THE MOST PROUD THING
The President of Moody Bible Institute tells this story: A young man from school took the bus to class. It was crowded. Before the conductor came around to take the fare, he had gotten off at the school without paying.
Later on, he remembered it. And he thought, "That wasn’t right. I had my ride. I should pay the fare."
So he went down to the station. Found the conductor, and paid him the money.
The conductor said, "You’re a fool for doing this.”
The young man said, "No, I’m not. I got the ride. I should pay for it."
He said, "It’s your business to collect the money. It’s my business to hand it to you."
The conductor said, "I bet you belong to that Bible Institute."
The President of Moody commented, "I have never heard anything said about our school that made me more proud than that one thing."
One of the things that distinguish the people of God is our honesty.
• It is a reflection of the God we worshipped, and the Christ we follow.
• Jesus repeatedly says, “Truly, truly I say to you…” NIV uses “I tell you the truth…”
• He is the truth, He stands for the truth, He speaks the truth and He lived the truth.
I like the way my lecturer puts it - we are called…
• not only to proclaim the truth but live it,
• not just to declare the truth but to demonstrate it,
• not just to express it, but to exhibit it.
Peter was mad (and God was mad), not because they did not give enough.
• It is not about the gift but the giver, it is not about the money, but the heart.
• Peter, moved by the Spirit, saw the motivation of their heart.
• They schemed together to lie. Verse 2 emphasized “with his wife’s full knowledge…” – so they jointly agreed to lie to the church.
It wasn’t an offering to God, it wasn’t a giving to the church, and it wasn’t an act of love for the poor.
• They were giving for themselves. They were giving for personal glory.
• They wanted to draw attention to themselves, to seek the praise of church members, to make an impression that they are spiritual and sacrificial people.
THE KING IS NOT COMING
Francois Fenelon, an archbishop was the court preacher for King Louis XIV of France in the 17th century.
One Sunday when the king and his attendants arrived at the chapel for the regular service, no one else was there but the preacher.
King Louis demanded, “What does this mean?”
Fenelon replied, “I had published that you would not come to church today, in order that your Majesty might see who serves God in truth and who flatters the king.”
They have come to impress the King. They were driven by the wrong motives.
Self-glory was the motivation behind the gift. They wanted people to see how generous they were.
• They were probably trying to COPY Barnabas. Acts 4:36 “Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means Son of Encouragement), 37sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.”
• Barnabas gave out of love for God and His people.
• You can’t copy this kind of thing. It has to do with the heart. One gives because he loves to, the other give because they feel they are supposed to.
It is not about the gift, it is about the giver. It is not the amount, it is the heart.
• The motivation of our heart is what the Lord looks at. He doesn’t need our money, He wants our heart.
• Mother Teresa said, “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.”
Love Him with a pure heart, and I’m sure the rest will be set right.
• Ananias and Sapphira need not have to sell their property. They need not have to give all the proceeds to the church.
• Even if they have sold it and decided to give a portion to the church, it would have been fine and pleasing to God.
• But now their pride caused them to sin, and it leads to dishonesty, hypocrisy, deception, and fraud.
The sad thing is both the husband and wife reinforces each other’s thinking.
• Both wanted to glorify themselves, instead of the Name of the Lord.
• It would have been good, if one had been truthful and corrected the other.
Sadly this incident became the first great offense of the church.
• We have been seeing the awesome presence and works of the Holy Spirit in the church (in the previous few chapters).
• But here we see the sin of man creeping into the church.
• Something that’s foreign to the very nature of the church, to the very nature of God, creeps in.
And God acted and stamped His disapproval in a very clear way.
• The church was at its infancy stage and God will not allow it to be defiled and derailed from its call.
• Peter rebuked Ananias: “How is it that Satan has so filled your heart?” (v.3)
• If Satan cannot attack the church from the outside, he will work from the inside. He works through our weaknesses. Here it was pride – man’s desire to make a name for ourselves.
Peter did not say you lied to me. He said you lied to the Holy Spirit. He said to Sapphira, “How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord?” (v.9).
• If God had not intervened, Ananias and Sapphira might likely have become influential people in the early church.
• It deemed best to God to remove them at this time.
God is not setting a precedent. If it is, all liars would have died even since.
• God is sending a message – a clear message that sin cannot be tolerated.
• “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.” (v.11)
Watch our heart. Watch our motives. Jeremiah 17:9-10 says:
9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
10 "I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve."
1 Samuel 16:7
But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."
Psalm 139:23-24
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Two things are clear here – (1) God is concerned with what is unseen, what lies within our heart. And (2) only God can set our heart right.
• The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. And then “I the Lord search the heart….” David prayed, “Search me, O God, and know my heart…”
Did you ever wonder why Ananias and Sapphira did such a thing?
• When they had been enjoying the fellowship of the church, experiencing the worship, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and seeing the miraculous signs, and then to choose to make an offering, unprompted and unforced, hoping to deceive Peter and the church (and God too!), just to glorify themselves.
• It is quite unthinkable, yet it is real. How could they even think that they can fool God? Probably not, yet they did it.
• It is real also in our lives. We know God knows, and yet we come with wrong motives. We know God knows, yet we sin.
John Ortberg says (in "When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box"):
“Our problem generally is not that we don’t know the rules, but that we don’t live what we already know….
The world gets pretty tired of people who have Christian bumper stickers on their cars, Christian fish signs on their trunk, Christian books on their shelves, Christian stations on their radios, Christian jewellery around their necks, Christian videos for their kids, and Christian magazines for their coffee tables but don’t actually have the life of Jesus in their bones or the love of Jesus in their hearts.”
PUT YOU TO THE TEST
A pastor got on the tram one morning. He paid his fare, and the driver gave him too much change. The pastor sat down and fumbled the change and looked it over, and counted it 3 or 4 times.
He said to himself, "Praise the Lord! It’s wonderful how God provides!" He realized he was tight that week and this was just about what he would need to breakeven. Or at least, it’s enough for his lunch.
He wrestled with himself all the way downtown. And by the time the tram pulled up to his stop, he couldn’t live with himself anymore. He walked up to the driver and said, "Here, you gave me too much change. You made a mistake."
The driver said, "No, it was no mistake. You see, I was in your church last night when you spoke on honesty, and I thought I would put you to the test."
It scares us to know that we are being watched or tested that way, right?
Yet we know that this is true. We cannot fool God.
• We should we? He’s not going to judge us by performance.
He alone can set our hearts right. We just need to draw near and ask Him to.
• God is gracious and loving. Look at the Scriptures, He has not scolded anyone for giving so little, but He has reprimanded many for their pride and self-righteousness.
• Heb 4:16 says “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
LESSONS:
• Seek to please God more than man.
• Seek to bless others more than self.
• Seek to do everything out of love more than anything else.
