Acts, Chapter 5,
verse 5
When Ananias heard these
words, he fell down and breathed his last, and great fear came upon all who heard of it.
Piety, Generosity and
Holiness cannot be pretended. Ananias’s story is a lesson in honesty. You
cannot fool God, who knows your heart and mind.
The problem with pretending[1]
True leaders give of
themselves liberally. Being a liberal does not make one generous. Nor does
pretending to be; thus comes the sad story of Ananias and Sapphira.
In the early church in Jerusalem a
group of believers were so filled with the Holy Spirit that they were of one
heart and one mind. So knit together were the hearts of the people that they
held all their possessions loosely and willingly shared them with one another,
not because they were coerced but because they loved one another. Those who
sold land and houses gave of their profits to the apostles, who distributed the
gifts to those in need. Ananias and his wife, Sapphira also had sold a field.
Part of the profit from their sale was kept back by the couple, and only laid a
part of the money was laid at the apostles’ feet. Ananias made a pretense of
having given all the proceeds. Peter, who was filled with the power of
the Spirit knew instantly that Ananias was lying—not just to him but to God—and
exposed his hypocrisy then and there. Ananias fell down and died. When Sapphira
showed up, she, too, lied to Peter and to God, saying that they had donated the
entire proceeds of the sale of the land to the church. When her lie had
been exposed, she also fell down and died at Peter’s feet. This was the sin of hypocrisy.
It can be easy today to gloss over the holiness of God, to forget that He is
righteous and pure and that He hates sin wholeheartedly.[2]
Here God removed a
spiritual cancer from the church by taking their lives and as Luke states in
the Acts, “Fear (holy) came upon all
the church.” Looking more closely at the problem we can see Ananias and
Sapphira:
1.
Clung to their possessions.
2.
Agreed to lie about their giving.
3.
Pretended to be someone they were not.
4.
Thought they could get by with appearing to be
generous.
5.
Felt more concerned with their image than their
relationship to God.
End of Ramadan/Eid-al-Fitr[3]
What is Eid? Eid
al-Fitr is an important Muslim celebration that marks the breaking of the fast
at the end of Ramadan.
Family and friends gather
to eat and pray together during the festival that lasts up to three days in
many Muslim countries.
Mubarak Eid, or Blessed
Eid, is a common greeting used during Eid al-Fitr.
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