Acts 5:1-11
Sin’s Heart Attack
The heart is an amazing muscle.
Psalms 139:14 I will praise thee; for I am
fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are
thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
a. The heart is about five inches long, weighs nine to eleven
ounces and is about the size of your clinched fist.
b. This amazing little muscle pumps something like seventeen
thousand, two hundred quarts of blood a day through the human
body.
c. That’s equivalent to six million, two hundred seventy-eight
thousand quarts a year being pumped.
d. Over a seventy year life span, something like four hundred and
thirty-nine million quarts of blood are pumped.
http://www.ucg.org/sermons/transcripts/200505cleanheart.htm
Converted, that is 109,750,000 gallons.
1. Average swimming pool (20x40, average 5’ deep) contains 30,000
gallons of water.
2. Our heart can fill that pool once per week—every week—for
seventy years.
http://www.backyardcitypools.com/swimming-pools/Pool-Volume-
Calculate.html
All of this work means heart problems are very serious.
The arteries can clog.
The heart can weaken.
The heart can enlarge.
Its lining can hardened.
Its lower and upper chambers can beat out of time.
Any of these can lead to a stroke or heart attack, making heart
disease the number one killer in America today among both men and
women.
While I do not mean to diminish the loss to these families, this is
not the heart’s greatest danger. The heart’s greatest dangers are
what happened to Ananias and Sapphira.
This morning let’s look at three causes of Sin’s Heart Attack.
I. The heart can conceive sin.
A. \\#4\\ "Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine own
heart?"
1. The human heart is the place where sin is CONCEIVED.
2. The word CONCEIVED means "to make, to set, to place, to
establish."
3. In short, conceive means to create.
4. Our heart is the place where sin can be created.
5. That is not very flattering. Let’s consider some aspects
of this ability.
B. Why can our hearts create sin? Why did God give us that
ability?
1. We are created in the image of God, and God is the
Creator.
2. It stands to reason that we would have the power to
create as God at least in some areas.
a. This is a power that God has given to us to make
lives fuller and more enjoyable.
b. It seems that I spend a good deal of time in or
around hospitals.
c. There is probably no place where technology is more
evident than in a hospital.
(1) My father-in-law came by for a visit yesterday
and I learned that he was to have a chip
implanted soon that would monitor and record
the condition of his heart for the next three
years.
(2) I recall a few years ago (2009) Virgil Perry
took a radio-active pill that would release
radio-active particles to seek out and latch
themselves onto the thyroid cancer compounds
in his body—and nothing else— to destroy
them.
(3) Less than a year ago, Truman McVea had a heart
valve replaced without even cutting into his
chest. They replaced it by going into this
artery.
d. Of course, the creative ability of humans shows up in
many other places.
(1) We have a space station floating above us
where men and women live for months on end.
(2) We have satellites that can pinpoint our
location within inches and beam news and
conversation to us almost anywhere.
3. Mankind’s abilities are amazing and frightening.
a. Why?
b. Because our fallen nature also taps into this divine
creative ability to create sin.
Romans 1:30 Backbiters, haters of God,
despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil
things, disobedient to parents,
c. One of the easy to identify characteristics of a sinful
heart is its ability to invent evil things.
d. Our hearts are the breeding grounds for sin!
C. What kind of sin does our heart create?
1. Any kind - Most of our sinful behaviors are born in the
heart.
2. Our heart is the place of emotion; so most of the time,
the heart creates sins that somehow satisfies its
perverted emotional desires.
a. The heart is a "luster." It is filled with lust.
b. God created the heart clean and pure, but sin has
changed it.
c. It is now deceitful and wicked, desiring things it
should not.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
3. The Bible gives us plenty of examples.
a. Ananias longed for glory.
b. \\#Acts 8:18-19\\ Simon longed for power.
c. \\#2Sam 11:3\\ David longed for thrills.
d. \\#2Ki 5:26\\ Gehazi longed for riches.
e. \\#Ge 3:5\\ Eve longing for deity.
f. In all of these cases, the person is longing, wanting
for something, he or she either should not have
wanted or should not have wanted that way.
4. Get this. Our heart, that deceitful seat of our emotion,
can lead us into great sin by making us love something
that will destroy us.
D. Something makes our heart condition much worse!
1. by Satan’s presence.
Acts 5:3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan
filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and
to keep back part of the price of the land?
2. Satan filled Ananias’ heart.
3. Here is a bad situation becoming worse.
a. As far as we know, Ananias was saved.
b. We conclude then that anyone’s heart, even a saved
person’s, came be influenced to evil by Satan.
c. I believe there are limits to what Satan can do to a
believer, but we have all known saved people who have
been misdirected by Satan.
d. The end result was that Ananias had a heart attack.
(1) His heart was attacked by sin and it killed him.
(2) What a sad state when a God’s people give their
hearts to devising wicked things!
E. Why would I tell you that?
1. We need to know our greatest sin attacks won’t be from
without but from within!
2. That knowledge may give you some hope of preparing.
3. What we need is a heart transplant.
a. This is a procedure that at one time was not
available.
b. When Jesus Christ died on cross, He donated His heart
for organ transplant.
Ezekiel 36:26 A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you: and I
will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you an heart of flesh.
II. Not only can the heart conceive sin, THE HEART CAN CONCEAL SIN.
A. To conceal sin does not sound, to our ears, nearly so bad as
to conceive sin, but it is!
B. I am uncertain as to who played what part in this sinful plot.
1. When two people are involved in a sin, the sin is most
likely hatched by one, with the other needing to be
convinced to go along and to conceal the plan.
2. From this account, it is hard to know in whose heart this
sin originated.
3. Since Ananias brought the money to Peter alone, we might
suppose that he was the one who hatched the plot (but
that was not necessarily so).
4. The point is that regardless of which one conceived the
sin and which one concealed it, God punished both
equally.
C. We have a more visible illustration of in the story of Achan.
Joshua 7:1 But the children of Israel committed a
trespass in the accursed thing: for Achan, the
son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah,
of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed
thing: and the anger of the LORD was kindled
against the children of Israel.
20 And Achan answered Joshua, and said, Indeed I
have sinned against the LORD God of Israel, and
thus and thus have I done:
24 And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took
Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the
garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons,
and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses,
and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had:
and they brought them unto the valley of Achor.
25 And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us?
the LORD shall trouble thee this day. And all
Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them
with fire, after they had stoned them with
stones.
26 And they raised over him a great heap of
stones unto this day. So the LORD turned from
the fierceness of his anger. Wherefore the
name of that place was called, The valley of
Achor, unto this day.
1. Here we are told that the sin both originated and was
carried out by Achan.
2. Yet the wife and children suffered the same fate as Achan
who took what God told him to leave alone.
3. Someone might be angry with God over this matter.
a. I would say they need to learn a lesson.
b. To conceal a sin in your heart, even if you don’t
profit from it, makes you as guilty as to conceive
and carry out the sin.
D. Many have thought they could conceal sin in their heart. All
failed.
2 Kings 17:9 And the children of Israel did
secretly those things that were not right
against the LORD their God….
Proverbs 28:13 He that covereth his sins shall
not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh
them shall have mercy.
E. What mischief, what unrighteousness, what wickedness is hid in
our hearts? Understand:
1. Sin, even when it is buried in darkness, grows.
2. It bears its own dark fruit.
3. This is what is wrong with sins people want to legalize.
a. No sinful acts is ever satisfied of itself -
pornography, marijuana, prostitution, they all
produce greater evils.
b. What we do in the secrecy of our hearts will bear fruit
somewhere.
c. Turn from it before it destroys you.
III. The heart IS crushed by sin.
A. This story ends in the death of both Ananias and Sapphira.
1. Sin always ends that way.
James 1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it
bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is
finished, bringeth forth death.
2. Let me say it again - The end of all sin is death.
3. Death may not come as quickly as it did in this case and
the results may not always be so directly tied to sin as
in this case, but death always comes.
4. That is what is meant by the Bible verse:
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but
the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.
5. Death and hell are the results of having unresolved sin in
your life.
a. People who bear their own sin always die.
b. People who ask for mercy through the Lord Jesus Christ
never die.
B. While we wait for death to come, sin destroys the functions of
the heart.
1. The heart is the place God intended for the good emotions:
a. The heart is the place for love, both giving and
receiving.
b. The heart is the place for joy and pleasure.
c. The heart is the place for peace.
d. The heart is the place for satisfaction.
2. Sin robs us of these and leaves only:
a. guilt
b. shame
c. worry and fret
d. sadness and regret
I told you earlier that you needed a heart transplant. Jesus has made
it possible. If you will repent of your sin and trust in what He did
on the cross for you, He will perform the procedure. Will you allow
Him to do it today?
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