The Letter to the Romans: Message #1 – Background on the Book of Romans (Part 1)

Just an ordinary—I don’t mean the church, but I mean the church. Everything happened in the church. All those promises you’re trying to milk out of the New Testament; you try to make them work for your life. The reason they won’t work is that they weren’t written to you; they were written to the ecclesia. And you’re in it. This book doesn’t work, and this faith doesn’t work, and Christianity doesn’t work outside of the local gathering of the body of believers. So, for five or six or seven years, there was one church on earth, and it got defined – what it was like. The people loved it. It was glorious. It was wonderful. It was a layman’s movement. It was not built with scholars. The men who were leading it could not read and could not write. They had no New Testament. Now, this just blows… it blows soot out of everything. You know what soot is? Do people in Chicago know what soot is? That’s a southern expression. Blows the soot out of it. Well, you’ve seen soot coming out of the back end of an engine when you’ve seen it race. It’s just, you know, leftovers of burned fuel. We think of it as wood. Well, anyway, this just blows up—destroys—the 20th-century, even the 21st-century concept of what the church is and what we’re supposed to be doing. Twelve men who had been given the Great Commission didn’t go anywhere until a people—probably fifteen to twenty thousand minimum, at the end of six or seven years—knew what the church of the Lord Jesus Christ was and experienced it. It was not a sit-and-listen proposition; functioning depended upon the body itself, where they met in homes and wherever else they could meet informally.

Now, how’s the first way to raise up a church? Alright, somebody tell me, what’s the first way a church can be raised up, New Testament pattern? A little bit louder—you need an apostle. Alright, say it, brother—you need an apostle. No! You need twelve apostles! Okay, twelve apostles. Twelve apostles in one city for a long period of time—six, seven years—that’s the first one. Now you got that? Twelve men working with ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand people. Isn’t that wonderful? Each one got about a thousand people. They started off with 3,000 people and 12 apostles. What’s twelve into 3,000? How many people is that per apostle? About 250 people? Each apostle got about 250 people. Each one of them…they probably rotated. Each one of them had something different to tell about the Lord Jesus. It was all oral, being passed down orally.

Believe it or not, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were basically written in Jerusalem, out of the mouth of the apostles when they told the story, and other men wrote it down. Each apostle had a story to tell about what the Lord said and did, and later it got written down. It was an oral—a spoken—New Testament at that time.

Now then, believe it or not, if I were to ask you, “There’s going to be a great explosion of churches coming out of this,” and if I were to ask you, “What is the one man most responsible for the church being spread all over Israel—what we call Palestine, or the Holy Lands, or Galilee and Judea?” The first great massive growth of the church—one man was responsible for it more than anyone else, and he never gets credit for this. Do you know who it would be? Saul of Tarsus – an unbelieving lost man. He came in there persecuting the church, and things got so bad that the people had to leave. They did what the Lord Jesus said: “If you just can’t get it done in one city, then shake your foot, let the dust come off of it, and go somewhere else.” And something like twenty thousand people poured out of that town, and the church in Jerusalem, for the first time, ceased to exist. It ceased to exist three times in its first hundred years and finally totally ceased to exist for a long, long time. I guess, by the way, it’s never really re-existed in its proper form. It ceased to exist, but boy—what an explosion! People went out all over Judea and Galilee. They began meeting in homes just like they did in Jerusalem, and they began adding people in numbers so that, if you numbered all the believers after the persecution and a few years passed, there’d be more than there were in Jerusalem. The church had spread throughout all the land where Jesus had ministered. All those towns had people just waiting—and this is only a few years after the Lord’s resurrection; seven years after the Lord had been through much of that country preaching. I always think of Philip going to Samaria and raising up the church there. Who must have been sitting in the front row? Think with me. Can you grasp that? Who would have been sitting in the front row? Okay, thank you both, brothers. Alright, great—the woman at the well! She’d been led to the Lord by the Lord. You know she was sitting right there rejoicing in Him, and the church had come to the Samaritans.

Alright, a great disbursement all over Judea and Galilee. We come now to the second way churches are raised up. Now, this is dumb to even ask because I just told you, but nonetheless, what is the second way a church can be raised up? Don’t be so timid. What? Persecution? No. Missed the point completely. Sorry about that. Yes. By groups of people going out to new cities, carrying the church with them. That would be like the last two rows here, alright? Going to a town I just passed through today. I don’t know anything about it. The back two rows would go to Toledo, okay? And the back two rows here would go to Cleveland, Ohio. And then this would be all that would be left here in this city—just this group. You’d almost have to start over again. You’d have lost about half your people. But now there would be three churches. Do you understand? You got it? Three churches. Now, in a little while, there would be more in the three than there would ever be in the one. Because in Toledo, you would find seeking people who were just waiting for something like what’s here, and the same thing would be true of Cleveland. So, the last two rows, when are you packing? When are you going to Cleveland? What was that? What, please? “After the meetings are over.” Okay.

Now, this is often called the Jerusalem line. Out of the church in Jerusalem come one or two hundred churches. By the way, they are all Jewish. I personally feel that they had some inborn problems—that, had there not come a Paul—not a Saul, but a Paul—the church would have been greatly flawed. We really needed—God really needed, the Lord needed, you and I needed—they needed some Gentiles to get in there and flavor this thing up. Some Italians. And some Gauls. And some Greeks. Greeks, Gauls—I’ve never thought about that—Greeks, Gauls, and Italians to spice things up. One church produced fifty, a hundred, a hundred seventy-five, or two hundred churches. That’s called the Jerusalem line of the churches. Now, I’d like to put it this way: we come now to another church, uniquely raised up in a totally different way than these two. What’s the first way? Twelve men of great stature staying in one city a long time and raising up the church as it ought to be, its functioning, and everything. You got it? And out of that come churches raised up by a great disbursement. You got that? Isn’t it exciting? I care about that. I really care about that.

I have to stop and tell you that not only were churches raised up, but there were workers raised up. Do you remember when the Lord Jesus started the seminary? When? Oh, I’m sorry—it was the Bible school. Do you remember when the Lord Jesus started the Bible school? I think they called it Moody Bible School—because the brothers and sisters were so moody! Do you remember the Bible school the Lord started? Do you remember the seminary He started? No? And why do we never raise up workers the way they were raised up in the New Testament? Well, it’s right in front of us. But you’re right, don’t seem to know how. The way you raise up workers is to take the Lord—or, if you please, an apostle, or if you please, a church planter—and he was the great church planter—and live with some young men and show them church life. That is what He did.

Now, what was church life for those twelve men? Church life for them was living with the Lord Jesus Christ and one another. In fact, there were seventy of them, not twelve. You know that, don’t you? Seventy men and a bunch of women were there to keep them on track. That’s right—to keep them from being religious. That’s right. Mary Magdalene probably played the greatest role in keeping those brothers from being religious. Praise the Lord for the sisters! Their names, their names? We know the names of five of them. Who were they? Can you name them? Alright, we got Mary. A little louder—Martha, Mary Magdalene, Joanna—and I forgot the other one’s name. Wait a minute—there’s Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, wife of somebody—huh? Okay—Susanna! That’s it. Susanna. Thank you.

So, we’ve got seventy brothers and at least five sisters. With five sisters and seventy brothers—no question about it – the sisters outnumber the brothers! I wish we would get back to the raising up of workers the way the Lord did. If it had only happened once in the New Testament, we would say it was an oddity—but it was not, because it happened twice. I’ll tell you about that later. So, we have the Lord Jesus raising up the embryonic, prototype church—seventy men and at least five women, probably a lot more—living physically with the Lord Jesus Christ. He was their center, and they lived together for two or three years. They learned a little bit about koinonia and ecclesia—gathering and fellowship. Then they, raised up by the Holy Spirit, brought into being the church in Jerusalem. The church in Jerusalem was brought into being by these men pouring their lives and all their experience into those people for six, seven, or eight years. So, we’ve got two situations right there.

Then the third one was the great disbursement—when the people, having what they had, went out and took it to other places. Now, they didn’t each go out with a pastor, saints, brothers, and sisters. They didn’t do that. There was no leader; this was not organized. Some went back to their homes. Some fled as far as they could and stayed in Israel, and some went as far away as Damascus. That was the disbursement—and around it grew up wonderful New Testament churches without any pastors or leaders or anything, and that set a new pattern for the church in the first century.

Now, let me ask you a question. It may not sound accurate, but it is accurate. What was the last church to come out of the Jerusalem line? The very last church—and I’ll give you a hint: it was the beginning of a new line. Yes, who said that? Alright, the Antioch church. Now, the reason that church is so unique is because it’s not all Jewish. It was started by Jews, but Gentiles just plain flat walked up and took it away from them, and it became a Gentile church. A little bit of a half-breed, but mostly a Gentile church—though raised up by Jewish people, Hebrews—mainly by Barnabas.

We have a unique situation here. We have an apostle who is not an apostle raising up a church that ought not to have been raised up! Now, the reason that happened was because there were workers who came out of the church in Jerusalem, and they were not the twelve, but in those six or seven years that the church was there, young men came up, not many. Out of twenty thousand believers, maybe five or six or seven or eight men. That was about all. Second generation of workers—actually, third generation. What would be the first generation? Huh? Jesus. Then the apostles, and now these men who grew up in the church in Jerusalem. Give me their names. These are workers—a new set of workers. Praise the Lord, there was a second group of workers!