Romans: A Picture Emerging

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Take the Romans times as an example. For years there’s been something inside of me about this picture of Romans. That’s what it was -- a picture. It wasn’t something that my eyes could see, but it was a picture of God’s counsel and the reasonableness of these things. In Chapters 1-11, there’s a very reasonable flow to it all whereas it’s aggravated me that the Calvinists will snag 9 and 11 to prove something, and the Baptists will grab Chapters 3 and 5 to prove something, and the Charismatics grab Chapter 8 to prove something. It all seemed so disconnected. It’s like a whole doctrine, a whole denomination around a particular chapter, but how does that relate to this whole thing? So, it’s tree, and tree, and tree and this is just a collection of trees and not a forest.

So over the course of time, God sort of opened up this thing to me without me really having tried to enlarge myself through academic pursuit, but simply through the process of life and prayer and reading, and just the course of reading Romans through backwards and forwards many times in the course of life, this forest began to emerge where all of a sudden it made sense to me now why Romans 1 and Romans 3 and Romans 11 were all very closely tied together. Why? Why?

Well, it’s not true that everybody will always, through time and prayer and reading have a forest emerge in front of them. That’s just not always true. In fact, my forest may not be somebody else’s and vice versa. That’s why we all need each other. But the point is that the temptation for me was to try to go back and clearly define all the trees and to very carefully calculate it and weigh it all out. What I had to do was to force myself to trust God that this picture that He’d caused to emerge in front of my viewing, that somehow, He would allow me to walk through it while I was teaching and describe what I was seeing while I was talking. But the picture was there. I didn’t just start blank. If you’d asked me what the picture was about, I could have told you a week before or five years before we did the Romans thing, “Well, here’s the general theme.”

In Myrtle Beach we talked about little pieces of it if you remember. Olester was always asking, “When are we going to talk about Romans?” Do you remember that? So, it’s been around for a long time, and I could describe little parts of the picture thematically like subheadings and captions on a picture. But something I’d never done or tried to do on my own -- even by myself, let alone with a group of people all there in front of me -- I never actually walked through the whole picture out loud until those evenings.

So yeah, you’re right, there were a lot of things I said that I’d never thought of before. But it wasn’t because I didn’t know it was there. It was just that I’d never stopped and looked at it. I could feel it, I could sense it, I could smell it, but I never verbalized it before. So that’s something of the process of the “not considering what to say or how to say it” (Matt. 10:20) deal. It’s not that they didn’t know anything, they didn’t go blank. But it was simply that they didn’t try to line it all up academically. They were just prepared to walk through a thing and to describe what they were seeing as they walked through it in response to things around them. It wasn’t rehearsed.

They used to tell us to practice with a tape recorder in front of a mirror, stuff like that. That’s why God’s people have been robbed of revelation for so many generations and there has been famine in hearing the Word -- people perishing for lack of understanding -- because the way we’ve approached the whole thing has been on the human side, the fleshly side, approaching it as an academic subject rather than trusting that God will lead us through this picture and “open your mouth and I will fill it” (Psalms 81:10). That is a spiritual principle. It’s God’s heart and desire if we’ll grab ahold of this thing.

It happened with Ephesians 3 which to this day remains one of the most important passages in my life. In fact, it’s a defining theme in my life. It has been for ten years now. It still thrills me whenever I even consider the passage, let alone read it, but it started off that way. I was reading during a “worship service” over a decade ago (because there wasn’t much else going on) and I read that passage, and I circled it, starred it, underlined it, highlighted it and crosshatched it and said, “This is it!” I leaned over to Kathy and said, “This is it!” And she said, “What is it?” and I said, “I don’t know.” And I really honestly didn’t know. It was like all of a sudden, this picture emerged in front of me, but I hadn’t walked through it yet. I didn’t know what it was. But I saw, it was almost like those pictures that you see in Cracker Barrel. You stare at it, and the picture comes out at you, and that’s what happened with Ephesians chapter 3.

Well, those are the things that God is calling you to teach, to help His people with. I saw that thing in Ephesians 3. I had never taught publicly in any way, shape, or form in my life. I’d never said a word publicly of any spiritual flavor or tone. Nothing about me had anything that was pointing toward saying anything ever in my whole life publicly out of the Word of God. In fact, my only experience with public speaking unfortunately was captured on videotape in my senior year of college, and it was the most pathetic demonstration of being able to say something out loud with a group of people that anybody could imagine. I was talking so fast and had no idea what I said. It was totally incomprehensible. Even though I knew the subject, I had no capacity to speak about anything. I couldn’t make sense even of carnal things that I understood extremely well, let alone spiritual things which I understood not at all.

I looked at this thing in Ephesians 3, and it did one of those deals, one of those hologram things where it just came out into my face. I knew there was something extremely important there, but if you put a gun to my head, I could not have told you what. I couldn’t understand. What does it mean? My mind could not capture the thought of what Paul was saying in Ephesians 3:1-10. My mind couldn’t comprehend it. But it was coming out, and I knew there would be a time that I could walk through that thing and describe what I was seeing as I walked through it deeper and deeper into the picture. That’s what God is calling us to do.

Again, that has become, I would have to say the most important defining theme of my life. I can summarize 90% of what I do in life out of a few verses. That’s what God is calling us to do in the process of helping His people is not to be an academia maniac or to hedge our bet by storing up a bunch of other peoples’ thoughts and then sifting through them and trying to remember them and spew them out on people. But simply to look, to capture the picture, and then to begin to walk through it; to open our mouth and let God fill it and be willing to risk, be willing to be a fool.

I can’t tell you how frightened I was in one sense of those Romans nights. Night after night after night, knowing full well that all I could do was to begin to walk through that picture of that particular chapter and try to describe what I was seeing as I was going knowing how easily I could’ve made a fool out of myself and just turned the whole thing into a bunch of mush quicker than you could snap your fingers. It would’ve been very easy to do, and I knew that, but I refused to hedge my bet. I refused to come in having considered what to say and how to say it in terms of having dissected it, and analyzed it, and rehearsed my thoughts and my words and my illustrations and all this kind of stuff. I had to walk through it, trusting God.

When you go to somebody’s house to teach them to pray, I guarantee that you will not feel secure. If you do, you’re making a mistake. You will not find God’s heart. You’ll find much of what you do falling to the ground if you approach it that way. But if instead you store things up in your heart, you’ll have maybe a picture. Maybe you’ll even have some doorways that you know you can go through, like you want to go look at what Jesus said in Mark 11 about moving mountains.

You maybe have some doorways you know you can go through, but you haven’t rehearsed in detail what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it in order to be someone’s Messiah in regard to prayer or some other subject. But simply, you’ve looked at the house, you’ve seen some of the doorways and then you go, and you lay yourself bare -- risk yourself, risk your reputation, risk their view of you, risk your time and energy -- and begin to open up those doorways and to go through them. See if anything’s there together. You may find out that they’re describing to you more of what’s in that room than what you were able to, and that’s okay, too. We’re just helping each other.