All Christians should beware of the sin of
A numuô un d -Su p p h iru
By VANCE HAVNER
AS RECORDED in the first four f - \ chapters of the Book of Acts, the early church rolled along tri umphantly for a time, but it soon en countered trouble within as well as with out. The fifth chapter begins signifi cantly with the word, “ But . . .” Let those who sigh for the “ good old days” remember that even the first church was
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign;” who never dream of actually making such a surrender to God! Consider how we invite God to “have Thine own way,” to “ hold o’er our beings absolute sway,” when there is not the faintest intention of thus submitting to His will. We have had courses in stewardship galore and have been told countless times that we are “not our own” but that we are “ bought with a price,” yet for all that, we withhold from God our time, talent, money and, above all, ourselves. Observe how the matter of lying to the Holy Spirit was dealt with. By the »grace of God, the church rose to the situation and cleaned house, exhibiting a holy and healthy intolerance of sin. Here was such a fever heat of consecration that men with falsehoods on their lips could not stand it. The temperature was high enough to kill the germs! If the church of today would take such a stand against the sins within it and would thunder like Peter against lying to the Holy Ghost, the world would retreat re spectfully to a safe distance, and the fear of God would fall on a generation that now laughs at holy things. But sin has been excused and pampered until liars, divorcees and hypocrites fill church offices and seem never to have heard that those who bear the vessels of the Lord must be clean. We read that, following the death of Ananias and Sapphira, great fear came upon the church and all that heard; many signs and wonders were wrought; some dared not join the church; but the people magnified them and believers were the more added to the Lord, multi tudes both of men and women. Such con sequences would again follow such pro cedure but of course nobody wants to risk it these days. Discipline has disap peared from the church. There is a lot of sickly sentiment about the sinning in dividual. The other side of the truth, that the body of the church must be pro tected from the individual when that person becomes a source of infection, is forgotten. Paul, in his drastic action in Corinth, had in mind the welfare of the whole church. Of course, the sinner must be restored when duly repentant and all action against him must be taken in love. But a weak tolerance of sin has filled our churches with liars against the Holy Ghost. The world has lost its awe of the church; it now slaps the church on the back in rude familiarity and all too often “ church” has become merely another club to join along with civic societies and fra ternal orders. There was a three-fold reaction to the death of Ananias and Sapphira: some
durst not join the church; but the people magnified them; multitudes of believers were added to the Lord (Acts 5:13, 14). Along with rebuffing the superficial came the drawing of the saved. The law of at traction works both ways. The thorn re pels; the rose charms. The rich young ruler was attracted, then repelled. A holy church that knows how to deal with Ananias and Sapphira will repulse some and entice others. Today the sole empha sis is on attraction. We enter the show business and make ourselves ridiculous, trying to lure the world into the church. The house of God needs first to be a dreadful place before it can be a delight ful place. The best way to deal with Ananias and Sapphira is to start with ourselves. “ Let a man examine himself.” Each one of us should ask, “ Is there any of this sin in me?” Believers may grieve the Spirit, may quench the Spirit, may lie to the Spirit. We are not our own, we are bought with a price. All things are ours but us, and we are His. Yet how many Christians do you know who think of themselves merely as stewards of God? Some give Him a tip, and call it a tithe, as though the nine-tenths were their own. Of course Ananias and Sapphira were not obliged to give up all their pos sessions and to place the price in the common fund, and neither are we. It was and is a voluntary matter. But to pre tend to do it and not do it is the sin that God marked with sudden death. Is it not equally sinful to profess a full sur render which we have not made? I do not hear much today about this startling incident in the early church. I suppose the liberalists have some way of accounting for it other than by the fearful facts of the case. But I do not hear much about it from the orthodox. Of course the Book of Acts gets a lot of letting alone from the saints. Much about it is most disturbing; our pale copy to day is so weak that much of the original is not discernible at all. The modernists stay in the gospels and the fundamental ists sometimes do not get started well until they reach Romans. But Acts gives us the norm. There is where the move ment started and, no matter how em barrassing some of it may be when compared with our modern version, we had better face up to it. We need some preaching about Ananias and Sapphira and lying to the Holy Ghost. Any lesson that God illustrates as fearfully as He did this deserves our earnest consider ation. If we had the holy intolerance of sin here manifest, we might also share in the aftermath of blessing, of multi tudes added to the Lord. Page Eleven
Dr. Vance Havner
not an untroubled brotherhood. What with the murmuring of the Grecians, the break between Paul and Barnabas, Paul’s “run-in” with Peter, the fuss be tween Euodias and Syntyche and the Gorinthian schisms, to say nothing of the failings of the churches in Asia as de scribed in Revelation, the New Testa ment is no record of unbroken harmony. There were liars aplenty in Jerusalem but Ananias and Sapphira had this dis tinction that they were liars in the church. What made this sin so grievous that two lives were snuffed out as an eternal warning to all saints of all time? It did not lie in their giving part of the price or in keeping part of it : that they had a perfect right to do. It did consist in feigning that the part was the whole; it was a pretense of full sur render which in reality had not been made. If God struck dead all who so lie to the Holy Ghost today, many a sanc tuary would be filled with corpses! Think of the multitudes who sing, “My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine, M A R C H , I 9 4 8
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