- Well good morning, Rockpoint Church!

- Come on.

- Good morning.

- Hey, see, you guys are ready for this weather, we're from Minnesota, right? We got this! No, totally, any time winter comes, it's, I'm not worried about, I'm worried about everyone else who, someone forgets to drive, and when ice suddenly comes, in the place where ice was probably created, I don't know. Well, good morning, welcome. My name is Seth, if you don't know who I am. I'm one of the staff, pastors on staff here. I'm so glad that you're here with us this morning. Thank you for being here as we seek to remember who God is, who we are in him. If you're newer with us, I wanna say a special welcome. And stop by out in the gathering area. In between services, there's an area there called Next Move. Get connected with somebody or just hang out for a little bit longer as we seek to multiply disciples in a healthy church. For those of you who are online or down in the warehouse, welcome. We are glad that you are here as well as we seek to go after this life together. And we wanna remember Roy and Lynette as they are on their travels there. They are over training the pastors over in Africa who are doing ministry in Africa, the Middle East area. So we wanna be praying for Roy and Lynette as well, and so let us pray now as we continue our time together. Lord Jesus, we pause again in the midst of gathering together in this place. And this place isn't special because of a location or bricks and mortar, this place is special because right now your people have gathered together to be with you. And so we think of your church as gathering all over the world, different time zones and different places, but we remember, Jesus, that you are the head of the body, the church, the one church. And with the eyes of faith, we are looking to you, and we are remembering at this moment, Jesus, where you are. You are at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, declaring that we belong to you, not because of what we've done or haven't done, but because of who you are. So now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer. It's in your name we pray, amen. Amen, well we'll be in Acts five this morning. You can start turning there in your Bibles or in the chair rack ahead of you. It's on page 913, the Bible there. But I wanna start off today as you're getting there, with this question: what is our response when we encounter sin in our lives? All right, what is our response when we encounter sin in our lives? I thought of two personal examples I wanna share with you, okay. One was back when I was third grade, all right, little kiddo, little tiny Seth, right. And it was the time that I remember distinctly saying my first major swear word, okay. I know, you may think that's petty or small or whatever, right.

- [Congregant] Which one?

- Which one, I'm not gonna. Family show, we're on. But what we got, what happened is I was riding the school bus home, and I had brought to school that day one of my He-Man toys, all right. Now don't judge me for having He-Man toys, okay, I'm more upset that I sold them all at a garage sale for a baseball glove. I mean, they would be worth so much money today. But anyway, so I had this He-Man toy, because I was really proud of it. I was really excited to show it off. Okay, my son right now is in third grade, so I thought of this as I've been trying to again see the world through his eyes. And I remember on the bus home holding this thing that was really important to me. And then you about imagine when a kid takes it from me, right, and I don't remember the, or how it happened, I don't remember thinking about it, but all I remember in my nine-year-old self just saying, just yelling at this kid, "Give me my blanking toy back," right? And after the rage quickly subsided, also and what washed over me was this deep sadness. I was like, "I said a swear, I said one of the bad ones." And I don't remember times before then, I don't remember other events like that, but I was not, okay, I was not a normal kid in this sense. I got home distraught. I called my mom at work, "Mom, I said a swear word." And she goes, and mom, she'll remember this, she can tell me later, but, she's probably watching right now. But she's like, "That's okay, we'll talk about it "when I get home, all right." And as a nine-year-old, I had a deep sense of sadness. And it wasn't guilt. Guilt, you know what guilt is? Guilt is where you feel bad for something you did. I distinctly remember, this is one of the first moments where I felt wrong in who I was. And I couldn't fix it, I couldn't go back, I couldn't change it. It was, again, what we're not talk about the word or not word, whatever, what I distinctly remember was, I had a deep sadness that there was something wrong with me. Okay, that was one example. The other example just actually happened just a couple months ago. A good friend of mine passed away. Actually I just got back from doing his celebration of life service. And after the initial shock and surprise wore off from hearing the news, and of course with sadness, I was angry. See, my friend struggled with alcoholism and depression. And I hated that sin had caused that effect in his life, that level of brokenness. I was angry with sin, and I wanted somebody to do something about it. I wanted somebody to fix it. So, what we're not talking about here is comparing sins or ranking sins, we've all experienced different levels of brokenness. Yes, many had to do with our own brokenness, but many has come from other people's brokenness against us. Regardless, there is a level of grieving that occurs when we encounter sin in our lives and in other people's lives. And you've heard the stages of grief before, right? Okay, let me just kind of, let's just walk through these quick. These are typically the stages you encounter when you experience a loss, right? There is denial or numbness and shock. And numbness is a normal reaction to a loss right away. And it should not be confused with not caring, right? But it's just that initial shock or denial piece. Well, anger normally comes at some point, and that is not uncommon as well, because when we feel helpless or powerless to do anything about something that occurred, we get angry. And we want it to be fixed, we want it, wished we could've prevented it. There's a depression stage, a sadness stage as we begin to realize and feel the true extent of the loss. And there is a deep sadness that it happened. But then there's a bargaining stage, right, the persistent thoughts of we start to try to think about what could've we done to have prevented it? What could we have done to have stopped that from happening? And then eventually, they say, you get to acceptance in time. We come to terms with emotions and feelings that we experience with what happened. Now these are the typical stages of grief. But you and I can agree, we don't follow this on a nice linear path, right? Check the box, go to the next stage, right? It's usually more like this, right? This is the typical, typical grief cycle we experience, it is cyclical, they come back again and again and again. Which, by the way, I do want to mention grieving is hard. Rockpoint does have a grief-share ministry as we seek to multiply disciples in a healthy church, grieving is part of the journey. So if that's you and you wanna know more about it, if you go to our website rockpoint.church, you click on the ministries tab, underneath, I need help. You'll get a place to get connected with a grief share. You were never meant to live the Christian life alone, okay, friends? So back to our original question, when we encounter sin in our lives and in other people's lives, we grieve in different ways and at different times. But my question is do we ever get to the acceptance stage as it relates to our sin? Do we ever get okay with our sin? Have we bargained or explained it away that, you know, no one is perfect, so do we accept it? So why am I talking about this? Because in our passage today in Acts chapter five, there is a story that bothers us. And if we're really, really honest, I think it offends us. We struggle with it a little bit. And regardless of where you're at on your personal journey with Jesus, your faith journey, and even if you've been in the church for a long time and you quote know the Bible answers, we still encounter passages at times that say, "What do we do with this? "What do we say about this?" So we're in a series going through the Book of Acts. And it's been titled "Witness," which is the story of the church being born and God, who is a missionary God, advancing his story, bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the entire world. And last week Pastor Roy shared the positive story, the deep generosity of the early church. They were selling property and possessions and bringing it to the apostles to share with anybody that had need. There was not a needy person among them that they said. But today we get to see the flip side of that, an encounter with sin that God deals with right away. Let's go to Acts five and verse one. "But a man named Ananias, with 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." Okay, they sold a piece of property, right? Christianity is brand new, the church is taking off, we've mentioned that. This was the big deal to sell property, especially in Israel. Because if you were a Jew belonging to the nation of Israel, what connected you, what connected your family to the story was that's our family property that we belong to this tribe. And it all had to do with ultimately the reference point of Jerusalem, the temple, that's where God's presence was. So property was a big deal. But as the kingdom of Jesus reality is emerging, it's bringing a new way to live life. And chapter five, of course, won't make sense unless we read chapter four. And if you missed last week, let me just share two verses. At the end of chapter four, verse 34, it says this, "There was not a needy person among them, "for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them, "brought the proceeds of what was sold, "and laid it at the apostles' feet, "and it was distributed to each as any had need." One man was named at the end of chapter four, a guy named Barnabas, who becomes a major character in the Book of Acts. But here we are here now given two more names, right? Ananias and Sapphira. Now, they had good intentions, as best as we can tell, 'cause they were doing what they were seeing other people do to help people who were in need. But they didn't follow through all the way. There was a deeper motivation at play. And let's be clear at the very beginning of all this. This is not a story about giving or how much to give. There's a deeper thing that is going on. Let's continue, verse three. "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? "'Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? "'You have not lied to man, but to God.'" Now we're gonna come back and camp out in this section, because I believe this is the heart of these verses. But let's finish the story. So verse five, "When Ananias heard these words, "he fell down and breathed his last. "And great fear came upon all who heard of it. "The young men rose up and wrapped him up "and carried him out and buried him." Now notice Peter did not announce Ananias's death, okay. He didn't expect it. He was just rebuking Ananias. God gave him a gift of knowledge and gave a peered insight into what was really going on in that moment. Up to this point Peter had been healing people, all right. So you can, and not killing people. So you can imagine even how shocked Peter was in this moment of like the guy just died, right? And of course, as a high school pastor, I love pointing out when teenagers show up in the Bible. And the youth group kids showed up, wrapped him up, carried them out, and buried him. The first youth group event, no. Sorry, gotta add some humor to this one, right? Can you imagine what was going through their minds? And remember, this was not a planned funeral. That whole process took time for those teenagers to be like, "What is going on?" And I find it fascinating that Luke includes these details, the author, 'cause verse seven, "After an interval of about three hours, "his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. "And Peter said to her, 'Tell me whether you sold "'the 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? "'Behold the feet of those who buried your husband "'are at the door, and they will carry you out.' "And immediately she fell down at his feet "and breathed her last. "And when the young men came in, they found her dead, "and 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." Man, I'm glad Roy left me an easy passage to preach when he left town. I love you, Roy, it's good. Back to verses three and four. Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart "to lie to the Holy Spirit? "You have not lied to man, but to God." Several things I wanna point out here, and this is in your sermon notes as we walk through this. The first is this. The Holy Spirit is a person, the Holy Spirit is a person. He is part of the Trinity, and he is God. Peter, when he calls out Ananias, he said, "You have lied to the Holy Spirit, "you have lied to God." He makes them equal. This is a big affirmation of the Trinity, okay. A second thing, and I'm sure many of you wonder this, as I wonder this. Were they true believers? Were Ananias and Sapphira true believers as we try to wrap our minds around this moment? And the answer is we don't know. We don't know. It's like with anyone, even today, only God sees the true status of our hearts and our souls. But what Peter calls out is the deeper motivation of them lying to the Holy Spirit. And in my preparation for this, I had a friend ask, "Is this connected "to the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, right? Remember when Jesus talked about that? It was the only sin that Jesus said God cannot forgive, the only sin. He called it blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which is basically unbelief. Believing that Jesus was not who he claimed to be. That is the only sin that God can never forgive. So quick note, my friends, as we're walking through this, outside of immovable unbelief, outside of immovable persistent unbelief, there is no sin that God cannot or will not forgive. And I pause in this story to make that point, because I know the voices that come into your hearts and my heart. We start to hear a different voice, don't we? We either have sinned too much, or we've sinned too big, or we feel disqualified. God will always be a greater Savior than you will be a sinner. But the third thing I want us to see is the deeper reality of sin. And we'll talk about this for awhile here. See, sin is not about breaking a list of rules. Notice the two why questions that Peter asked Ananias. First he says, "Why has Satan your heart to lie "to the Holy Spirit?" Now this isn't the devil made me do it moment, okay. Again, I should've looked up in between, first service, I quoted that, and I'm like, famous person said that. Anyway, but this isn't that moment where the devil made me do it. That is not what it's talking about. Yes, it starts there. Okay, it starts with Satan lying. Lying is a characteristic of Satan. He is the father of lies, Jesus said. And then Jesus said he comes to steal, to kill, to destroy, John 10:10. Satan is the exact opposite of the character of God who cannot lie. And there are a number of verses that declare that. And Satan is unoriginal, okay. He never creates his own thing. He always twists what God has already made. I mean, go back to the garden of Eden moment. With Adam and Eve, all Satan did was just twist lightly what God said, and he whispered a lie to Adam and Eve's hearts. And that is the first why question that Peter points out. But notice the second one. Then Peter says, "Why have you contrived "this deed in your heart?" Yes, our sins starts with Satan lying. Sin starts with believing a lie about either who God is or who we are in him. It starts there. But where it becomes our sin, where it becomes our sin is when we contrive in our hearts to do something about the lie. Satan lies, but we contrive. You see, my friends, we are not victims of our sin, we become creators and participants of it. And I want us to see this deeper reality of sin, okay. It starts with this, it starts with our thoughts. It starts with our thoughts. It starts with your thoughts are the lens, your filter with which you see the world. What you think is true, what you think is real, what you think is most valuable or not valuable, and these come from our deeper desires. Okay, we've talked about these before. God has given you and me as human beings, made in his image, core desires that you cannot deny or get around: to be heard and understood, to be affirmed, to be safe, to be touched, to be blessed, to be chosen, to be included. That is who God made us to be. And Satan lies about these things. And he lies to our thoughts. In fact, it's the primary weapon that he has against us, but it's also, your thoughts are also the same place where God can speak powerful truths to you as well. Now, we don't know what Ananias and Sapphira were thinking, okay, we don't know what their thoughts were. We're not told that. But let's imagine as we seek to understand this moment, okay. What could they've been thinking? Well, this is my stuff. I worked hard for this. We finally got ahead. This is our security. We're happy right now. We're living the good life. We don't know. So it starts with our thoughts, but the second step then goes to our intentions. From our thoughts come our intentions. So from what we think is true, we start to formulate plans. Okay, we think about them and they start to loop in our brains. We add to them, we modify them, and we start to live in this thought world that we create in our minds. So yes, it starts with our thoughts, but it never stays just our thoughts, does it? They always move forward to intentions, because our thoughts come from those deeper desires, those longings that we're trying to find answers to. We make plans and notice the plans get developed to the point of intentions. And so for Ananias and Sapphira, again, we don't know, but let's imagine. Well, we don't wanna give as much as everybody else does, but boy, we want people to sure think we did. They made a plan to look godly. They wanted the image of Christianity but without the reality. They wanted the spiritual appearance without the Spirit-filled life. They could've give only 2% and said, "Hey, we sold a piece of property, here's 2%." Oh, thank you so much. Hey, we sold a piece of property, here's half. Oh, thank you so much. The deal wasn't the amount, it was what they claimed was the amount was what was at stake here. The root of this was their pride. How many of us, we get our act together, because we want people to think that we are more spiritual than we are. I'm there. How many of us have been taught to walk in and be better than what we are? We wanna look like we are great Christians, even if our private life doesn't match it. Our thoughts stem from our deeper desires of the longings that we are trying to find answers to, so we make plans, we contrive, and those plans get developed to the point of intentions. And when intentions get fully realized, we enter the place of motivation. Thought, intention, motivation, we act on it. We contrive, we've made a plan, we thought about something long enough, and eventually we do something. We do something about it. The verse says that they kept back, which means that they put aside for oneself in a secret, dishonest way. It's actually an uncommon word in the Bible. It's only found in two other places, one of which was back in the Book of Joshua with this character named Achan. Some of you may know that story. The Israelites were entering the promised land and God gave directions through Joshua as they conquered Jericho that everything there was dedicated to the Lord. But Achan saw some of the spoils and it says he kept back some of that for himself. And later, actually, Achan was also put to death. The deeper reality of sin involves our thoughts, our intentions, our motivations. Yes, Satan lied to their heart, but they contrived in theirs and acted on it. Yes, Satan lies to your heart and to my heart, but we contrive, and we act on it. This was not an issue about giving, this was an issue about pride, hypocrisy and lying. That's what was going on in this moment, which leads us to our fourth point. And that is this. Our sin, even though, yes, it affects other people, our sin is about God. Our sin has to do with God. And I wanna go back to what I mentioned at the very beginning and that this passage offends us, why? I think because we know it's true. We know that God is holy, we are not. And we need a Savior outside of ourselves to fix it. There are other places in the Bible where we see glimpses of God executing judgment immediately, and it's usually at the beginning of something very, very big, all right. We already mentioned as they entered the promised land, the nation of Israel, but even before Achan, there was Korah's rebellion, okay, in that moment. Later on we see as David was returning the ark back to Jerusalem for God's presence to be among his people, remember when Uzzah, Uzzah tried to steady the ark that was shaky on the ark and he did it out of irreverence and God struck him dead. And here in this moment, at the beginning of the church, in fact, right here Acts chapter five verse 11, you can circle in your Bibles is the first time church appears in the Book of Acts, the first time where the word church is used to reference to the public gathering of God's people, which, let's remember, is still very small. God will deal with sin. And we actually want that. See, heaven, by definition is where God is, that's the definition of heaven is the presence of God. And because God is holy, it is also the place where sin is not. God is a jealous God and that is a great thing. You want a jealous God. Not the negative jealous that you and I think of in today's drama world, but the true meaning of the word jealous, protecting, overarching love, care, and concern. You better believe that I am jealous for my wife's heart and my kids' heart. And if there's anything that would threaten that, you better believe, I not only would notice it, but I'm gonna do something about it. I'm jealous for the hearts of my wife and my kids. And again, so often we think of sin as breaking a list of rules. Even someone will bring up, "Well, what about the 10 Commandments?" Yeah, let's talk about the 10 Commandments. Let's go back to Exodus 20. You remember how God even describes the 10 Commandments? Right at the very beginning he says, "You shall have no other gods before me, "because I, the Lord, am a jealous God." Exodus 20, you can go check that out. God's saying, "I'm it, I'm all that you need. "There is nothing else you will ever need. "What you worship, what you crave, it's me." And those desires that we mentioned earlier, we were made to only have those desires perfectly met in him. And the lies that Satan tells us are lies about who God is and who we are. So God is a jealous God and the church is called his bride. This relationship, this union with God, God is jealous for his bride. We are only in chapter five of the Book of Acts, remember? Let's remember, how many chapters of church have we had? Three, okay. This is at the very, very beginning. So God's whole plan to reach the world is starting with this tiny group of people. And this moment is threatening the unity of his bride. And it could've unraveled at the very start. So we need to see this as God is protecting his bride on their honeymoon. We cannot afford to lose this at the beginning. My friends, God will never be okay with sin. He won't. 'Cause we see the extent that he went to save us from it. Second Corinthians five verse 21 says, "For our sake God made him "who knew no sin to be sin "so that in him we might become the righteousness of God, "that we might become made right with him." So why does this story offend us? Well ultimately, I think it's 'cause we project that God is like us. We do, we work backwards. We make God in our image, instead of embracing the truth that we were made in his. Our filter is broken. So the way we see ourselves, the way we see others, the way we see the world is broken. Therefore, we believe that because of our lived experience that no one is perfect, to encounter a line of perfection where God draws the line and says, "No," is not only, it's almost unthinkable to us, it's offensive to us. Like, there's a part of. If we're honest that goes, ah, why would God do that? Because they lied? But instead, what if we saw the truth that we were made in the image of a holy God? And we have the capacity to be like him. We need to be redeemed. What is broken needs to get fixed. We know there's a holy God, then we need to be made right with him, so that this shouldn't offend us, but it should draw out of us a longing sense, we need to be made right with him. So what was the result? It says that great fear came upon the entire church, which was small at the time. And all who heard about it, those outside of the church, in an awareness of God's holy presence should create that response in us. So what do you and I do with this, right? Remember the original question that we kind of talked about, about how are we relating to sin in our lives? I just wanna go back to the stages of grief thing as a reference, just to kind of help us talk through this. Perhaps you're here this morning and you're hearing this, but when it comes to the reality of sin in your life, maybe you are denying it. Let's just get real, all right? Maybe you're thinking like, "Man, I'm not that bad. "I don't have a sin problem, I'm a good person. "There's other people that are way more messed up than me." I hope you realize that we're not talking about morality. There's not this cosmic balance of your good deeds outweighing your bad deeds. There's no being good enough. In fact, the Bible says, there is no one who is righteous, not even one. And if you are here and if you're being honest and you're denying that you have a sin problem, then your faith, and yes, you still have faith, your faith is in your trusting in your ability to live a perfect life, and your ability to stand before a holy God one day based solely on your merit, whether or not you can earn it. Maybe you're here and you've got that place of accepting your sin. And that's the one that gripped me so much, that's what even got me down this line of thinking about the stages of grief. 'Cause you start to think, well, no one is perfect, this is just my sin, this is just a thorn in my flesh. And I was bothered by my own tendency to get comfortable with me sin. It bothered me that I've gotten okay with some things in my life or comfortable with it. My friend, if that is you as well, I want you to read and reread the Easter story. I know it's almost Christmas, I haven't got my calendar messed up. And I don't sing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving, I'm sorry, Sharon. But I want you to read the Easter story. Yes, Jesus came as a baby at Christmas, but he came on a trajectory to do something. And you have to say why. Put John 3:16 in front of you, "For God so loved you." Put your name in there. Second Corinthians five, for your sake, put your name in there. God made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that you could be made right with God. God will never be okay with sin, but he is jealous for your heart and he wants you. Are you sad about your sin, okay? And that can lean one of two directions. And let me clarify this, okay. Sad, you can be sad about your sin in a shameful way. You can be beating yourself up, devaluing yourself. And those same lies that Satan comes back to you and declare that you are no longer worthy to be loved, that you feel disqualified. We mentioned this earlier. Or you could be sad about your sin in a blaming way, that you are a victim and it's someone else's fault. And my friends, that mentality will lock you into woundedness. It will never bring about healing in your life. Are you angry about your sin? Anger can be a good thing when dealing with sin, right, 'cause you cannot accept something if you have declared it as an enemy in your life. So that's definitely a part of it, but it is very hard for you and I to separate sin from people, isn't it? 'Cause our anger starts to get directed at people very quickly, and we draw lines of who's in and who's out and we become judge, jury, and executioner really quick. And we point a condemning finger at a very broken world as we sit in our self-righteous castle sometimes, don't we? Last thing, and the one I want us to really lean into is can we do something about our sin? And this is where I wanna call us today. It starts with great fear and reverent awe of God's holy presence in your life. It starts with reminding yourself of the Holy Spirit that's in you, for those who have trusted in Jesus as Savior and Lord, and that his Holy Spirit is in you. All of God is in you. And then bring yourself into his light, the light that shines on us, because Jesus declared it as finished, that you are completely known and you are completely loved and with open hands, you're in a posture to receive God's intense, loyal, jealous love for you. 'Cause only God's perfect love casts out all fear, First John four. And yes, God grieves with you over your sin and other people's sin. So listen, don't hear me wrong, there is a healthy place to experience the emotions that he has given you. You can be sad about your sin, but be sad with him. You can be angry about your sin, but be angry with him, and recognize that God will always be more angry about sin than you ever will be. Allow your emotions to draw you closer to him, and that is why your emotions are a gift from God. It's not about just helping you experience life on this earth, it is to draw you closer to his jealous heart for you. And he will continue to whisper to your soul, "You aren't home yet." I think that's what I realized as I looked at this. We'll be grieving in different ways, sin, until Jesus brings us home. We won't accept it until he declares us, which so it brought my heart, as we finish up here today and as we prepare to worship a great song together, as Doug and the team comes back out. Revelation 21, as we close. "And I saw the holy city, "the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God "prepared as a bride, "beautifully dressed for her husband. "And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "'Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, "'and he will dwell with them, "'and they will be his people, "'and God himself will be with them and be their God. "'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. "'There'll be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, "'for the old order of things has passed away.' "And he was seated on the throne said, "'I am making everything new.' "And then he said, 'Write this down, "'for these words are trustworthy and true.'" Jesus, with the eyes of faith, and by your Spirit, help us to see you right now of who you truly are and where you are. Allow us to see truth about who you are and who we are in you. And Jesus, by your Spirit, declare your jealous love over our hearts as we look to you. In your name.