When Church is a Health Hazard

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. With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time, those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet. Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife, Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife's full knowledge, he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles' feet. 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 received for the land? Didn't it belong to you before it was sold?

And after it was sold, wasn't the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God." 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.

About three hours later, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, "Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?" "Yes," she said. "That is the price." Peter said to her, "How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord?

Look. The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also." At that moment, she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

This is the word of the Lord. Can I encourage you, congregation, just to leave your Bible open there at Acts 5 as this morning we look at this story of Ananias and Sapphira? And that goes also for those who are watching the live streaming. Please do leave your Bibles open in front of you as we work our way through this portion of God's word together this morning. I was toying with the idea this past week, brothers and sisters in Christ, of taking some photos of cigarette packets and putting them up on the screen here in front of us.

But some of those sad pictures of diseased organs are probably just a little bit too graphic for a church service. I'm sure you're familiar with them photos of gangrenous toes and diseased lungs and pictures like that. And of course, splashed right across the pack is the words: smoking is a health hazard. Well, I want to announce this morning a competition that you might like to enter. I'd like someone to draw up some posters, not about smoking, but about church.

We'll need some very graphic pictures as well. And then the words right across, flashed across it: church is a health hazard. Because isn't that what we find here this morning in the book of Acts? For example, look in your Bible a moment and tell me what's recorded later in chapter 5 and verse 40. What happens there?

Someone got it? Verse 40. What happens in verse 40? Disciples are being flogged. Now it seems to me, congregation, that that sounds like a health hazard.

So maybe the poster that you designed could have a picture of someone being flogged. If you turn over a few more pages and see what happens at the end of Acts chapter 7, verses 59 and 60 would give you some more material for some graphic pictures for your poster. The story of Stephen, a deacon in the church, and what happens to him there? He's stoned and not with drugs, with rocks. I don't want to be flippant, congregation, but that sounds very much like a health hazard to me.

Acts chapter 12 opens with more graphic imagery. James, the brother of John, is executed for no other reason than that he's a follower of Jesus and happens to be the leader in the church. Well, in Acts chapter 16 where Paul and Silas are flogged and put in the stocks in prison. We read a verse later, a little earlier from where the prisoner asked, "What must I do to be saved?" But Paul and Silas in the stocks, why would anyone want to join the church, congregation, if that can happen to you?

Church is a health hazard. Here in our text this morning, we've got two corpses in the church, Ananias and Sapphira. So we need a poster warning: church is a health hazard. You can end up getting killed as a martyr or as a liar. This morning, friends, to understand the story of Ananias and Sapphira, we need the context at the end of chapter 4.

That's why we began our reading in chapter 4. It presents a wonderful picture of harmony and love. Notice what it says in verse 32 of chapter 4. All believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of these possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.

And that's about a church that's not just made up of a couple of dozen people or even a couple of hundred people. This is a church that has grown in leaps and bounds in a matter of days to more than 5,000. And people with property are selling it and bringing the money to the apostles for the needy. That's not some form of Christian communism. It's not enforced.

Not like some of the sects that we sometimes read about where it's mandatory, it's demanded that you sell everything and share it with everybody. This is totally voluntary. It's quite an amazing picture when you read it and think about it. And then we're told at the end of that chapter about that outstanding example of generosity that Levi Joseph sells a field and he brings the outcome of that, the money, and he puts it at the apostles' feet. They've nicknamed him Barney, a name that means son of encouragement.

Wonderful example of Christian generosity and love and compassion. And so Ananias and Sapphira decide to do the same thing, but somewhere along the line they decide they won't give the apostles all the money. Maybe they had some second thoughts when they got that brochure in the mail, you know, a holiday cruise on the Dead Sea. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Let's keep some of the money and take that cruise.

We need a holiday. Okay, I'm using my imagination. We're not told exactly how it went, but it's perfectly understandable, isn't it, congregation? You make the sale and suddenly you've got all this money in your hands.

You were going to make a sizable donation to a worthy cause, to a charity, but hey, hang on, we worked hard for this and we do need a holiday. And so what they do is they pretend that they're bringing the whole sum of what they received from the sale of their land, but they keep back part of it for themselves. Hey, who's to know anyway? Today if I asked you what you thought the worst sin is, I wonder what you'd say. I know if I asked some Christians, though, some Christians, that they would say sexual sins are the worst.

Merely mentioning that is enough to get them quite wound up. For others, the worst sin might be the abuse of one's spouse or one's children. It's a terrible thing to be hurt by those who are nearest and dearest to us and who are supposed to love us. There are still others who would live daily with the damage caused by drunkenness and they loathe it and in their eyes that's the worst sin. In our day and age, it causes so many other problems. But hey, the sin of Ananias and Sapphira here in this chapter, it's a capital offence.

They actually die for this sin. Did God really have to be so harsh with them? Isn't this an overreaction? It's a problem, congregation, for many people today because this is not a major sin by our standards. This is just wanting to look a little better, a little more generous than what they really are.

Ananias and Sapphira want to look good and compassionate like Barnabas and so they pretend to give everything, all of it, so that people will think well of them. But I want to ask you this morning, congregation, isn't that, when it's all boiled down, isn't that the heart of sin? Isn't sin basically putting ourselves at the centre of the universe? The heart of sin is about self-glorification and our hunger for that. It's about me and that comes out in a hundred and one different ways. Look at the world around us and we see it all the time.

Today our young people are being told you need to make your own choices in life. In other words, don't let your parents tell you what to do. Don't believe that there are moral absolutes that a creator God has set. You make your own moral choices because life is all about you and you need to be happy. That's precisely the fatal mistake that Ananias and Sapphira make here in Acts 5.

It's all about me, about my happiness, and me being thought of well by others. This morning, congregation, this passage of the Bible is highlighting that with God, sin is sin and God doesn't grade sin the way we do. So that we have some sins that we sort of well put up with, but there are other sins that we frown on as being totally unacceptable. And there's still others that we speak about with passion and outrage. That's how it is with us.

That's not how it is with God. This was a lesson that the young infant church had to learn here early in its history, that the church must learn to take sin seriously because God takes sin seriously. We need to deal with this sad situation that we want to be at the centre of the universe, the centre of the world. Life has got to be about me, about my happiness, and my popularity, and my success in life. And God says, no.

That's really the essence of what sin is, the heart of it. Makes us realise this morning that Ananias and Sapphira makes us realise that like them, we, we deserve to die too because we want to make our own choices, don't we, in life? And we want to do our own thing. And that means that so often in the practicalities of daily life, it's no longer the choices that God sets before us, but it's our decisions and our inclinations and our needs. Today, friends, the modern church needs to learn this as badly as they did here in the early church in the book of Acts because, unfortunately, and I'm going to name a name and I've known people to get upset when I do this, but we have preachers in the Christian church today like Joel Osteen who pump people full of exaggerated self-esteem.

But it's all about me and about my happiness. And so more and more Christians today have this sinful idea that life needs to revolve around yours truly. In the case of Ananias and Sapphira, friends, this self-glorification works out in them telling lies. I want others to see how caring they are and how generous they are and so they deliberately set out to deceive. Interestingly, the word isn't actually mentioned in our text, but we all of us this morning know what that amounts to, and I'm talking about hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, congregation, is something that God loathes. Did you know that Jesus' strongest words in the Gospels were reserved for the Pharisees when He accused them of hypocrisy? And hypocrisy is when our words don't match our deeds and the words of Ananias and Sapphira didn't match their deeds either. Today, unfortunately, hypocrisy is still a huge issue for the church and I'm sure that all of us here this morning have sometimes heard it said by someone, "The church is full of hypocrites." Heard that?

Many of us have. It's tempting to say to people when they say that, "Well, come on in. There's always room for one more." That's probably not all that helpful, but the sad reality is that there's too much truth in it for us to dismiss the charge, isn't there? Because Ananias and Sapphira are alive and well in the church today.

And okay, they've got different names but the problems are the same. Too many Christians today, their words don't match their deeds. And like this couple in Acts 5, what they say doesn't square with their actions. And all of us, friends, need to do some repenting at times. Vows we make that are easily broken, promises given but not kept.

It's especially why we see the church here in its infancy called to deal with it. Hypocrisy is a barrier to the Gospel. When others cannot see integrity in us, they don't want to embrace our faith. Hypocrisy hinders people from coming to Jesus. So here it is: if God nips hypocrisy in the bud before it festers and grows in this infant church.

Let me point out a couple of other things about the sin of Ananias and Sapphira. Verse 4, if you look at verse 4, it makes clear that this is not just a sin against man, but it's a sin against God. Maybe that's a little hard for you to see this morning. Wasn't this just two people who were out to deceive other people? They wanted to be thought well of, so they lied to the apostles.

Does that make this a sin against God? Yes, it does, and in two ways. First, because as I already pointed out, the hypocrisy would have been a barrier to the good news of Jesus, and their lack of integrity would turn others off once they found out about it. But secondly, they're actually breaking God's commands not to bear false witness.

Let me remind you this morning that sin of any kind is always first and foremost a sin against God whose commandments we're breaking. It's a good example of that in Psalm 51. Got some time today? Read it. You'll notice that David wrote this Psalm after his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah.

But in that Psalm, David laments. He says, "Against You, You only have I sinned." David had, as it were, thumbed his nose at what God required of him. Sin is primarily always an offence against God because we're following our choices, our own passions, and not God's choices. The other thing about this sin that we ought to realise is that it was a lie.

Today we tend to see lies as relatively unimportant, don't we? I mean, what's the problem with just a little bit of untruth? Hey, our world is brim full of lies. Politicians today are renowned for their lack of truthfulness and we're considered wise today not to believe half of what we hear in advertising, where goods are described in deceptively glowing language as it turns our wants into needs. So who today cares about an occasional white lie?

But lies are not a minor matter, congregation, because lies undermine the fabric of life. More than that, lies are satanic. And I remind you of the words of Jesus when He said that the devil is the father of lies. Maybe this morning, we should also notice, especially, the deliberateness of the lies of Ananias and Sapphira. This is not a lie made in the heat of debate or a lie that's made under the pressures of life.

This was deliberate. It was premeditated because they agreed to do this together. Peter later asked Sapphira whether this was indeed what they got for the land and without hesitation she affirms it. They conspired together to lie about this and Peter proved that they were co-conspirators in their sin against the Lord. I must admit, congregation, that it's the very easiest thing in the world to become a partner in sin with those who are closest to us.

Do you want me to give you a couple of examples this morning? I hope you won't get too embarrassed, but just imagine the phone rings in your family and young Johnny is about to answer it and his father calls out from the lounge and says, "If that's Bill, tell him I'm not home." And so, well, it is Bill and Johnny dutifully tells Bill that dad's not home at present. See how easy a situation arises in which we conspire together to lie, to be less than truthful. I think of a wife I know who's covered up for her husband's drunkenness again and again with little white lies, or the husband who covers up for his wife's gambling problem.

You have more important loyalties than loyalties to your parents and your family, congregation. I know we've got to live with our spouse, but is that an excuse to go along with deception? We have a higher loyalty to the Lord our God and we need to uphold truthfulness also in our family, the moral standards that God sets for us. As a matter of fact, let me ask you the question: what's the more loving thing to do, congregation? Is it to go along with your spouse in telling lies, to join our parents in deceiving others, or is it to say to them, "This is really not what God would want me to do"?

And so firmly and lovingly to say, "Sorry, I can't join you in this deception." Ananias and Sapphira lied together and they died together. That brings us to the very heart of the story this morning and this is the most difficult part of it. What stands out in this passage in the Bible is God's judgment. God's Spirit gives the apostle Peter special insight into what has really happened.

And through the Spirit, Peter pronounces God's death sentence on this couple. But it makes people ask, "What kind of God is this who kills people?" Well, let me remind you this morning that this is not the only place in the Bible where people are killed for sinning against God. You'll be aware of others. In the book of Exodus, there are two sons of Aaron called Nadab and Abihu who decide to be creative about worship and instead of following God's instructions for worship, they decide to make up their own rules.

They thought of something that might be better and they're struck dead on the spot. Well, in the book of Joshua, the story of Israel's victory over Jericho. But Achan takes some of the gold from the plunder that God has devoted to destruction and he and his family are stoned to death for their disobedience. You know what I think we've done, congregation? I think we've domesticated God.

We've kind of turned Him into a kindly grandfather figure who lives upstairs and wouldn't hurt a fly. He's become to so many people a kind of a celestial Santa Claus. And we've lost the biblical perspective and understanding of the awesome holiness of our God, that the God we worship is the God of Malachi, who is the refiner's fire. Here in this chapter, we have a God who wants to burn away the garbage of sin in our lives and the garbage of sin in the church, and it's not us, it's He, and not we, who are at the centre of the universe.

It's not about us. It's about Him. This action also raises some questions about church growth, doesn't it? I mean, a corpse in the church is hardly an incentive for church growth, is it? And two corpses in the church are an even greater barrier to church growth.

By the way, you may be wondering why Ananias was buried without the knowledge of Sapphira. That is often asked. I take it to be because of God's judgment on this man and the way that happened so speedily. Because of that, they buried him post-haste with a minimum of formalities. And maybe Peter even told them to keep it quiet because he wanted to confront Sapphira. But the point is, friends, these two deaths in the church were off-putting for others.

They make us want to put up that poster warning: church is a health hazard. We understand the reaction. Have a look at verse 5 in your Bible. It says, "Great fear seized all who heard what happened." Verse 11, it's repeated.

"Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events." Later in verse 13, it speaks about others being reluctant to join the church. And so it's all very well to say that God does this because of His holiness and His majesty and glory, but doesn't the Lord God know that this puts a damper on the growth of the church? Well, there's another side to it, congregation, and that's the purity of the church. And I want to say this morning, and you can debate this with me if you like or debate it with Tony, preferably, God is more concerned for a pure church than a large church.

And He wants His church to be concerned about the purity of the church too. In fact, that's precisely why not only in the Gospels, but also in the letters, the Bible has a lot to say about what we call church discipline, that God has actually put in place some biblical procedures for dealing with sin in the church. And so the book of Acts presents us with this balance. On the one hand, there is the wonderful, marvellous blessing of the Gospel to see people over and over and over coming to faith in Jesus. On the other hand, there is the curse of God as sin in the church is dealt with.

That presents us this morning with this contrast, congregation. On the one hand, the power of Christ as a lame man leaps for joy in Acts 3. On the other hand, the righteous judgment of God as two liars die in Acts 5. The book of Acts takes salvation in Christ seriously, but it also takes sin seriously. And we as God's people today must do the same.

I pointed out several times this morning that this is happening to a vulnerable church in its infancy. Let me put it in broader context. The devil has just tried for the first time to stop the growth of the church from the outside, so that the authorities have taken Peter and John prisoner and they've demanded their silence. Now, since that didn't work, the devil now tries to destroy the church from within: deliberate lies undermining the integrity of this young, vulnerable church, and God intervenes to protect it. One big final question is whether God still does this sort of thing today.

Well, there was once a bishop who preached on the story of Ananias and Sapphira, and in preaching on it, he said to his congregation, "It's just as well that God doesn't strike people dead anymore because if He did that, where would I be? If still, if God still did that today?" There was a bit of a ripple of a snigger of laughter went through the congregation, but he interrupted it by roaring back, "I'll tell you where I'd be. I'd be preaching to an empty church." So does God still do this today, congregation? Well, it's sobering that in 1 Corinthians 11, we read that the Corinthians church was disciplined by God by the death of some of its members, sobering. And elsewhere too in the New Testament, there are hints that God sometimes removes people by death.

God's ultimate form of discipline for those who continue to rebel against Him. So, congregation, church is a health hazard. But the solution is not to stay away from church because the end of Acts 4 shows us the glorious blessing of belonging to God's people. And the rest of the book of Acts shows us how God changes people through His grace. But His grace, congregation, is not cheap grace, as if we can now forget about personal integrity.

Grace comes through the death of Jesus and God freely applying that to repentant sinners who trust in Him. But brothers and sisters, by the grace of God, we also know the health hazards and we deal with them. By grace, we can live with integrity in the one, the wonderful new life that we're called to share in Jesus, and God does equip us for doing that with His Holy Spirit. Let me lead you in prayer. Father, thank You for the multifaceted truth that Your word contains.

Awesome truth about unbelievers, rebels against You, enemies becoming Christians as they trust in Jesus for salvation. But Father, Your word also shows us Your utter holiness and that we need to be people with integrity. And so help us this morning, Lord, to seek the well-being of the church in its growth, but also the well-being of the church in its purity. Help us, Father, to encourage one another to live by the truth of Your word, to live that out in our lives so that we will not have these constant accusations of hypocrisy that the world throws at us. Help us to live the kind of life that is pleasing to You.

We pray that through Jesus Christ our Lord in whose name we say together. Amen.