At the end of every seven years you
shall grant a release. And this is the
manner of the release: Every creditor
shall release what he has lent to his neighbor.
He shall not exact it of his neighbor, his brother, because the Lord’s
release has been proclaimed. Of a
foreigner you may exact it, but whatever of yours is with your brother your
hand shall release. But there will be no
poor among you; for the Lord sill bless you in the land that the Lord your God
is giving you for an inheritance to possess – if only you will strictly obey
the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all this commandment that I
command you today.
Acts 4:32ff is a clear fulfillment of that promise. The church is the perfect expression of this
fulfillment. We read that through a
great distribution of divine grace upon the church (vs. 33) there were no poor;
no unmet needs. Through the distribution
of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in these first thousands of
Christians, justice and loving kindness was done instinctively. How? The
Lord puts it succinctly in Jeremiah 9:23-26: He circumcised their hearts and the result was
that they had everything in common. The
testimony of Scripture couldn’t be clearer – the more one grasps the
incomparable grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the more of a giver they
become. And this should come as no
surprise for throughout the Old Testament the word “righteousness” tzadequa (in Hebrew) refers not to
personal morality, but right relationships.
It’s a word that is far more social than personal. And that’s exactly what we will see in our
study of Acts 4:32-37 and Jeremiah 9:23-26 this Sunday.
Verse 33(b) is the fulcrum on which Acts 4:32-37 is
balanced. Luke says, “…and great grace
was upon them all.” Listen to what Tim
Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City, says, “My experience as
a pastor has been that those who are middle class in spirit tend to be
indifferent to the poor, but people who come to grasp the Gospel of grace
and become spiritually poor find their hearts gravitating toward the
materially poor. To the degree that the
Gospel shapes your self-image, you will identify with those in need.” That’s what Luke shows us in Acts, chapter 4.
On Monday night I shared with a group of ten who are
equipping themselves to do justice and love kindness even more intently, the
words of the late Episcopal priest, Robert Farrar Capon, who died last
September in New York City, regarding the Gospel of grace. Capon writes:
The Reformation was a time when men
went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement
of late Medievalism, a whole cellar-full of bottle after bottle of pure
distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince everyone that God
saves us single-handedly. The word of
the gospel – after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven
by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps – suddenly turned out to be
a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to
be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and
certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that
bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the
case.
And once it’s drunk, really drunk and re-drunk, the natural result
is free, generous giving.
In preparation for Sunday’s message you may wish to consider
the following:
1. Find
out who Fr. Gregory Boyle is, and think about getting his 2010 book, Tattoos on the Heart.
2. How
do you read Jeremiah 9:23-26?
3. How
would you define “kinship”?
4. How
does being of “one heart and soul” play itself out?
5. How
many Christians is Luke talking about in chapter 4?
6. What
does it mean to say that Jesus never met a stranger?
7. How
often in the Bible do you find the word “grace” (charis in Greek) modified as it is in verse 33?
8. Do
you agree with the statement, “The deeper you grow in the Spirit the poorer you
become”?
9. What
common objections do you hear for not giving to others, especially the poor?
10. What
does the word that’s used to describe Barnabas in verse 36 mean? And what is the significance?
See you Sunday as we continue to Gather and Give Beyond
ourselves! If you haven’t yet brought
your “Gather” – you’ve got all month to do it.
This Sunday we begin collecting our “Give”. (The goal is $20,000 over and above our
regular giving.)
