The Church is Dangerous | Room For More | Pastor Joe Coffey

Acts 5:1–11

Acts 5:1–11

But a man named Ananias,

with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his

wife's knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds,

and brought only a part of it, and laid it at the apostles feet.

But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan fill your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit

and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land

while remain unsold, did it not remain your own?

And after it was sold, was it not a your disposal?

Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart?

You have not lied to man, but to God.

When an honest heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last.

And great fear came upon all who heard of it.

The young man rose and wrapped him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing

what had happened, and Peter said to her,

tell me whether you sold the land for so much.

And she said yes for so much.

But Peter said to her,

how is it that you have agreed together to test the spirit of the Lord?

Behold, the feet of those who have bury

your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.

Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathe her last.

When the young man came in and they found her dead,

they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.

And great fear came upon the whole church,

and upon all who heard of these things.

Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community Chapel,

my name is Joe.

I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm glad you've come.

If you're seeing me on the screen, special welcome to you.

Alright,

this is the fourth week of our ten-week series on the Book of Acts.

And you just listen to a passage from Acts chapter five,

the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

Let me be the first one to say

yikes.

I mean, holy cow, you have two people dropped dead,

presumably because they lied about what they had given.

It's a wild story.

It takes 11 verses to tell.

There's very little detail.

There's no explanation.

It's never mentioned again.

And it's one of the most disturbing stories in the whole book of Acts.

And I get to preach on it.

So let's go.

All right.

Let me give you a little background before I get to the three points,

so you can understand the context of Ananias and Sapphira.

Really it begins in chapter four.

Oh, I should tell you too that your title

for this series on Acts is Room for More and Ananias and Sapphira

made room for two more, little dark humor just to get started.

All right. This is Acts chapter four.

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul.

No one said that any of the things that belong to him was his own,

but they had everything in common, and with great power.

The apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection

of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands

or houses sold them and brought the proceeds

of what was sold, and laid it at the apostles feet,

and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas,

which means set of encouragement, a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold

a field that belonged to him,

and brought the money and laid it at the apostles feet.

Okay, the church at this time is days,

maybe weeks old, and it is amazing.

I hope you can kind of feel that there is just overwhelming

joy and love, and there is just this reckless

generosity, and there's a purity to everything that's going on.

There's no one trying to scam the system.

Everybody was was sharing and caring for each other.

And it ends with the last two verses with a man named Barnabas,

who sells a piece of property and takes all the proceeds, gives it to the apostles

so that they can distribute it as they see fit to help the church.

And then chapter five begins, and you're introduced

to Ananias and Sapphira and Ananias and Sapphira.

They see what Barnabas has done.

It appears that they're doing the same thing, but it's not the same at all.

This story is not about how much you give.

You know, Peter makes it clear when he sells, Ananias was the property,

not yours.

Before you sold it was the money, not yours.

After you sold it.

This is a story about lying and pretending

to be something you're not.

The title of this message is

The church is dangerous.

The church is dangerous.

It's a it's a tough motto.

If you have a church

that you want to have grow, we're not going to put a banner out

front of 303 saying, this church is dangerous.

What's interesting is that it doesn't seem to have slowed the growth

of the early church at all.

All right. Here are my three points.

When we talk about the church's dangerous, I'm going to talk about the danger

of God's presence, the danger of pretending

and the safety of surrender, the danger of God's presence,

the danger of pretending and the safety of surrender.

First, the danger of God's presence.

If you've ever taken the Bible and tried to read it from cover

to cover, you start with the Book of Genesis,

which is the first book, and it's a great book.

Great book to start with, super interesting moves, very fast.

It's a divided first with four events.

You have creation fall, which is when sin enters the world,

things begin to break up.

You got Noah and the ark, the flood, and then you have the Tower of Babel.

Then you move right into four patriarchs the story of Abraham,

the story of Isaac, story of Jacob, story of Joseph in your through Genesis.

Then you start Exodus.

Exodus also moves very quickly.

At first you have the Israelites, her in Egypt.

God is going to redeem them.

You got the ten plagues, you got Passover, you got the Promised Land, all of that.

And then towards the end of Exodus, and then as you get into the third book,

which is Leviticus, things slow way up and you begin to slog

through pages and pages of detail

about clean and unclean

food, about sacrifices, about a thing called the tabernacle, about a box

that's about the size of a cedar chest called

the Ark of the covenant, made famous by Indiana Jones.

And there are pages and pages of detail about that box,

about the dimensions of the box, how it was supposed to be crafted

and designed, what was going to go in the box, who could carry the box,

how they're going to carry the box, where are they going to put the box?

Because that box represented the very presence of God,

the very presence of God.

If I was going to sum up that whole part of the Bible,

I would sum it up with a single sentence that God is communicating to human beings,

that you approach him on his terms, not on yours.

That's it.

God is communicating over and over again. You.

You approach him on his terms, not on yours.

He is saying something about his nature.

It helps me to think about electricity like electricity.

Super beneficial.

I would not want to live without electricity,

but electricity is also dangerous

and you approach electricity on its terms, not on your own.

Like there was a summer when I was in college

where I worked as an electrician's helper.

That's an overstatement.

I did not help much, but I stood around him a lot,

and he liked to work fast, and sometimes when it was a simple project,

he would even turn the breaker off.

And one day he was up on a ladder and he made a mistake and the electricity

blew him off the ladder, which probably saved his life.

And he almost bit his tongue in two.

And that made such an impression on me.

That's probably why I limit my contact with electricity

to changing light bulbs and plugging the toaster in carefully.

Right.

Because I have a respect for electricity.

Listen, right at the beginning

in the Old Testament, when God tells, here's your lights, I will.

My presence will be with you.

Huge benefits to that.

Like electricity, huge benefits to living with electricity.

But there's also an inherent danger that God makes very clear about his nature.

And one of the things that you cannot have

a God of infinite power and have him be so safe,

you can approach him any way you want, all willy nilly.

Like that's a mistake that a lot of people make, a lot of people.

We want a God who is who can do things we can't do,

change parts of us that we can't change, transform

us, redeem us, save us.

But we also want to him to be so safe that we can treat him any way we want.

We can wear t shirts that say, Jesus is my homeboy.

I remember seeing a photograph of Ashton Kutcher years ago

with that t shirt on, and I was thinking, what?

Wonder if he's talking about the same Jesus

that Paul the Apostle talks about in Colossians?

This is how Paul describes Jesus.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible

and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

All things were created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and him all things hold together.

He's the head of the body, the church.

He's the beginning,

the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,

and through him to reconcile to himself all things,

whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

That is not my homeboy.

That is the God of the universe.

You know, two weeks ago

we talked about Pentecost in Acts chapter two with the Spirit of God.

Holy spirit came down, mighty rushing

wind, flames of fire, right?

And human beings experienced something human beings had never experienced before,

which was the presence of God actually coming inside of them with power.

They became like a a field of burning bushes.

Listen.

That is a God who was powerful

and inherently dangerous.

And here at the very beginning of the church, God,

something happens that reminds everyone that God's

nature has not changed,

that you approach God on his terms, not on your own.

That's the danger of God's presence.

The second point is the danger of pretending.

So Ananias and Sapphira, they see what Barnabas did,

and then they decide

they're going to try to show that they're doing the same thing.

I'm going to have to make a couple

of assumptions here, because there aren't many details in the story.

And my first assumption is that when Barnabas did

what he did, he didn't do it so that other people would notice.

They Barnabas did it because he loved God,

because he was overwhelmed by grace and because he was full of joy.

Which is why any of us and all of us should give, right?

So he does that.

But people do notice.

And when they notice he goes up.

It kind of in their in his reputation, in how they think of him.

And Ananias and Sapphira see that and they want that to happen to them.

So they hatch this plan to act like

they're doing what he did, but they don't really do it.

They pretend.

And there are two dangers that I can see with pretending,

and both of them are directly impact your relationship with God.

Which is why Peter tells Ananias you have not lied to people.

You have lied to God.

The first danger of pretending of of acting like I'm someone that I'm not,

is that I create an image of myself that is not real.

Like if I have this right, there's the real me.

There's the made up me.

And this does not really exist.

And God can do all kinds of stuff with what is real.

He can't do anything with what doesn't exist.

And when I say that God can deal with what is real.

I mean, God can deal with weakness and failure.

This is Peter who is the one who is talking.

Peter, who failed miserably, denied Jesus three times, was a coward

when he should have been courageous, and Jesus took him and restored him.

Peter never acted like he was something other than he was.

He just said, yeah, I failed terribly

and that's all God needed to hear, right?

God can deal with doubt.

You got Thomas, who was the only disciple to not see Jesus.

Everybody else is all excited.

Thomas says something very crass to everybody else.

He says, unless I put my finger in the wound in his hand, unless

I put my hand in the wound of his side, I will never believe.

And then Jesus shows up.

Jesus restores Thomas.

Thomas ends up taking the gospel to India.

My point is this there.

They're all kinds of us here, myself included,

who made a mess of our lives in one way or another.

But we have been transformed because God can do all

he can do anything with what is real.

And one of the dangers of church

is that church can be an easy place to pretend.

But Jesus never intended the church to be a place where you had to pretend.

Because the one thing we have in common in this church that we know

we are all of us sinners, and all of us in desperate need of a Savior.

So this is the one place where you can be

absolutely real about who you are,

right?

The first danger of pretending

is if you pretend to be someone you're not,

you actually put yourself out of the reach of God.

That's the first danger.

The second danger is why Ananias and Sapphira

actually did what they did, right?

Why did they go through the whole charade of selling a piece of property and saying

it was for so much when they actually were keeping part of it behind?

Well, I don't think they did that because they were trying

to give something to God.

They didn't do it because of God's grace or other joy

they had, or the love that they had for God.

They didn't do it for the same reason that Barnabas did.

They did it because they wanted to look good to other people.

That was more important to them than anything else.

Like if I was going to cast and make a very simple play about this

story and I was going to cast characters, I would have Ananias and Sapphira.

I'd have the piece of property or money, right?

I would have the group of people that they were trying to impress.

And if somebody said, well, where's God in the story?

I would say, well, you know, God's kind of God's a prop.

He's over here.

He's not really important to the story, not with Ananias,

that he is involved with these things.

He's not very involved with God.

It's a very dangerous thing.

It's not a small thing to use God as a prop, like a businessman who joins

a church, is to make business connections, but doesn't really care about God,

but acts like he cares about God in order to get business connections.

Like if you were in the Old Testament,

that'd be a little like smuggling an idol into the temple.

It is a dangerous thing to do, to pretend like that.

That's the danger of God's presence, the danger of pretending

now, the safety of surrender.

All right,

so in the Old Testament,

you have the temple, which is the place of worship.

The temple was constructed very carefully to communicate something about God.

And when I say the temple was constructed very carefully,

there was an outer court where everybody could go.

Then there was a smaller court, like a doorway as you go

through to get into the smaller court, and only Jews could go there.

Then you had a smaller court where only priests could go.

And then there was the smallest room, which was called the Holy of Holies.

That's where the box was.

That's where the Ark of the covenant was.

It was behind a big curtain that was that was as thick as a man's hand.

It was made of wool.

It was super, super thick.

And they the only one person

could go into the Holy of holies, and he could go in once a year.

That was the high priest.

Pages and pages of details

on how the high priest was supposed to be able to go into the Holy of Holies.

He was supposed to wash a certain way.

He was supposed to put on certain clothes.

He had to make a sacrifice for himself and a sacrifice for the people.

He would carry a bowl of blood into the Holy of Holies.

Before he went in, they attached a rope to his ankle,

put bells on his robe so that if he dropped dead inside

the Holy of Holies that could pull him out,

they would know he'd drop dead because the bells would stop,

and then they would pull him out by the rope.

The reason they did that is they knew that the high priest

was going into the most dangerous place in the universe.

He was going as close as you could possibly

get to the very presence of God.

It was like the nuclear reactor

when Jesus died on the

cross, when he breathed his last breath.

There's a detail, something that happens.

And what happens is that curtain that is as thick

as a man's hand, tore in half and splayed open.

It was God visually demonstrating

that the sacrifice that Jesus just made

made the presence of God available to people like Jesus would be able

to take you by the hand and walk you into the very presence of God.

And the most dangerous place in the universe would then become

the safest place in the universe for you, because you were with Jesus.

That's why Paul the Apostle could write what he wrote in Romans chapter eight.

This is what he says.

What then shall we say to these things?

If God is for us, who can be against us?

He did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all.

How we not also with him graciously give us all things?

Who shall bring any charge against God's elect?

It is God who justifies, who is to condemn

Christ Jesus is the one who died more than that he was raised

who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us?

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution,

or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword,

as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all day long.

We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

Knowing all these things, we're more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,

nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth,

nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us

from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Listen, the wonder of the gospel is this

you can be your real self,

your real you.

You can be the angry you,

the ashamed you, the anxious you,

the selfish you, the exhausted you,

and all you do is take the real you and surrender it to Jesus.

Your lifeguards are taught when they swim out to somebody who's drowning.

The thing they try to get them to do is just say, just stop struggling

and let me take you.

That's that's the gospel.

That's Jesus.

Jesus said, it will take you by the hand, and I will walk you

into the very presence of God in the most dangerous place in the year

will become the safest place.

Because you've surrendered to me.

The gospel is the place

where you can be fully known

and fully loved because of Jesus.

Here,

right at the beginning of the church, something happens.

Oh, and it says it.

It filled the the fear of God swept through the church.

And that word, the fear of God, means that there was reverence and worship

and or and the truth is, the more you fear

God like that, the less you fear

because you're close to him.

Listen.

The church is dangerous status because the presence of God is here.

There is something inherently dangerous about the most powerful

being in the universe.

There's a danger in pretending, but there is a safety in surrender.

If you surrender to Jesus, that makes this

the greatest place in the entire universe, that's the church.

Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven.

Thank you.

Thanks for your grace through Jesus.

Thanks that we can surrender to you our real self.

We don't have to pretend because Jesus

makes it possible to take whatever we are.

Bring it to

you and we can stand in your presence with him.

Prayer for every person here.

You will help us all to stop wanting to pretend, but be our real selves

and let you transform us through the love of Jesus.

Thanks.

Thanks for giving us such a wonderful Savior.

We pray this in his name. Amen.