The Ephesians Story (Part 3)

Now, look at me very carefully. This is the sociology of the first century. There’s 1% of the people up here who are wealthy. They are made up of basically two groups: Romans and ex-soldiers who got rich stealing booty. That’s about all there are that are wealthy. They live in villas. They don’t live in town because it stinks. There is another 1% right up here, and they are the middle class. See the rich class, the poor class. And here’s the middle class. It’s about that big. In the United States, I understand, we have the rich class, the middle class, and the poor class. Well, here it is in Rome. Rich class, middle class. They are made up exclusively of Jews and Greeks. They are the merchants in the marketplace. They are selling their wares to the poor, to one another, and to the wealthy. They have their little tents, or booths they open every day, and you come by and you haggle with them. There’s no price tag on anything. By the way, not all of those people can read and write, but some can; reading and writing is a profession, just like carpentry. You read letters for people, you write letters for people, you explain documents to them, and draw up documents. Now there are others who can read and write, but it’s looked upon as a marketing skill. It doesn’t mean these people are that ignorant; many of them are highly skilled, but they still can’t read and write. But they are incredibly poor. Now we come to the other class, and it’s split right down the middle. In the bottom part of it, half of the people in the Roman Empire are slaves; the other half are the great unwashed. That’s what they’re called. Brother Ed, do you know why they’re called the great unwashed? Because they stunk. They have the clothes they wear, and they may have some sandals. Their kids run naked in the streets. They may have one room. They probably don’t own it; they probably rent it from the wealthy or a merchant. That room has a window and a door. It may not even have a window. The people sleep on the floor in that room, and they cook in that room. That’s the unwashed. The slaves may live in or around the villa; they may live in the village. They may sleep in a wagon. They may sleep in a barn, but I’ll tell you, the ones that fascinate me the most are those who were skilled.

Now, you’ve heard about Paul and his tent-mending business. Well, I want you to know what Paul of Tarsus is up against. I want you to imagine Paul in any town he was ever in. Let’s take the town of Thessalonica, and he’s there working for a living. Beside him in another booth is another man who mends tents, but that man is a slave. Now I want my tent mended, and I walk up to these two men, Paul of Tarsus and a slave named Demetrius…we gave him a nice, good slave’s name. And I say, “I want this mended.” Paul says, “I’ll do it for such and such. I’ll do it for a half pound of grain. I’ll do it for copper.” Whatever. The slave says, “I’ll do it for a quarter of a pound of grain, not a half a pound. I’ll do it for half a copper.” Now, why can he do that? Because he doesn’t have any overhead, and he will at the end of the day, whatever he has gained he will take that to his master and it becomes his master’s and that’s what Paul of Tarsus and every other skilled workman was up against, they were up against equally skilled slaves who were under bidding them, it was a self-destructive society. Now, these people are slaves; half of them. The other half are the great unwashed, with 2% who are wealthy and middle class.

Go with me and stand in the street. The street is five or six feet wide. In it, the middle of it is a little cutout notch that drops about six inches. It’s about a foot wide. That’s the gully. When it rains, that’s where things watch. It is also the city garbage dump. In fact, that entire street is a garbage dump. Everyone throws their filth and their garbage into the street. If you’re in a street, you cannot possibly walk around this stuff. Flies have filled the street up completely. There is a stench that rises out of that street that is ghastly, but everyone just opens the door and throws their garbage out there, and it’s never collected. The only thing that ever changes it is if there’s a good torrential rain; it will wash it down and out just by the flooding.

The people live on mixed grain, a little fruit, and a little vegetables that they grow for themselves, and some yogurt or cheese. They die at the average age of 35, 40, or 45, and they die of old age, malnutrition, and they die without doctors. They can’t afford them, and they don’t even die with the philosopher to say nice things over them, out of which came our Christian funerals. That was for the wealthy and the middle class. Brothers and sisters, their children were naked. These people’s arms and faces were filled with sores. Plagues would come through and sometimes wipe out half a town. The plagues had no name; they didn’t know what started them. We don’t know what started them. Rats are everywhere, and so are flies. These people have no entertainment, other than every once in a while, something at the amphitheater if there is one in town, and that’s it. They have no protection from the law. They have tattoos around their mouths and over their eyebrows. I told you last night that when they go to the temple, they stand around this little round circular thing, probably dedicated to Zeus or Jupiter or someone like that, and they slaughter an ox, and they drink the blood. These are miserable people. They are ignorant people, and they are unhappy people. They do not understand literature. They are uneducated. Superstition is their great religion. There’s nothing in their lives but life and death. For every mother who gives birth to six or seven children, one will survive. That’s a way of life. It was hardly worth crying over. That’s just the way it was. One or two might survive. Those kids had no shoes, and they probably ran naked in the streets until they were two or three years old.

Point. Out of those people came the vaulted, almost mythical folks that we have called first-century Christians. Revise your thinking, buddy. This is not Cecil B. DeMille. And into this town of Colossae – but I’ve described any town in the Roman Empire – into this town comes Epaphroditus. I don’t know how he does it, but somehow or other, he leads some of those people to a savior and a Lord. And saints, I cannot explain this to you, but if there is anything that differentiates the Christian faith from any other religion, it’s what happens to people when they meet the Lord. Buddha doesn’t do this, and Muhammad doesn’t do this. And the Shinto religion, the Tao religion, the Zoroastrian religion, and Hinduism, none of them do this incredible thing of causing people to be quickened and to fall in love with one another. It’s a peculiarity of our species. It’s an instinct, and it happens all over the world, and it can happen without American Christian missionaries telling them. In fact, I think American Christian missionaries kill church life because they bring them into John Calvin’s Sunday morning church service and almost demand that we never get to know one another. Unwittingly, we do that.

And again, I think of Nepal because I have just also described to you a nation that exists today, that’s exactly like the nation I just described. And I think of a Prem Pradhan winning one or two people in a village, and that’s all, and another one, and another one. And these people, each week, they’ll get up early in the morning and they will walk to one of the villages. Let’s just say there are seven villages and there’s one convert in each one, and they come together walking miles from daybreak. They meet. They are all illiterate. Maybe one of them can read. They all get together. They spend the day. They sing. They praise the Lord. They share. One brother reads. The only book that they had in Paul’s language in the early days was the book of John, which, by the way, does not ever tell you that Jesus Christ ascended. It’s not recorded in the book of John. And a lot of these people got the idea in their heads that he’s still on earth somewhere in some city that they haven’t been to yet.

And they get together and they praise the Lord and sing and share and cry and so on and so forth and hug one another and then they all go home. Buddhists don’t do this. Mohammedans don’t do this. Muslims don’t do this. Christians do this. And Epaphroditus preaches the Gospel to these people, and they learn to sing, and they learn to share, and they learn to love. Out of them comes the fivefold ministry. And this is why I know what an evangelist is, besides seeing it experientially. And why I know what a pastor is, why I know what a prophet is, and why I know what a church planter is. Epaphroditus was a church planter. These people, please see them. Let’s hope and pray to God in reverse time that a Greek got saved. Let’s hope in mercy they don’t meet in the home of a slave or a great unwashed. It would be such a filthy hole; it would be unimaginable. Let’s hope a Greek or a Jew got saved in some place where there were three or four rooms and a little garden in the middle, and let’s hope they all met there. Will you hope that with me? Every time I get to thinking about this, I get unraveled. Please, Lord, let a Greek get saved. Let a Jew be converted.

And they come together and they sit around on the floor. They don’t have chairs; chairs weren’t invented for another 1500 years. Benches exist, but they don’t have them; they sit on the floor. I’ll tell you how they sit, too. You want to see how they sit? They sit like this. That’s how they sit. That’s how people sat in those days: it was like this. And they’re perfectly comfortable. You and I are not, but they are. And they chatted and talked and sang and shared, and they fell in love with one another because they had a common life that just loves, as does the Godhead love. And if you don’t know how the Godhead loves, then you don’t know one of the great imponderables. The Father’s desire to live only for the Son and the Son’s desire to live only for the Father and the Spirit’s desire to see that they both are glorified, and that life is in them.

One morning, two men get hired to go out and bale hay. Halfway through the day, the manager of the field says to them, You know, we need another hand, and one of them says, I know somebody, and he strikes out back for Colossae. And he goes and knocks on someone’s door and says, Hey, you didn’t get a job today. No, come go with us. A sister and a brother aren’t doing too well in getting some work each day, and someone shares grain with them. Someone shares a copper, a bronze, or an iron coin. Sisters take care of one another. Brothers meet each other in the marketplace and hug. Out of the home of a Greek, there rises music that can be heard for several blocks, and they recognize some of the old folk tunes of that town, but they don’t recognize the words. Those people are making up songs, Colossians. They are making melodies.

They see these believers doing something you don’t see in Colossae: they watch these people smile. And smiling is virtually unknown among these folks. They hear one of them shout one day when he sees another brother and hugs him, “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord.” And Colossae knows that something is growing up in their town that not since the fall of Adam has the eye ever seen. Nowhere, ever. What is it that’s being seen? A little bit of heaven. It’s called the ekklesia. And if you ever touch her, she’ll win your heart and destroy your life. And I will repeat what I said last night, but let me do it now in context. The greatest single instrument of evangelism the world has ever known is the church herself. She is the most magnetic thing there is, and those people in that town were curious. They’d tell stories about their love for one another and their care for one another, along with some other weird stories they would tell. But every once in a while, somebody would have the good sense to know, I want to look into this for myself, and they would go into one of those meetings and sit down in a corner and do like that.

And the people touched one another. They were touched. There was affection. The sisters kissed one another. If you please, their brothers kissed one another. Live with it. They’d sit there and talk, and they’d talk about this God and this Lord and then sing and then praise and then share and then hold one another and cry, and you’d walk into that room of pagans, and you would hardly know the name Jesus Christ. You walk out a believer, but there’s something you would know that you didn’t walk out and join a parachurch organization; the next day, you wouldn’t say in the marketplace, ‘I’m shopping around for a church and taking my family.’ You would not be going to any seminars on marriage, nor would you be joining a mission society for left-handed, Albino Eskimos refugees in southwest Africa. These things didn’t exist.

There were two things that were synonymous. They were so synonymous that men and women were incapable of thinking otherwise, and that is the Christian ekklesia. Salvation was not separated from the body of Christ. You knew that if you followed the Way and became a follower of the Way, you belonged to that body of believers, and there was no choice in the matter. Otherwise, you weren’t even considered a believer. You were considered some weirdo who walked in, said he was a Christian, and walked out. That was incomprehensible. I’m not talking about salvation by the church. I am talking to you about a lifestyle, that the lifestyle was absolutely inseparable with the concept of the Gospel, that you belong to the ekklesia, if you became a believer, and you took the medicine and the shame and the condemnation and perhaps the family excommunication, or at least the stigma of belonging to this strange thing that met down there in Gaius’ garden, there in the middle of his little house.