Coveting Is An Equal-Opportunity Sin

Excerpt from Worldliness, Author - Dave Harvey


Coveting is an equal opportunity sin. It stalks the rich and poor alike.  The audience gathered around the Lord that day consisted largely of peasants, yet Christ took aim at their coveting and unbelief by relating the parable of the rich fool (12:13-21).  The issue is not tax brackets; it's desires.
     Consider the following true story:

Many years ago a major American company had trouble keeping employees working in their assembly plant in Panama.  The laborers lived in a generally agrarian, barter economy, but the company paid them in cash.  Since the average employee had more cash after a week's work than he had ever seen, he would periodically quit working, satisfied with what he had made.  What was the solution?  Company executives gave all their employees a Sears catalog.   No one quit then, because they all wanted the previously undreamed-of things they saw in that book.

The lesson is clear.  The mere availability of stuff can ignite covetous desires.  But we're called to walk a different road.  As this book's title suggests --Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World--we're to battle covetousness at the level of our desires. 


In my travels, I've visited believers living in poverty in the Philipppines, Ghana, South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka.  It's utterly inspiring to see courageous Christians endure and prevail in surroundings of squalor.  The Western church has much to learn about suffering from poor Christians in the world.  But the temptation to covet can be just at strong whether the stuff in question is a neighbor's goat or a neighbor's golf clubs.


Yes, affluence can be a spiritual disability that dulls people to their need for God.  Jesus was quite serious in saying "How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"  (Luke 18:34).  But this doesn't mean God is biased against the rich; it means the rich are often biased against God.  Their affluence feels like it meets needs, but it really diverts attention from the Savior to their stuff.


Locating materialism and consumerism in the coveting heart is important.  It offers a biblical diagnosis for a common social malady.  Consumer ailments don't begin with shopping addictions or "an offer I couldn't refuse."  The real problem is sin.  Austerity and indulgence won't cure the bankruptcy of soul and emptiness of life that commonly result when our covetous desires are allowed free reign.


(page 96)