The Greek word Paul reaches for is zēloō. It is the verb form of zēlos — a word that, by itself, can go either way. Used well, zēlos is the heat of zeal. The man who is zealous for a good cause pours his energy into it. Used badly, the same heat is envy — the rising resentment a man feels when someone else has what he wanted. Same word. Same temperature inside the chest. Only the direction of the gaze decides which it is. The zealous man is looking at the work in front of him. The envious man is looking sideways at his brother.
Paul has just used the word in its good sense at the end of the previous chapter, closing his discussion of spiritual gifts with the line “But earnestly desire the greater gifts” (12:31, NASB). The verb there is the same root — zēloute, be zealous for. Then he writes the love chapter, and the third thing he says love is, is the opposite use of the same word. Love does not zēloō. Love does not envy. Whatever zeal you were just told to have, do not let it curdle into the wrong kind of zeal — the kind that watches your brother get the gift you wanted and resents him for it.
What was happening in Corinth
If patience was missing in Corinth because the wealthy could not wait for the slaves at the Lord’s Supper, and kindness was missing because the strong were wounding the weak with their knowledge about meat, jealousy was loose in Corinth because the spiritually gifted had built a hierarchy out of God’s gifts and were measuring one another on it.
Paul spends all of 1 Corinthians 12 on the problem. The believers there had received a wide range of miraculous gifts — tongues, prophecy, healing, words of knowledge, discernment of spirits, and others. Rather than receive each gift as God’s distribution to His one body, the Corinthians had ranked the gifts and ranked themselves. The showier the gift, the higher the rank. Tongues was at the top, because tongues was the gift you could not miss in the assembly. The quieter gifts — service, helping, administration — sat at the bottom, because they did not draw attention. And the believer with a quieter gift found himself looking sideways at the believer with a louder one and wondering why God had given more to him.
Paul’s correction is patient and long. He spends the whole chapter on it. The two sentences in the middle of the chapter that hit the envy directly are these:
And the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”; or again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”
1 Corinthians 12:21 (NASB)
That is the rebuke aimed at the gifted. You with the visible gift, do not look down at your brother whose gift is small.
But verses 25 and 26 turn the same rebuke around and aim it at the one who feels small:
…so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.
1 Corinthians 12:25–26 (NASB)
If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Read that slowly. Paul is not saying if one member is honored, the others tolerate it. He is not saying the others endure it. He is saying the others rejoice — the same word that describes the honor itself. The believer who has been given the small gift is not commanded to swallow his disappointment in silence; he is commanded to be genuinely glad that his brother has been given the large one. That is the death of envy. The hand does not envy the eye. The hand is glad the eye sees.
Then Paul lands the bridge:
But earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way.
1 Corinthians 12:31 (NASB)
Earnestly desire. The verb is zēloute — burn for the better gifts. And then, immediately, a still more excellent way. Because zēloute without love becomes zēloō in 13:4. The same fuel can fire either engine. The way without love is the way that burns sideways, at your brother. The more excellent way burns forward, toward what God has actually placed in front of you.
Now you can hear what Paul is doing in 13:4. Love is not jealous. You said you had love. Your jockeying over gifts shows otherwise. The one who has been given little envies the one who has been given much. The one who has been given much looks down on the one who has been given little. Both of you have forgotten that you are members of one body, and that the body is the Lord’s. The love you claim to have is not the love I am writing about.
The God who never envies
Here we have to be careful, because Scripture says many times that God is a jealous God:
…for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God… — Exodus 20:5 (NASB)
For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. — Deuteronomy 4:24 (NASB)
So the believer reads 1 Corinthians 13:4 — love is not jealous — and reads Exodus 20:5 — I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God — and the two seem to contradict. They do not.
The word covers two different things in English, and Scripture uses it for both. The first is covenant jealousy — the guarding, protective jealousy of a husband for his wife. When God says He is jealous, He means He will not share His people with idols, the way a faithful husband will not share his wife with another man. That kind of jealousy is honorable. It is one of the proofs that God’s love for His people is the love of a covenant Lord, not the loose affection of a stranger. The whole book of Hosea is God’s covenant jealousy written out the long way.
The second is envy — the resentment of another’s good. That kind of jealousy is the kind 1 Corinthians 13:4 forbids, and it is a kind God never has. God is the source of every gift. He has nothing to envy:
Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.
James 1:17 (NASB)
The Father of lights does not look sideways. He cannot. There is no good He does not already have, and there is no good in any of His creatures that did not first come from His hand. The God who hands out the gifts cannot be jealous of the people receiving them. He is glad. He is the source of their gladness. If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it is not just Paul’s instruction to the church; it is the very thing the God who set the gifts in place is doing toward the member He honored.
So when Paul tells believers love is not jealous, he is calling them into the disposition of God Himself in this matter. The Christian who is not envious of his brother is showing — in the small currency of his own heart — the same character the Father has on a scale the universe cannot contain.
Patience absorbs, kindness gives, freedom from envy rejoices
Patience and kindness, as we saw in the last two chapters, are a pair. Patience absorbs the wrong. Kindness initiates the unrequired good. The third attribute, not jealous, sits beside them and does a third thing. Freedom from envy rejoices in the good of another.
Where patience says, I will not strike back at you, and kindness says, I will do good for you, freedom from envy says, I am glad about what God has given you, even though He has not given the same to me.
It is the hardest of the three for most believers, and it is the test that exposes whether the first two were genuine. A man can absorb a wrong out of cold pride — I will not stoop. That is not patience; it is contempt that has learned to hold its tongue. A man can do an unrequired good out of vanity — they will see how generous I am. That is not kindness; it is performance. But no man envies his brother for show. Envy is what is in the heart when no one is watching, when the friend’s good news comes by text and there is no audience to perform for, when the only person who knows your reaction is you and God. If the inside of you, in that moment, is glad, patience and kindness have a foundation underneath them. If the inside of you is bitter, the first two were probably costumes.
What it looks like
Freedom from envy looks like a teenage girl who, when her best friend gets asked to the school dance and she does not, congratulates her without a single second’s pause and means it.
It looks like a high-school junior who, when the starting position he had worked for all summer goes to another player, walks over to that player after the announcement and tells him he is glad for him, and then practices harder.
It looks like a senior who, when the scholarship she was hoping for is awarded to a classmate who also applied, finds the classmate in the hallway and tells her congratulations before the classmate has time to brace for an awkward conversation.
It looks like a teenager who, when his best friend gets the car, the job, or the freedom he’s been wishing for himself, throws himself into celebrating with him, because his friend’s happiness is now his happiness, even though his own situation hasn’t changed yet.
It looks like a student worker or club member who, when the leadership spot or officer role she wanted goes to someone else, walks up to the new leader and asks how she can help them make the club or the project succeed.
It looks like a Christian who, when another believer in the congregation begins to be used by God in a way he had hoped to be used, opens his hands and his prayer life to ask for the brother’s success rather than his own.
It looks like a sibling who, watching their brother or sister receive an award or a burst of praise from their parents that they did not get, is genuinely proud of them, without running a silent mental tape comparing who gets treated better.
It looks like a student who hears about a classmate from middle school whose family just moved into the biggest neighborhood in town, and who, instead of making a cynical comment or feeling small, can say honestly, I am really glad for them.
It looks like Christ. The One who, when John the Baptist’s disciples came to Him with John’s question, sent them back with the answer — and then turned to the crowds and praised John as more than a prophet (Matthew 11:9), without a flicker of the rivalry the world would have expected between two such men. The One who, hanging on a cross between two criminals, gave paradise to the one beside Him who had nothing to give back. He owed no one anything. He never once begrudged another the good that was His to give.
The world’s envy, and ours
The world has built much of its economy on envy. Marketing tells you that you deserve what the man next to you has, and that you should not rest until you have it. The newer phone. The bigger house. The better-looking partner. The image of the better life. Whole industries exist to make you discontent with what God has given you, by holding up what He has given someone else.
Social media has industrialized the same machinery. The believer scrolls past photographs of vacations he has not taken, weddings he has not been invited to, children who look happier than his, marriages that look easier than his, and the small fuel of zēloō lights in his chest a hundred times a day. Most of him does not even notice. The fire has been so steady for so long it feels like the temperature of the room.
The Christian is called out of all of it. He cannot afford to live with that fire burning inside him. It is not love. It is the opposite of love. It is the thing Paul names, three traits into his list, as the thing that proves the love a believer claims is not yet the love God is calling him to.
The way out is not to scroll less, though scrolling less may help. The way out is to remember what God has actually given you, and to receive it as enough. He has given you life. He has given you a body. He has given you, if you are in Christ, the forgiveness of every sin and a place in His household forever. He has given you the gifts He chose for you, in the measure He chose, for the place He has set you in His body. He has given you Himself. Anything more is grace upon grace. Anything less — any good your neighbor has that you do not — is a gift from the same Father, and it is not deducted from yours. There is no shortage in the storehouse of God. Your classmate making the varsity team is not your failure. Your friend getting invited to the group chat is not your isolation. Your peer’s academic success is not your stupidity. They are different gifts from the same hand, to different people, and the right response to all of them is the rejoicing of one member of the body for another member’s honor.
A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ
If you have not yet obeyed the gospel, the math of God’s grace is news that should change how you hear this chapter.
You may have spent much of your life under the assumption that the people who are doing well — the friend with the easy faith, the sibling with the stable marriage, the classmate who seems to have everything together — are doing well at your expense. That if there is only so much blessing to go around, their share is the share you did not get. That is not how it works. God’s storehouse is not a fixed pie that runs out when too many people show up. The God who fed five thousand from a boy’s lunch is not running out of anything, and He is not picking and choosing between you and the brother you have been comparing yourself to.
Coming to Christ does not mean you have caught up to people who were ahead of you. It means you have entered a family in which the categories of ahead and behind no longer apply. The church kid who has grown up in the pews and knows every answer has no structural advantage over the person who obeys the gospel today — both sit at the exact same table of grace in the end. Christ paid the same price for both of them and gave the same Spirit to both of them and prepared the same place for both of them.
The first move toward losing the envy that has cost you so much is to come into the household where the math no longer works the way the world has trained you to think. Hear the gospel — that Christ died for your sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Believe it. Repent of the life you have been living without Him. Confess Him as Lord. Be baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). Then look around the family you have entered, at every brother and sister whose gifts and graces are not the same as yours, and learn the new arithmetic. None of theirs comes out of yours. All of theirs and all of yours come from the same Father, and there is more where every one of them came from.
Where this leaves us
Three traits in, the floor of love is laid. Patience that absorbs the wrong. Kindness that gives the unrequired good. Freedom from envy that rejoices in the good of another. The believer who has these three has stopped being a problem for the people around him and has begun to be a help. The believer who has none of them, no matter how much he claims to love, is still living in the same room he was in before he claimed it.
The next attribute moves from the inside of the heart to the outside of the mouth. The believer who has stopped envying his brother’s gift is now ready to be told what to do about his own. Love does not brag and is not arrogant. The disease that breeds envy in the small-gifted breeds pride in the large-gifted, and Paul will not let either one of them live.
That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Watch your brother get what you wanted, and rejoice. Watch the friend you have prayed for get the answer to a different prayer than the one you have been praying for yourself, and rejoice. Watch the gift you did not receive land in the hand of someone who did, and rejoice. The believer who can do that is being made into the image of the One whose hand handed out every gift, and who has never, in all of eternity, looked sideways at any of His children with anything in His eye but love.
THINK
Think of one person whose good news has been hard for you to hear lately — the friend whose engagement landed before yours, the classmate whose grade came in higher than yours, the coworker whose promotion went past you, the brother whose marriage looks easier than yours, the sister whose child obeys without the fight yours puts up. You owe them nothing extra. You have not wronged them. The world would call you generous for keeping your envy hidden. Freedom from envy asks more. Pray for that person right now — not for them to be less, but for God to bless them MORE than He has so far. Then, this week, find one specific thing about what God has done in their life that you genuinely admire, and tell them. The envy will not survive the prayer or the sentence. And the heart that has just been freed of envy in one place is the heart God will use to free others, in time, in every other place it is still hiding.