Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Taking Things Seriously (Acts 5:1-16)
Date: June 25, 2023
I often start off our time together with a question. I’m going to do that this morning. This question, though, is a little more personal than what I often ask. I want you to think back to your past a bit this morning—hopefully not the recent past if you haven’t yet been around here very long. I want you to think for a minute about whether or not you’ve ever had a bad church experience.
The unfortunate truth is that there are a ton of people who have bad church stories. It’s just about bad enough that at least in the South, if you throw a rock in a crowded place, it’ll probably hit five or six people who had a bad church experience before it hits the ground. Some of them are still engaged with the church today, but a great many of them are not. And the thing is, if bad church experiences came only in a single form, we could do something about them. But they come in so many different shapes and sizes. By the time we managed to address one, a dozen more would pop up in its place. Still, for all the variety, there are some broad categories into which we can sort many of them.
For some people, they were treated unfairly by the church. The church put expectations on them that it didn’t put on other people and the reason for the differences wasn’t sufficiently justifiable in their view. Even if the unfairness is merely a matter of perception, though, perception can become reality in our hearts and minds far too easily. For others, the church was judgmental to them in some way that felt out of sync with the example of Jesus. Again, the perception of judgmentalism can easily be skewed through the lens of our circumstances such that the judgment cast was entirely consistent with the Scriptures, but that doesn’t always—or even often—matter. The end result is a bad church experience either way. Certainly pastoral abuse of any kind creates a bad church experience. Such stories are numerous, painful, and heartbreaking. A fourth category that gives some direction for our journey this morning is an exercise of church discipline gone wrong. The former church member is living a lifestyle that is inconsistent with the confession of the church and the witnesses of the Scriptures and demonstrates no apparent intention of changing that. The church, moving entirely in line with its God-given authority, moves to hold the person accountable for their choices. Rather than pursuing this process with gentleness and love, though, the church is ugly or antagonistic or vindictive or even simply not careful enough of the person’s feelings. A bad church experience is the result.
This morning we are in the third part of our teaching series, The Story of Us. All this summer, we are looking together at the incredible story of the early church through the lens of Dr. Luke’s account in the historical record we know of as Acts. We are taking this journey together for several reasons. For starters, it is a story worth knowing. It is our story; the story of how we got here. It is the story of how our movement started in relative obscurity, and grew to be the largest religious movement in the history of the world. Obviously Acts doesn’t cover that much of the story, but it does show how we got our footing and started advancing across the world. Knowing this story gives us great encouragement. If they could expand and advance then given the cultural context they were facing, so can we today even as our culture continues to turn against us. Knowing this story gives us direction. The ways they grew and overcame the various challenges they faced provide a roadmap for our doing the same thing. As we move forward as a church into the great and awesome future God has in store for us both in the near and far term, this story will help us keep on the track Jesus laid for us instead of veering off in pursuit of a manifold of things that don’t ultimately matter. Knowing who we are like this helps us better understand where we are going.
In the first two parts of our journey we saw how the church exploded into existence and the posture they took into facing down the various challenges they encountered along the way. While there were a number of things that made the church’s early growth so explosive, three things stand out as most significant. They proclaimed the Gospel with powerful words. They backed those words up with radically loving actions. They paired those two things with an incredibly attractive community. Gospel connections happen through word, deed, and community. Challenges came as Jesus had told them they would, but these didn’t derail them because of their posture of Gospel boldness. With Jesus’ assurance of the coming of the challenges behind them, and His promise to help them overcome going before them, they continued to march forward no matter what stood in their way. Boldness drives a church through challenges.
This morning, we are not actually moving on to the next part of the story. Not just yet. That’ll come next week, Lord willing. There was a part of the story we looked at last week that I fairly well skipped over. This is not because it is unimportant. The story is foundationally important. We skipped over it because it didn’t sit well with the larger story we were telling then. We skipped over it then because it deserves its own week’s worth of attention. It is a story that happens to be one of the hardest stories in the entirety of the New Testament. It is a story that seems to fit much more comfortably with the various stories of apparently capricious and wildly overblown judgment from God in the Old Testament before He supposedly mellowed out after Jesus arrived and did His thing. It is also a story that sets an idea before us that is fundamental to getting the church right that the church has mostly ignored or otherwise handled terribly over the course of our history. If we are going to be fully the church God designed us to be, we have to take this story into account as we navigate our way forward. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you today, find your way to Acts 5. Luke tells several stories about external challenges the church faced. This is one of the two stories about internal challenges she faced. Let’s see what happened when someone tried to lie to the church.
The story picks up right at the beginning of Acts 5, but a little bit of context is in order. At the end of chapter 4, Luke offers us another summary statement along the lines of what he gave us back at the end of chapter 2 and which we talked about in the first part of the series. After their prayer for boldness, the church surged forward. Luke describes it like this: “Now the entire group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. With great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of what was sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed to each person as any had need. Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus by birth, the one the apostles called Barnabas (which is translated Son of Encouragement), sold a field he owned, brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.”
The fact that Barnabas’ story got included in Luke’s narrative of the early church written some 30 years later suggests that it was a really big deal. There were obviously lots of folks doing this same kind of thing, but Barnabas, it would seem, eclipsed them all. Well, there’s something about human nature that when we see someone gaining lots of recognition for themselves (and the power and authority that often comes with it), we aren’t so much happy for them as we want it for ourselves. We want it for ourselves, and we’re willing to go to some pretty great—and sometimes shady—lengths to get it. In this particular case, there was a couple in the church named Ananias and Sapphira who wanted what Barnabas had, but either they didn’t understand how he actually got it, or else they simply didn’t want to go that route. To put it more plainly, Barnabas was radically generous, and received great recognition for it. Ananias and Sapphira weren’t. They just wanted the recognition for being generous. So, they cut corners. Stick with me in the text in chapter 5 now and let’s see how this all played out.
“But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. However, he kept back part of the proceeds with his wife’s knowledge, and brought a portion of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” See the scheme? And it wasn’t like it was just one of them with the other clueless about what was happening. They concocted this plot together. They sold some of their land, made a big show of bringing in the “total” proceeds as Barnabas had done. The trouble was, it wasn’t all of the money. They didn’t want to give all of the money. But they wanted the recognition for having given all of the money, so they lied about it. They lied about it thinking everything was going to be fine, and sat back to wait for all the accolades to start rolling in. The trouble is, that’s not how things went.
From v. 3 now: “‘Ananias,’ Peter asked, ‘why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the proceeds of the land? Wasn’t it yours while you possessed it? And after it was sold, wasn’t it at your disposal? Why is it that you planned this thing in your heart? You have not lied to people but to God.’” Do you see what’s going on here? Ananias went through this grand pretense that he was following in Barnabas’ footsteps. Somehow, though, Peter saw through the ruse. He knew that Ananias had only given a portion of the sale. The rest was being kept hidden back at their house. So, he calls out Ananias on his lie right there in front of everyone. You can almost see the change that came across his face when he realized things weren’t going the way he imagined they would go when he played this scene out in his mind.
Peter here does a good job of making clear what the real issue was. How much money Ananias brought to the church from the sale of his piece of property didn’t matter. That is totally irrelevant to the situation. He could have brought some of it, none of it, or all of it, and that was totally up to him. God wasn’t making him do this. What mattered was that he lied about how much he was bringing. He pretended he was bringing all of it like Barnabas had done, but it was really only a portion of it. His goal was recognition, not selfless generosity.
It was a tense moment. Everyone was watching to see what would happen. Maybe Peter would simply continue dressing him down in front of the group. Maybe Peter would kick him out of the church. Maybe a lot of things. Surely, though, no one expected what actually happened. “When he heard these words, Ananias dropped dead, and a great fear came on all who heard.” You think? Then, “the young men got up, wrapped his body, carried him out, and buried him.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. “About three hours later, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. ‘Tell me,’ Peter asked her, ‘did you sell the land for this price?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for that price.’ Then Peter said to her, ‘Why did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.’ Instantly she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men came in, they found her dead, carried her out, and buried her beside her husband. Then great fear came on the whole church and on all who heard these things.” Again: you think?
Can we be honest with one another for a second here? We read this story today and are horrified by it. The thought that God would strike someone down on the spot for lying in church is incredibly uncomfortable. It’s made even more uncomfortable by the fact that I suspect some of us in the room have done it before. (Have you ever said, “I’m fine,” when you weren’t?!?) This is the kind of story someone struggling with the faith comes across and quickly responds by saying, “Nope, that’s not for me.” What are we supposed to do with this?
Well, here are a few thoughts. And, you may not buy these. These may not make this story any easier for you to stomach in even the least amount. That’s okay. This story doesn’t take away from the fact that Jesus still rose from the grave. Stick with Him and these kinds of stories will eventually sort themselves out for you with His help. That being said, the first thing we have to do if we are going to make any kind of positive sense out of this story (or any other story in the Scriptures for that matter) is to get God’s character right. If you aren’t correctly settled on that, you don’t stand a chance when stories like these come up. In this particular case, there are two things we must be absolutely clear about when it comes to God’s character. God is just and God is love. God’s judgments are just. This means God always does the right thing. Always. Every single time. Without fail. Ever. God doesn’t only do the right thing, though, He also tempers His doing of the right thing rather liberally with mercy.
In the case of Ananias and Sapphira, while there is a lot we can’t say because we don’t know, what we can say because of what we know about God’s character is that in His perfect wisdom, God determined that they were beyond the capability of repentance and that the consequences for their sin should be delivered immediately. He knew their hearts in a way we cannot. We recoil at what happened to them because if it happened to them, it could happen to us. We’re not totally sure they were deserving of that, but we’re absolutely certain we aren’t. So, we have to conclude they weren’t either in order to keep our position consistent. And that position is that sin shouldn’t be taken with such deadly seriousness. It’s not really that big of a deal.
Speaking of that, something else that gets in the way of our making positive sense out of this story is that as a general rule, we think of sin as not that big of a deal. Yet sin is serious business. It separates us from God. Even a sin we deem to be teeny-tiny and barely noticeable is committed in direct and open rebellion against God’s authority as God. That “little white lie” is told as an act of wresting control of our lives from God and pronouncing Him insufficient as the sovereign over the world He created. It is a bold declaration that reality as He designed it is wrong and that our version is better. And it’s not just that some sins can be characterized that way. All of them can. It is a testament to God’s patient and abiding love for us that He doesn’t strike all of us down on the spot of sin the first time we commit it. We think we can live life our way and still be a part of God’s kingdom, but that’s just not how it works.
The truth is that this was a moment fraught with a significance nobody but perhaps the apostles themselves thanks to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit understood. Yes, Ananias and Sapphira’s decision to lie to the church was a big deal, but that’s not the real heart of the matter here. A question was being asked here whose answer would determine everything about where the movement went from here. That question was this: What kind of institution is the church going to be? Was it going to be an institution that functioned pretty much like every other human institution in the world, or was it going to be different? They were still in a foundation-building season, and this couple represented a crooked contractor who wanted to cut some corners on the building process in order to get the place up more quickly and looking good on the outside while not caring at all about the people who were going to one day have to live in it and deal with the mess he was creating.
Had they been able to pull off what they were trying to do, others would eventually be emboldened to do the same thing without fear of the potential consequences of it. The church would have been revealed to be about mostly power and prestige and image rather than shining as a city on a hill, drawing people to the holiness and righteousness of God. People have always been like Ananias and Sapphira. They’ve had countless copycats seek to follow in their footsteps over the centuries of our history. Every human institution has dealt with this same thing. We always just either ignore it or—more often—embrace it. But the church was supposed to be different. The church was—and is—the body of Christ. We are the primary way by which the world sees and knows who He is and what He is like. If we took the path of operating pretty much like the rest of the world, then no one was going to think Him any different from any of the other gods, and His movement was going to eventually fade into obscurity just like all the rest of the religious movements popular in that day. If the church was taken casually then, that fundamental point of weakness would eventually lead to our total downfall. If the church was going to stand with the strength Christ intended for it to bear, then we were going to have to take it seriously. Taking the church seriously makes the whole thing stronger.
Okay, but what does that look like in practice? Well, from the example we find here and in a few other places scattered across the New Testament, it looks like exercising our God-given authority to gently and patiently and humbly and lovingly hold our members accountable for pursuing the path of Christ with faithfulness and consistency in their lives. This process is called church discipline. Now, I know that no matter how much I try to soften it, that kind of language sounds scary. And, honestly, it can be scary. Sin so often and so easily sneaks its way into the process and makes a disaster of things resulting in one bad church experience after another as we try to do what Jesus said but not in the way Jesus said to do it. Today, we live in a culture in which exercising that kind of judgment on another person—even when it is handled completely properly—can blow up in a church’s face. Churches have been split by it. Pastors have been fired for it. Churches have been sued for it. Who wants to risk any of that? Someone who is more committed to following the path of Christ than the path of the world. Someone who takes the church with the full seriousness it deserves. Someone who wants to see the church strengthened and grown and the lives of the people in its care brought more in line with the image of Christ. Taking the church seriously makes the whole thing stronger.
What we see here was an exercise in church discipline. Now, before you freak out, no, this does not mean that if we went through a process of church discipline we’d have people dropping dead at the end of it. There is not a single example of something like this ever happening again. This was a one-off moment. You can go ahead and breathe a big sigh of relief. Ananias and Sapphira were given over to the consequences of their sin immediately in this case. We don’t know why God chose to do this beyond the reasons we’ve already talked about. And we dare not draw doctrine from it beyond two points: Sin is a whole lot more serious of a problem than we think, and church discipline makes the church stronger. Taking the church seriously makes the whole thing stronger.
We know this is true because of the summary Luke goes on to immediately give us of what happened after this moment. Look with me starting in v. 12. “Many signs and wonders were being done among the people through the hands of the apostles. They were all together in Solomon’s Colonnade. No one else dared to join them, but the people spoke well of them. Believers were added to the Lord in increasing numbers—multitudes of both men and women. As a result, they would carry the sick out into the streets and lay them on cots and mats so that when Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on some of them. In addition, a multitude came together from the towns surrounding Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those who were tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all healed.”
This dramatic exercise in church discipline didn’t blow the church to pieces like we might have expected. It made it stronger. Its members all took their call and confession much more seriously, and the church continued growing faster than they could count. The world around them saw that the church was something truly different from anything else the world could offer. They saw the joyful seriousness with which its members took it. They saw how utterly committed they were to following the path of Christ. And so they flocked to the church in droves. “Believers were added to the Lord in increasing numbers—multitudes of both men and women.”
When we take the church with the seriousness it deserves, the whole thing gets stronger. And, by the way, seriousness doesn’t mean somberness. Part of taking the church seriously means embracing the joy of the Lord such that it fairly well shines through everything we do. It means we love the people around us and within us with exuberance. It means sharing Gospel fruits with radical generosity. It means we follow Jesus with glee. And when we do, the church grows. It grew then. It will grow now. Taking the church seriously makes the whole thing stronger.
That, my friends, is my invitation to you: take this seriously. Don’t settle for just being sort of here. Be here. Be connected. Be involved. Give. Serve. Learn. Love. Make an investment in seeing the Gospel advanced from here to the ends of the earth. Taking the church seriously makes the whole thing stronger. Let us be strong so that we can leverage that strength for those around us even more effectively than we already are. Let us become fully who God designed us to be. Nothing less will do.