4 truths to speak when envy says you’re not enough

By Scott Sauls, Op-ed contributor Sunday, October 18, 2026

Most of us know what it feels like to have a perfectly good day fall apart in five minutes.

We catch a glimpse of someone else’s life — their marriage, possessions, career, platform, or seemingly easy way of moving through life — and our hearts sink. Why them? Why not me? Moments earlier, we felt content, maybe even grateful. Now we feel smaller and less-than and not enough, wondering why the grass looks greener in somebody else’s yard.

In the fourth chapter of my recent book, The Mercy King, I wrote this about envy:

“Envy insists that joy and contentment are always out of reach, just one more achievement, one more possession, one more relationship away. But the Gospel tells a different story. In Christ nothing essential is missing. In him we already have what we need most: love that doesn’t waver, belonging that doesn’t expire, and a future that doesn’t depend on our performance.”

Comparison grips us because we all want something to tell us who we are and whether our lives matter. It promises significance and security once we get ahead of someone else —  and then moves the line again.

Bertrand Russell, who was no friend of Christianity, saw this with a clarity that is both humorous and haunting: “If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”

Every rung on the ladder has someone standing above it, and the ladder ends in a myth. We’ve all heard the familiar quip that comparison is the thief of joy. C.S. Lewis got to the root of why when he observed that people aren’t proud merely of being rich, clever, or good-looking, he observed, but of being richer, cleverer, or better-looking than others. “It is the comparison that makes you proud,” Lewis wrote, “the pleasure of being above the rest.”

Envy is comparative pleasure flipped on its head. Pride delights in being above the rest; envy feels sick about being beneath them. Both turn good things into rankings and hierarchies and pecking orders that never stay settled.

Comparison does not satisfy the beast of disproportionate desire.

It only feeds it.

A truth-telling prayer

Psalm 73, a prayer of Asaph, is a helpful and healthy place to bring this struggle because its author doesn’t pretend to be above it.

Asaph begins with what he knows: “Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.” Almost in the same breath, he admits how close envy has brought him to losing his grip: “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Psalm 73:1–3).

He describes those he envies — their comfort, confidence, and apparent immunity to ordinary troubles. He is not merely noticing their pride and prosperity. He is measuring his life against it. And the comparison nearly undoes him.

Looking back, Asaph identifies what envy had done to him personally and explicitly: “When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you” (73:21–22). The turning point comes when he carries his envy into God’s presence: “When I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God” (73:16–17).

The prosperous are still prospering, and Asaph’s questions don’t go away. But in God’s presence, he sees their lives as well as his own from a different vantage point: “Whom have I in Heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (73:25–26).

Disappointment, aging, setback, and loss remain for him. Asaph has rediscovered where — and in whom — his life receives its truest meaning and his soul finds its deepest rest.

When the Lord becomes your portion

The word portion carries significant weight. In Hebrew, the word is cheleq, which anyone in Israel would recognize as the language of inheritance — the share allotted to each family and tribe. A portion is not achieved or earned. It is given: your place, your share, the thing that belongs to you and to which you belong.

When the land was divided among Israel’s tribes, the tribe of Levi received no territory of its own. God told Aaron: “You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel” (Numbers 18:20).

The Levites could easily look across at other tribes’ lush fields and vineyards and feel their own sense of lack by comparison. Yet God did not say they had been shortchanged. They had been given something far better. They had been given God Himself.

Asaph knew this history personally. He was a Levite appointed to lead Israel’s worship (1 Chronicles 15:16–17). So, when he calls God his portion, he is making a direct claim against the soul-diminishing, life-sucking trap of comparison: My place does not depend on outperforming, out-earning, or outshining you. Your success cannot take it from me. Someone else’s beauty, wealth, marriage, influence, or accomplishments do not leave me with less, because what I have been given was never, and will never be, measured in those terms. Why would I want it to be?

If God is my portion, I don’t need comparison to tell me whether I’m okay. I already have a place and a portion: the Lord Almighty himself, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10). It’s good to know where, and to whom, you already belong. Consider the answer given by the Heidelberg Catechism to the question, “what is your only comfort in life and in death?”

That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in Heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to Him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

This is what the Gospel gives to us in Jesus. It does not deny that disappointments matter or losses hurt. It gives us something more durable: love that doesn’t rise and fall with our performance, belonging that doesn’t expire when others move ahead or move on, and a future resting on his faithfulness to keep us rather than our faithfulness to keep up.

True joy is not reliant on comfortable circumstances or constant approval. It is the settled confidence that nothing we most need is missing, because Christ is with us and for us.

And He is never not enough.

Talking back to envy

The pull of comparison won’t go away entirely, at least not on this side of glory. But by grace, we can recognize it sooner and respond differently. When we sense that we are falling behind or not measuring up, we can pause without shaming ourselves and ask: What am I believing right now that I *must have* in order to be okay?

What must I accomplish? Whose approval must I secure? What possession, relationship, or measure of power and influence have I decided would make my life enough?

Once we name the lie that we tell ourselves, we can answer it with what is true. In Christ, we are loved at our best, our worst, and every place in between. Even when we feel behind, our future in Him remains secure. Envy cannot touch that future, and failure cannot take it away.

In a season of my own discontent, a former mentor urged me to develop the habit of “talking to yourself more than you listen to yourself.” As he encouraged me, I also encourage you to take that counsel literally. When comparison insists that something you have been unfairly deprived of or are entitled to is missing, talk back. Answer the lie with truth — out loud, if needed. Let Asaph’s words become your own: “Whom have I in heaven but you? My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

The one who made all things for His glory, who set the galaxies in place, and who has no rival also happens to also be your Father in Heaven. If He is your portion, somebody else having more of this or that cannot mean you have less. Their success does not diminish you. Their life no longer needs to be the measuring stick for your own.

If you find this hard to believe, consider the Beatitudes — Jesus’ own picture of a genuinely blessed life. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Blessed are those who mourn.” “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (Matthew 5:3–4, 10). Blessing is not visible success. It is life under God’s favor and care, even when circumstances look anything but enviable.

Consider also what Jesus says about the rich: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).

Maybe we’ve had it backward. Some we envy may be in greater spiritual danger than we realize, while some we overlook may be nearer the Kingdom than appearances suggest.

Here is one freedom that grace supplies: You can bless what God is doing in someone else’s life without interpreting it as a curse upon yours. Their flourishing is not evidence that God has forgotten, neglected, betrayed, or shortchanged you. It is a gift you can celebrate because you already know what he has said about you and what the future in him holds in store for you.

Comparison trains our eyes to look sideways, checking whether we have enough and are enough. The Gospel lifts our eyes. When we look up, we find what Asaph found in the sanctuary: The greatest gift God gives us is God himself.

Next to that, a life that measures up better than somebody else’s is a tiny thing to want.

With God as our portion, we are free to receive and fully inhabit the life He has actually given us — and to discover, as David did, that the lines have indeed fallen for us in pleasant places (Psalm 16:6).