Part One: Why Study Romans (Romans 1:1-7) Series

Good morning. Please open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 1. We are beginning a new series today. I want to preach through the book of Romans.

There is a joke among pastors, whenever they hear that someone is going to start a series on Romans. They say whenever you start a series on Romans, you need to make sure you have both your will and your resume up to date (Ok—I didn’t say it was a funny joke). The point is that a series on Romans is a major undertaking. Martyn Lloyd Jones was a pastor in England. On October 7, 1955, he began a sermon series on Romans. 13 years later, he had gotten to Romans 14 (Romans has 16 chapters) before he retired from preaching because of illness. He spent the rest of his life editing his sermon manuscripts, and died in 1981. His sermons, which averaged 55 minutes each, are collected in a fourteen volume set.

So Romans has killed some pastors, and run off others. I actually know a lot of guys who, every time they do a series on Romans, they get called to another church before they finish it.

Let me ease your mind on both counts. First, I’m not planning to spend the next 13 years on Romans. And second, I don’t have any plans to go anywhere.

But I do want to spend a lot of time with this book. As I sat down over the Christmas break to map out my sermons for 2022, I’ve got us going through at least September.

So let me recommend one more thing to you as well. We’ve ordered a number of these ESV Scripture journals. Students, you guys are already familiar with these, because you’ve been using them in youth bible study for awhile now. But this [hold it up] is the text of the book of Romans, and every other page of the journal is blank, so you can make your own notes, highlights, etc. They are five dollars each, and since we are going to be in this book for awhile, I think this will be a great resource for you to keep notes in. If you decide you want one of the journals, I will have them after the service.

So why attempt this? Because the book of Romans has done more to actually change the course of church history than any other single book of the Bible. Consider this:

St. Augustine is probably the most influential theologian after the Apostle Paul. In 386 AD, after years of seeking truth in philosophy and hedonism, Augustine heard two children on the playground chanting, “Take and read, take and read.” Augustine picked up a copy of the book of Romans, and randomly turned to Romans 13:13-14, which says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the lusts of the flesh.” He marked his conversion from that point.

A thousand years later in Germany, a monk named Martin Luther was depressed almost to the point of suicide. He had tried to pursue righteousness through strict self discipline, and found himself hating the idea of the righteousness of God because he could never measure up to it. Then he started meditating on Romans 1:17, which we will talk about next week. It talks about how the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. From that point on, Luther wrote, “I felt myself to be reborn, and to have gone through the open doors of Paradise.”

At roughly the same time as Luther, William Tyndale was over in England working on an English translation of the Bible. This was almost a century before the King James Version: William Tyndale was the first person to translate the Bible into English directly from the Hebrew and Greek, and was burned at the stake for doing so. But he believed that everyone should have access to God’s Word—not just Latin scholars. So here’s what Tyndale wrote about Romans: Tyndale wrote, “It is the principal and most excellent part of the New Testament, and I think it [appropriate] that every Christian know it by heart and exercise himself therein continually, as daily bread for the soul. No man can read it too often or study it too well; for the more it is studied the easier it is; the more it is chewed the pleasanter it is, and the more it is searched the more precious are the things found in it.”

John Calvin wrote that Romans was “the entrance to all the most hidden treasures of Scripture.”

John Bunyan wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” after studying Romans.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, and, along with his brother Charles the writer of more than six thousand hymns including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was converted to Christ in 1738, while reading Luther’s introduction to the book of Romans. He wrote in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ and Christ alone for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins and saved me from the law of sin and death.”