Author: pastortoney

As we read the passage in Acts 2: 42-47 we find the model for the churches behavior. We find that the early believers had certain things that they were consistent in doing. They studied the teaching of the apostles, enjoyed the fellowship of the saints, participated in corporate prayer and ate meals together including the Lord’s Supper. God established His welfare system through them as they were moved to sell their assets and divide it among all of those in need. In today’s church I often hear people say comments like we don’t like change or we want to do it the way it has always been done. Statements like that are made but the church doesn’t really believe them it seems. Most congregations might do part of what the early church did, such as study the apostles teachings. After that the change sets in because the rest of it makes us feel very uncomfortable. The modern believer only wants to fellowship with those people that they have something in common with. The modern day version of corporate prayer mostly consists of a prayer service over a prayer list. We don’t really pray expecting God to really do anything. When we eat together it is usually only on special occasions and our idea of taking the Lord’s Supper together is to just be in the same room together. We have no interaction while we are observing the sacrament. Then you come to what I call God’s Welfare System for the modern church. There is not much helping others and certainly no selling of our stuff to help others. We often think that others can take care of themselves and we will just talk about them. When all is done we like to say that we don’t want to change and yet we have gone so far from what the Bible says. Change is something that we can’t avoid; yet we should not change how the Bible described the earlier believers behavior. If we are to obey the Bible we must try to replicate everything the earlier believers did. I am not saying that we have to sell everything we own to be like them; but we must at the very least be willing to sell it all to take care of members of the church if needed. Changing in methods are ok as long as we don’t change what the methods were meant to do.

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?