God prospered David.  In 1 Chronicles 29:2, as they’re preparing for the temple, it says “I have prepared with all my might for the house of God.”  He mentions the things that he had put aside.  He says in verse 3, “Moreover, because I have set my affection to the house of my God.”  Two things we see here are very important.  We also see it during the building of the tabernacle when Moses had called for the people to give.  Those are some of the only times in all of the Word of God that you see these words, “Tell the people to refrain.  They bring too much.”  Shouldn’t that be our heart toward God?  The opposite spirit is reproved later in Haggai 1:4, “The temple is laid waste and you’re living in cieled houses.” An affection, a love, an appreciation, a recognition for God through whom we live and move and have our very being.  Our very breath. Every breath we take is a gift from God and has Him as its source.  David, knowing the blessings of the Lord, said, “I have set my affection to the house of my God, I have of my own proper good...”  This was just what he, personally, had accrued of gold and silver.  He says that he had given—and today it’s way beyond this.  In today’s calculations, he’d given over 700 million in gold, 110 million in silver.  Here’s what I like about it, though.  This is what he had given.  You know he could sit there and think of himself and go, “Praise God, I’m thankful that I was able to do this.  That I’d been able to accrue this over all these years.”  But the real issue, I think comes out here in verse 12.  “Both riches and honour come of thee,” hallelujah!  God’s the source.  That’s the one thing we just want to drive home.  We all say it, but beloved, God is, truly, our source.  It doesn’t matter if it’s not something that can come to us financially.  We deal in money today, but God’s not limited to money.  He can keep our shoes from wearing out and feed us with manna.  When we get tired of that and murmur, He can blow quail in and we can eat it until we’re sick.  He’ll can give us water out of a rock.  His ravens can deliver food.  God’s our source; amen?  David said, “I’ve been young and now I’m old and I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread.”  There should never be a person in the body of Christ begging bread.  There’s sufficient, when we pool our resources together, for every one of us to have enough, praise God; amen?

In the book of Acts, we see, when it was necessitated, each and every one of them pooled their resources together so that there was no lack in the community.  We see is that everyone sold their possessions and laid the money at the apostles’ feet and they distributed as they saw need.  We talked about the faith that it would take to do something like that.  The recognition of divine order.  We saw that it was not a normal circumstance for the church.  This was a very unique and isolated incident.  The Bible does not teach communism, a commune, everybody getting fed out of the same pot, unless it is necessitated; amen?  But it’s talking about the heart.  The reason we know that’s talking as much about the heart as anything else, is by the next chapter when we look at Ananias and Sapphira.  The people’s needs were met when they had all things in common.  But Ananias and Sapphira came and lied about what they had put in.  They said they had given everything, just like everybody else.  He said, “Why did Satan put it in your heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?  Was this not yours to possess, to do with whatever you wanted?”  You see, there was never a requirement from the church saying, “Everybody has to do this.”  You give as your heart leads you to give.  You give as God has blessed you and you give according to the abundance that He’s blessed you with.