Jealousy

Today's devotional: taken from YouVersion, Life Application Study Bible Devotion

The disciples were jealous. Nine of them together were unable to drive out a single evil spirit, but when they saw a man who was not one of their group driving out demons, they told him to stop. Our pride is hurt when someone else succeeds where we have failed, but Jesus says there is no room for such jealousy in the spiritual warfare of his kingdom. Share Jesus' open-arms attitude to Christian workers outside your group.

““Master,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.” “Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.””Luke‬ ‭9‬:‭49‬-‭50‬ ‭NIV‬‬

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Reflections

Indeed in such situations there is no need for us to be jealous. In fact we probably have to think about why our prayers doesn’t work, but this guy’s prayers just work as is. What did he do in order to succeed? what are we missing here? I think the point here is not to compare, but to seek clarifications, to learn and to improve, wherever we fall short.

It is also recognition of how pride works in our lives. when we have pride and ego, we kind of fall short of the things that we do because we have blind spots in our lives and we just fail to recognise these areas that we have completely forgotten, thinking we are just up there and that we are great and nothing can come close to us until the reality hits home. That is where we should realise that our ego has got the better of us. It is lesson for us to learn about being humble, to learn about humility, to learn about how Christ teaches us to be low profile to do these things out of love for others and not for ourselves..

I think the posture that we should adopt is one that is of continuous learning, we cannot stop learning because once we stop learning that is where we think that we are competent, it is where we are feeling complacent. This is where we think that we are above all things. When the truth is we are definitely not and it is giving the devil a foothold in our lives so we need to be careful of the things that we do, the things that we think, and the actions that we show to the others on how they may view us as the children of God.

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