The Letter to the Romans: Message #3 – Meet the People in Rome (Part 1)

Well, this is the book that changed history. I want to tell you right now—I want to warn you ahead of time—that all the glory stuff is in Romans 1–8, and all the gory stuff is in Romans 12–16. This is not inspirational. This is perspirational. This is getting down to the nitty-gritty of church life, and I want to remind you that, if sometimes this doesn’t seem as glorious as you’d like it to be, it’s not me, but Paul who did this. I can speak about glories, and if you don’t believe me, I’ll come back here sometime and do it, but nonetheless, what is here is so incredibly important.

Alright, brothers and sisters, I’d like to hear from those of you who have worked on these names. Somebody tell me who Phoebe is. Phoebe—who got Phoebe? Phoebe was—her name means radiant. It meant what? Radiant? Radiant. All right. She was considered a deacon—deaconess, okay, and she was believed to have been the one who got the letter to the Romans in the hem of her skirt. In the hem of her skirt. It is traditionally stated that she had it there. That is correct. Alright, I want to say a little bit more about her. Phoebe was converted to Christ sometime in the early part of the founding of the church in Corinth, but she lives nine miles from Corinth in a seaport town called Cenchrea, and that’s a little bitty town of very little significance. I just like to put it in context. She did not belong to the church in Corinth, but she was nonetheless in the atmosphere of Corinth. Therefore, we finally have two people in the church in Corinth who are not drunks! She must have been a woman of unusual character.

By everything that Paul says about her, he seems to have put a great deal of confidence in her. Another thing I want you to know: it is only with Phoebe, and during this period, that women’s names have become prominent in the record of the first century. Now, I am just telling you what’s there. The early part of the record of the church is filled almost exclusively with men’s names. Now, that wasn’t true in the Lord’s ministry. There were women mentioned there, and women will get mentioned a great deal in the New Testament, but it’s only with the coming of Phoebe that you begin hearing a lot of women’s names. I observe that without comment. As far as I’m concerned, the women are just as equal as the men in the church. I do want you to know a personal opinion of mine—and this is a controversial opinion; I could very well be wrong. I’m not sure that such an office as “deaconess” ever existed. Be careful with words that are transliterated instead of translated. There is a word servant—there is a masculine in the Greek and the Latin. There is a name for a servant male and a servant female. There’s not in English; there’s only “servant,” unless you want to say “servantess,” which is not a word that most of us would feel comfortable with. Nonetheless, in my personal judgment, anybody who was serving for a period of time in the church in some crucial way was considered a servant, and that everyone was considered a servant. I doubt that there were actually set-apart deaconesses in the early church, and I am very sorry for the tragedies that have come out of that—the nunneries, and all the women, the millions of women, who were put into the servitude of being nuns in Europe. I don’t know if you know this or not, but children were not really given the choice in most homes. They had big families, and if they had this little girl they didn’t like particularly, they’d say, “Honey, you love the Lord, don’t you?”  “I promise, I love the Lord. I love the—”
“Oh, good. She’s going to be a nun when she grows up. You’re going to be a nun when you grow up.” “Yeah, I’m going to be a nun when I grow up.” And they’d hit about eleven or twelve, and the family would pay the church to take the child. And a lot of this has come out of making big deals out of this kind of thing. Perhaps it’s my own personal revulsion at such things that makes me say I wouldn’t create a class of people in the house of God called “deaconesses.” Let us consider everyone a servant who serves Him with all their hearts. Okay? That would make us all deacons and deaconesses, would it not? Hopefully, at least most of us. One or two of you are a bunch of lazybones—but other than that…

Okay, we have Priscilla and Aquila. What are we going to say about them? Is there anything more to be said? What have you got here on Priscilla and Aquila that has not been covered? Is that it? No. There is more. Priscilla? Yeah? Oh, let’s hear it. Alright, Prisca. Prisca. Those names were, like, interchangeable. I believe they said that Priscilla was, yeah, was like a noble name, and that they believed that she was very influential, and that she was the wife of Aquila. That she was. And that they were well-to-do, because of the fact that they were able to move around more than most, so when Paul told them to move, they were able to take their…

Okay, they were well-to-do. Be careful with that word. They might have gotten all the way up to the lower-middle class. You could move around. By the way, it was really cheap to travel in those days by boat. It was very expensive to do it by land, but a lot safer. Alright, go ahead. Prisca—I think that that was a… I know Priscilla meant “noble,” and I forgot what Priscia meant, but that name was interchangeable. Luke called her Prisca. That’s right. She gets called both. Right—and what we found out was that somehow Paul really loved her. I think her personality was more—I don’t know, maybe more… Well, he obviously was one very quiet brother. We don’t hardly get anything out of him. She was definitely the outspoken person in the family. No one knows when or where or how she risked—he and she risked—their necks for Paul, but they obviously had been very active in Corinth, very active not only in Ephesus but in the young churches being raised up by the young men around.

We get some real insight into a situation right here, when—what does it say to them? “And greet those who what?” Or who what? “The ekklesia.” Does it not say ekklesia? Yeah. Where does it say that? Ekklesia—and the church that meets in their home. Well, I have a notion that when Priscilla and Aquila got to Rome, they managed the house, and that the meetings of that which would become one of the most powerful and influential churches in human history—in all of Christendom’s history—began, truly began, in their living room, which is really quite amazing. And I see, again, Paul’s enormous effort to make sure this was a Gentile church. Now, Priscilla and Aquila were obviously Jews, but they had been Gentile-ized. They had to be. They had been living with Gentiles. They had been living in Rome, a Gentile city. They lived in Corinth—which would make anybody Gentile—and they had been with Paul in the founding of the church in Ephesus.

They were obviously people who had been set free from the law. They go back to Rome, and at least one of the gatherings of the gathering in Rome was in their home. The word church—just in the last few months, I’ve been trying my best not to use it. You can’t say that word without it bringing up an image. Ekklesia—assembly, or assembling of, gathering. I like that word much better. I’m sure that it had that connotation in the first, second, and third centuries: the gathering that gathers in your home, the ecclesia that ecclesias in your home, the assembly that assembles in your home. So, you might see me use that word; know what I’m talking about. This is an ecclesia. This is not a Kershaw or a Kirk. That’s, I don’t know, German—Kershaw. Kirk is Scottish, and that’s how it got into our language.

Okay, if you’ve got anything else, you’d better say it fast. They were really close to Paul; you can tell that. They must have been literally his co-workers, literally Paul’s co-workers. You need someone like that. Let me tell you something: one of the great tragedies with the Christian faith today is that everybody wants to be first or not at all, and we’re dying from a lack of “Indians” who will fold their opinions into neutral and say, “I will serve another man whom God has obviously given some incredible task to perform.”

I was in Great Britain, and one of the brothers over there is doing a really wonderful job for the Lord. One of the secrets to his life was a brother and sister who had literally given him their lives. Well, you might look at that and say, “Well, they don’t have any life of their own. They have no purpose of their own. It’s all tied up in this person.” But it made him four times the man he was to get a work done for the Lord. We need some more Priscillas and Aquilas. America doesn’t give us many Priscillas and Aquilas; it gives us chiefs or pouters. If I can’t be God, I won’t be nobody.

Alright, let’s go on from Priscilla and Aquila, who are now in Rome, and the church is meeting in their home. And who is next? Epaenetus. Okay, I want somebody to tell me about Epaenetus. I want someone to tell me all about Epaenetus. Yes, sister? Oh, it says he was a Christian in Rome, greeted by Paul, and he was one of the first fruits in Asia. And that doesn’t mean anything to you, eh? That doesn’t ring a bell? Oh, I can’t believe that. Huh? That’s exactly correct. He was a Jew who had heard John the Baptist preach the coming gospel. Somehow, he left there, went to Ephesus, and continued being loyal to the gospel of John the Baptist, and he was the first person Paul led to Jesus Christ coming into the city of Ephesus in the province of Asia, or province of Asia Minor. This brother was one of those who had been in Ephesus from the beginning.

Now, I want to think about what’s really exciting here: he couldn’t have been a Christian much more than two years old when Paul walked over to him and said, “Hey, how would you like to go to Rome?” This brother, two years old in the Lord, packed up his bag and went to Rome with two years of Gentile church experience under his belt. That’s one of Paul’s own converts whom he sent to Rome. Say “praise the Lord.” That’s good. I like the way you say, “Praise the Lord.” So, we’ve got Priscilla and Aquila, and we’ve got Epaenetus, and boy, listen, I don’t know who else is in that city, but I’m telling you that Paul’s getting these people outclassed, outnumbered, and surrounded. He is building the church in Rome by proxy.

Okay, let’s go to the next one: Mary. Does anybody know anything about Mary? I know nothing about Mary. I don’t either. Her name is Miriam. She has a Jewish name. She is probably Jewish. That’s all I know about her. Anybody got any more than that? Any traditions? Anything that used to be said about her?