Building Something That Lasts

Happy Mother’s Day to all those moms out there. I hope you had a good time celebrating, and I hope you celebrated your mom.

Today, what we’re going to talk about is how to build something that lasts, and we’re going to do it through kind of a tricky story. It’s a story in Acts 4 and 5 in which Barnabas comes, sells a plot of land, and gives all the proceeds to the church. The church is described as a place where no one has need, everyone is taken care of, and it’s this healthy, thriving community.

But then what happens is this couple, Ananias and Sapphira, also sell a piece of land. They come and pretend to offer all of its proceeds when, in fact, they had kept a portion back for themselves. It’s sort of a shocking story and a harsh story because both Ananias and Sapphira die. You’re left thinking, “Man, what the heck is going on?”

Now, it’s a challenging story, but I think it’s also helpful if we can understand it in its fuller context. What’s happening in the early church is that they are proclaiming the message that Jesus was the Son of God, the Son of Man, the one who fulfilled the Old Testament scriptures through His life, death, and resurrection. He transformed the world, sent His Spirit to the apostles, and now the apostles are building the church. The church is to be the new temple.

In the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies represented the most sacred place. If you entered without being prepared in a clean and authentic way, you would be exposed to the power and awesomeness of God, and you would die. I think this is a similar thought to the ocean. The ocean is beautiful and wonderful, but if you don’t respect its power, majesty, and authority, it can take your life.

So what I think is going on in the early church is that, in its infancy stage, it was really important for the church to be built on a solid foundation, with integrity and authenticity. Those things were essential for the church to grow and flourish, and for us to still be talking about it 2,000 years later.

Those same things apply to us when we think about building something that lasts in our own lives—whether it’s our marriage, our family, our kids, our career, our faith, the church, or any kind of organization. It’s really important that the foundation is solid, that the systems have integrity, and that ultimately it’s authentic and real.

When you think about a foundation, you know that if the foundation is wrong, everything else tilts the other way. With my kids at Christmas, we gather everybody together and have the Brookside Cup. One of the games is building a tower out of toothpicks and marshmallows as fast as possible, and whoever builds the tallest tower wins. But we have a rule that it has to still be standing 30 seconds after you stop. Anyone who compromises on the foundation watches their tower fall down. It’s this reminder that the foundation we build our lives on matters.

Jesus talks in another place about how, if we build our foundation on sand, it will be washed away. If we’re honest, a lot of times we’re building our foundation on weak things—success, image, power, privilege, and whatever else.

Second, we want the integrity of the system to hold up. If the integrity of your data collapses, your data is breached and stolen, and it all caves in on itself. If the integrity of the foundation or framing of your house is compromised, it falls down. What we want to ensure is that the integrity of the things we build is strong and able to last, because the integrity we build with will determine longevity.

So one of the questions I would ask you is not only how solid your foundation is, but also how strong the integrity of your systems is. Are they going to flourish, or are they eventually going to collapse in on themselves?

Lastly, we look at authenticity. In the discourse between Peter and Ananias, it’s not that they kept the money. Peter basically says, “Listen, the land was yours, and after you sold it, the money was yours.” The issue wasn’t that they kept some of it back. The issue was that they proclaimed they had given it all. When we get to a place where what we’re offering or saying is not authentic, we lose the ability to trust those realities.

One of the things that’s really important to us here at Grace Community is that we travel through the messiness of life together. One of the functions of that is that it allows us to be authentic instead of pretending we have it all together or acting like Jesus waves a magic wand and our lives instantly become this ideal picture. We’re allowed to have grace, freedom, and continue to grind through life together.

It allows our community to be a place that walks through the messiness of life together, owns the brokenness and all the things that happen, chooses hope, and loves God and our world.

So what is it that you’re building, and is it real? Pinocchio, the Velveteen Rabbit, and Coke all know that it’s cool to be real. What you want to do is make sure you’re cultivating authenticity in whatever it is you’re building so that it can be trusted into the future.

Hey, it’s always great to be with you. I hope you have a great week, and we’ll see you soon as we continue on in our series in Acts.