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

Now, who are they? Philip. Stephen. Barnabas. Silas, I’ll put Silas in there. Okay? Yeah. John Mark? John Mark was probably around sixteen, seventeen years old, maybe twenty. Too young. Absolutely too young. No—Agabus. Now let’s do that again and count them. We’ve got Silas, Philip, Stephen, Barnabas, and Agabus. We know the names of five. I’m sure that if I go back and check, there’d be more than that. One of those brothers sneaked off—well, he didn’t really sneak off; he was sent off—but he did sneak off, and he did something he shouldn’t have done. He raised up a church. And I can tell you why he did. He was tired of all this Jewish stuff. Even though he himself was Jewish, he was tired of it. There was still a whole lot of mixture in this—still the synagogue, still the old Jewish traditions; he was wanting a revolution, and he knew somebody who could help him pull it off – a recent convert. So he went, got on a mule, and rode all the way over—some way or other they went over to Tarsus—and found this man in hiding, whose name was Paul, and came back, and they raised up the church in Antioch. and this is really unique. It’s basically a one-man show, but we can say five men raised up that church. Three of those men started it, brought in Barnabas -they respected him – and he took over the leadership. But he needed help, and he got Paul. That was fine.

Now, can you give me the names of these other three Jews who fled to Antioch, who dispersed to Antioch? Now, if you can do this, I’ll be impressed. Alright, come on—give me any one of them. They’re in a prayer meeting—they’re listed in the New Testament. I think it’s Acts 13, I’m not really sure. Okay, they had a prayer meeting. These are the leaders, the prophets of the church. These are the men who go out and preach, and by the way, the church in Antioch is quite large – probably fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand people. These five men go out and preach in the homes, but they can’t preach in all the homes, so lots of times you don’t have to put up with these preachers! You get to have your own meetings, with nobody around, and you get to do all your sharing—no elders, no bishops, nobody staring down the back row keeping you from doing something. You can do anything you want, stupid things and all that!

These five men who were instrumental in raising up the church – none of them were really apostles. The church is quite large. I want you to remember that four of those men had the experience of being dispersed into the community, where there were no leaders. Every once in a while, one of the twelve apostles would come from Jerusalem and preach to these little groups, but these men had come out of the dispersion, and they knew the church was to function without a human head. That had been their experience—that had been the experience of the church in Jerusalem—and that had been the experience of the twelve when they lived with the Lord.

Those men are Lucius, Niger, Simon of Cyrene, Barnabas, and Paul. They had a prayer meeting, and the Holy Spirit said, “Send Paul and Barnabas out and raise up Gentile churches.” And Simon the Cyrene, Niger, and Lucius stayed in Antioch, in this great big, huge church. They could give up two workers and not miss them. Now that’s quite a deal! Remember, all those Christians were meeting in dozens of homes throughout that great city. Are you following me?

This, to me, is fascinating—that the Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit, would send twelve men to two million Jews, and send two men to all the rest of the entire planet. Isn’t that incredible? And you know something? Because of the way they did it—the kind of men they were, and the way they did – they pulled off something fantastic. By the way, the discussion tonight is about how the church in Rome was raised up. Are you following me so far? Okay. We’re coming to the Book of Romans tomorrow night for sure. This, to me, is what I live and breathe for. The Lord Jesus raises up an embryonic church in Galilee, and He raises up workers at the same time. The church in Jerusalem becomes a large expression of that embryonic church in Galilee, where twelve men—or seventy men—lived with the Lord. The Jerusalem church was raised up by those men staying with a large group of people for six or seven years. Do you begin to see how important that is now? There’s a great going forth, but there needed to be a really solid work first, because things have definitely picked up. Have you noticed that the center stage here is the church? It’s not Campus Crusade for Christ. It’s not InterVarsity. It’s not Moody Bible Institute—I’ll pick on something local here. I don’t mean that as criticism; I’m just telling you, it was the church.

Would you also notice that the men who are center stage are the church planters, not the pastors? Today, the church planter does not exist, and something called a pastor does. Where he came from is beyond me. All I can tell you is, he stole your right to function. He turned you into one great big, huge ear, and about the only thing you know how to do is listen. I’m not talking to you individually, but we, as believers, just became a huge ear. The rest of the body died. We became one big tongue and one big ear—and you know who the tongue is.

Then came the dispersal. Churches were without leaders; they did not have leaders. There were not that many leaders. The apostles were circuit. That’s in the New Testament. They went around preaching to these churches. That circuit ministry helped them, and then they’d go on, leaving the churches to function without leaders. Later, leaders grew up. At the same time, new workers were being raised up. How were they raised up? They were not raised up by the Lord Jesus. They were raised up by the apostles. Yet, that’s not exactly true either. The apostles didn’t sit down and train them. You know what really raised up those men—Barnabas, Silas, Agabus, Stephen, and Philip? You know what raised them up? The church. Just being in the body of Christ. Praise the Lord.

Now we have a new church being raised up in a new way. First of all, it is Gentile and it’s far from Jerusalem. Those people never saw the Jerusalem church. Everybody else did. We don’t have a people being planted as sort of a little Jerusalem church. In Antioch, you have something totally different. You have a tiny little group of Christian men speaking to and raising up a people who never saw a church in their lives, never had a day of experience in the body of Christ. They got the church of Jesus Christ by the preaching of these men. Now, these men—not a man, but these men—go around preaching in these homes. Two of them leave town. I think it is wonderful that these men feel like they can leave. I was a member of a church in a town in Texas that, over a period of 50 years, had only two ministers. Two. One ministered, I think, as pastor for about twenty or twenty-five years, then he retired, and his son-in-law took over and just recently retired. That’s fifty years by two men. They never left. Their whole lives were spent there.

Now, I ask you—do you think that when that second pastor retired, the day he left, he had that church raised up to a position where he could walk out of there and they’d never need another minister? That they were all functioning and taking care of themselves? Can you imagine what it would have been like on the Sunday he said farewell? “Next Sunday you’re all going to meet here, and there’ll be no choir, no song leader, and no me. You’re all here to function and carry on the church by yourselves, without any human headship.” How do you think that church would manage? Fifty years of preaching—and they were exactly where they had been fifty years before: sitting and listening.

I’m laying out to you things on my heart. This is what makes Gene Edwards run. You see right back there? You wind that up, and that’s what makes me run. Those men stayed—three of those men stayed. I’m sure they were there forever, but that church functioned as a church.

Now, out of this comes what we call the Antioch line of churches. We’ve got the Lord in the embryonic church. We’ve got the church in Jerusalem. Out of the church in Jerusalem comes a great dispersion of churches—the church in Jerusalem splitting up into little pieces and being taken out everywhere. Are you following that? The disbursement. Then we have a church raised up by people who never saw a church, by a handful of workers—and they’re Gentiles. It turns out they seem to have a better handle on this than the Jews did, because they don’t have to forget what a synagogue is like. Do you understand? They’ve never seen a synagogue. I wish you’d never seen a church building—you’d be better off. I wish I’d never seen one. I wish nobody had ever seen one. Say “Amen.” I’m feeling insecure—say “Amen.” I want you to know that it’s like throwing raw meat to a hungry lion. I don’t feel insecure anymore. I think I am good.

Now, let’s look at this Paul and Barnabas situation, because they’ve got a little task. They’ve got somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people on this planet. We don’t know the population of the world at that time, but it’s been estimated that the Roman Empire was made up of about fifty million, so let’s just stop with the Roman Empire—two men against fifty million heathen who never even heard of Abraham, Moses, or Isaac, or hardly even heard of God. They only knew gods—and those gods were mostly men. The gods they understood were just jumbo men who went around chasing one another, hitting one another, cursing one another, and throwing thunderbolts at one another. Men with jumbo virtues and jumbo human failures and frailties. They had a job on their hands, and what is incredible to me is what God led those men to do, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s from here on that I really pay attention to how a church is raised up, because from here on, it’s Gentile territory. I’m a Gentile, so this speaks to me.