Comparison assigns value, establishes prices, and promises returns. We spend attention discovering where we stand. We spend effort improving that standing. Sometimes we spend obedience because the life we envy seems to offer a better return.
Noticing that someone has more skill is not the trouble; that can be honest, even useful. The trouble begins when the noticing turns to resentment, and another person’s circumstances become our measure of God’s goodness. Their ability and their role make ours look small. Their abundance becomes evidence that God has withheld something we must have to be content.
We establish the valuations, then ask God to honor them.
When I first started my career in technology, more than 35 years ago, I was surrounded by people who were much smarter and more skilled than I was. It pulled me towards that comparison economy through envy. This led to a competitive quest for superiority. It’s one of the things in the world that competed with my relationship with God.
That is how the world places people, by who stands above whom. Those in Christ have another place, and Paul describes it as a body.
When we think, “I wish I had their role,” Paul answers with who did the arranging: “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” (1 Corinthians 12:18, ESV) Paul tells them, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27, ESV) Within that body, a difference between members is no reason to despise ourselves or to dismiss someone else.
Paul is writing to Corinth about spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1), given by the Spirit to that first-century church as He willed (1 Corinthians 12:11). Our abilities are a different thing, but what Paul goes on to say about the members still holds, because that body remains, and what we have we also received: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7, ESV)
Then he takes up the ranking itself, the thought that their ability is better than ours, and turns it over. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” (1 Corinthians 12:21, ESV) The parts we would rank lowest, the ones “that seem to be weaker,” Paul calls “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22, ESV), and “God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it” (1 Corinthians 12:24, ESV). The world’s way of placing people would never price the body that way.
God composed the body “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.” (1 Corinthians 12:25, ESV) When one member is honored we rejoice with it, and when one suffers we suffer with it (1 Corinthians 12:26). Comparison makes a rival of someone we have been joined to love.
Peter says what a received gift is for: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10, ESV). A steward holds what belongs to someone else, and Paul says the same of us in 1 Corinthians, while warning against sexual immorality: our bodies are members of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:15), and “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20, ESV) What we received was given for one another, and while we assess someone else’s usefulness, the service goes undone.
The thought “I would be content if I had what they have” has its own answer. Paul told the Philippians he had learned “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12, ESV), and that he could do all things “through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13, ESV). We can begin learning that dependence in the circumstances we have today.
Where has watching someone else’s life become a reason to withhold obedience in your own?
Where envy has already cost us obedience, we confess it, and He is faithful and just to forgive (1 John 1:9). Looking back on back in my life, I find the angst of it all shaped my closer walk with the Lord, when envy of others was replaced with identity and value from God. So we go back to what we were given, and to the member whose need we have overlooked.
The same care goes with us into the world. Jesus said it is by the love His disciples have for one another that “all people will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35, ESV), and Paul carries the good past the church: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” (Galatians 6:10, ESV) The neighbor we have been measuring ourselves against is someone we can do good to instead.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016.
Drafted with AI assistance from Herbert Berkley’s own words and reviewed by him.
