Depending on where you get your news, from the newspaper, internet, or TV, you most likely have heard of this terrible virus called Ebola. It has been all over the news lately. I will be honest; I really don’t understand that much about the disease other than what I have gleaned through the news. One thing that seems to be clear is that people are getting nervous in the United States about the disease because we thought it was isolated on the continent of Africa, but lately we have seen that it has invaded our own continent. So people are getting very nervous about this thing called Ebola. So much so that you have the CDC and all sorts of government agencies getting involved and trying to keep it from spreading. They are paying a lot of attention to the ports of entry, particularly airports. They actually are starting to step onto planes to prevent people from getting off the planes that may have this disease. We will show you this on the video really quickly. (Video shown here.) Did anybody see that news story this week? Does anybody think that is excessive the way they handled that? Somebody said they sneezed. Somebody said they had Ebola. Does that look like excessive when the guys in the blue suits come on? Nobody. I think you wouldn’t think it was excessive especially if you were the people on the plane or possibly in a school where somebody was suspected of having it or some other public place. You would take whatever measures are necessary within your power to begin to deal with the possible spread of this virus.
That is what we see in today’s story out of the book of Acts. What we see is God doing whatever is within his power to deal with the spread not of Ebola but this thing called sin. If you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at chapter 5, probably the first 10, possible 11 verses. You may recall that we are in the midst of the series called The Story that began at the beginning of the year and hopefully will be finished by the end of the year. We are talking about God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. We are in the portion of the story called the book of Acts. Last week, if you were here, we began to talk about how Jesus, following the resurrection, wasn’t immediately taken up to heaven. Instead, he hung around with some of the disciples and followers. Some believe up to 500 people saw him, and he continued to do what he does best. He continued to teach and preach. Basically, he told the group of disciples, I know you are probably anxious to get out and begin to share the good news about the resurrection and that sort of thing, but I want you to wait because I am about to send you a gift. And the gift was the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says in Acts 1:8 “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit come son you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” You may recall how I said that this one passage kind of serves as Luke’s outline for the entire book of Acts because the first eight chapters deal with the church in Jerusalem. The next four or five chapters we see the church beginning to expand out into Judea and Samaria and then the last 15 or so chapters we see the church really begin to expand out into the farthest corners of the known world. This particular passage serves again as an outline for the book of Acts. We are going to be talking about each of these individual areas, but I am going to have to do kind of a high flyover of the book of Acts because of our need to get done by the end of the year.
Today, we are going to look primarily at chapter five. We have to look at a few verses to put it in context before chapter five. You may recall that at this particular time in the book of Acts the church is doing phenomenally. It is growing by leaps and bounds. As we saw last week, the people came together, the Holy Spirit came down, the people were filled with the spirit, and Peter went out and gave a phenomenal sermon. So much so that 3,000 people were baptized right on the spot. They were saved and went on to meet in homes and teach and fellowship and that sort of thing. We see in the next few chapters that Peter and John went out and continued the work of Christ. They continued proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. Began to proclaim the resurrection and the kingdom of God that is here. They began to perform miracles and healings so much so that it began to get people attracted to this new thing that really didn’t have a name at that time but this new off-shoot of Judaism that was inspired and catalyzed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church in those early chapters just began to grow by leaps and bounds. As good as it was, it wasn’t without persecution. As exciting as this new thing was, there was a group of people known as the Pharisees, or the Jewish elite, who really weren’t as excited as some of these early converts. So much so that they decided to persecute the early church in any way they could. They went after them. You would have thought that the persecution would have resulted in the division of the church and people fleeing, but actually the persecution tended to band the people together. It tended to unite the people. They would be united against this particular persecution. We see this in one of the early verses in chapter four where it says “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.” This was something that was probably necessary at this time of the church. They were very vulnerable and meeting a lot of resistance not only from the Jewish elite but the other Jews. These could have been family members, employers, whatever. They were joining in the persecution of these early believers. So the believers had to band together. They had to be united. So much so that they began to sell their possessions and put the proceeds into a fund that everybody in need could draw from. We see this clearly in chapter 4, verse 34 where it says “There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time, those who owned lands for houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostle’s feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.” This is an amazing thing. Everybody was taking care of one another. That enabled the church to really begin to grow and be unified. What we see in these early chapters is an amazing work of the spirit. We see the church begin to expand. We see people that are out there facing persecution but not cowering. They are standing up against it. We see this sense of brotherly love. Brothers and sisters coming together in a united cause. We see this intense devotion to the teaching of Jesus Christ.
In the midst of this great thing that is happening, something out of the blue happens that had the potential to throw the whole thing off course. We find that in the story of Ananias and Sapphira. It is the sin of Ananias and Sapphira that has the potential to split up the church if it is not dealt with. I am going to read through the first 11 verses so you can get a feel for the story, and then I will go back and address a few of the details. Reading from Acts 5:1. (Scripture read here.)
I don’t know about you, but I read this passage, and I have read it many times, and it makes me uncomfortable. Does anybody feel uncomfortable with this passage? Doesn’t it look like God is being kind of mean? All this wonderful stuff is happening. The spirit is moving. The church is growing. All these great things are happening and it seems like out of the blue God’s wrath comes down on these two people that seem kind of innocent. They seem like they really didn’t do anything wrong. It is really troubling from 21st century eyes to look back and see a God who seems very vindictive. What we have to do is examine the story in a little bit of detail to understand the context that was going on and to realize maybe God wasn’t that harsh. The first thing we have to realize is what the sin was about. It is easy to read this passage and think the sin was that Ananias and Sapphira held back some money. They didn’t give all the money to the apostles. They held some back. The reality is if we look back at chapter four, we would see that there is no obligation for the believers to give the money. It wasn’t something that the apostles said anybody who has land you have to sell it all and take the money and put it at the apostles feet. There is no evidence of that. The people that did sell their land and gave everything to the apostles were doing it out of the filling of God’s love into their heart. It was an act of extreme generosity, but there was no requirement for them to do so. So the sin of Ananias and Sapphira really got down to the sin of lying. Lying to the apostles and as we see lying ultimately to the Holy Spirit. Why would they lie? What would be their motivation? I imagine their motivation could be similar to anybody’s motivation. The first reason we sometimes lie is out of fear. You are afraid of being punished for something. Anybody who has children knows there are times the child may get into the cookie jar before dinner time and the mom or dad comes in and think they have caught the child and asks if they have broken into the cookies, and the kid says no I didn’t do it. My sister did it. My brother did it. They are responding out of fear. We see a similar thing happening with adults. They can get into the cookie jar before dinner, but really we see adults in a more sophisticated way. They are afraid that they have done something illegal and they may get caught by the authorities. The authorities could be the police, a teacher, or it could be an employer. They are afraid of losing their job, getting arrested, getting a bad grade or whatever. Their fear of punishment. In this particular situation, there is no evidence that Ananias and Sapphira had anything to be afraid of because, again, there was not an obligation for them to even sell the property. And even if they did sell the property, they had options. They could have said we are not going to give it all. We would like to keep some for ourselves. They could have been honest about it. It wasn’t probably something motivated by fear.
The second reason we might lie is really based on the desire to get something that we want. Thinking again about a child. A child may lie and say he or she is sick one day to get out of going to school so they can stay home and watch TV. Then you have adults who lie on things like résumés so they might get a better job. You have people that lie on tax returns so they get a bigger refund or have to pay out less money to the IRS. Those aren’t based on fear. Those are based on a desire to get what you want. It seems like for Ananias and Sapphira they kind of fit this second idea. The desire to get something they want. We really do not know what it is they want. Maybe they just want the recognition for the apostles. The pat on the back that comes from the perceived thing that they gave all their money after selling their property. It could just be that they wanted to be more welcomed into the community. Everybody else sold their property and gave their money so maybe they feel like they need to lie so they are accepted into the community. They may have lied just because they have the desire to feel holier than though. That they like the other believers are holy and spiritual because they gave something. When you have a situation where you desire to be seen as holier than thou yet you know inside of you because of some form of selfishness that you are not holier than thou, then what happens is you are trying to fill that gap and the gap can be filled by lying. This is speculation. We really do not know why Ananias and Sapphira lied, but we do know that they lied and they lied as a couple. The lie was intentional. They knew from the very beginning that they were going to lie together. They conspired to lie against the apostles. We see the apostle Peter, for whatever reason, was able to pick up on this. He understood what was going on. He called it what it was. He saw it. Again, the sin was not that they kept money back. The sin was that they lied to the Holy Spirit and this lie could have been prompted by another spirit known as Satan. The passage goes on to say “Then Peter said, ‘Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you have received for the land?’” Peter called it like it was. We don’t know where he got this discernment, but he knew there was a lie going on. It wasn’t just any lie. It was a lie to the spirit of God.
There was an interesting quote I came across this week by an unknown author. It is pretty straightforward. “No man lies to his fellow man before he first lies to the truth within him.” As I thought about this, this could really pertain to a Christian or a non-Christian. For a non-Christian that tells a lie, they have to get past this thing called a conscience. They have to get past this thing that is inside of them. Everybody has a conscience. They have to first bypass the thing inside them that is helping them distinguish the truth from the lie. From a Christian’s perspective, we have a built-in lie detector and it basically goes by the name of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is called The Spirit of Truth. There is a passage in John that speaks of this. Jesus says “When He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.” God has given us a spirit of truth. God has given us a lie detector. These people that were supposedly filled with the spirit of God had the ability to hear from the spirit of God, to listen and be prompted by the spirit when they were about to sin, when they were about to lie, but yet at the same time, after being prompted by the spirit, they chose to go against the spirit of truth. In a sense, they were first and foremost lying to God before they even opened their mouth. That is what we are talking about here. You have the spirit of truth. Call it a conscience or whatever you want to call it, but you first have to get past that lie detector. That truth detector. When you are prompted to not lie and you go against that what you are doing is you are lying first to the spirit of truth. That is what is going on here with Ananias and Sapphira. It was a very serious thing and it was a thing that was probably prompted by the spirit of Satan.
Looking back at this prior passage, it says “How is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit?” So Satan was involved in this situation, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. While the Holy Spirit is referred to as the spirit of the truth, Satan is referred to as the father of lies. If you know your Bible, you know that I believe in John it talks about it where Satan is referred to as the father of lies. When you choose to ignore the spirit of God and choose to listen to the father of lies, you are entering on Satan’s territory. You are giving him space. I think there is passage in Ephesians that says don’t give a place to the devil. Don’t give the devil a foothold. The actual Greek word underlying that is the word topos or something that has to do with topography. Don’t give Satan topography, a place in your heart. That is what you are doing when you begin to enter into the domain of lies, deceit, or cheating, you are giving topography to Satan. This is a great tactic for Satan. Considering what is going on here, it makes a lot of sense. Satan knew that he couldn’t get over on Jesus. He knew that the cross and the following resurrection was something he could not win over. He thought he was defeated for the short term anyway so now he is going to go after the church. The way he goes after it is just by introducing a subtle lie. It is a subtle lie that is couched within a good deed of selling all your stuff and giving maybe not all your proceeds but a good portion of your proceeds to the church. It is a very subtle thing, but Peter picks up on it. As the story goes, Ananias shows up and he asks what were you thinking Ananias. He goes on and tells him it was your property and you sold it and you could have given all the proceeds to us, but you chose to lie. When Ananias, and really Satan, was caught red-handed, the passage goes on to say “When Ananias heard this, he fell down. And died and great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.” Then as the story draws to a close, the wife shows up. Sapphira shows up about three hours later. Apparently, she hadn’t heard about Ananias being dead. She shows up and Peter asks her straightforward. Was this the price you received from the land and did you give us all the proceeds from that price? And she says yes. Right then he says how can you say that? The guys who just carried out your husband are back in the house and now they are about to carry you away. Sure enough, just like that, she drops dead, and they carry her away. Verse 11 goes on to say “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.” That is pretty much the end of the story.
I think if we are honest with ourselves, it is a troubling story. God just looks kind of mean. He looks excessive in this. What did they do that was so bad? They just didn’t give all the proceeds from this land. Again, we are talking about a lie. A lie to none other than the spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit. It is not only that. What you have to understand is the context here. At this particular point, the church was at its infancy. It was a baby, brand new, church start-up. When I say church, it is the collective church, not just one local church, but it was brand new. Probably only several months old at this time. The church was going to be the chosen vessel that God would continue the work of Jesus Christ in proclaiming the good news, in talking about the kingdom, in continuing to carry out the works and miracles that Jesus carried out. Not only that, this entity called the church was now going to be the place where the very spirit of God would indwell. Prior to that, where did the spirit indwell? It indwelled first in the tabernacle and then in the temple. You remember when they first built the tabernacle and there was a blemish. Phineas and somebody else did some strange fire or committed some sin and they were put out just like that because God was going to make a statement. Don’t mess with the Holy place. Don’t mess with it. He was going to cut off any of this blemish right from the start. Really that is what he is doing with this church. It is a brand new church so he is setting an example by using these two people, Ananias and Sapphira. When this thing called sin or lying comes out of left field all of a sudden and begins to go into the church, God deals with it quickly and decisively whether we like it or not. He is going to deal with it. It makes sense.
Especially when you relate it back to this idea of Ebola. Let’s say there is a village over in Africa that has several hundred people and mostly young adults with babies. It is growing and it is a great place. Then one day, somebody catches Ebola. What do you think the smart leaders would do? They would quickly deal with it. They would isolate it. They would confine it. Because if they do not confine it, if they do not isolate it, it is going to spread. It is going to hit the most vulnerable. It is going to hit the babies first and then it is going to hit the young adults and before long the entire village could be wiped out if they don’t deal with it. That is what is going on here. You have the infant church that is brand new, new believers, really not even that mature believers. Very, very vulnerable. You have this sickness, this virus, this sin called lying that is trying to get into the door. If it was somehow going to be overlooked, if it was going to be ignored, it could infiltrate itself into the church and before long one strand of lie becomes a web of lies. When you have a web of lies, you begin to have things that characterize the church such as mistrust, suspicion, guilt, fear, and disunity and all this stuff. After some time, the church will collapse under the weight of those lies and it will be destroyed. God is trying to say I am going to deal with this. You are not going to mess with my church before it gets off the ground, so he deals with it quickly and decisively. Consequently, the global church not only survives but it thrives to the point where today several billion people are part of this thing called Christianity. God had to deal with this thing before it got out of hand.
In closing, we begin to think about what are the lessons for us today? I think the basic lesson is that lies are pervasive in our culture, and if we are not careful they can really pervade the church. Whether we want to admit it or not, the culture is full of lies and many times we are part of that culture so we participate in those lies. I was reading a recent article that said on the average, a person commits a lie about every five minutes. That means we have up to 200 lies per day. You say that sounds crazy. Let’s say they are half right. It is still a lot of lies. This is the average American. It doesn’t seem too excessive when you consider how many ways we lie. We are talking to somebody and we are acting like we are interested in their conversation. Would that be considered a lie? We do those all the time. Somebody is talking about a movie or a TV show or a great book everybody is supposed to have read. Somebody is talking about it and we never read it, but we don’t want to admit it, so we act like we know what they are talking about. Anybody ever do stuff like that? Those are just simple examples of the little subtle lies that we commit on a regular basis so much so that we become immune to them. I guarantee that every married guy in this room has committed this sort of lie. Your wife comes home and she has this nice dress on and she asks if the dress makes her look heavy. Because you are quick on your feet, you say it accents your beautiful curves. It didn’t go over in the first service or this service. It is supposed to be funny. All kidding aside, the culture is pervasive with lies. We see it on the TV shows. We see what the commercials try to sell us and how they make that if you buy this product, you will turn into this wonderful person. We see it happening with the politicians. We see all these lies in the culture and we have become insensitive to it because we are surrounded by it. We would be naïve to think that somehow these lies will just skip past the church and that they would never pervade the church. That is wrong. At a minimum it is being naïve. At a maximum it is exposing the church to all sorts of problems. Lies do infiltrate the church. They do it in very subtle ways and very innocently. We all engage in the white lies where somebody asks you how you are doing today and you say I am just fine. All the while you are feeling like you got hit by a truckload of bricks. You are going to lie a little bit. Those are white lies. We also engage in lies similar to Ananias and Sapphira when we maybe think that we are being more generous in our giving or serving than we really are. We rationalize in our mind even though the spirit of God might be prompting us to give more of our time, talent, and treasure. We have rationalized that that is sufficient. Or we choose to go against the spirit of truth and really commit the lie against the Holy Spirit. Or we have all been guilty of speaking nice to somebody to their face but the next day going behind their back and saying something negative about them. Or something as simple as you are talking to somebody and they really want your prayer and you say I will pray for you. All the while not really intending to do it at all. Or standing up on Sunday morning and praising God and acting like you are totally committed to following Jesus wholeheartedly to only on Monday going out and returning to the ways of the average American or the average pagan out there. Those are lies. When you stand up front and say you are going to follow Jesus with all your heart, all the while knowing you have no intention of doing that Monday morning. If these lies are not kept in check, they begin to infiltrate the church. In a way where the church begins to be characterized by things like mistrust or suspicion or fear or divisiveness and those types of things. Then the church crumbles under the weight of the lies. Although I have no statistic to back it up, I would suspect that if we were to look into why so many churches have closed in Pittsburgh over the past years, we would probably identify a point where lies had entered the church or some form of deception and went unchecked.
The good news is that we know that the church universal, the church of Christ on earth, will not crumble. It is too established right now. In fact, it was Jesus himself who said to Peter “I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” We know that at least for now, the church universal is safe even though the local manifestation of the church can easily crumble. Even though we know the church universal is safe, we need to, as Christians and as a church, be able to make sure that our local manifestation of the church is kept pure and free of blemish. The only way to do that is by self-examination and corporate examination. As self we have to be willing to put ourselves under the lie detector known as the Holy Spirit and allow the spirit of Christ, the spirit of truth, to begin to show us places that may not be pure and that may reveal some deceit or lies or some other sin and then deal with it in a quick and decisive manner before it goes on to infect the church. Although there are a lot of different ways to do it, it really isn’t that complicated. It requires what I would call a daily examination of conscience. What is also known as the Prayer of Examen, which is really a prayer by a monk named St. Ignatius. He was a Catholic monk and I know some of you don’t like the Catholic monks, but this is actually a pretty good prayer. It is a very good prayer because it kind of gets us away from the average prayers that we do that we are not even thinking about and we just start praying and we are not even conscience of what we are praying. In this prayer, we are taking our interior life under review of the Holy Spirit. We do this in a very simple way that can be done in your morning devotional. It could be night when you are lying in bed. It could be done weekly, monthly, or whatever you want. It is really a simple process. You just go before the Lord. The first thing you do is thank God for his blessings that he has given you that day or particular week. I suspect that most of us, if we give it some thought, we should be able to find a number of things that we can be thankful for. This is actually the easiest part of the exercise.
Then it gets a little harder. The next thing you have to think about is notice where God is at work in the world or in your life. This is really difficult because how many of us really pay attention to where God might be at work. That work could be happening out in creation. It could be happening in the work place. It could be happening in your own life. It could be a miracle that comes in your life that you hardly even notice. What happens is you begin to think about those things and you begin to notice God. Maybe you write it down or you meditate on it.
Finally, this is where it is the toughest. You do a confession of known sin. In other words, you examine the last 24 hours or the last week and you go through your interactions with people at home or work or wherever, and you try to identify any known sins. This could be sins of commission, sins of action, or sins of inaction. It doesn’t matter. They are sins. When you do that what happens is these things tend to bubble up and it is at that point that the spirit of truth, the lie detector, will point these things out and it is up to you to be able to respond in truth, agree, or deny it and side with Satan and give Satan more topography in your life. This is not rocket science. This is not that tough. Everybody can do this. But again you have to want to do it. What people don’t like about this is they don’t like to be exposed to the spirit of God because they don’t want to see their blemishes. I tell you again if you are serious about transformation in your life, there is no way that you can ever be transformed unless you are willing to allow the spirit of God come in and help you in the transformation process. If you want to get over here and you are here, the only way you can do it is allow the spirit of God to show you your faults and then begin to confess them and then the next time you are in that situation, try to be different. Ask for the spirit of God to come alongside of you and say I lied yesterday to this person and so today I am going to be honest and help me Spirit because I cannot do that. This is only if you are serious about your personal growth. If you are serious about your personal growth, I would say try it. If you want more detail, I can give you more detail. I can give you a narrative that goes with this. But try this either on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, whatever, but try it. What we are going to do today during this time of prayer, we are going to switch things up. We are actually going to go through the Prayer of Examen in a very non-threatening way. What I want you to do, as Debbie plays, she is going to take us through this prayer, just close your eyes and choose to go through it or not. I would encourage all of you that have never gone through this type of exercise to just try it. As Debbie leads us through the process, just try it and see what God reveals. Hopefully, if you do this on a regular basis, you will see yourself going through your day paying attention to the things you can be thankful for, paying attention to how God is working in your life, and most of all paying attention to where you have sinned and actually trying to change your behavior. In doing so, you will begin to look like, you will begin to be transformed into the image of Christ.
