Today in our study of Acts we come to the end of chapter 4, and the description of the life of the early church, a description that echoes the description we find at the end of chapter 2. But to see what an incredible description this is, it is necessary to go back in the Scriptures, not back to chapter 2 or even to the beginning of Acts, but all the way back to Genesis.
God created Adam and said that it was not good for Adam to be alone, so he created Eve as a partner, a companion for him. And the two of them were to be fruitful and fill the earth with their descendants. Mankind was created relationally, for community. We read of Adam and Eve that they were naked – that is, open, vulnerable, intimate, no barriers – and that they had no shame.
In Genesis 3 we read of Adam and Eve’s choice to live under the delusion that they, not God, had final authority in their lives. They rebelled against God’s Word to them and disobeyed, and thus sin entered human experience.
The immediate effects of sin were disastrous. Adam and Eve hid from God. They felt shame in their nakedness. Adam blamed Eve for his own sin. Sin ruptures relationship. It estranges. Self-interest becomes all-important, and to show just how totally destructive sin is, in the very next account in Scripture is the account of Cain murdering his brother Abel.
Now you have sin in the world, manifesting itself in a dynamic of me-first so we read in Genesis 6 that by the time of Noah, every intention of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil, continually (Gen 6:5).
Then, in Genesis 12, God calls a man, Abraham, and makes a covenant with him. God pledges to form a nation out of Abraham’s descendants, and through this nation to bless all the peoples of the earth. A few hundred years later, the promise to build a nation has been fulfilled. This nation, called Israel, enters into a covenant with God at Mount Sinai, en route between Egypt and Canaan. God says to them, ‘If you are going to live as my people, live under my loving Lordship, it will look like this’, and God gives them his laws: laws concerning ethics, diet, worship, money, sex, harvest, marriage and so on. All of these laws reflect the righteousness, the perfection of God’s character.
Over the centuries that followed, it came to be understood that all of these laws were expressions of two supreme, basic commands: to love God and to love others. Jesus himself summarized the Law of God under these two commandments.
Part of God’s Law had to do with the care of the poor. In a world of sin, where people’s default orientation was to seek their own interests first at the expense of others, it was inevitable that there would be rich and poor, haves and have nots, powerful and oppressed.
So God said, ‘You are not to live that way’ so he made various provisions for the people to prevent poverty among them. Among these provisions was the provision of the Sabbatical year in Deuteronomy 15: every seven years there was to be a release of debt among the Israelites. They were to lend freely to one another if someone needed it, and the knowledge that the debt might be forgiven in the seventh year was not to hinder anyone from being generous to his neighbor. ‘And if you live like that,’ God said, ‘there will be no poor among you, for the LORD will bless you in the land that the LORD you God is giving to you as an inheritance to possess – if only you will strictly obey the voice of the LORD your God’ (Deut. 15:4-5).
The idea behind the covenant was that to the extent Israel lived this out, the world would see again what had been lost in Eden: namely, the blessing and joy of living in a loving relationship with God, under his perfect Word. More than that, the world would begin to see who God himself was as they saw the character of God reflected in his people. That was Israel’s great calling: to demonstrate the reign of God to the world.
As the Old Testament progressed, this idea of ‘care for the poor’ and the otherwise underprivileged was increasingly spoken of with the terms ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’. ‘Justice’ and ‘righteousness’ were the values and the action that God’s people were to have toward the needy among them. If a widow was in need, ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ was when the people took care of her. If a wealthy or powerful man was oppressing someone in his power, ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ meant that that someone’s interests were being looked after. If circumstances brought poverty or need to someone, ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ meant that there was provision for that person until they could establish themselves again.
As Israel did this (that is, lived as a just and mutually caring community) it would be a powerful demonstration to the world of God and what it meant to live as God’s people.
But Israel did not do this. They failed spectacularly at it, and when God lamented their unfaithfulness to him, it was their abandonment of justice and righteousness he rebuked them for: they were not taking care of the needs of their people: the widows, the orphans, or the poor.
Isaiah contrasts the ‘worship’ habits of the people with what God calls real ‘worship’: In Isaiah 1 God says, ‘I hate your sacrifices, I hate your gatherings and special services! Instead, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause (Is 1:17).
Isaiah’s contemporary, the prophet Amos, puts it even more starkly. Amos chapter 5 is a funeral lament at the ‘funeral’ of Israel. The cause of death is their abandonment of justice and righteousness: you turn justice to wormwood and cast down righteousness to the earth, you trample on the poor and you exact taxes of grain on him, you afflict the righteous and take bribes, you turn aside the needy… (Amos 5:6-15).
And again God says he hates their ‘worship’:
I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
What does God say is real worship? But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Israel did not keep the covenant. Israel did not really worship God. Israel did not care for their needy and therefore Israel singularly failed at being the vehicle by which God revealed himself to the nations. There should have been no poor among them. But there always was.
Part of what Israel’s history made abundantly clear was that when God sets up his standard and calls people to try to attain it, they cannot do it. Sin is so completely pervasive that no one has it within themselves to overcome it and live rightly as God’s people. Israel cannot return to Eden.
Then Jesus comes: God the Son, Deity himself comes to earth. In his teaching he reminds the people of God’s character and God’s values. And in his teaching Jesus, too, reiterated the reality of ‘righteousness’ in terms of care for the poor. In Matthew 6:1, the Sermon on the Mount, he says, ‘Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. But when you give to the needy….’ Giving to the needy, according to Jesus, is ‘practicing righteousness’. Surely that makes us sit up and take notice! In his teaching Jesus reveals God’s heart and character.
Maybe more profoundly, by his life he does what Israel never could. He perfectly lives justly and righteously: he heals the sick, he feeds the hungry, he gives dignity to the outcast, he meets needs.
Then, having lived the life that God’s people should have lived but could not because of their sin, he dies for their sin on the cross at Calvary: that is, he takes upon himself God’s holy punishment for sin, giving his perfect life for sinful humanity’s sin.
Three days later, God raised Jesus from the dead. By raising Jesus from the dead, God the Father ratified or affirmed Jesus’ life, teaching, and sacrificial death.
By the death and resurrection of Jesus, status as God’s people was no longer on the basis of a person’s conformity to God’s Laws, but on the basis of Jesus, who conformed perfectly to God’s Law in our place, and also died in our place for our willful failure to conform to God’s Law. That is the meaning of his death and resurrection.
Then Jesus ascends to heaven, resuming his place at the throne of God the Father.
But that’s not the end of the story, not by a long shot. In the book of Acts Jesus has poured out on his few followers the Holy Spirit. This is very significant. Instead of outlining God’s character and telling the community of God’s people to perform toward it, God is now putting his character within people. Instead of people trying to live like God, God is living within them and expressing his life through them.
Israel, the community centered around keeping God’s Law, failed badly. What will the new Israel, the community of God’s people centered around God’s grace in Jesus, do?
That’s where our text from Acts 4 comes in, and its companion text at the end of Acts 2. In these texts we have the description of the life of the community of God’s people. When people have trusted Jesus’ death for the forgiveness of their sins, when they are so transformed by the certain knowledge of his resurrection, and when they are filled with his Holy Spirit, what do we see?
‘Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.’
And then this powerful sentence: ‘There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.’
Here, finally, is the revelation of God through his people to the world. Here, finally, is the righteousness of God expressed in the life of his people. This is such a profound paragraph, one that would be easy to read over quickly and forget.
But what do we see in the community of Jesus? What do Christians look like?
They have a deep unity: ‘one in heart and soul’.
They joyfully recognize that Jesus is Lord over all: ‘no one said any of his possessions was his own’.
And all this gets expressed in generosity: if anyone had a need, it got met, even if it meant selling their stuff in order to provide for it.
This is not a mandate for us to sell everything and pool our resources. Acts 4 is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, it tells us what they did; it does not tell us, ‘you must do this’. For in the very next chapter Peter will tell Ananias that he had the right to do whatever he wanted with his money.
The difference lies in what they wanted.
What happens in a congregation when we are ‘one in heart and soul’, and when none of us considers anything we possess as belonging to us? My vehicle is not really my vehicle. My savings and money are not really mine. My house is not mine. My time is not mine. For that is the mindset when we fix ourselves on Jesus and when his Holy Spirit within begins transforming our character, our value system.
When that happens and we suddenly realize that one of us has no food or can’t make rent, we take the resources we have and meet the need. Even if it means selling something (the second vehicle, the second property, or downsizing), we do it not because we have to but because that is the natural action when I am ‘one in heart and soul’ with the person in need. None of what I have is mine, but God’s. That was the power of the early church. For the first time, people could look at the community of God’s people and see what God was like.
That’s what happens when we are aware of our ‘oneness in heart and soul’. It is not just being nicer or more social but cultivating and expressing community here. As we do that, it would be good for each of us to think about our finances, our time, our love, our skills and tools. What can it look like for us to recognize that it all belongs to Jesus, and to live accordingly? What can it look like for us to live in such a way that there would be no needy person among us? And not just financial needs, but lonely people would have their need met in relationship, conflict needs or marriage stress needs would be met in loving mentorship, new ‘Christian-faith’ needs would be met in intentional discipleship, widows and elderly would have their needs met by getting rides to appointments and having their homes cleaned and yard work done, and so on.
The kingdom of God looks like generosity with money, time, and love.
I pray that we will be one in heart and soul, that we would testify with great power to the resurrection of Jesus, that much grace will be on us, and that there will be no needy person among us.
Amen.