Bible Guys Classics: Acts 5 Part 1

Well, today we're gonna find out how sin can kill you dead. Wow. So I'm sure you're glad you're tuned in on a Monday to hear about that. I'm Jeff, He's Chris, and we're the Daily Bible guys. Mm. So today we're gonna just try to make each other laugh real. Quick, that's what we're gonna do. Yeah. Well, I mean we have like a personal segment that we just kind of you know, goof around a little bit. That's good and uh so I'm just gonna attend. Pretty easy mark on these kinds of things. Right. Well, we've just proven that kind of a giggler yeah and fall. Kickoff, we figured that out. But so so yeah, So here's what I'm gonna do. I want you to turn away for three seconds and then turn turn back around. Hang on and get you hang on. Now, you know you have a lot of listeners too, Well that's okay, so you have to describe for them what you're doing. All right, Look, am I supposed to turn around? Yeah? I made a face, ladies and jentlemen made face was hideous? Okay, okay, make me laugh. So Polar Bear walks into a diner and he says, give me a hamburger and fries, and the service says, why the big pause. He goes, Oh no, I was born with him. You know that's funny. Come, it is funny. But I didn't laugh. You worked really hard at that one. I did. I worked really hard. Okay. I'm more sixth grade trying to make you laugh. Okay, Nope, not gonna laugh at that one. Never laugh at those. That's not even sixth grade. That's my my three year old grandson. He was doing that for this morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, come on in junior high, sixth grade. Knock, knock, Yes, who's there? Control freak? Control for now? You taken control freak? Who gotcha? Okay, that was pretty good. That was pretty good. Yeah, I win. I'm the winner. Yeah, you're the winner. Okay. Hey. By the way, for those who don't attend our church, we're pastors both at Heritage Church and last week last Sunday, Yeah, we did a tortilla challenge on stage. That's right, and the goal is to make one another laugh by slapping them with tortillas with a mouthful of water. So we had three services, and. I'm sure if you're allowed to do that in church or not, but we did. Yeah, and uh, anyway, I lost two of the three services. So Jeff has a belt, an actual victory. The UFC belt, a championship belt. Yeah, what's in your office? It's incredible. Yeah, it's really great. So yeah, whatever, So before we jump into the study of the day, I'm sure you're glad that we just spent that two and a half minutes there horsing around. But would you do this for us? Would you go on YouTube if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe. If you subscribe on YouTube, that helps us all their algorithms, all those kinds of things. Make sure you like the podcast if you do. Even if you don't, we just really shade hit, just hit the like, give it the thumbs up, and then maybe leave a comment of some sort. So all the interaction that you have on YouTube helps the algorithms that makes YouTube pay attention to the fact that people like this podcast. So that'll help us, and it'll help you be able to share more of these things with your friends and family. So just if you're doing that on YouTube, that'd be great. If you're listening on one of the other podcast platforms, do the same kind of thing. On those platforms, but especially on YouTube today. Yeah, and there's and all the links are available at the bibleguys dot com. Yep, that's right. Okay. So we are continuing along in the Book of Acts, and we're just looking at how God began to send this message of Jesus, this good news all around the world. And it's really extraordinary because he's using everyday ordinary people to do this work. And so we're reading in Acts, chapter five, verse one. So this is. Months maybe after the Holy Spirit came. This is months after Jesus has sent it back to heaven. The Holy Spirit came like a my rushing wind. And then they begin to preach and share the good news of the Gospel. And at this point now to give some context this passage, there were so many Christians that had traveled from all around the world to come for Passover in Pentecost, and now they're kind of stuck here. They don't have a lot of money, they don't have a lot of resources, they're running out of things, and there's beginning to be just a little bit of social pressure, and so the Christians begin to sell what they have to share with the other Christians who maybe were stuck in Druce lom Er didn't have anything. So that's what we're picking up with here. In Acts chapter five, verse one, and it says, but there was a certain man named Annonius who, with his wife Sephirah, sold some property. He brought part of the money to the apostles, claiming it was the full amount with his wife's consent. He kept the rest. Then Peter said, Anonius, why have you let Satan fill your heart? You lied to the Holy Spirit, and you kept some of the money for yourself. The property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished, and after selling it, the money was also yours to give away. How could you. Do a thing like this. You weren't lying to us, but to God. And as soon as Anna and i As heard these words, he fell to the floor and died. Everyone who heard about it was terrified. Then some young men got up and wrapped him in a sheet and took him out and buried him. About three hours later, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened, and Peter asked her, what is the I'm sorry, Peter asked her. Was this the price you and your husband received for your land? Yes? She replied, that's the price, and Peter said, how could the two of you even think of conspiring to test the spirit of the Lord like this? The young men who buried your husband are just outside the door, and they'll carry you out too. Instantly, she fell to the floor and died. When the young men came in and saw that she was dead, they carried her out and buried her outside beside her husband. Great fear gripped the entire church and everyone else who'd heard what had happened. Yeah, this is a kind of a crazy story. Yeah, now are we continue on to verse sixteen? No? Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll keep going. The apostles were performing many miraculous signs and wonders among the people, and all the believers were meeting regularly at the temple in the area known as Solomon's Colony, but no one else dared to join them, even though all the people had high regard for them. Yet more and more people believed and were brought to the Lord, crowds of both men and women as a result of the apostles work. Sick people were brought out into the streets on beds and mats so that Peter's shadow might fall across some of them as he went by. Crowds came from the villages around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those possessed by evil spirits, and they were all healed. Okay, So yeah, sort of two parts there, which is the apostles. Are healing many he left punch man. Yeah, the right ones and last and the left punches as the farrs. You know, it's a fair question. It's a fair question to say, why would God do this? It's a fair thing to think like that doesn't sound like that sounds more like the God of the Old Testament versus the God the New Testament. People would say, sure, you know, and why would God kill somebody? Because I mean, you know, lying he's a big deal. But but why would he do this? And by the way, is this the I think this is the only place right in the New Testament where God strikes somebody down. He did in the Old Testament for disobeying sure, like when they touched the ark of the Covenant and whoop, they just died disobeyed God. Yeah, I think that there are a few others he struck down Herod and a couple others, but I think this is the only one where we were seeing Christians, Yes, that are struck down within the church. Yes, So do you want to you want to try to comment on that, like why would why would. I, well, loving God do that? Yeah. Yeah, So the way you framed the question, you're asking why you know this sounds more like the God of the Old Testament than the God of the New Testament. Yeah. Well, for one thing, it's the same God, right, So there's that, right, and and I know you know that, but it is kind of surprising people feel like, oh, no, God's wrath and judgment is only in the Old Testament and now it's all grace and mercy. So thank God for God's grace. Thank God for mercy. You know. Book of Romans is all about God's mercy and God's grace and it's so incredibly important. And in the Church, God's message is not a message of judgment. Well, God is trying to say to the people, those that are non believers, especially that yes, judgment will come at the end, we'll all stand before Christ and give an account, but mercy is available now. God doesn't want you to be running in fear all the time. God wants you to respond to his mercy and grace so that with regard to salvation is always available. But sometimes I think we can tangle up all. God just is kind of winking at my sin, whereas before I used to be mad about it. And God has not changed his opinion. So in this situation what they've done, they're not in trouble for lying. They're in trouble for lying to the Holy Spirit. They're lying to God, and they're lying to all the other Christians for the sake of their own personal pride. And that's the confrontation that you have from Peters. All this stuff was yours. You didn't have to give any of it. You could have chosen any portion of it, but you held. You didn't have to sell the land. Yeah, you didn't have to do anything right right, but you chose to lie. And that's the issue. You're lying to God and you're lying to God's people, And God said, I'm going to draw a line here. I think all of the Christians needs understand. How you behave, particularly with the the attitude of your heart, the pride in your life, there is a consequence to those things. You know. What it reminds me of is in the Old Testament. Remember Haffnei in Phineas. Yeah enough, sure, if that's how you Haffnai or haff Yeah. So they were elis sons and they were the ones that were blaspheming in the temple. And you know in that story, Eli would have been the high priest and those were his sons. And Eli was demonstrated himself as somebody who used to be close to God and hearing his voice but was so far removed, you know, just sort of going through the motions so that you know, we can find ourselves spiritually that way sometimes related to Eli, but it's a whole different category for Hoffney and Phineas because they were doing things, you know, running the church basically, and it says they were sleeping with women at the temple. They were manipulating their position to sleep with women as they were coming, as women were coming to give their sacrifices. And then the sacrifices were you know, like oftentimes like bulls and cows, and they were actually eating the meat that was supposed to be sacrificed. So think about that. You know, they bring an offering to God for their sin, and instead of seeing it like an offering to pay for sin in the Old Testament. They thought, hey, that looks like a good steak, and they ate it. So all that to say that I believe that this to me smells like you know. Peter's response says, listen, either make the commitment to God himself or don't make the commitment. That's up to you. That's the grace part, right. God wasn't going to judge it because of it. There was any requirement at all, There was no pressure. There was no you have to thou shout thus shah not. None of that was there, right, But what you chose to do is you chose to look in the face of God. In this case, it was actually a very specific thing that was happening amongst the early Church. And you said, in front of God and everybody, we're so holy, we sold this amount, We're sacrificing everything to this whole thing. And God said, nope, I'm not going to have it. Yeah, And God God punished them for the category of blaspheming, right, because that's what Peter says. You've not lied to us, You've lied to God. You've told the Holy Spirit this and it's a blaspheming kind of a thing. And you know what it's a reminder to all of us, especially those who are pastors. And you don't have to be a pastor for this, but especially if you're a vocational minister or you or you spend the majority of your time in a leadership role, that when you cross over into the line of blaspheming, that's a really dangerous place to be. Yeah, and I think the threshold for blasphemy is lower maybe than many of us would think. Right, Yeah, it's. So so this is you know, Anonius was just a certain man and it doesn't say that he was one of the leaders, right, He's just a certain man. His wife just they're just normal business people, probably in the community, something along those lines. They had a little bit of extra. But this reminds me of you remember in a book of Proverbs, it talks about that there's six things that God hates. It says in the King James, six things does God hate? YEA seven are an abomination, right, right, And it talks about one of them would be a lying tongue, that's one of them. But the other, the last one says, a prideful look is one of those. Right. This pride issue, this pride that puffs us up is one of the things that God is particularly despises. It's literally it's an abomination. The word abomination in the Bible means it makes God want to throw up. And so I think we need to be very careful about minimizing the consequences of our sin or the offense that our sin causes to God. Just because He's willing to give me of my sin does not mean that there's not going to be some kind of consequence if I'm flippantly running around doing you know, all kinds of sins against God. So his opinion of it, of my sin has not changed. His opinion of my behavior, and my attitudes have not changed. And so as Christians. Even though now I do not believe that antonisis fire went to Hell. I just think he cut their mission on Earth short because he couldn't trust them anymore. Well, if that's where you're gonna live, it's not a bad. Day for analysis to fire. They go to heaven. Oh no, I go to heaven. I go to heaven early, right, right. But it is a shock to everybody else, going, oh wow. I need to mind my p's and q's. I need to pay attention to my attitudes I need to be paying attention to my pay attention to my intentions, and I think that's incredibly important. So what we're seeing here is a couple of things are happening in this season Acts four, five, six, seven, eight. One is there's a lot of external pressure. Persecution is beginning to bubble up in a skin and it gets hotter and hotter and hotter over the next couple chapters. So persecution on the outside is happening, but on the inside we see in this situation there's dishonesty and there's greed. In just a moment, we're going to read about the difficulties that they're having. From an administrative standpoint, leadership is struggling. There's a lot of disappointments I think among the Christians in the way that the other Christians in leadership are behaving. And I think it sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think both of us have dealt a lot with that. So how do you deal with Christian leaders or other high profile Christians who have failures or who you know don't always live up to the ideal that Jesus has called us to Because right now we live in a cancel culture, right, So our culture believes if you make any mistakes at all, particularly if you break a couple of rules that we've all established as being unbreakable, then you're canceled. And so it doesn't matter all the good you've done. You make this one mistake, we're gonna you know, we're going to cancel you. So how have you dealt with or manage through without saying any specific names the failures that are inevitable because we're all still sinners here in Nis and Sapphira, who are Christians just prove to us Christians still give in to temptation. Yeah, so, you know, I've never had a problem with separating the imperfect people who run the church and the perfect God that I love and serve. Now, there's a lot of people that cannot separate those two. And so if they go and they have a bad church experience and all of a sudden, the pastor is a jerk or you know, or you know, some sort of a leader volunteer leaders a jerk, or you know, or somebody does something dishonest or even sinful, right, you know, even malicious. There are people who what will happen is is it will destroy their you know, faith and by the way, it's gonna you're gonna get beat up. If you're a part of a church and you believe in that those people and all of a sudden something like that happens, You're going to get beat up. But in the end you have to wrestle through it and say, Okay, you know who offended me? Was it God himself or was it his people and his people? It's just disappointing. It's it's you know, it's that whole like, you're my friend, you're my family, you've offended me. I'm super hurt. And then that's a person to person forgiveness. But there are people who they just say, I give up on you know, God, I give up on church experiences. And so I don't know why, but I've just been able to, probably because God's wired me that way. So my number one spiritual gift is faith above anything else, and so I think that that's what makes it easy for me to say, Okay, I can separate these two. But let me just say this too. There are also people who you know, they're ninety nine percent, they're betting nine hundred right. There are people who just are faithful for years and years and years, and then that person maybe is going through a really bad season. I've known pastors who were faithful for twenty years and they were just amazing, and you can just tell they're worn out, they're discouraged. Maybe they go through a really hard time financially or medically or whatever it is, and just like all of us do right, and what ends up happening is that they start running on fumes and then you know, it's not necessarily driven by the power of the Holy Spirit, it's driven by their own reservoir, and it just ends up being not good. And you have to look past that and give them grace too, because it's like, you know, we're supposed to give each other grace, but it's really hurtful though. For a lot of. People, we tend to expect more from the other people around us than we want them to expect from us. We want them to extend more mercy and grace to us than we desire to extend back to them. Most of the time, especially the people we look up to, and we have this false idea that the leaders that are in our life are holier and better, somehow supernaturally more moral than we are, supernaturally protected from temptation and all these kinds of things, and that they are then to be put on a pedestal. And that's the mistake I think that we make a lot of times as we put people on a pedestal. And even Paul in his writings, and we'll get to this eventually, I'm sure, but Paul tells the Corinthians follow me as I follow Christ. He's giving them permission to not follow him when he's not clearly following Jesus, right, So what he's really trying to say is follow Jesus. And of course, you know, you can't see Jesus right now. We can read his words, but you can't see him. And so a lot of times God will give a leader, but there is no perfect leader apart from Christ, there's no perfect leader. Moses was a great leader, but he wasn't perfect. David was a great leader, but he certainly wasn't perfect. You can just go on down the line name all the leaders in the Bible. There's some really great heroes of the faith that had moments that we should all aspire to when they did do the best thing, but they all had moments when they also had failures. And God still chose to use them knowing what the their circumstances be like. And so I think we can celebrate the good and overlook would be the wrong word, but give grace in the bad. And I mean, how many times you've been a pastor for a long time. It's always interesting to me somebody who's been attending for you know, the church for you know, several months or several years, and they come and say, this Sunday was a travesty. I'm never coming back, right. Yeah, Oh, I've heard that sure over the year. Show And that's always an interesting conversation to me. So so let's say, all right, so we had fifty two weeks over the last from this week, from this week until the same week last year, fifty two weeks, and we blew it on this week. So we're going to draw the line. The other fifty one doesn't matter. Yeah, they were great, right, right, but this one's the one. Right, But what have you done for me lately? Yeah? And I think sometimes when it comes to church, when it comes to leadership, when it even comes to our Christian friends or the Christian people, we look up to one mistake, We're out one issue, We're done there's no no grace extended. We we need God's grace, but we you won't extend grace. And I would just say be careful. You know the passage everybody loves to quote in Matthew or the Bible, Jesus says, judge not right. They love to tell us, Oh, the Bible says judge not, that you be not judged, because then he goes on and says, because with the judgment you judge others is the same judgment God's going to judge you with. So think about that for a minute. That's huge. So we love to quote the judge not, but we miss the fact that Jesus says the level that you judge other people at is the same level God's going to judge you at. On that one. And so if you figure that if you were in that leadership position, you would have never made that mistake, or if you were a Christian and you saw some other Christian make a mistake and you think, oh, I would never make that mistake, well then don't judge them unless you want God to judge you at the same level of judgment in the future. And I think that that's a big issue. So in this circumstance. What you see is, Yeah, over the next couple pages, there's going to be a lot of persecution the outside. Persecution never destroys the church. Persecution never kills the forward movement of God. He always finds a way. And we've seen that all through the twentieth century with communism spreading around the world, and the Church just goes underground and keeps spreading. The largest church in the world right now probably is in China. It's not even free, but it's happening. So it's not the outside, it's the inside. It's when we begin to eat each other alive. It's when we begin to rise up in pride, when we begin to try to take advantage of others whatever. That's when we wind up destroying church, the church and destroying Christianity. Well, that's certainly a great lesson learned from this, you know, passage here, and then I would just wrap it up because our time is up by saying that the fear of the Lord is a healthy thing. You know, when it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, and let's fear the Lord. You know that word fear can be a healthy fear and the way that you love and respect your mother and father, and you fear them because you fear disappointing them if you're you know, not living up to what they've asked you to do what you deserve to you know, pay them back for all these different things. So the fear of the Lord is a healthy thing. I think that's Uh, those are great thoughts for this passage today. So yeah, so that's great. We wrap that up with that, just honor and respect the Lord and make him who he is. And then tomorrow we're going to be jumping into more of that. What we're talking about the believers. Now we're going to start experiencing opposition. I think a lot of people, a lot of our listeners have experienced opposition in their lives, and so these things can be a real encouragement to us to see how God brings them through this opposition. Yep, we're talking about tomorrow. Yep. We'll see you next time on the Bible, guys,