If You Can't Be Happy For Your Sister/Brother...

 By Pastor Benjamin Glaser - Posted at Thoughts From Parson Farms:

How Petty Jealousy Destroys the Local Church

Good Morning,

Closing out the Fifth Commandment is a series of Q/A’s on the duties and sins of equals, and as with the Fourth, a testimony as to how God has given reminder of why we are to keep this portion of His law perfectly. In some ways how we treat those at our level really says who we are as a person. It’s easy to be magnanimous to someone who works for you, and to treat with honor the King, but it takes a different muscle to support and pray with a man or woman of your own station. We have a fear here that needs mortified as much as any other transgression of the law.

Probably the best Biblical example we could go to on this front would be either the conflict between brothers (Cain/Able, Jacob/Esau) or the individual divisions among the closest disciples of Jesus Christ (Sons of Thunder) among who would be the greatest. So much of the word is given over to these types of struggles, and at the heart of them is what really is at the heart of every sin associated with the first of the second table sins, and that is pride. Part of our inborn depravity is thinking we deserve more than others. Regardless of what we have done, not done, or may do there is a little voice in all of us that wants to be preferred, to gain the first and to never be last.

In today’s questions we are going to hear some reasons why it is antichrist to live in such competition with one another. Let’s read the catechism together...

Continue here.