Paul, the Church in Rome and the Gospel: 1:8-17

Welcome back. Good to see you all for the second episode of Series 1 on the book of Romans.

Recap and Background

In the last episode I explained Paul’s call, his background, the reasons why he wrote to the Romans, and the method of writing letters in those days which was very laborious, complicated, quite risky and very expensive. I told you about the man called Tertius, who was the scribe mentioned in Romans 16, who wrote this incredibly long letter down. This is the one of the longest letters ever discovered in the Ancient World. Paul was an amazing writer. This is the longest letter that he wrote, but also much longer than the letters of most other Romans whose letters have been discovered from a similar time.

We learned a little about the city of Rome and about the Emperor Nero who was ruling the empire at that particular time. We heard about the church in Rome. Paul had probably never visited Rome up until this point but certainly not as a Christian missionary. The book of Acts tells us that Paul started his missionary work in the Eastern Mediterranean, in a city called Antioch, where he was working with a colleague and friend, fellow apostle, Barnabas. God called them to start travelling around and plant churches. He went to what we would now describe as Southern Turkey, the Roman province of Asia Minor, planting churches. As we go through the book of Acts, we find that he moves increasingly westward. He goes from Turkey over to Greece, all through Greece, and then he comes back again. He is planting churches and now a little further on in time he has a big plan to go even further west and to go to the capital city of the Roman Empire, where he has never been before.

The church there, as we discovered last time, grew out of some Jewish converts who were in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. On the Day of Pentecost it says in Acts 2, ‘there were some visitors from Rome’. So they went back, started a church and many years later Paul wants to visit this church. He would love to connect with them. It is not just a personal connection; it is strategic. He wants them to help him with his mission and, later on in the book of Romans, we will discover that his plan in fact was to go to Spain - much further west again - and he hoped that the Roman church would help him with various resources for that journey.

We have four series in our study of Romans. They reflect the themes of this book. The great thing about the book of Romans is that because Paul is not writing to a church that he has been involved with, the book isn’t filled with too many practical issues and personal things about his last visit, and what happened and what should happen, and what went wrong. He takes a step back and he decides to present the church in Rome with the big picture of God’s purposes in history. He is laying out his whole understanding of the gospel in a comprehensive way. This is an immense benefit to us because we need that too. There is far less detail in this book about what is going on in the church in Rome, and much more about God’s big picture. That is why Christians throughout the centuries have found the book of Romans such an important resource in terms of understanding our faith.

The Vulnerable Church in Rome

After the opening greetings, and by the end of this second episode, Paul is going to introduce his central and important theme. Before we get there, let me tell you more about the vulnerability of the church in Rome. I mentioned the Emperor Nero. He was an immensely powerful man who came to the throne as a 16 year old - almost before he was an adult. He was immature, inexperienced, and unpredictable and had a particular ability to be violent and very cruel. He had different wives and many children. In one incident recorded by a Roman historian, he is credited with having killed his mother. He was very suspicious of the church and worried about the Jewish presence in the city.

There are two things that Nero did that are important for our story. One of them happened before the book of Romans was written and one happened afterwards. Before the book of Romans was written, according to the book of Acts and Roman historians, he expelled the whole Jewish community after some disturbances in the city. He blamed them for the disturbances. This is quite important and is referred to in the book of Acts. If he expelled the whole Jewish community, he would have expelled many Jewish Christians from the city. Among them were some of Paul’s friends, Priscilla and Aquila, who we meet in the book of Acts. They were in Rome, were forced out when there was this sudden expulsion by the Emperor Nero, and then later on the Jewish community was allowed to come back but this destabilised the church in Rome.

Later on, after the book was written, a more famous incident took place to do with the church. There was a terrible fire in the city of Rome about 10 years after Nero came to power. Many districts were severely burnt, and great disruption and hardship came about through this fire. When these things happen, and particularly in the Ancient World, people look around for who caused it. A similar thing happened in England in the 1660s, in something known as The Great Fire of London which destroyed much of the city. Great fires can have hugely devastating effects on urban environments. This was a big one for the Romans and some people began to point the finger at Nero himself. He deliberately blamed the Christians for the fire. It is incredibly unlikely that the Christians would have caused this fire. There is no possible reason why they might have done it. But he started a round of vicious persecution and, according to Roman historians, some Christians at that time were taken to the big auditoriums and thrown to the lions to be killed as public entertainment. Others were crucified on crosses like Jesus’ cross. Some were turned into human torches. It was a terrible event. This was Nero. So the church was vulnerable even at this stage and Paul wanted to strengthen the church.

Faithful Witness

“First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is being reported all over the world. God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times and I pray that now at last by God’s will, the way may be opened for me to come to you.”

Romans 1:8-10, NIV

Paul is so thankful for their witness. They have had a difficult time. The Jewish members of the church had been expelled from Rome and had come back again. The Emperor is nearby and is unpredictable and could turn against them at any point. Their religion doesn’t have any public recognition in Rome; it was not strictly a legal religion; it didn’t have any legal protections. The Christians in Rome were expected to pay sacrifice to the Roman gods at their temples which were all over the city and they didn’t do that. That could make them very unpopular with their employers or their neighbours.

A Good Reputation

It was a vulnerable situation and yet Paul is grateful for the church. They must have been strong in their faith because it says ‘Your faith is being reported all over the world. I am hearing about your church; I have not been to Rome but I am hearing good things about your church. People have visited your church and come back with a good impression. People from your church have moved from Italy, maybe to Greece or Judea or maybe to Asia Minor, and I have come across them.’

We see in Romans 16, Paul had in fact met many people in the Roman Church that he knew and sends greetings to them. It is a very long list of people that he greets. He has never visited the city so how does he know these people? They must be traveling around and they have given a good reputation of the church. This is a really interesting lesson for us. The reputations of churches really matter. The reputation of a church in a community, or in an area, can be very poor - it can be almost nothing because it is invisible - or it can be very good. We surely want our churches to have good reputations. The impact of what happens in a church spreads out around the community and even into other countries and other places - far more than people ever realise. Paul noticed it; he had never been there but he had been to so many other places and everywhere he went he heard ‘Oh, we were in the church in Rome; they are doing really well: they have had some extra converts; they are really kind to the poor people; they really follow the gospel teaching’ - all those kinds of things. Paul was encouraged.

Prayerful Paul

Also, Paul was prayerful. ‘I constantly remember you in my prayers at all times’, he says. What does that mean? People often say ‘I’m praying for you’- what does it mean? It is an easy thing to say; it is a very hard thing to do. But Paul had no hesitation in saying he prayed constantly for them. If you look through his letters you will find that in many other places he makes similar statements about other churches. If we add all that together I think we come to the conclusion that Paul spent quite a long time praying - probably for a list of churches and contacts, particularly the churches he planted. Because Paul suffered a very difficult experience, he had a real compassion and a heart for all these different churches, but he was usually unable to be with them and to get to them. He was either in prison or in another country, or held up, or travel took so long or was very expensive, or the weather was against him, or he had a bout of persecution. There were so many different things. He even had illness to contend with which we hear about in in the book of Galatians. So he couldn’t get to be with people enough. He could, and did, pray for them. I think that is an absolutely wonderful thing to learn from the book of Romans.

The book of Romans has a reputation of bringing us a lot of teaching and doctrine but it also brings us profound spiritual truths. What I learn from this is the importance of being faithful in prayer. Many years ago I was inspired by visiting South Korea, and being the guest of some of the larger churches in the cities of South Korea, and seeing the intensity of their prayer life and the effects that it had. It inspired me personally to particularly pray for my own church regularly, and with other people. I have been involved in doing that for several decades. But one of the people who inspires me is Paul. We think of Paul as a man of action, don’t we? A great talker, great pioneer, great traveller, great preacher, great miracle worker, great thinker, great theologian. All these things are true - but I want you to think of Paul as a man of prayer today. He knew that it wasn’t by human effort alone that the gospel was going to spread but by God’s divine power.

Spiritual Gifts

Romans 1: 11 - 13 show us something more of Paul’s heart for the church in Rome.

“I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, to make you strong that is that you and we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. I do not want you to be unaware brothers and sisters that I planned many times to come to you but have been prevented from doing so until now, in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I’ve had among the other Gentiles.”

Romans 1:11-13, NIV

There were three reasons Paul wanted to visit Rome according to this passage: the first one is to impart spiritual gifts. This is a really interesting statement from Paul. What does he actually mean when he says ‘I want to impart some spiritual gift to make you strong’? Paul believed that the Holy Spirit gave spiritual gifts, powers and capabilities to church members in every church community, which had a miraculous dimension to them. He teaches about this mostly in 1 Corinthians chapters 12 - 14. 1 Corinthians 12:1 ‘Now, about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters. I do not want you to be uninformed. I want you to know what the spiritual gifts are.’ He gives lists of these amazing capabilities in different places but we are going to look briefly at a similar list in this very book, because he speaks about these gifts in Romans 12:6 - 8, which we will study more closely later on.

“We have different gifts according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying then prophesy in accordance with your faith, if it is serving then serve, if it is teaching then teach, if it is encouraging then give encouragement, if it is giving then give generously, if it is to lead do it diligently, if it is to show mercy do it cheerfully.”

Romans 12:6-8, NIV

That is very interesting. People in churches have different capabilities and some of them are things that we feel as though just come out of our personality, like showing mercy or being generous but Paul says here that those spiritual gifts are more than just our natural inclination and capability. God gives special power to those things by the Holy Spirit. Some of those gifts have a miraculous capacity like prophesying, for example, where there is something miraculous: you hear a word from God and you speak it to people - his current message to a congregation, or a person at any particular time. That is miraculous. Some of these things are remarkable in other ways - serving, encouraging, giving, leading, showing mercy. Paul wants to strengthen the church in its spiritual gifts. He wants to impart gifts. He wants to come and stir people up so that they function better in the gifts that God has given them, or he might give them some new gifts - for example, the gift of healing. That is a miraculous gift. Some people have a particular gift of being able to pray for the sick and it has a physical impact on them at the time that they pray. Paul wanted to impart these gifts.

How would he do it? First of all, by teaching them and secondly, he laid hands on people. He says to Timothy, in 2 Timothy 1:16 to strengthen and stir up the gift that came to him through the ‘laying on of hands’. Paul wants the Roman church to be alive with God’s spiritual gifts, to make the community strong, and make its mission strong. That is the first thing he wants to do by coming to visit them. ‘I want to impart some spiritual gifts to you.’ That is amazing, isn’t it? That is a powerful thing. He doesn’t want to just give them information; he wants to give them a sense of God’s power. He wants to be transmitting something of God’s power and particularly increasing their faith, so that they can step out and do things that they previously thought they couldn’t do.

Fellowship

But in these verses, he doesn’t want to just give them spiritual gifts, he wants to benefit from fellowship, from being together. He has never been together with this church and Paul just longs to be with them. Here is the incredible power of Christian fellowship being described by Paul in very personal terms. We live in an age in some parts of the world - especially in the West - where people are less committed to being together in communities. Some people are saying, ‘I can live the Christian life on my own, or with my family or with a couple of friends; I don’t really need the church community.’ Paul teaches totally against that. For example, in 1 Corinthians 12 he describes the church as a human body where every organ is interconnected and the more powerful organs - like the eye for example - can’t say, I don’t need the rest of the body, I can just function on my own. But the eye can’t function on its own. It needs the rest of the body. Paul passionately believed that God did something really powerful amongst Christians when they committed to living their lives together and meeting regularly together: friendship develops, sharing food together is important, storytelling, sharing your sorrows as well as your joys, encouraging one another, sharing painful experiences, and gaining support from one another is an incredibly important thing. Paul knew all about this. He knew how risky it was for people to separate themselves from churches and drift away.

In the modern world, the most popular sport worldwide is football. Wherever you are in the world listening to this recording, you are probably in a country that loves football. Wherever I have travelled in the world, I have never been to a country where people don’t love football. In many places, you can watch it on television, so why do people go to football matches in such vast numbers, if you can watch it on television? Because there is something fundamentally different from experiencing an event in person, than experiencing it at a distance. In general, people who love football and have a club that they support, want to get to that stadium if at all possible, to get to see that club, to stand or sit next to those other fellow supporters, to shout for the club from the stadium, and to celebrate their goals and their victories. They come away somewhat changed by that experience and they say things like, ‘I wouldn’t have missed that for anything’, and if I say to them ‘You could have watched it on television’, they would look at me and say, ‘Yeah, but I was there.’ Something like that operates in the Christian church. There is nothing quite like being there. When you hear an amazingly powerful prophetic word, or someone preaches in a remarkable way, or someone gives an amazing testimony of God in their lives, or you have an awesome moment of worshiping together, where there is a sense of divine presence coming down on the whole congregation, and many other similar experiences. Paul had a very big view of the importance of that. We need each other. So he wanted to gain the encouragement of being in Rome and he wanted to encourage them.

Evangelism

The third reason he wanted to go there is to preach because he was an evangelist and he wanted to help the church to grow. One great way of getting churches to grow is to bring evangelists in from other places. Paul acted in that way.

“I’m obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I’m so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.’

Romans 1:14-15, NIV

Paul had a sense of obligation to preach to all kinds of people. He describes here Greeks and non-Greeks, wise and foolish - different types of people, different ethnic groups. This all comes from Paul’s Damascus road experience in Acts 9:14 - 15. As I quoted in the last episode, but I will quote it again, these words came to a man called Ananias to give to Paul when he was converted.

“Go, this man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles, and their kings, and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

Acts 9:14-15, NIV

Paul felt a sense of obligation; I have got to keep going to new places and finding new people. He really wanted to do that in Rome.

Righteousness by Faith

Now we come to the climax of our episode and the beginning of our great theological journey. The last two verses,

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, first for the Jew then for the Gentile. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written,‘The righteous will live by faith.’”

Romans 1:16-17, NIV

These are some of the most famous verses of the book of Romans. This is Paul’s introduction to his central message. The gospel of Jesus Christ can save people, Paul believes. It wasn’t just words or ideas but power that changes the human heart. He believed the gospel was for every nation - the Jews first. He always went to the synagogue first but he offered the message to every group of people.

The very centre and the heart of the gospel, and this is the point I want to bring us to as we come to the end of this episode, is the very important expression here, ‘the righteousness that is by faith’. ‘The righteousness of God’. What does Paul mean by this expression? This is one of the most central things to understand in Christianity. What is the ‘righteousness of God’? The righteousness of God is the believer’s status of being made right with God. Paul believed that something absolutely miraculous happened through the gospel. That through no self-efforts, through no religious law-keeping or moral uprightness but simply through faith, repentance and belief in the power of Jesus and his death on the cross, people’s whole lives fundamentally changed.

It is like a person standing in a law court, facing a charge and the judge looks them in the eye and says ‘You’re acquitted, someone else has paid the price.’ It is like a father and a son who have been hostile and against each other for ten years. The son has been very rebellious and then he comes back and he apologises, they are reconciled and they hug together. His status has changed. He is in relationship with his father again. The judge says to the man in the law court, ‘You are free, the charge has been completed and ended. There is nothing against you’. Paul was thinking in these dramatic terms when he thought about the gospel. He saw faith as the key. We see it here in these verses and I am going to explore this theme in more detail in subsequent episodes. But these two verses are crucial to Paul’s understanding of the gospel, and indeed to our understanding.

Reflections

As we conclude this episode, my first reflection is that we have reached the first climax - the first key point in Paul’s argument. When you go through Romans there are six different places where you reach an absolutely central highlight. Here is the first highlight. Paul says ‘This is the gospel.’ During the next couple of chapters, he is going to explain how this gospel functions, why it is needed, and what it does in people’s lives. That is the journey that we are going to go on shortly.

Another reflection: the power of prayer. Let me encourage you to take heart from what Paul says about the power of prayer, and to strengthen your prayer life.

My final reflection in this episode is a comment about fellowship. Some of you listening to this in different places will probably not be well-connected to church. Maybe you have fallen out with the church, or don’t know how to connect. Maybe you are a new Christian and you haven’t found your way into the church. Maybe there has been some problems for you. Can I encourage you to find your way back? Paul believed that being connected to other believers was one of the most significant things that helped us in our Christian journey. If that is the case, being separated from them unnecessarily will always be harmful for us in the end.

Thanks for listening to this episode and I look forward to welcoming you back as we continue the journey.