Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello, this is Mark Rutland. Before we begin today's message, I have a very special and very happy announcement. Our son Travis, who is the pastor at Liberty Square Church in Cartersville, Georgia, has just launched his own podcast featuring the sermons that he preaches there and elsewhere. I'm so excited to offer this to you because I believe Travis is one of the finest preachers I hear today. My wife and I attend that church and I look forward to every single message filled with application and anointing. He is a terrific preacher and you're gonna be blessed. The name of the podcast is very obviously the Travis Rutland Podcast and you can find it on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and others.
Or you can listen directly through the Global Servants website at globalservants.org/podcast.
His new episodes are going to be released every Thursday and they will be ready for you when you wake up and start your I hope you'll subscribe. Listen each week, leave a five star review and let Travis know how much his messages encourage you as they encourage me. Here I am in my late 70s and one of the finest preachers that I hear today, ever hear today, is my son. It thrills me to offer him to you through his new podcast, the Travis Rutland Podcast. God bless you.
If you have your Bibles now, if you'll take those and turn, if you will please, to Paul's letter to the church at Buford, Paul's letter to the church at Rome, the Book of Romans.
Now I'm beginning tonight.
This is a new study for me.
This church has just about worked me to death.
The last several series I've done were completely new. I've never done this before and I wanted to do this. I wanted to say if the early epistles. Epistle just means letter, a message. So if the early letters were written to the churches and to individuals, if each of them came to you.
And I wanted to say, you've got mail.
J.B. phillips translated the New Testament and he called it Letters to Young Christians.
So whether you are young numerically or chronologically or whatever, these letters are letters to you. What I hope is that as we come out of this 10 series ending with Revelation, which is an Epistle. Many people don't think of it. And often when you take a seminary course in the Epistles, Revelation is left out. But that makes no sense at all.
It is a letter to churches.
And so we're going to do these. Some I'll group together as, for example, 1, 2 and 3 John. Some of these I'll clump up. But we're going to go through the Revelation through to Revelation, studying of the Epistles.
And what I'm hoping is that at the end of it you will realize what is God saying to you, to the church at Buford, or to you personally, wherever you attend.
Now, if you have your Bibles open to the Book of Romans, I want to read beginning chapter one. I want to begin reading in verse 19 and read through to 29, and then we'll turn to chapter 12.
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God hath showed it to them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God. Neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the Creator more the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever.
Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections. For even their women did change the natural use of that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another. Men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, and malignity and whispers. Now turn to Romans, chapter 12,
[00:06:02] Speaker A: and
[00:06:02] Speaker B: we'll just read the first two verses.
I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God. Yet you present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
The author of the Book of Romans, the letter to the Church at Rome, to be precise, is certainly Paul the Apostle. Some of the epistles, we're not quite as sure as others, but this one we're sure.
Furthermore, we're pretty sure of the date because there are none of the epistles that are as tied to world historical events as the Book of Romans.
There is no city that is identified with world history at the time of the first church in the first century as the city of Rome. So a letter written to the church in the capital of the world at one of the most tumultuous seasons in world history, even until this day is connected to history, and I'm praying, believing that before the night is over, you're going to see how it connects and touches your history.
Now, how do we know the date in which it's written? Because nobody dated anything, as you know, 144 B.C. or 13 A.D.
but we know the dates in which certain historical things happened, and they are either directly or indirectly referenced in either in the Book of Romans or in the Book of Acts.
So Paul is the author of the book, and he wrote it between 56 and 57 A.D. how do we know?
In 49 A.D.
the Emperor Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome, ordered them to get out. It was the first pogrom and ordered the Jews to evacuate Rome.
Certainly many of those Jews were also believers. So therefore the believing Jewish Christians also fled.
We know that among those were Priscilla and Aquila and that Paul later met them. And that happened and is recorded in Acts chapter 18. It talks about when Claudius ordered the Jews out of Rome.
But then when Claudius was murdered and his adopted son Nero became the emperor, the Jews were allowed to come back and they did, bringing with them the Gospel.
And those returning Jewish believers planted a church in Rome.
It's one of the New Testament churches that is not planted by apostolic effort.
Paul didn't plant the church at Rome. He's writing to them and he's never met them, he's never seen them, he's never been to Rome.
St. Peter has not yet been to Rome. Both of them will go there and both of them will die there. But at this time, they're writing to a church that has sprung up like a mushroom it is the effort, really, of believing Jewish and Gentile Christians who have returned to the most complicated power center in the history of the world, one of the most depraved cities ever, and have planted a church.
Paul is writing, therefore, to a mixed congregation of Jews and Gentiles who are believers that have sort of planted this church in Rome.
And Paul is writing to them about things that they need.
First of all, he's writing about theological instruction.
Who is God?
What is he like? What does he expect of us?
Second, he's writing about how do the Jews in the church and the Gentiles in the church, how do they each relate to God and how do they relate to each other?
And then finally, he's writing, how do you live as a Christian in Rome?
How do you live in a city so debauched?
How do you. What does it mean to be a Christian in this place?
There are three major themes of the Book of Romans. The love of God, the way to salvation, the only way to salvation, and a call, a summons to absolute surrender.
I believe that I can state this categorically. Some of you may differ with me on it, but I believe that there are more quotable and more frequently quoted individual verses in the Book of Romans than in any of the Epistles.
I have assembled some of these verses, and I have them in three groups. Now. I'm not going to take a real long time with it, but I don't want to just gloss over this because there are verses in the Book of Romans that are so astonishing in their power, so blatantly and obviously anointed of God.
It has begged a question in my heart, and I have not resolved it.
When Paul the Apostle was writing these letters, when Peter was writing the letters, when John was writing, did they understand that they were writing the New Testament?
Did they understand that they were writing what would be called Bible?
Did Paul the Apostle sit down and say, I'm going to write this letter to this church at Rome, and someday it'll be called the Book of Romans, and it'll be considered to have the same biblical authenticity and power as the Book of Isaiah is to Jews of his day?
I don't believe that was clear to them. I've resolved in my mind that they were obeying God the best they knew how to. But there must have been some unusual, unusual sense of God's presence and powers. They wrote these things, and certainly the Holy Spirit was inspiring the writing of the New Testament, the New Covenant through them, even if they didn't know it.
And in A sense that makes it better.
So here are some of these grand verses. Romans 1:20.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
God and humanity.
The book of Psalms says, not once, not twice, but multiple times. He is a fool who denies that there is a God.
5 and 8.
God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That's probably the cornerstone on which the entire book of Romans rests.
He deals with salvation.
To remember, who are these people?
There are people living within 20 or 30 years of the crucifixion of Christ who have not seen it. They weren't in Jerusalem. They've heard about it from somebody that heard about it, from somebody that heard about it, from somebody that saw it.
And somehow faith has arisen in their souls and they are now part of the first church of Rome.
Paul's got to explain to them, this is what it means to you. This is what's happened.
Romans 1:17.
One of the most powerful verses of Scripture ever written, which was hundreds of years after it was written, cause a second great wave of church planting called the Protestant Reformation.
The righteous shall live by faith.
Romans 3 and 23. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Why are those two verses so important? He's saying, look, whether you're a Jewish believer or a Christian believer, the only way that you have righteousness is by faith, not by the law.
How do you. It says, the only way that you know that you've sinned, whether you're a Jew, you're a Jew or a Gentile, it doesn't matter whether you're under Torah or not. Under Torah, Everybody sinned. Romans 6:23. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is salvation. The gift of God.
So he's saying to the Jewish believers in the Church of Rome, you don't earn this.
You can't memorize enough Torah to earn this. And he's saying to the Gentiles, look what God has given you. You don't deserve this.
You can't earn it, and you don't deserve it.
Romans 8:1. There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ.
Think what he's saying to people that may have lived horrible, horrible lives. These are Romans.
These are Romans. They're believers now, but they have been citizens of the most depraved city in the world at that time.
Now I'm going to deal with some of that in just a moment.
Romans 10, 9.
That if you will confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God hath raised Jesus Christ from the dead. You will be saved.
Romans 10, 12, and 13. I'd like for you to turn with me there. Not going to read all these passages, but I want you to hear this. Romans 10, 12, 13.
For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek. He's writing to a mixed congregation that he's never met before. There's no difference between you, he says.
Some of you Jewish believers, some of you Gentile believers, that's over with.
And the Greek for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
So he's writing about the ultimate unity of the body that transcends race, culture or previous religious affiliation.
Now, that's important, and it's important to the church today.
I don't want to get old and cranky. I don't want to be that guy.
But I almost never call out preachers for their stupid things they say and do. That's just. It's not my job.
But I just read a statement by Rick Warren, and I just feel somebody's got to speak to this.
In fact, I was so shocked when I read it on Twitter, I just about decided not to go on Twitter anymore. But I decided instead, I just won't read Rick Warren anymore. I don't.
But listen to what Rick Warren said.
In heaven, you will be a minority. Get used to it.
Most Christian believers don't look like you do.
They're saved by grace through Jesus, and they are from every era of time and place.
If diversity scares you, you'll hate heaven now. I hope Rick Warren hears this somewhere.
Listen to me. There's not going to be any diversity in heaven. There's not going to be any minorities. There's not going to be a majority. There's not going to be a Jewish section and a gentile section. There's not going to be a black section and a white section. There's not going to be a Baptist section or a Pentecostal section.
There won't be any minority. Because in heaven, thanks be to God in heaven, all of those things that have separated us into tribes here, we'll all be gone, and we'll all look like Jesus.
It doth not yet appear what we shall be.
You can't look at us in our skin tones and our eye color and our background and our national frontiers. There's nothing. You can't look at us and tell what we'll look like in heaven, but when he shall appear, we shall look like him.
That probably isn't going to help Rick in any way, but I feel a lot better.
That's one of the great points that Paul is trying to make in the book of Romans, is that there's all of those party lines and racial divisions. They're gone.
They're all gone. And they will be utterly gone, consummately gone in heaven.
Now then Paul reaches into another place.
He says, having said all that, he said, what about living in the culture that you live in?
I'm going to just say a word about it because I told you this book is profoundly linked to world history.
So when Claudius adopted son Nero comes to the throne, he brings to the throne a level of malevolent, malignant madness that not even Caligula has ever known.
Nero is popular at first. He's young and handsome and the nation responds to him.
But soon his depravity, his violence, his cruelty, his lust for violence and his sexual perversion becomes so notorious that even the Roman people, as debauched as they are, are sickened by it.
Nero murders his mother, Agrippina, then he murders his half brother Germanicus.
He has a long standing affair with a slave.
He commits incest with his own sister.
He has two homosexual weddings.
In the first one he serves as the groom with an effeminate boy as his bride. And in the second one he serves as the bride, which horrifies the Rome.
He is a wannabe rock star, a musician, and he even wants to be a charioteer.
This is profoundly frowned upon by Roman culture.
He's a.
He's a Roman emperor. He should be have some level of royalty and regality about him.
Imagine, just imagine if Queen Elizabeth announced that she wanted to be a stripper at any age.
So Roman culture now becomes immersed in a level of depravity.
The culture is beginning to literally come apart at the seams until there is a terrible, terrible fire on the 19th of July, the year 64.
And Nero needs to blame it on somebody.
It burns for seven days.
Two thirds of Rome is burned up and Nero wants to blame it on somebody, so he blames it on this kind of Jewish sect called Christians.
And Nero launches the first really sustained and barbaric persecution of Christians, feeding them to wild animals in the Coliseum in order to provide light for night circuses.
He wraps them in oil rags and ties them to posts and lights them on fire.
It is indescribable, the nightmare of persecution that he launches on the church in that period of time, almost certainly Paul the Apostle is beheaded and Simon Peter is crucified upside down.
But before that happened, between the time that Paul wrote the Book of Romans, just following the advent of Nero to the throne, and the horrifying persecution following the Great Fire of Rome, Paul wrote this.
He said, I beg you therefore, brethren, no matter what Rome does with its body, no matter what the emperor does with his body, no matter what the thousands and thousands and thousands of prostitutes, male and female prostitutes in Rome, do with their bodies, no matter what is acceptable by Roman culture to do with your body, I beg you.
You present your body as a living sacrifice unto God. And he says, this is not some crazy thing. This is reasonable.
This is your reasonable service. If God made you, as I just pointed out in the first of the letter, if God created you, if God sent his son while you were yet sinners to die for you, if he loved you before you ever knew him, then it's the most reasonable thing in the world to say. Give your body to God.
Give your body to God and don't be squeezed into the mold of Rome.
Listen to what he's. He's talking to a tiny little group of people with no political power, no religious leadership, no temple in their behalf. They're just a group of people meeting in somebody's house in the largest, most powerful and most depraved city in the world.
And he says, don't allow that to squeeze you into its mold, but be ye transformed.
So let me ask you a simple question.
Think back to when you were a little child and you played in a sandbox.
You remember that?
I used to have a little yellow plastic squid form.
The tentacles came down and you fill it up with damp sand and pack it down with your little shovel. Do you remember this?
You take that and turn it out on the wooden board along the sandbox.
Did anybody play with a mold? Tap it out? Now you tap the bottom of it with your little shovel and you carefully remove the mold.
And what have you got?
Somebody tell me.
Squid. No. If you have a squid, it's a miracle.
What you have is sand in the form of a squid.
So Paul says, you squeeze yourself into the mold of Rome and you're Romans.
You'll be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You no longer think like Rome. You no longer live like Rome. You no longer want the things that Rome wants. You're no longer Romans, now. You're Christ, Christians, believers, now. You've been transformed.
And then he says, now let me give you this Great hope.
What can separate you from the love of God?
What could separate you? Can Caesar.
No, I'm calling out to you. Can Caesar?
Can the Praetorian Guard, Can Roman culture?
Can persecution?
Can being wrapped in oil rags and set on fire while your children are eaten by lions, can that separate you from God?
If America implodes.
If America implodes and you wake up with Chinese tanks in your driveway, does that separate you from God then? Nothing can.
Nothing can.
Paul says these three things. God made you and he loves you. And he loved you before you knew it.
He sent his son Jesus to die for you. That you would not only be saved, but that you would be transformed.
Transformed.
Rome doesn't have the power to squeeze you into its mold.
You'll be transformed by the supernatural, miraculous grace of Almighty God.
And nothing, nothing, not even Rome itself, nothing can separate you from the love of God that is yours in Christ Jesus.
The book of Romans is a prophetic statement of hope to a people that are about to go through an historical nightmare.
And the result is what?
Roman Empire did not conquer. Christianity.
Christianity brought the Roman Empire to its knees.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, I thank you so much.
Through your word you speak to us.
It's us.
It's we ourselves that have mail.
Thank you. That somehow you breathed this great truth into the Apostle Paul, that he would write to those Romans and to us.
We hear the Holy Ghost say to us, you have mail.
I love you.
My son died for you. I will save you and transform you.
And nothing and no one can ever take it away.
In Jesus name, Amen. Amen. God bless you, everybody.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x@dr. Mark Rutland, or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
