Acts 4v32-5v11 Making it, faking it.

Acts 4v32-5v11  Making it, faking it.

Making it
Luke moves his history of the emerging church along with a short description of the life they shared together.  Making it, forming this community, is the work of the Holy Spirit.   We finished last week by stating that this “amazing shared life” was one of the “visible demonstrations of God's transforming power.” It was part of the answer to the prayer for God to stretch out his hand. The Spirit is bringing this into being. 

Of one mind. Luke has still held back from using the word “Church” (Ekklesia),  he is still talking about “believers” (cf. 2. 44) – only now they are a crowd, too many to be “in one place”, but still they are of one mind.    Making it happen starts inside.  It starts with our values. I've seen plenty of Churches say big, exciting things about their life together.  But it's not about rhetoric; it's about the inner life.  It's about being “one in heart and soul ”  (Literal translation).  That means we are not just a bunch of people who are interested in Christianity; we are a real community, a family (aiming to be a healthy one not a dysfunctional one!). That's quite a work of the Spirit, and one we need to co-operate with as we allow the Word and Spirit to infiltrate and shape our values, our emotional responses, our inner drives.

They shared everything they had.   It's about our attitude to possessions, but also about our attitude to one another and to ourselves, and to Jesus.  I remember hearing Jim Graham comment about the way the early Church,”had everything in common”.  He said there are two wrong attitudes.  One is to say “What's mine's my own.”  The other is to say “What's yours is mine!”  Rather, Jim suggested, we need to be able to say “What's mine is His!”  The ability to hold on to material things loosely, using them to bless one another, and being prepared to hand things over, is a litmus test of our relationship with Jesus.  It is one of the evidences that we have reached a point where “What’s mine is His!”  Being the Church, living as the Church, as a real community, is part of the outworking of Discipleship. 

Great Power, Great Grace  They knwe an anointing to proclaim the Gospel – presumably with signs following; and (literally) “great grace was upon them all, for there was not a needy person among them”.  Nobody was stuck. Nobody went without. This is one of these points when I want to say again that Grace is a wee bit more than “God's riches at Christ’s expense.”  It's more like “God's Redeeming Action in Christian Experience”.  It's not quite so neat but it's better theology.  The word “Grace” (Charis) is a big word that's about the  gifting, joy-bringing, releasing, pleasing, thanks-inspiring action of God. The supreme example of that was the cross of Jesus. for helpless sinners; but it's the same word that Paul uses when he is talking about spiritual gifts, about anointing to preach the Gospel, and in other ways.   

Grace at work.  “Grace” works out, for the first believers, in this practical life. “There wasn’t a need person among them...”  because they were prepared to use their resources for the common good.  People realised capital and made it available to church leaders – not for the private jet or the luxury home, or even for the smoked-glass fronted sanctuary – but for the poor.  Now the sharing of goods in Acts 2 wasn't a once-off, across the board event that left everyone in the same financial circumstances.  People responded “from  time to time”.  The words “owned, brought and put” are continuous actions. You could translate it “They were bringing the money and putting it at the Apostles' feet.”  It was an ongoing thing not something that happened all at once. They did it as they were led to by the Holy Spirit.  This worked out differently for different believers in Jerusalem: not everyone stripped away all they owned all at once.  These inner attitudes have to turn outwards, in practical discipleship.  Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. (Rom  12. 9 NLT)   We can't claim to love people and remain indifferent to their needs.  We can't claim we love people and exploit them.   Grace is always practical. But it will be practical in different ways in different times in the lives of different people.  

Summary.  The Spirit “makes” community life that is radical in its attitude to material things (because of radical obedience to Jesus.) and experiences the power of the Spirit, and meets real needs.

Faking it
In the Jerusalem Church, Ananias and Sapphira  watched; they were impressed.  They wanted to fit in.  They wanted a part of the action.  They wanted to make an impression too. Maybe someone in their house-group had asked an awkward question about how much they had in the bank.  So they sold a piece of property, which they were entitled to do.  And they came to the Apostles with their offering. They wanted the Apostles  to think that the money they presented was every penny they got from selling the land.  They wanted their friends who may have known how much money they got for the property, to think they  had given it all to church.   It was a big lie.  They were challenged about it. Not only Ananias, but Sapphira died on the spot. 

So what is the big deal?  Howard Marshall describes this episode as “one of the most difficult” in the book of Acts. When I mentioned at house-group on Wednesday that this was the next passage to deal with, someone said they felt sorry for  Ananias and Sapphira.  As Peter said, before they sold their land it was “theirs”.  When they sold it the money was “theirs”.  Nobody was making any objection to that.  Nobody was coercing them into anything different.

Why did God react in such forceful and final way? 

The problem begins in the fact that they was their property as “Theirs”. That made them fundamentally different to the rest of the community: the others didn’t' think what what they owned was their own.  But although they were different form the rest of the community,  they wanted to look like they were the same as all the rest.  They wanted everyone  to think “Ananias and Sapphira are keen believers who don't view the resources they have as their own.”   It would have been OK to be different.  It would have been OK to say “That field was mine; and this money is mine, and I'm giving part of it for the poor; and the rest, is remaining mine!” That would have been OK.  What wasn’t'  OK was to pretend, to act the part.  Do you know what the Greek word for an actor is?  It's "hypocrites." If you or I are acting a part, were a hypocrite.

By playing the part, they showed that they were different from the rest in another way.  Peter says, they weren't just lying to men but to God. The Holy Spirit is the one who “created the community and maintained it in being.” He is in the Apostles.  And he is God.  And there Ananias and Sapphira were, lying to the Holy Spirit and testing the Holy Spirit obviously trying to see how much they could get away with.  The rest of the fellowship was marked by “Great power and great grace” … they were swimming in this amazing move of God, and Ananias and Sapphira had already reckoned the Holy Spirit out of the equation, viewing the the community and its leaders as just a bunch of religious people, daring the Spirit to reveal the truth about them to the others.  Was God really there with them? Did God really care about how they behaved and thought? Would God notice? Maybe he wasn't as close as they all claimed he was? 

There are too many Christians who “Fake it” in terms of what they putting in and why.  They fake it about giving money or time, or about their motives.  They “Fake it” about how much they read the Bible and pray.  There are too many Christians  who “Fake it” about what they are actually receiving or experiencing from God: they copy gifts, they do what looks or sounds “spiritual”.   When the Spirit is making it happen, there will always be someone faking it. That's part of life. 

It's OK to fail.  It's OK not to be super-dedicated to the Lord.  Now don't get me wrong.  It's better if we are 100% committed to Jesus. and love him with all we are.    I want us to be 100% committed.  But I also want us to be 100% real.  Too much of Word and Spirit Christianity is built on putting people on a guilt trip and manipulating them.  So, part of commitment is honesty. 

I want us to be a generous, giving, bible-reading, praying, worshipping, healing, spirit-filled Church.  But above all I want us to be a real community.

© Gilmour Lilly August  2013