Our gracious heavenly Father, we ask now for Your blessing as we come to Your Word, that I might decrease and Christ would increase, that You would give us ears to hear that we might listen attentively and learn, and that by Your grace we would be changed and transformed as Your disciples. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

Our text this morning is Acts chapter 4, verses 32 through 37. We are taking these several months to hit some of the highlights in the book of Acts, and we come this morning to the end of chapter 4, beginning at verse 32.

“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. 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. Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.”

I have been here two and a quarter years and I don’t think I have properly preached a sermon on giving. Until now. When I was, oh, a young man lo these many years ago, and had my first real job out of seminary, where I had a paycheck and I think I was making $40,000 which seemed to be just as rich as kings, and we had a small, little house. It was just the two of us and it was plenty. But for the very first time, really had to think about how do we approach money. Now my parents, having grown up in the church with good Christian parents, were very adamant from a young age that we had to tithe, so back then when we got $2 for mowing the lawn, you better put 20¢ in, or when we would baby-sit and we would get paid $2 an hour, I can promise if I paid you $2 an hour to baby-sit for us you would be calling the authorities [laughter]. That’s what we got, $2. And you might make a grand total of $10 for some very long evening. You would put $1. My parents instructed us well in tithing.

But then when I had a read job, so called, and I was preaching from time to time, I really had to think through, well, what, what does this look, because when you are very poor, that is to say when you’re a college student and then a seminary student and you really have nothing, it’s easy to be quite dramatic about your stance toward money and possessions.

I forget which author said for years he thought he was very generous, and it turned out he had just been very poor. [laughter]

But what do I really think about this?

And then, when I had two years later a senior pastor job and was making even a little bit more money than that and had a house that was almost 2000 square feet and we felt with just one kid almost felt guilty for it. I took for those first two or three years in ministry, there was probably nothing that I read about or studied more and just had books and books and books, on how to think about wealth and possessions. Because I wanted to be obedient. I often felt guilty. When I look back now and think I had much less then than I have now, and I wanted to be faithful, and I wanted to be generous, and I wanted to instruct people well, and also did not want to lay down a burden that was not really there, so it was a mess of ideas.

And you can read books, Christian books, that will make you feel quite content to have whatever you have, maybe even feel particularly blessed. Lots of books, not necessarily in our tradition, that would tell you that you’re rich precisely because God is blessing you and if you just gave a little more to the church,