Celebrate Success

‘These things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age’ 1 Cor.10:11.

The truth is that you cannot love a person you are competing with. So if you are always competing with your spouse, you cannot really love your spouse because he/she becomes your competitor. Competition means getting ahead of the other person. Love means preferring the person over yourself. Competition is the opposite of love in this regard. To love is to put the person before yourself and not as Cain who chose to silence Abel totally. The only thing Abel did was to prosper, to succeed. Some of us don’t know that the only thing you have done is succeed – so that has become your sin. Some people cannot understand what they have done to attract all the attacks they are facing. When you are prospering, the Cain’s of this world will want to kill you but they will fail in Jesus Name. The Bible says these things are written for our own examples. So when a Cain invites me to come for a discussion in the garden, I know how to protect myself or escape. It would be foolishness to go blindly because it means you have not learnt from Abel’s experience.

So God is saying to us do not respond like Cain. If you find yourself jealous the solution is simple; genuinely celebrate the person. What Cain should have done after confronting his feelings would have been to go to Abel and celebrate his success. That will kill jealousy totally if you genuinely celebrate the person you are jealous of. The jealousy will disappear because that is a total contradiction to the feeling of jealousy. Genuine celebration here means not pretending to celebrate the person and when the person turns around your jealousy is just as fresh; but silencing evil with good works. You cannot show love to a person who you are competing with. Remember also that God is constantly examining your heart. Learn from the examples that He has put before you and do good works.

Prayer: Father, help me never to forget the things You have taught me and the examples You show me with other people’s lives, in Jesus Name.