my covetousness. Forgive me for desiring what You do not want for me. Help me to turn to You and focus on You and find in You the Living God, all the joy, peace and love that I need for this life and for eternity. Keep me from dying eternally from the cancer of covetousness. O Lord Jesus, free me today. Heal my broken heart, I pray. Fill me with Your love, Your peace and Your joy as I follow in Your footsteps, Lord Jesus. Amen.