Please be seated. How many of you watch the
Oscars? None.
Well, this may, this may not land land at all.
Do you guys know who Matthew McConaughey is?
All right, all right, all right. But did you know that he was
known as the ROM com guy? Like romantic comedies were his
thing. And he was like, you know what?
I don't want to do those anymore.
I kind of want to do some more serious things.
And he put that out there in Hollywood and Hollywood said,
you're the ROM com guy. That's what you're going to do.
And so he waited like 18 months, and then some of those other
roles that he won awards for started to come in this morning.
Not saying that I'm Matthew McConaughey, but I might be from
this perspective. This morning's text is not fun.
This morning's text is probably going to offend you.
Let's just get that out there. And this morning, you probably
aren't going to leave here feeling pretty good about
yourself. But I find that when I come up
against God's holiness, I normally don't feel good about
myself. So before we jump in, let's
appropriately posture our hearts and pray.
Lord, we thank you for this morning.
We thank you for your word, the amazing things that it teaches
us both that uplift us and confront us.
And I just asked that we would be open to your confronting this
morning and all God's people said, well, you've been tricked.
I am the ROM com guy. Ha, ha.
No, actually you've been duped. No, you've been misled.
You've actually been horn swaggled.
It's such a crime, what has happened?
And to think, the nerve, the audacity, the slickness, the
corruption, let's just call it what it is.
It's sin. No good, Downright terrible,
Very bad, odious, skinless sin. That is what imposters do.
That is what thieves do. That is what the wretched do.
That's what they do. This is what we do.
This is what we have done. This is what we do all of the
time. We lie.
We lie when there doesn't even need to be a reason to lie.
And we lie about lying. Big lies, small lies, teeny
weeny little white lies. We lie to ourselves, and we are
the best at it. We know that lying externally is
bad, but yet when we lied to ourselves, we see it welling up,
but we do not stop it. We can see the effects from
miles away and yet we let it happen.
We can see the way that it will desecrate the landscape and we
still stand by thinking that it will just blow over.
Think about some of the biggest lies you have ever heard, not
just political themed lies like read my lips.
No new taxes. How many of those did you
actually believe at first? Or maybe still, and this is what
we are up against this morning, we are going to take a big look
in the mirror. And my hope is that we don't lie
about what we see because there's only one ending when it
comes to lies. It's the truth either in this
life or the next. And they say denial isn't just a
river. But first we are going to look
at some others lies and maybe, just maybe, we might learn
something about ourselves, Something we might not like,
something we may know that will need to be changed, something
that we end up understanding that only God can do.
It's going to take more than a tide, a tide pen to clean this
up. The lies, the deceit, the greed,
the envy, the pride, the malice, the guilt, the shame.
It will need surgically removed. How you feel about that?
We feel good about ourselves right now.
I do not. When I was in the seminary, I
read a whole bunch of books that really changed how I thought
about a lot of things. But in particular, there was
there was this independent study that Lee and I did about
international aid and the ethics of aid.
Right. So a few of these books were
Toxic Charity, When Helping Hurts and A Bed for the Night.
Needless to say, we had an interesting experience and some
of the things that I had just kind of taken for granted.
Like you figure, a charity's a charity.
They do good things, right? Not all the time.
And they say never to meet your heroes.
And it's like if you do deep dives on certain charities and
certain organizations, or when scandals happen, some
organizations you might hold near and dear, you might
reconsider if you support them. The math doesn't always math.
And it had set my teeth on edge because now I was skeptical of
everybody, right? I was skeptical of everyone.
And, and I, I got some of that first hand because Leah used to
work in a place called Samaritan's Purse.
Samaritan's Purse is one of the foremost aid organizations in
the world. And not only did she work there,
she went to the places they went.
She wrote the stories, you read them.
You didn't know you were reading her work.
She went to Cameroon, she went to Uganda, she went to all over
the world, and she saw on the ground what was going on.
We'll get back to them. In 2013, the Kids Wish Network
was famously named the worst charity in America.
The Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative
Reporting gave them this and that.
Why? Why, why, might you ask?
And over the course of a decade, this charity raised millions and
millions and millions of dollars, but spent less than
three cents per dollar on actually helping needy kids.
They estimate that over $100 million was paid out to for
profit solicitors who had helped raise the money in the 1st place
and also the founders funneled money into their own private
companies. That's called a kickback.
This is 1 of dozens of stories about places they that say they
are going to do one thing with money and that they raise and
then they go and do another. It's stories like that, though,
that arose such charity watchdogs like Charity
Navigator, GuideStar and Charity Watch, and it kind of put
charities on notice that you should probably be a little bit
more transparent about where your money is actually being
put. And so you may now go on a
website someplace like World Vision.
And at the very bottom it says 93% of our stuff goes to
whatever, right? That's that's kind of the
transparency that's necessary now.
And let's go back to Samaritan's Purse.
Leah worked for them like I had said, and they did international
and domestic relief and they also did Operation Christmas
Child. They generally hit somewhere
between 75% and 86% of their total expenses that go to
program and aid. Now, I'm sure that the Kids Wish
network is not nearly the behemoth that Samaritan's Purse
is, but in order in order for somebody to hit 100%, you got to
do some creative math. But they got an A minus.
When did you ever get an A minus for a 76% in in school?
I did not. I did not.
But there are places that actually claim that they hit
100%. Charity water is one of them.
But here's the reality. They structure things in such a
way that allow them to be able to say that they hit 100%.
And here's how it works. Yes, all of the money that you
would give would make it there because they have a separate
pool of private donors who then fund all of the administrative
costs. So are they telling the truth?
Yes, Oprah does the same thing, but guess what?
She pays it herself. So why does any of that matter?
I think at our core, we really want to believe that people are
going to do the right thing that that we would do the right thing
if we were in their shoes. And I'm sure that at some point
you've had the conversation in your house about what you would
do if you won the lottery. We've had that conversation
several times and it all sounds pretty altruistic in theory, pay
off mom's house, do this, do that.
Had this long laundry list of all the ways that would give
money away. But that's the the one in a
million chance of that's going to happen makes that
conversation kind of mute. What about what do we do with a
windfall of 500 bucks? What do we do about somebody
gives us a gift card That's way more applicable.
It's way more applicable. And the thing that makes me kind
of chuckle about the Oscars or about social media in general,
is that Uber rich people usually have the best advice about how
not Uber rich people should support other people when some
of those Uber rich people could wipe out in a snap of their
fingers medical debt for 100,000 people.
And the Oscar goes to Ananias and Sapphira carry out for two.
It's a cautionary tale about giving 100% and what happened
when people held back. I told myself I wasn't going to
cry. And at the end of Acts 4, we
pick it up. Now here's the funny part.
This text actually includes everything that Jerry read.
This story is not stand alone. It is necessary to have heard
what you already heard because what happens is there's being
set up what's called a contrast. All of the believers, we're
doing these things, but this happens all the time.
But a man named Ananias and 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. It's important for us to know
two things before we go any further.
We don't know the situation 100%.
We weren't there and there could have been.
A lot of the scholars were very broken up about what their
motivations might be. And if this were a modern day
tale, I'm sure there would be concerns about tax write offs
and this that and the other thing.
But the core of it we don't actually catch unless we know
Greek, because when you read this in English, it doesn't
really seem like there's too much wrong other than he didn't
keep his. I mean, he kept his wife in the
loop. But I mean, if you don't keep
your wife in the loop, then you could have major problems.
But this phrase kept back. Is what the whole thing hinges
on. The Greek word nosfismi means to
miss appropriate it means. To pilfer it means to steal it
means not just kept back. Now my 4th grade teacher Missus
Yaros would say now that's the horse of a different color
because when you understand that they sold a property and with
his wife's knowledge, which means they had a meeting about
it, he kept back. He knows fisimide some of the
proceeds when a guy named Barnabas, he gave everything and
all everybody else was selling and giving and whatever.
And you have this guy and this gal who go, we're going to skim
a little off the top. Nobody will know.
And the interesting thing about Nosfismi is only used two other
times, and they are very, very important to other times.
The other time is found in Joshua 7.
Now, scholars have said that this story in Joshua 7, which is
essentially Aiken and his theft, are kind of corollaries or
things that are connected in terms of themes to what's
happening here, right? So you have Joshua 7, Aiken, God
says don't take any of the stuff.
Aiken goes, I'm going to take some stuff and I'm going to bury
it in my tent and nobody's going to know the difference until he
gets confronted and he has to confess.
But if you really want to dig into that, and I, I most
certainly say that you should Joshua 710 through 26.
And the other time is in Titus 210 when the specific reference
is about stealing. Now you might be asking
yourselves like, hey, if it's their property and they sold it,
how could they be stealing from themselves?
If they decided to do XYZ with it, then that's their
prerogative. Here's the difference.
It's one thing that if they had said, hey, we did this and
perhaps we'll give some to the church, that'd be one thing.
But they decided, premeditated to do what they did, to
deliberately try to set it up in such a way that it would make
them look like they gave everything.
In reality, they did not. Either way, it's trending bad
and there's going to be some smoke really soon.
In verses 5 three through 4, we see that God gives Peter a heads
up about what is coming and so they bring the proceeds to the
apostles. Ananias or Ananias does not
Sapphira and instead of getting like this big high 5 or this
picture with the check moment. He gets called out.
Peter knows what's been happening privately, and he's
about to make it known publicly. Here's what happens.
But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie
to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the
proceeds of the land while it remained unsold?
Did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it
not at your disposal? So we're he's not, it's not
about the sale of the land. Why is it that you have
contrived this deed in your heart?
You have not lied to man, but to God.
Do you smell the smoke? He literally calls this out as a
work of Satan. Let that sink in.
Private sin usually means private consequence.
Public sin usually means public consequence.
But this was private sin that ended up having public
consequences. Could you imagine if that kind
of thing happened today? I mean, the offerings after the
sermon. Could you imagine if you put
something into the offering plate and then the then the
usher comes over and goes, what about that crumpled couple ones?
Could you imagine that happening?
I am mortified by that, by the way, and I bet you that you
would be horrified and offended if somebody did that to you or
me. Even still, one of the things we
are really worried about when that plate goes by is what other
people think. We're We're on the real train
this morning, my friends. What will people think if it
passes me by and I do not put something in?
What if I throw in a wad of cash?
Quick, let's crumple up some ones and make it look like
there's more. Well, they don't understand that
I give online, but I still feel the need to put something in the
plate so it looks like I'm doing something.
And perhaps if I look like I'm praying, the plate will pass me
by and I will avoid the embarrassment of not having
anything to put in it. If we are honest, these thoughts
go through our heads. This is supposed to be an act of
worship, something that could only really be between you and
the Lord. Yet it usually ends up with us
being worried about what other people think.
We all get funny about money and like I said, there's an offering
after the sermons. So, but this is not a
stewardship text, although a lot of people use it for those
purposes. When I was doing some research,
there were a lot of stewardship sermons based on this text and I
went, you missed the boat. This text ultimately has one
thread and that is being honest with God.
It's the same thing that Adam and Eve dealt with.
It's the same thing that David dealt with.
It's the same thing that we deal with.
I actually consider this like a it's kind of like chivalry, kind
of like a warning. When Ananias heard these words,
he fell down and breathed his last, and great fear came upon
all who heard of it. The young man rose up and
wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him dead.
He keeled over dead. Why did Peter strike him down?
Did God send a lightning bolt? What caused it Doesn't say.
Perhaps it was the shock of being found out, perhaps the
sheer guilt and shame of the ACT caught up to him, and in that
moment it was so much that he just literally dropped.
Whatever caused it caused a ripple effect.
That is actually what I think is most compelling because great
fear gripped the people and it spread.
But you know who it didn't get to?
After an interval, about 3 hours, his wife came in, not in
the loop, not knowing what had happened.
And Peter said to her, tell me whether you sold a 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? This is one of the coldest
sentences in the entire Bible. Are you ready?
Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at
the door, and they will carry you out.
She has no clue what happened. The body's been removed.
So instead of starting with, hey, here's what happened, you
know your husband died. Peter just keeps up with the
confrontation and asks her to corroborate the story.
She does and it's as if Peter just assumes that the same thing
is going to happen and he announces, behold, the feet of
those who have buried your husband are at the door and they
will carry you out. She didn't get a refund.
There was no here. Take your money.
It's no good to us. We don't know if they kept the
money or not. And immediately she fell down at
his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in and
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 these things.
And if we are listening this morning, we might be a little
bit scared ourselves, but I think things are a little bit
different now because it just doesn't seem like we have that
same kind of fear anymore. The kind of fear that leads to
repentance. We just kind of operate with the
kind of fear that helps us stop. And then soon enough, we're
right back on the path that we were on before, Enough to
reflect, but maybe not enough to repent.
And sometimes we take our sin pretty lightly, that we sin and
just count on the fact that we have been forgiven and that we
will be forgiven as a license to just keep doing it.
I wonder if we do not have fear of God's judgement anymore.
I know we've grown incredibly comfortable with the way that
life is, where we can be on fire when we want to be, and we can
opt out just the same. How accountable are we these
days? This shows up in our behaviors.
We might attend and engage in church like it's just an
activity, rather than seeing this body as essential to our
survival. Who is getting on your case when
you're not here? Who misses you?
Who are you looking after? Who do you miss?
This might be Captain Obvious, but the word community.
There's 2 words. There's come and there's unity.
The come part is presence, you're not present if you don't
come, and the unity part is where influence is found.
You need to come into unity so that you may be influenced to go
then become an influence. And they say, people who do
these statistics, that you need to be someplace 3 out of four
times in a given month to feel connected.
And we wonder why in America, where the average community is
one out of four, that people are lonely, that people feel
disconnected, that people feel far from God, that people feel
all of these different things when part of it simply has to do
with presence. We might give like it's just
another obligation, like a monthly bill instead of a
radical act of obedience or a movement of the Spirit into
generosity. There's no one who comes and
sits down at my kitchen table when I'm doing my bills to make
sure that I give. Who would you let into your life
to do that? And we might live like we can be
the kind of people that we want others to see and elsewhere go
be who we really are. And this is actually the scary
part of the story. And this is the part that
gripped me. Not that they did what they did,
not that they lied or even died. But I wonder what if they had
had someone in their life that could have advised them, who
could have known them, perhaps could have talked them out of
what they were planning on doing, or perhaps even redeemed
it? Did anyone have presence with
them? And if not, I am not surprised
at the outcome. Do you have anyone in your life
that has the presence to influence you, that knows you
well enough to be able to reach into the dark and ugly parts of
your life and have the presence to pull out the weeds?
That they can see you careening towards a Cliff, jump in, grab
the wheel, pull the brake and stop the car?
The people to your left and to your right, Could they do it?
Would you invite them in? Would they invite you in?
Whether we know it or not, we are influenced all the time.
And if this isn't a phrase that you already know, it is a phrase
you are going to hear from now until forever.
That we are discipled by an algorithm.
Now, what does that mean with the amount of time that we spend
absorbing media through our phones, TV, social, whatever,
all of it is shaping you. We no longer live in an era of
social media that died three years ago.
That's three. It's now called interest media,
which means it's created specifically for the things that
you care about. So if you watch something for X
amount of seconds, the algorithm goes show them more of that.
That'll keep them here. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
No longer social. Do you?
Do you get pictures of your friends, kids, birthday parties
anymore? Not really.
You get advertisements, you get businesses doing sponsored ads,
you get all these kinds of different things.
It's no longer social media. It's called interest media.
And whether we know it or not, we allow ourselves to be
discipled by it because that's who we spend time with.
If our presence is with a screen 7 hours a day, that's what they
say. That's well over 40 hours a
week. That's a work week that there's
influence on you. How can one hour a week compete
with 40? When we disciple kids, one of
the reasons why we're so passionate that you were
ultimately their disciplers and that we're coming alongside you
is because we understand that we get one hour, maybe a week to
help. And in the course of a year you
have 3000. And so the best thing that we
can do is come alongside you as best we can.
How can one hour a week compete? Yesterday at the Faith in Life
conference, it was fantastic. They talked about presence and
influence, and it was such a thing that I had already had my
sermon finished yesterday and I'm sitting there listening and
I go, that's exactly where I'm going.
And so I sat there in the kitchen basically writing as
fast as I can to keep up with what John and Kathy are talking
about, so that in case you missed it, you still might hear
what a good word it was. And we got to Q&A time and we
asked them questions. And one of the questions or one
of the answers that Kathy gave, well, she said, be careful who
you listen to. And John said, put your phone
down. Let's be clear, it's not just
the phone, right? Some of you might say, well, I
don't even do the phone. Do you watch TV?
Do you listen to the radio? And any physical media also
counts. The algorithm's just a lot
slower in the newspaper. But when you think about it,
influence is what discipleship actually is.
You come under. Or you follow someone to then be
influenced by either watching their life or walking alongside
them in their life about how to better live yours.
So we are all following someone or something and yet at the same
time we are all leading someone. At the very least you lead
yourself. It's one thing that they lied.
It's another thing that maybe they didn't have a structure in
place in the early church to help curb that it happened.
The Bible shares both incredibly gracious moments and incredibly
tragic moments. But these guys, when you really
look at what happened, they were chasing influence.
If they had had some influence in their life, someone present
in their life, perhaps they would have made a different
choice. They were clearly looking or
seeking to gain some sort of influence with a gift that they
made and how they made it. The consequences of their
actions had incredible influence on the rest of the church and
all those who heard it. And we have, having heard this,
now are included in those crowd of witnesses.
And I will, I pray that we will respond well because
discipleship is influence. And in order to be influence,
you have to be a present. And in order to be a present, we
need God's help. Let's pray.
Lord, we thank You that You are the ultimate example of
influence, that you came, You lived a perfect, sinless life.
You took our sin upon the cross, You vanquished it, and then you
victoriously rose again. If that's not a picture of
influence, I don't know what is. As we approach Easter and we
look at this week more closely, as we look at all of it.
Help us to remember that you paid it all, and all to you we
owe Sin had left a Crimson stain, and you washed it white
as snow. Amen.