The DEEPEST Truth Paul Ever Taught – The First-Century Church & Ephesians

The church got larger and larger. Paul, while he sat there at the weaver’s beam making tents, also talked to people who came by. The fact that he was able to heal in that day, at a time when there was no television, was big news, and also because people were so desperately ill, the average lifespan of a person was 39 or 40. Does that sound very young to you? Does it? That the average lifespan of a human being at that time was around 40? Well, it shouldn’t shock you at all. Do you know what it was in 1900? In America. That’s in America. Well, make a wild guess. That? Forty-seven. So, from Paul’s time until the generation before me, it added seven years. People die young. You will not die young unless you’re blown to a nuclear crisp.

A lot of people were saved, and I’m going to tell you about someone who was saved. He made fleece. I mean, he grew…well, he was a merchant in fleece. He lived 90 miles due east of Ephesus. Ephesus was an incredibly huge marketplace. He came there from his hometown to market his fleece. He also came and sat down in the marketplace and listened to Paul, sitting there at the weaver’s beam, talk about Jesus Christ. He got saved, and he was a fairly well-to-do man. Now, is there anybody in this room who is wise enough to tell me his name and the town he came from? We know so little about Scripture, it’s unbelievable. What’s his name? That’s right. Thank you. His name was Philemon. He came from a town famous for its fleece, a little town of about 10,000 people jammed up against a mountain. By the way, it sat here, and another town sat here, and another town sat here, and they were in a triangle, and they were all 10 miles away from one another. Would somebody like to tell me the names of the other two towns? I’m sorry, brother. Laodicea and Hierapolis. Wasn’t that much clearer? Depending on which piece of land you’re standing on, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to an Irishman at all.

He went back home after several months of sitting in Tyrannus’ house listening to Paul preach. I want you to remember a couple of things really important. One of them was that those six men, young men, had all been from a church somewhere, from different cultures and languages, and they were all pollinating, cross-pollinating with one another, and they were now in a totally different country and a totally different culture, and they were all learning church life in another place, and they were watching Paul of Tarsus. If you were to think really, really hard, the idea or thought might come to you that what Paul of Tarsus was doing with those six men in that town was very similar to what Jesus Christ had done with 12 men that He raised up to be church planters.

Now, I want to introduce you to two or three other people. One night, two young men come in, and they’re friends. No, they came in at four o’clock in the morning. It was a morning meeting of the church, and they stood there, and one of them said, “I want to be baptized.” The other one shook his head, and Paul had seen them in the marketplace, and something had happened to them. Something wonderful. A few questions were asked of them, and they took them out to the river. I think the river’s name is Lyceum or Lycius; I’ve forgotten. I’m doing this from memory. I did it deliberately. I’m testing what I can remember. They baptized them, and these were incredible young men. I don’t know how they managed to do this. They never told me, but from that moment on, every day they were sitting at Paul’s feet in Tyrannus’ house. And now, Jan, this is your big moment. What were their names? They’re both from the city of Ephesus. Come on. It starts with a T. You’ve already said it. Tychicus and Trophimus, and before Paul of Tarsus leaves Ephesus, he is not training six men but eight men, and you will find all of them reappearing in different parts of the Roman Empire throughout Scripture. He bet on eight men, and he won in every case. Although we know almost nothing about Secundus, we know a lot about the other seven.

One day, one of the brothers whose name we don’t know came running in from the Ephesian port and broke into Paul’s house. He was white as a sheet, and he said news had just come from the first ship from Rome since this had happened. It’s unbelievable. Does anybody want to guess what the man is going to tell Paul? This is the greatest news Paul has ever heard. Honest to goodness, it really was. Very close. Thank you. I’ll give you an A for that. The word was that Claudius was dead, and it was 54 AD, which meant it was 24 years after Pentecost. And Paul flips out.

Now I’m going to tell you why Paul’s excited. Paul is excited because all the Christian churches in Israel and Cyprus—well, let me just talk about Cyprus—were really dead because Jewish Christians were saved, and they went to the synagogue, and they had never made a clear break. There had been a group of Christians meeting in Rome, Italy, and they were all Jewish, and they all met in one ghetto of Rome, and the name of that ghetto is Trastevere. It’s the Jewish ghetto. But when Claudius forced the Jews out of Rome, there was no longer a church in Rome. Paul didn’t have to deal with a half-dead Jewish church, and he was thrilled pink at the news that Claudius had pushed the Jews out. Now he was thrilled pink that Claudius was dead.

Now, somebody thrill my heart and tell me what Paul did when he heard this news. Tell me that you have been a really good student of mine. Don’t break my heart. Please. Tell me, in great, big, thick words, what Paul did. He went to it? No. He wrote to every church he knew anything about that had Gentiles and said, “Back them, get them there.” Priscilla and Aquila say to him, “We’re going back to Rome,” and Paul says, “Don’t do that. We don’t know yet if there is going to be a decree that will let you back in.” And Priscilla, who grew up in Rome, said, “Paul, every time one of these decrees has been passed, and it’s been done before, and when the emperor that does it dies, it always gets forgotten.” And then Paul said, “You’ll be risking your necks.” And Aquila says, “We’ll do it.”

He has written a letter, and this is what he said: “I’m asking Priscilla, Aquila, and one other brother to go to Rome.” Now stay with me; thrill my heart and tell me what his name is. Epaenetus. Epaenetus, Priscilla, and Aquila are going to Rome. Help them buy a house and send some brothers and sisters, and Priscilla says, “You don’t have to ask them to buy a house. I come from a very wealthy family, and I have enough money to buy one.” And Paul said, “Buy that house in a decent place, because Rome is quite literally the hellhole of the world.” It’s the noisiest place on earth. It’s the filthiest place on earth. Thirty thousand people take up one third of the land in that city, and everybody else is crammed into rooms that are 8 by 9 and 8 by 10, and they’re paying the equivalent of 10 months’ wages per month to live in those. They’re called insulas, which means islands. And you know what people do? Ten or fifteen people will rent an 8-by-10 room and take shifts sleeping there. The only thing is, they don’t sleep. It’s too noisy, and those rooms do not have windows. In the winter, you freeze, and in the summer, you burn out.

And now I’m going to tell you a little story. If you were to walk through the forum in Corinth at 2 o’clock in the morning, or you were to go out and watch on the hills where the slaves were pulling those ships across the isthmus of Corinth, if you were to go at two o’clock in the morning in Ephesus and walk out in the hill country or into the forum, you know what you would see? You would see the forum absolutely packed with nothing but tents. You would see all the doorways with people sleeping in them. If you went to Corinth and saw the grassy hills around it, they would be filled with tents. People just made nine cents a day. They made a denarius a day, and they slept in these tents at night, and that was their home. Then they would fold them up. If they were in the forum—and in Rome mentally all the forums were filled with cattle at night—the people slept on the roofs or any place they could find a square foot, and they would throw tents wherever they could and sleep in them and simply store their clothing and their belongings in the rooms they rented, and they would come there to eat. Now you didn’t know that, did you?

By the way, did that ring a bell with anybody? Did anything click? Did you get a point here and a point here and put them together? What did Paul of Tarsus do? Build tents. He was doing land-office business, building tents. Because the poorest people either slept in the doorways or managed to buy a tent. That’s where they lived, and so, he said to Priscilla and Aquila, “Buy a decent place.” I want you to know it is actually possible to go to the very spot where she bought that house. It’s one of those few things that has managed to survive history. They bought a home in one of the few areas of all of Rome where you could get a night’s sleep and where the stink was not beyond nausea. It was on a hill, and it managed to be quite near the ghetto so that the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians could meet in, and this is in the Scripture, in the home of Priscilla and Aquila.

Brothers and sisters, this was what life was like in the first century. This is reality. Most of God’s people, poor beyond description—slaves and freed slaves and free men—make up well over 90% of the churches in abject poverty. But that’s what happened when they waved Priscilla, Aquila, and Epaenetus off to Rome. Paul said, “I’m coming soon.” He also asked his first cousin down in Jerusalem to go so there’d be some Jews there, and he wrote to all the churches and asked them to send somebody there. Would you like to know their names? Simple – read Romans 16. There are 29 of them. We know by name who got up and left the Gentile churches and a few Jewish churches and went to Rome. And when they got to Rome, they all headed for the house of Priscilla and Aquila. Epaenetus lived there too, and they stayed there until they could get jobs. Then they rented out an insula, and there were five brothers, you’ll find them listed in Romans 16, five brothers got together and rented an insula. You only need to read it once to understand that that’s what they were doing. Some of the others got jobs in the homes of two of the great controllers of Rome. One was Narcissus, and what was the other’s name? Well, Narcissus was one of them. Very clear what’s going on when you read Romans 16, but Paul hasn’t left Ephesus yet, and he’s sitting in the school of Tyrannus teaching his six young—eight young—brothers, and the whole room’s packed with new Christians.

Priscilla and Aquila, by the way, left their home in Ephesus, tore out two or three walls to make room for more people, and met every morning before the sun went up and every night after it came down, and probably met in several other homes. But on this particular day, someone walked in, and when he got to the door, he just completely filled it up—big guy. Yeah, like Brother Mike over here—came in the middle of the room and just interrupted Paul and said, “I want to be baptized.” Paul looked up and had no idea who he was. Paul asked him where he was from, and the man told him. Then Paul said, “Well, do you know such and such?” And he said, “Yeah, he led me to the Lord, but I want to be baptized.” So, the young brothers, all eight of them, took him down to the water, the river, and they dunked him good, because he was a young man too. They’re just kind of drawn to that. They did not know that they had just baptized one of the greatest Christians of the first century. He hung around for months, probably until Paul left, learning all they could. And so, in a way, there were nine men whose lives were touched in Ephesus.