Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/1611800977271039 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRNwtb9a9wE
We are finishing up our medium dive into the 10 commandments. And as we came to this last one, I hope I was reminded, because I had to have known once, that this one is different. The first nine of these ten words are all about what we do. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Don’t bear false witness. You can write laws around those. You can build a courtroom, call witnesses, hand down a sentence. Doing is prove-able.
But this last one isn’t about doing. It’s about wanting. And you cannot arrest a person for wanting.
That’s what makes it strange, and honestly, that’s what makes it the most honest commandment on the list. Because if we’re truthful with ourselves, we know that wanting is where the other nine start. Nobody wakes up and steals out of nowhere. They want something first. Nobody bears false witness against a neighbor for no reason. They want something that testimony will get them. The last commandment isn’t tacked onto the end almost as an afterthought — it’s naming the root the other nine grow out of.
And there’s something else worth noticing. It’s the only one of the ten commandments that’s repeated. Your neighbor’s house. Your neighbor’s wife. As if God knew we’d need to hear it twice, because we’d tell ourselves the first time didn’t really apply to us. This isn’t coveting in general, some vague desire floating out there in the culture. It’s specific. It’s your neighbor’s house. Your neighbor’s marriage. Your neighbor’s actual, particular life.
Scripture doesn’t leave us to imagine what that looks like when it goes all the way through. There’s a king, up on his roof one evening, who looks out and sees a woman bathing. Bathsheba. And David already has everything a king could reasonably want. Palaces. Power. Every comfort available to him. But he sees something that belongs to someone else, and in that moment none of what he has is enough anymore. He sends for her. He takes her. And when it becomes clear that she’s pregnant, he arranges for her husband Uriah to be abandoned on the battlefield, along with the men under his command, until they’re all killed. All of it — the deception, the murder, the unraveling of an entire family — starts with a king who had everything, looking at the one thing that wasn’t his.
Or there’s Ahab and Jezebel, a few pages later, who want a vineyard that belongs to a man named Naboth. Naboth won’t sell — it’s his family’s inheritance, land that was never meant to change hands. So Jezebel arranges for false witnesses, two of them, paid to lie under oath, and Naboth is put to death so the king can finally have his garden. It all started with a little coveting.
I tell you those stories not to make you feel better about yourself in comparison — none of us, I hope, are arranging for anyone’s death this week. I tell you because I want us to see what coveting actually does before it ever gets that far. It doesn’t just make you want a thing. It makes you look at your own life through someone else’s, and come up short. David had a kingdom, and it stopped counting because of one rooftop. Ahab had a palace, and it stopped counting because of one vineyard he didn’t own. Coveting doesn’t add anything to your want-list. It subtracts from your sense of what you already have.
We know this in our bones, don’t we. We know what it is to scroll past somebody else’s kitchen renovation, or somebody else’s marriage that looks effortless from the outside, or somebody else’s kid who seems to have life figured out, and feel our own actual life go a little gray in comparison. Coveting isn’t really about the object. It’s about the math. It’s a constant, quiet arithmetic where our worth is whatever’s left over after we’ve measured ourselves against everyone around us. And that math never balances, because there’s always another house, another marriage, another vineyard just over the fence.
Ecclesiastes says it plainly — all toil and skill come from one person’s envy of another. Which is a hard thing to sit with, because so much of what we call ambition, or drive, or simply trying to do better, might really be envy wearing nicer clothes. I’m not saying wanting to grow, wanting to improve, wanting more for the people you love is wrong. I’m saying it’s worth asking, honestly, what’s underneath the wanting. Are we reaching toward something because it’s genuinely good, or because someone else has it and we’ve decided that means we should too?
Here’s where I want to take this somewhere I don’t think we talk about enough. We do this as individuals. And we do it as churches.
I don’t just mean that a congregation can be envious the way a person can be envious, though that’s true too. I mean something a little more specific. A church can look at another church — the one down the road with the fuller parking lot, the newer building, the youth group that seems to be bursting at the seams — and quietly decide that its own life doesn’t count until it looks more like that. And once that decision gets made, even quietly, even without anyone saying it out loud in a meeting, something starts to shift. We stop asking what God is doing here, with these people, in this place, and we start asking how we get what they have.
That’s not the same as learning from another congregation, or being inspired by something good happening somewhere else. There’s real wisdom in paying attention to what other churches are doing well. But there’s a difference between being inspired and being covetous, and the difference is in the question underneath it. Inspiration asks, what is God teaching us through what we’re seeing. Coveting asks, why don’t we have that, and how fast can we get it.
And when a church starts changing its worship, or its programs, or the whole shape of its life, because it’s trying to become another congregation rather than becoming more fully itself — I don’t think that’s strategic planning. I think that’s coveting, dressed up in the language of growth and vision. It’s Ahab, wanting a vineyard that was never planted for him, instead of tending the garden that was actually his to tend.
And a church can even covet itself. Its former self, I mean. The packed pews of some decade we remember fondly, the budget we used to have, the version of us that seemed to have it all figured out. That’s coveting too — measuring the life we actually have, right now, against a life that isn’t ours anymore, and letting that comparison tell us we don’t measure up.
So here’s a question worth sitting with, individually and as a congregation. When we’re tempted to change — our habits, our priorities, the shape of this church’s life — are we changing because we’re listening to God? Or are we changing because we’re looking at someone else’s yard?
Here’s the honest truth about this commandment, though. You cannot white-knuckle your way out of coveting. I wish I could stand up here and give you five spiritual disciplines that will finally cure the comparing heart, and I won’t lie to you — prayer helps. Fasting helps. Confession, accountability, a good friend who’ll tell you the truth — all of that curbs the worst of it. But none of it gets all the way to the root. The desires of the heart run deeper than our discipline can dig.
And that’s actually where the good news starts, not where it runs out. Because the commandment was never given so that we could finally prove ourselves capable of not wanting. It was given so we’d stop pretending we’re above it, so we’d stop performing a contentment we don’t actually feel, and instead bring the real thing — the actual wanting, the actual comparison, the actual sense that our life or our church’s life isn’t enough — to a God who already knows.
Paul writes to the Romans that all of us fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely, by grace, as a gift. Not by finally getting the comparison game right. Not by managing to want less than the person next to us. As a gift. Which means the coveting commandment isn’t a bar we have to clear before God will love us. It’s a mirror, showing us something true, held up by a God who loved us before we ever looked in it.
So what does that mean for us, walking out of here today.
It means your worth was never supposed to be measured against your neighbor’s house, or marriage, or the life they seem to be living. That measuring stick was never yours to hold in the first place. You get to put it down. Not because you’ve become a better person who doesn’t want things anymore, but because the God who made you already called your life enough before you’d proven anything.
And it means the same thing for this church. The harder, better work in front of us isn’t becoming more like the congregation down the road, or trying to recover some version of ourselves from years back. It’s asking, honestly and together, what God is actually calling this specific body of people, with these specific gifts and this specific history, to be. That’s not resistance to change. Some of the most faithful change a church can make comes from exactly that kind of asking. But it’s change rooted in who we actually are, not in who we’re not.
There is a vineyard that’s actually ours to tend. There’s a life — yours, and this congregation’s — that was never meant to be measured against the one over the fence. May we have the grace to stop looking at someone else’s yard, and start tending the one we’ve actually been given.