Who do you think your lying to?

We find in Acts 5: 1-10 a very interesting story that Dr. Luke under inspiration chose to include in the story of the early church. The church as a whole is growing by leaps and bounds. Many people are showing signs of being moved by compassion as they sell their lands and possessions to take care of all. No doubt pride was setting in for some of our early fathers. Enter a couple by the name of Ananias and Sapphira. They too wanted to help out the cause or did they just want to be noticed. Here in this story we find a couple of different things happen. First, we find that sin crept in and husband and wife conceived a plan in their heart to get the recognition without the complete sacrifice. Often times pride will cause people to do things that ordinarily they may not otherwise do. Sin will more often than not take you further than you had intended on going. The plan was conceived, second the plan had to be carried out. We find this next exchange between Apostle Peter and Ananias to be quick yet a powerful one in testimony. Here I think that we find what Jesus talked about so often, a hypocrite. See they were saying one thing and yet their life was saying something completely different.   Third, like any other sin there are consequences.   Lying in and of itself is a sin, but they made the consequences that much greater when they decided to deceive the church and try to deceive God Himself. Our lives are not that much different than that of this couple. We will often do things or even say things that are completely contrary to what we have done. Our hope is that the people in front of us will never find out the real truth. We think that by closing the door on Sunday morning that God will stay put and what we do during the week will not affect Him. Yet one important concept we can take away from this story is the fact that our personal testimony has a great bearing upon the Church. If we weighed everything in light of this story and the fact that our consequences could be the same as this couple. It would make us think about the questions; who in the world do you think your lying to?