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• Illustration: A high school girl who didn't make the cheerleading team shoots a friend who did.
• We were shocked at this story because this girl was like us, and she felt things that we've felt: envy.
• The story of Cain and Abel is the first story of the evil beast of envy.

• (1) The path of the achiever who discovers someone else has achieved his goal.
• Illustration: Brouwer has felt envy when he has visited large, successful churches like Willow Creek.
• (2) The path of the shortcut, of thinking we can get ahead by cutting corners.
• Illustration: A psychologist wrote a book with the same theme as that of Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, and he's envious of Kushner's success. But Kushner wrote from hard experience, the psychologist from theory.
• Cain tried to take a shortcut to God.
• (3) The path of the crushed spirit.
• Illustration: In the play/movie Amadeus, we see how the envy of Salieri toward Mozart drove him mad.
• Illustration: A woman is so crushed by the loss of her own baby, and made so envious by a friend's healthy baby, she's willing to let Solomon kill the baby she stole.
• Illustration: Shel Silverstein poem that says, "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my toys to break, so the other kids can't play with them."
• Thus Cain went out and killed Abel.

• (1) It turns us into hypocrites and liars.
• Illustration: Pastors of two less successful churches start rumors about a successful pastor who is drawing people from their congregations.
• Illustration: French proverb: "It is only at the tree loaded with fruit that people throw stones."
• Illustration: Francis Bacon: "He who cannot mend his own case will do what he can to impair another's."
• (2) It makes us ungrateful.
• Illustration: Economist Thorstein Veblen noted that the way consumerism works is to never let consumers believe that enough is enough.
• (3) It makes us negative.
• Illustration: Malcolm X was so envious of whites, that he went through extraordinary pains to change his skin color and hair texture.

• The other blood beside that spilled by Cain, it is the blood spilled on Calvary, the blood of Christ.
• Illustration: Brouwer is often envious of colleague Pastor Peter, but the beast is tamed when he prays with him and loves him.
• You can't envy one whom you love.
• Illustration: From Shakespeare's Othello: "jealousy …the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds upon."
• Love, like envy, grows on spilled blood.
• The love of Christ keeps envy at bay.