Acts 4:32-5:2

There are two major changes that Jesus brings in a believer’s heart, the heart is loosened in relationship to things and tightened in its relationship to people.

4: 32: “Now the company of those who believed! This is the key: believing in Jesus as Savior and Lord, trusting him for all you need, being satisfied with all that God is for you in Jesus, that’s the key, that’s the root of what’s happening in this story.

That’s what this story is all about. It’s a snapshot of a community of people whose hearts have been utterly revolutionized by believing in Jesus. They found themselves freely caring about people, and freely selling land and houses and giving the money to the church for distribution to those with special needs.

What Luke is describing for us here in this story is the radically freeing effect of true faith in Jesus. Christianity is not a matter of external conformity to religious expectations. It is a matter of internal liberty. It is not a matter of force and law. It’s a matter of freedom and love. Being a Christian means being changed from the inside out so that you fall in love with people and fall out of love with things.

Here in Acts we see the early Christian devotion to fellow Christians. The early Christian communalism depicted here testifies to the intimate concern Christians had for each other. There was so much love and concern one for another that there was a remarkable independence of any ensnarement to mere things. “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.”

These believers, still owned their own goods in one sense, as is made clear, for instance, in the next chapter, verse 4, when Peter insists when Ananias and Sapphira sold their land it was still their money to do with as they pleased.

There was no imposition of communism, no imposition of complete poverty as a criterion for entering the Christian community.

This whole thing came about by the dynamic power of the Spirit from within. Christians loved each other so much that if they saw each other in need, in a day before the welfare state, they did whatever was necessary to alleviate the pressure.

By this time, there were thousands in this Christian community, many of whom had come to Jerusalem for the feast, were saved by Peter’s message and never returned to the own country.

Today, we don’t have with ease the opportunities for this kind of help that the first Christians had. Our opportunities for help are always more remote: the church in another country or something. However, we need to demonstrate devotion to one another by all kinds of other practical ways. We must look for them.

We find it easier to write a check today than to give our time, but if we demonstrate something of this communal concern for one another amongst ourselves, then our church we will begin to light the entire community as people take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus.

Barnabas

What’s his name? Son of encouragement. Son of encouragement simply meant this person was characterized by encouragement. “

1. He did not love money and things. He dreamed about the good that would be done with his gift and the glory it would bring to Jesus.

2. He did not want to appear more generous than he was. He did not need the praise of men. He had the approval of God.

3. He did not lie. He loved the truth. He could be trusted. His integrity became legendary in the early church.

4. He brought no reproach on the Holy Spirit. He knew that the Spirit was alive and real in the church. He knew that his every thought was open and laid bare before the Spirit of truth. And he knew that the gift of grace in his life was not the permission of God to keep on loving things, but the power of God to start loving people.

Ananias and Sapphira

They stand for the exact opposite, people who have not really been changed on the inside by being satisfied with all that God is for them in Christ, but who still want some place in the visible church. The reason they drop dead is to give a stunning warning to the whole church that phony Christians will all end up this way, sooner or later.

God means for his people to fear hypocrisy. He means for us to be afraid of treating the Holy Spirit with contempt. After Ananias had died: “And great fear came upon all who heard of it.” Then again in verse 11 after Sapphira died, “And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.” This is the lesson Luke wants us to get: faking faith in the presence of God is a fearful thing.

The Wrong Attitude of Ananias and Sapphira

1.They loved their money. They made the sale, they looked at all that cash, and they couldn’t bear the thought of giving it all away. So they kept some back (v. 2).

2. They wanted to look more generous than they really were. They wanted the apostles to think that they were like Barnabas perhaps. They wanted external religious approval. They not only loved money, they loved the praise of men, the two almost always go together (Luke 16:14–15).

3. They lied to cover their covetousness, and to give the impression of generosity, they lied. If you love possessions and you love the praise of men, your love for truth will dissolve into deception and fraud. That’s the meaning of hypocrisy.

4. They discredited the Holy Spirit. Verse 3 says they lied to the Holy Spirit. Verse 4 says they lied not to man but to God. Verse 9 says they tempted the Lord.

They discredited the Holy Spirit.

1. One is that they may not have even believed the Holy Spirit was even present in the church. They may have simply functioned on a human level and never even thought about the real presence of the Spirit of the living God.

2. Maybe they believed in his presence in some theoretical way, but just didn’t think he knew the thoughts of their mind. He was there, maybe, but he wasn’t real. He wasn’t a person who knew things and felt things and acted in real ways, like making people die!

3. Or, maybe they thought he was there and real, but that he wouldn’t really punish them. Perhaps they had a view of grace that says, “No matter how devious and hypocritical you are, God always tolerates everything.”

But the heart of their deceit, was the conspiracy to lie against the Holy Spirit.

It’s not just that they lied before the community. That’s what they thought they were doing. They thought by this lie they could keep some of the money and, thus, gain that way and, yet, at the same time have a reputation for being extraordinarily generous and all you had to do was deceive a few Christians. What difference did it make since, after all, they were giving a lot of money, and the money would help a lot of people?

Under the new covenant, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the people of God in a transforming way. Remember the promise of Jeremiah in chapter 31? The old covenant was basically a tribal arrangement. At Mount Sinai, the people were afraid of coming too close to God, so Moses served as a kind of intermediary. He was like God to the people, and he represented the people to God.

Then later, as the years passed, there were various institutions and gifts. Prophets, priests, and kings served and some other notable leaders, whom the Spirit was poured out, but never do we read the Spirit was poured out all on the people. No, the entire arrangement of that old covenant was fundamentally tribal. God dealt with a group of people as a whole through designated leaders who stood for the people before God and who stood for God before the people.

When King David sins, there is a curse that comes upon the entire people and the entire people are chastened. When the Spirit is poured out, the Spirit is poured out on the monarch or the priest or the king or other notable leaders. David, having seen that the Spirit was withdrawn from Saul, when he sins, cries to God and says, “Withdraw not your Holy Spirit from me!”

But Jeremiah promises a new covenant, in Jeremiah 31:29, “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ” Part of the entire tribal structure of the old covenant. “Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge. ‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers.’

Jeremiah 31:33 This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord … That is, as under the old tribal structure where there were various individuals who were designated teachers and intermediaries of one sort or another.

“… because they will all know me.” Under the new covenant there is no special brand of mediators, of priests who are one notch farther in who have a special enduement of the Holy Spirit. Gifts are distributed, but all people under the new covenant have the Holy Spirit. ‘They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness, and I will remember their sins no more.’ ”

So also in Ezekiel 36 and Joel, chapter 2. The promise of the new covenant is associated with the promise of the outpouring of the Spirit. When the Spirit comes, each individual person under that new covenant will be transformed and have God’s ways, God’s standards implanted on the heart so that people will be pure.

They will love holiness. They will not need to be taught by some special brand of mediators. There may be teachers in the church but not mediating teachers. Merely the distribution of gifts from this one Spirit. Now
someone comes along within this new covenant community and fakes holiness. Do you see the heinousness now of the offense?

The very heart of the new covenant is transformed character, the result of regeneration, people who love holiness where they did not once love holiness, people who have been transformed from the inside.

Now someone wants a reputation for that and pretends, in fact, that they have been transformed. Thus, they are lying regarding the gift of the Spirit. They are lying before God. They are not simply deceiving the church. There is a sense in which they are flaunting the new covenant, trying to domesticate that.

There are many ways in which we today to our shame treat the same blessed Holy Spirit as lightly. We may stand up in our prayer meetings and pray passionately for revival. Do we pray so earnestly on our knees in the quiet places? What does Jesus say about those who pray only in public? How many of us in our churches are more concerned for our reputation for moral integrity than we are with moral integrity itself? What is that but the same sin of deceit?

As a result, there was early Christian discipline as well. Some think Ananias simply fell down from a heart attack when he found his deceit exposed, but by the time you come to verse 9, Peter is actually predicting the death of Sapphira. No, this is God breaking into the church to discipline it immediately and shockingly.

It’s not the only place in the New Testament where this sort of thing takes place. The others are not quite so dramatic; they are no less final. We read in 1 Corinthians 11, because certain people approached the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner, some in Corinth had fallen ill and others had actually fallen asleep. That is, they had died.

In 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, in the case of immorality, Paul counsels the church to hand this person over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh which, means the destruction of his physical well-being to death if need be in the hope that instead he will repent and turn again.

Paul, elsewhere in his first epistle to Timothy, can say he has cast over Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan in order that they may be taught not to blaspheme, and Satan’s aim is certainly not to destroy the flesh in the spiritual sense. It’s certainly not to destroy the old, sinful nature. His aim is to destroy the body, to destroy the person and bring him down to death.

It is almost as if the ultimate sanction in the New Testament (excommunication) was a self-conscious removal of the person by the church to an orb outside the kind of sphere of protective covering that the church has under the lordship of Christ, to put him outside that and say, “All right. If you’re not coming under this lordship, come under Satan’s lordship and see how you do there.”

The final sanction in the New Testament is very severe. In the New Testament, this final sanction is imposed in three areas: major moral depravity, ; major doctrinal deviation; and major, consistent, loveless factionalism as in 2 Timothy, for example. “Warn a divisive person once. Warn him twice. Then have nothing to do with him.”

Those three areas are, interestingly enough, precisely the three areas John deals with in his first epistle when he describes criteria for genuine, vital Christianity. That is, there was a certain doctrinal test (in his case, the test of the confession that Jesus is the Christ), there was also a moral test (obedience to Christ), and a love test (loving the brothers in Christ’s name).

In the New Testament, of course, church discipline does not begin with excommunication.

If you see something going amuck in someone’s life in our church, we have an obligation to pray for that person and quite possibly gently and with humility, remembering the possibility of a beam in our own eye, nevertheless, ultimately challenge that person with the truth and standard of God’s Word.

The higher up you are in church authority, the more you have that responsibility, but ultimately the extreme sanction is not only approved by the New Testament; it is mandated, for the church is never a social club, a gathering of people who have common social interests. It is the people of the new covenant, and that redeemed community aims under God to be a confessional, morally pure group.

Many people who are converted take a long time to exhibit all the patterns of Christian maturity some would like to see. We should be more concerned about the direction of a life than about this or that little bit, but where there is no sign of direction toward conformity to Christ, New Testament sanctions are mandated.

This is not an easy teaching. Moreover, it is not always clear that God will act to preserve his church in so dynamic a way. Elsewhere, in the New Testament the church itself is to take this decision, as in 1 Corinthians 5. Nevertheless, it is quite clear God is concerned that his people be a pure people.

Both in Scripture and in Christian experience, whenever the church exercises discipline with brokenness and compassion, there is inevitably good result.

But where Christians remember the advice Paul gives to the Galatians in the sixth chapter, to the elders to remember themselves lest they also should be tempted, when the advice Paul gives to the Corinthians in his first epistle, the fifth chapter, to grieve over the person who has committed such a sin as well as to exercise church discipline, whenever such advice is followed, inevitably church discipline becomes a cathartic experience. It cleans up the church, and it can have restorative value to the erring member.