Spirit-Led: Living in the Spirit

My name is Micah. I'm really honored to be with you today. If this is your first time here, you should know that you've landed in a great place. My family has been a part of Whitewater for 12 years now. When I came here.

Thank you.

I didn't expect that line to get applause, but I'm for it. So when we came here, my daughter was in second grade and she just finished up her first year of college. My son was in, he was in kindergarten and he's now a senior. He's with all the high schoolers at CIY this weekend. And then my youngest was born after we got here and he turns 12 later this month.

And so, like, it's just crazy to me. Like, he's been at this church just about every Sunday of his entire life. And it's just, it's a cool thing. Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton say you can't make new old friends, but I think you'll find that if you start getting to know people now, you'll be surprised at how fast the years go by. Right.

So I'm glad you're with us today. And if you're new, you're joining us in the middle of our walk through the book of Acts. This week we're looking at Acts 5, 1 11, Ananias and Sapphira. You don't need to turn there yet, but maybe if you got a Bible, you just start getting your page flipping hand warmed up, right? And we'll get there pretty soon.

One of the things that the Bible tells us about itself is that it's God breathed and it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. Right? It's God breathed, it's true. And also it's useful. And so as we get ready to read the story of Ananias and Sapphira, you should know that I believe that this story is both true, it's God breathed, and it's useful to us.

So it's true. It really happened. If you had a time machine, you could go back in time and see these events take place. But also reading and understanding this story should help me to live my life better. Should help you to live your life better, Right?

So before we dive in, let me give you a couple quick notes on the book of Acts. One, Acts is the second part of a two part book, right? Both written in the first century by a guy named Luke. Luke was not one of the 12 apostles of Jesus. Right?

He was a companion of the apostle Paul, but he's highly Educated, he did research, he interviewed people and he wrote both a story of recorded the life of Jesus. The Gospel of Luke is what we call that. And then also he wrote the earliest history of the church, which if you have like an old Bible, it probably says in there the Acts of the Apostles. But if you have like a newer Bible, it probably just says Acts. Right?

So Luke himself didn't give it any title, either of the books, any title. It's just a two part letter that he wrote. All right, and fun fact, the recipient of the letter is someone that he calls most excellent Theophilus, which I always imagine in a Bill and Ted's excellent adventure accent, I'm like most excellent Theophilus, right? And it's about time travel, so it could happen. Right, but the book of Acts is what it says on the tin, right?

It's a record of all of the actions of the apostles. Even after the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the apostles keep doing Jesus like things, right? They preach, they heal, they raise the dead, they continue to make disciples of their own. A lot of scholars note that you can also call the book the Acts of the Holy Spirit. Because throughout the book we continue to see the Spirit empowering regular people to do things both miraculous and non miraculous that Jesus himself was empowered by the spirit to do.

All right, so let's talk about Ananias and Sapphira in a minute. All right. Talking about my kids has me nostalgic. I was with a friend this week. We were talking about 80s and 90s movies, the classics, right?

They don't make movies like that anymore. And like ET Is a great example. Yeah, you're right. But you know, ET Is actually a great example for what I'm about to say. Like if you go back today and you watch some of those movies, you forget maybe they were a little darker than you remembered, right?

Like I've tried to watch some of these movies where we. I'm watching, I'm like, this is a great movie. This would be great to watch with my kids. It's rated G in the 80s. That's a great.

And like an 80s G is different from, you know, watching the thing. I'm like, okay, okay, kids, cover your eyes for this part. You said E.T. the kid gets drunk in the movie. It's a whole thing, right?

And the alien goes through a whole bunch of beer and gets drunk. That's exactly what happens, right? And it's like, man, this is a kid's movie. So that's how those back then, trust me, I Trust you. So I think that for me, about.

It's about 50. 50. 50% of it was that I just didn't remember. I was like too young and. And naive and innocent.

And I didn't really understand everything that was happening in the movies. And then also 50% of it is that we watched movies before streaming services were a thing. We watched movies the way God intended on TNT with commercial breaks and a disclaimer that said this movie has been edited for content and to fit the time allotted. And I just didn't realize when I was a kid how much heavy lifting that edited for content was doing by tnt. So good job to them.

But even in the church, we had kind of this certified banger that we sang in children's church about Ananias and Sapphira. And it also is darker than I remembered. Anybody know it? Anybody? I see a hand.

Thank you. Sing it if you want. I'm going to sing just a little bit of. We're not going to do the whole thing, but it starts out. I'm going to do it real slow.

It starts out like this. It goes. Ananias and Sapphira got together to conspire a plot to cheat the church and get ahead. They knew God's power but did not fear it. Tried to cheat the Holy Spirit.

Peter prophesied it and they both drop dead. Oh, God loves.

And if you've never. Yeah, thank you. If you've never heard a room full of third graders singing and they both drop dead like you haven't lived. Right. It's.

And the funny thing. The fun. The fun. I don't know. Fun.

The fun thing about the song is that you just sing it faster and faster and faster. Right? So it's like Ananias inspire. Got together to inspire a plot to cheat the church can get ahead. Then who goes forward to try to see the Holy Spirit?

Peter prophesied and they both drop dead. Oh. And so it just keeps going faster. And. And if you're under the age of 30.

Thank you. If you're under the age of 30, you need to just. You need to be aware that the bar for what counted as entertainment was lower before everybody had their own screen. Okay, so that was fun for us. So enough talk.

Let's dig into the passage. Pull out Ananias. Pull out Acts 5:1 through 11. It'll be on the screen. But if you've got a phone or a Bible, let's do that 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 he 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 from the land? Didn't it belong to you before it was sold and after it was sold? Was not the money at your disposal?

What made you think of doing such a thing? You've not lied just to human beings, but to God. When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard about what happened. I bet.

Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, 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 that you and Ananias got for this land? Yes, she said, that's the price. Peter said to her, how could you conspire to test the spirit of the Lord?

Listen, the feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door. 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.

We don't normally have offering plates, but we got some just for this weekend. And so if the ushers would go ahead.

No, that's not what's happening. I don't know how your brain's wired but for me personally, when I read this passage, the first thing I think is not like, wow, what a really useful passage of scripture for me to internalize right now, right? I'm, I read it and I'm like, I wonder, am I giving enough that I don't drop dead, right? If I'm just powering my way through my daily reading plan, like I'm reading the Bible this year and I get to this, I come across this, I'm just like, okay, God, what do I do with this? Right?

You ever experienced that when you're reading, you're like, what do I do with this? Right? What I'd like to do today with our time is just kind of unpack this passage and also show my work to teach you a simple way to read and study the Word. It's not revolutionary, right? You see, Josh and Russ do this every week, but I think it's helpful.

And I've got the microphone so we're Gonna do it together. All right, so as we get into that, let me give you a quick plug. I left Whitewater staff in 2021, which is five years ago next month, which seems crazy to me. That feels like yesterday. I'm now a vice president at Central Bible University and I lead our Cincinnati site, which is technically down in Florence.

Right. But if you've ever wanted to study the Bible at a college level, either because you're considering ministry or just for your own enrichment, talk to me. I'm here every week. So. All right, let's look at the passage.

What we're trying to. When we're trying to understand and apply Scripture, there's a simple three step passage that I like to use, right? The first step is observation. And the question here is, what? What does it say?

Observation. What does it say? The second question is? Or the second step is interpretation. The question is, what does it mean?

And the third step? Application. What does it mean to me? Observation, interpretation, application. What does it say?

What does it mean? What does it mean to me? Overall, this is called the inductive study method. It's certainly not the only way to study the Bible, but it's a helpful one. Right?

And so let's walk through the process one step at a time. First off, observation. What does it say? Like, what do you notice when you read this passage? Lots of people want to skip this part and get straight to the juicy stuff in like interpretation and application.

But spending time just noticing is actually one of the best ways to make sure that you have a productive study. If you do this well, everything else gets easier. So I like Josh's preaching for a lot of reasons, but one is that he consistently makes great observations about the text. So let's observe together.

I'll need that later. When I look at this passage, the first thing that I notice is, in the words of the legendary anchorman Ron Burgundy, the this escalated quickly, right? Like, dude sells some property, he lays some money at the apostles feet, and then he dies. Bing, bang, boom, right? It's like the wife comes in, same thing.

It's boom, boom, boom, and we're through it. That seems weird. What's it mean? I don't know. We're still just observing, but I just think it's weird, right?

It's noticeable to me. Well, what else do we see? The second thing I noticed when I was reading this passage for myself is it doesn't seem to be about not giving money to the church. Right? In verse four, Peter says, didn't it belong to you before it was sold.

After it was sold, wasn't the money at your disposal? I talked to David Vaughn this week and I told him I was preaching and he joked, like, he said, are you doing the offering too Right? We tend to approach this passage from the perspective of money, but the main character in it is Peter. He treats the money like an afterthought. Like, I don't know why, but that seems notable.

The third thing I noticed when I read this passage is it doesn't actually say that God killed Ananias and Sapphira. It just says that they died. It doesn't say they were punished, it just says they died. I never really noticed that until this week. I've read this passage a hundred times, but I was studying for this and I was like, huh, that's weird.

So I don't know what that means or if it means anything, but something I noticed. The fourth thing that I noticed is that Peter attributes this behavior directly to Satan. Not that Ananias and Sapphira aren't responsible, but he asked the question. He says, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart? We've been in this series where we've been talking about the spirit and we've had a lot of language around, like, the spirit and our heart and filled with the spirit, all this kind of stuff.

And so it's so interesting to me that this seems like the dark mirror of some of the stuff that we've been talking about. It says, Satan has filled your heart. I was like, man, that's interesting to me. I don't know. The last thing that I wrote down here is that this really does.

The whole passage as a whole really does seem to have something to do with the Spirit. Peter's accusation against Ananias is that he, quote, lied to the Holy Spirit, to Sapphira. He says, you conspired to test the spirit. So there's some Holy Spirit thing that's a part of this, even if it's not immediately clear what's going on there. So that's what I notice that it says, right?

None of this is rocket surgery, right? Like, none of that was like, oh, man, you can't possibly do this unless you've got, you know, unless you're a minister preaching or something. Like anybody could come up with those observations. But that's the foundation of everything else. We've got a weird passage.

We've made some observations. Now we're going to kind of pull the thread and see what happens, right? See what's going on there. The next question after what does it say? The next question is, what does it mean?

And the answer is, I don't know. There's a couple of puzzles here. We're going to work through them together. The first thing we do when we're trying to understand a passage of scripture is, is to zoom out a little bit, right? My wife Judy, known professionally as Dr. Judith Oder, right, has a PhD in New Testament.

She loves the analogy of throwing a rock in a pond. So just imagine big old rock, you throw it in the pond and the biggest ripples are the ones closest to the impact. And then the ripples kind of get smaller as you go out from there, right? And so when we're trying to understand a passage, we don't have to like do all kinds of crazy things to go all over the Bible to try and understand it. The biggest and best thing that you can do to understand what's happening in a passage is just look at what's immediately around it, right?

You don't have to be like this guy. I've got a great picture. I just love this meme me trying to interpret a simple Bible passage. Like we don't have to get that crazy with it. We can just kind of zoom out a little bit and just see, okay, what do we see like right before or right after this passage?

We tend to treat scripture. A lot of times we do this thing where we treat scripture like a fortune cookie. We find one little line in there and we're like, cool, I like that. And I'm gonna build, I'm gonna pull that out by itself and build a whole kind of theology of life around that piece. But scripture's an integrated whole.

So let's look at what came just before this passage, starting in chapter four, verse 32. This is what it says. It says all the believers were one in heart and mind. If you go to King James, it says all the believers were in one accord. Which sounds cramped, right?

But no one claimed that any of their possessions were their own. But they shared everything they had with great power. The apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, of Lord Jesus. And God's grace was so powerfully at work in them that there were no needy persons among them. 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 who 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've lied to the Holy Spirit and kept some of the money for yourself that 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 just to human beings, but to God. Now that changes our understanding a little bit, right?

Barnabas does something good and noble and everybody praises him for it. And then Ananias does something similar, right? I said this earlier, it escalated quickly. But actually if you see the whole story, you go, okay, I was wrong. It didn't actually escalate that quickly.

In context, it's clearer what happened. What's Ananias after? He's not trying to be good for goodness sake, right? He's after the praise, he's after the clout. He wants to be like Barnabas and get a cool new nickname, right?

This is what's motivating him. This isn't about generosity. This is about wanting to look good. Barnabas was trying to be good. Ananias was trying to look good.

So ripples in the pond. We did the big ripple right around the passage. Let's move a little bit farther out. Jesus wrote the Book of Acts. Jesus wrote, Luke wrote the Book of Acts to go alongside the Gospels.

And the apostles are doing and teaching things that Jesus did and taught. Is there anything in the Gospels that Jesus said about trying to look good? And the answer is actually yeah, there's a lot of examples of that. At one point he calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs. Right?

Whitewashed tombs. Great coat of paint, but full of dead bones. Right? But the clearest place is from the Sermon on the mount. Matthew 6:1:4.

This is what Jesus says. He says, be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues or on the streets to be honored by others. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right Hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret. Then your father, who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Jesus says it's not enough to do good things. He wants you to do good things for good reasons. If you want to give money in order to look good, according to this passage, you will get the reward that you're looking for, right?

You will look good. But God looks at that, and he says, you already got your reward. You get nothing from me. In the verses that follow, Jesus says the same thing about fancy prayers. If you want to pray with long sentences and big words to impress everybody, God will give you the desire of your heart.

But that's all you're gonna get because you already got your reward. This isn't even a new idea with Jesus, right? If you let the ripples go further out, you can see this a thousand years earlier, when the prophet Samuel met the boy David. Samuel goes up and he's seeing. He's in the house of Jesse.

He sees all the kids. He sees all of Jesse's kids. And the young one, he thinks is like the least impressive. He sees a kid, but God sees a king. And that.

Samuel hears this famous line, man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. Ananias and Sapphira have a great outward appearance, but a bad heart. They gave money, which was great. All they had to do was say, hey, we kept some of it, but this is a lot of it.

This is most of it, right? That's an admirable thing, worthy of praise. Peter says, you could have done that and it would have been fine, right? Lots of people would have been helped by the money. It's not like saying this is all of it means the money stretches further or helps more people.

The only difference is how much respect they get. They weren't after the impact. They were after the prestige. They wanted to look good more than they wanted to be good. Do you see that?

One of the interpretive questions that Russ teaches us to ask when we read the Bible is what does this passage help us to understand about people? Now, look, we live in the wealthiest society in the history of the world. And what happens when all of our basic needs are met? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Food and shelter are taken care of.

You start looking for status, right? Your great, great great grandparents didn't have time to worry about how much likes, how many likes their Facebook post got, right? They're just trying to put food on the Table. But most of us, not all of us, but most of us are not operating at a day to day subsistence level, right? So what do we hunt?

We hunt status.

This is the great temptation of our time, right? The temptation to look good instead of doing the deeper work of fear being good. And none of us are immune to it. There's a great story about Shaquille O', Neal, basketball player Shaquille O', Neal, right? one point, Shaq was the most dominant force in basketball.

Unstoppable. If he gets the ball close to the basket, two points, right? He only had one weakness, but it was a big one. It was free throws, right? So teams would hack a Shaq, they would foul him to keep him from scoring.

And. And he was one of the worst free throw shooters in the league. So he just couldn't hit his free throws. A good scorer should be hitting about 80%. Shaq averaged for his career right around 50%, right?

The number four free throw shooter of all time, Rick Barry, offered to teach Shaq his method for shooting free throws, which was a granny shot. Now, a granny shot for those of you that maybe it's been a while since you've been on the playground. You take the ball under the legs, feet wide stance, boom, and up.

It's the first shot a lot of us ever learned to shoot with a basketball. It's really effective. Rick said, hey, I can get you to 80% if you're willing to do this. And Shaq refused. He said this, this is a real quote.

He said, I'd rather shoot 0% than shoot underhand. I'm too cool for that.

One of the richest, winningest, most popular players in basketball would rather miss critical game defining free throws than look silly. He'd rather look good than be good.

Let's go over our questions again. What does it say? What does it mean? What does it mean to me? Our first two observations, we said, okay, well, this seemed to escalate quickly.

Second observation, it didn't seem to be primarily about money. Kind of brought that together. Interpretive principle. Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. That's what it says, that's what it means.

But what does it mean to me? I got a confession for you. I was working on this sermon. I was studying on it, I was prepping it, crafting it. I was about 90% through before I realized I was doing the exact same thing that Ananias and Sapphira were.

Because at the beginning, I really wanted this sermon to like, be effective and feed the flock. And I wanted people to be blessed by the Word and understand it better. But along the way, what crept in is, like, I really wanted people to think I was doing a good job. Like, I used to do this a lot, and now I don't do it very much. And I really wanted some people who have been, you know, have heard me preach over the last decade to be like, man, Micah's still got it right.

And there was a point this week where I realized my desire for approval was outweighing my desire to serve. I wanted to look good more than I wanted to be good.

I don't think that's just me, right? I try hard not to, like, project my own sins on everybody else, but I look around our culture. I think this is something a lot of us are going through, right? I don't mean those godless heathens outside the church. I mean us here in here.

This is a story about what's happening inside the church, right? This passage is about what's going on on the inside. Who are we really?

Who are we really? Are we a people who are deeply formed by the Word and the Spirit to be more and more and more and more like Jesus Christ? Or are we just shiny, happy people? Whitewashed tombs that look good on the outside but are full of dead things on the inside? Which way, Christian man?

Which way, Christian woman? Look good or be good?

I don't know if that's helpful to you or not, but it was helpful to me in my own study, as I was reading the passage for myself. I got something out of that passage. I could say, man, that's useful to me. But that was just two of our five observations, right? There's more here.

We're going to dig in again. We're going to do that whole process again, but this time we're going to speedrun it because we only have so much time as we're trying to interpret this.

It's worth it to start with our observations and work our way out again. Their third observation was Luke seemed to avoid calling this a punishment. So it's, like, worth asking the question again. Ripples in the pond as we zoom out. Is that normal for Luke?

Does Luke do that anywhere else? And the answer is, there's actually other places in the Book of Acts where God is explicitly punishing someone. The clearest One is Acts 12, 21, 24. The crowd is trying to flatter King Herod. Right, you don't have to turn there.

I'll just read it to you. It says, on the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted, this is the voice of a God, not a man. Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down. He was eaten by worms and died.

By the way, this is historically attested. The historian Josephus also records this, that this almost exactly the same thing, not word for word, but like very, very, very similar description. This really happened, right? This is a. This is a thing that they all say.

This is a voice. This is the voice of God, not a man. And it says, he didn't give praise to God. An angel of the Lord struck him down. He was eaten by worms and died.

There is zero ambiguity in this passage, right? He didn't give God the glory, angel struck him down dead. No ambiguity at all. But when Luke tells the story of Ananias and Sapphira, notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say God struck Ananias dead.

He doesn't say Peter cursed him. He doesn't even say this is punishment. He just says Ananias heard Peter's words and fell dead. Now, I think Luke does want us to see God's hand at work here, but it's interesting that he leaves the mechanics unexplained. The focus is not on how Ananias died.

The focus is on what Ananias did, right? He lied to the Holy Spirit. It's not presented as like, God's mad at Ananias, right? It's like this is the natural reaction. This is a natural consequence of what happens when we try to lie to God.

A second interpretive question that Russ teaches us to ask is, what does this passage help us to learn about God? And I guess my answer to that would be, sometimes I think sometimes God doesn't punish us. He just lets us receive the natural consequences of our actions. Sometimes what feels like punishment is just God letting events run to their natural conclusion. So if that's what it says and that's what it means, then what does it mean to me?

I guess it means that I need to really think and be aware of the trajectory of my life. So my hunger for approval, what DV used to call the disease to please, right, may not be a very big thing in me right now. It's just a little thing, right? But everything grows when we feed it. If this desire to impress people is something that grows over time in me, then what does it look like when I'm 50?

What does it look like when I'm 60 when I'm 70. What are the natural consequences of this thing growing throughout my life if we're gonna live forever? Like, what does it look like if that trajectory keeps going? Judy and I try to be vigilant about this with our kids, right? We see things, little things.

It's like, eh, it's not that big a deal. It's just a little weed in the garden, right? But what would happen if that weed grew up? So we've tried as parents to be really diligent about pulling those weeds out when we see them rather than just letting them grow.

The question we ought to ask ourselves is, isn't God a better parent than us?

If we're trying to be diligent with that in our kid's life, don't we think that God is trying to be diligent with that in us?

There's somebody at work that, that's wrong to you, right? And you're holding a grudge, you're not ready to forgive him. And it's like, I get it, I get it, just a little thing. But like, if you keep holding onto that unforgiveness, do you think that that's gonna get less or more over time? Are you gonna become a less bitter person or a more bitter person or different scenario?

You're home alone, late, you're tempted to take a quick peek at that website. God will forgive you, right? And he will, that's true. But if you don't fight for your visual purity now, do you think it's going to get easier later?

I had two more observations, right? So we've kind of done that lap now a couple times. I had two more observations and we really just don't have time to get into them, right? And so rather I had, I had like a really good 10 minutes written that I was just so proud of. And I cut all of it because I thought, man, this is so good, man, people are going to be so impressed when I say these things.

And I was like, okay, what if we didn't do that? So I'm going to give them to you as homework. I work for a college now and I can give homework.

So this is your homework this week. I want you to think about these two other observations or you can make your own, right? But how would you answer the question? What does it say? What does it mean?

What does it mean to me? Peter says, the observation number four, you remember Peter says, how is it that Satan has filled your heart? What does that mean? What's it mean to you? And then Peter's accusation is that Ananias lied to the Spirit.

What does that mean? What's it mean to you?

I do want to answer those questions for you, but what I really want is for you to open a Bible for yourself. Like, 10 minutes more of me talking is not going to help you nearly as much as cracking a Bible for yourself and starting to get in the practice of getting in the Word.

For you to start learning to wrestle with Scripture on your own, to not just depend on the sage on the stage. Right. But to start making and eating your own spiritual meals.

I said this halfway through the sermon. I'm gonna say it again. Are we people who are deeply formed by the Word and the Spirit to be more and more like Jesus Christ? I've been doing ministry for 20 years now. Been teaching it for the last five.

And. And what I've learned is that there is no substitute for the quiet work of getting out your Bible and reading it for yourself, reflecting on it. I tell people, if you want to hear the voice of God, read your Bible. If you want to hear the audible voice of God, read your Bible out loud. Right?

You want to be filled with the Spirit? You need to start by learning to recognize his voice, by spending time in the Word. Do you want to look good, or do you want to be good?