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The Romans Road: How the Book of Romans Changed the World
Throughout church history, sinners have come to faith in nearly every conceivable way and through the most unlikely people.
Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian apologists, was evangelized by an elderly man on a beach. A young John Owen found Christ through listening to a substitute preacher. And the light of salvation has shone in good weather and bad. John Newton, the slave-trader who eventually penned “Amazing Grace,” was converted in the hull of a ship during a thunderstorm. Charles Spurgeon accepted Christ when a snowstorm led him to a small Primitive Methodist chapel, where he heard the words of Isaiah 45:22: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.”
Like the apostle Paul, some were born again in a dramatic Damascus Road experience. Abolitionist Sojourner Truth was blinded by a flash of light on a New York back road, where she heard Jesus’s voice. Richard Allen, the father of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, burst into tears after receiving salvation: “All of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and, glory to God, I cried. My soul was filled. I cried, enough, for me the Saviour died.”
Whether in a barn (where Methodist bishop Francis Asbury was saved) or in a Sunday school classroom (where evangelist Dwight L. Moody first believed in Christ), all these conversions had one thing in common: by hearing the good news of salvation (Rom. 10:17). These believers were born again by the Word of God (1 Pet. 1:23).
While John 3:16 has long been regarded as the most well-known verse in Scripture, and while every book of the Bible is equally inspired, no book has more transformed the course of human history than Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
From Augustine to Luther
In Milan in AD 386, a wayward North African teacher of rhetoric by the name of Augustine heard the voice of a child singing, “Pick it up and read it. Pick it up and read it.” Not seeing any children around, Augustine soon realized these words were the command of God. Locating a Bible, he quickly turned to the first passage of Scripture he could find: Romans 13:13–14. He read, “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
No book has more transformed the course of human history than Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
These words changed the world—or at least half of it. The man later called “the father of the Western church” was finally given eyes to see: “No further would I read; nor needed I. For instantly even with the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of confidence now darted into my heart, all the darkness of doubting vanished away.”
Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield famously said, “It was Augustine who gave us the Reformation.” Indeed, the reformers often appealed to Augustine’s theology to defend the idea that they were retrieving an ancient faith, not inventing a new one. However, once again, it was the book of Romans that provided the real catalyst for change. An Augustinian friar by the name of Martin Luther was forever changed when he read the words of Romans 1:16–17: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”
Luther recorded his conversion experience:
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
From Reformation to Revival
Luther relished Romans for the rest of his life. In his Preface to Romans (1522), he called it “the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel.”
Two hundred years later, Luther’s love for Romans altered the course of English Protestantism. Walking into London’s Aldersgate chapel in 1738, John Wesley heard someone reading from Luther’s Preface to the Romans, and as he later described in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” At last, he knew God’s forgiveness.
Wesley, the founder of Methodism, would also influence the likes of a young George Whitefield, the chief evangelist of the Great Awakening (converted with the help of Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man, which he received from Charles Wesley, John’s brother).
Romans was, of course, not the only book of the Bible to generate revival. The primary defender of the Great Awakening, Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, was converted by another Pauline epistle. In 1721, while meditating on 1 Timothy 1:17 (“To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”), Edwards was struck with a “new sense” of divine things:
As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before. . . . I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven; and be as it were swallowed up in him forever! I kept saying, and as it were singing over these words of scripture to myself; and went to prayer, to pray to God that I might enjoy him; and prayed in a manner quite different from what I used to do; with a new sort of affection.
Even still, Romans had already significantly influenced the Anglo-American world by the end of the 17th century. Although converted by multiple texts of Scripture, including Luke 14:22–23, John Bunyan encountered Christ’s love most powerfully in Romans 8:39. As Bunyan records in his spiritual autobiography, the words “Thou art my Love, Thou art my Love; and nothing shall separate Thee from my Love” began to ring inside his aching soul. He wrote, “And with that Romans eight, thirty-nine came into my mind. Now was my heart filled full of comfort and hope, and now I could believe that my sins should be forgiven me; yea, I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God, that I remember I could not tell how to contain till I go Home.”
Bunyan would go on to pen Pilgrim’s Progress (much of it from prison for preaching without a license), an allegory of the Christian life still widely regarded as the best-selling book in history other than the Bible.
From the Past to the Present Day
In the 19th century, Hudson Taylor, pioneer missionary to China, was converted at the age of 17 after reading a gospel tract about the words of Christ on the cross from John 19:30: “It is finished.” However, for others, the finished work of Christ was captured most vividly in Romans.
The book’s converting power on evangelicals could be felt well into the 20th and even 21st centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1934, in a revival meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, a young Billy Graham listened to an evangelist named Mordecai Ham. As Graham described in his autobiography, “After all his tirades against sin, he gave us a gentle reminder: ‘But God commandeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8 KJV).” After singing “Just as I Am” along with another hymn, Graham “walked down to the front” and placed his trust in Jesus to be saved. The 16-year-old Graham eventually became the most famous evangelist of the 20th century.
The converting power of the book of Romans on Protestants could be felt well into the 20th and even 21st centuries.
Ten years later, across the pond, J. I. Packer’s conversion experience in the Church of England had striking similarities with that of Graham.
Packer’s spiritual journey began when a friend was saved at the University of Bristol. Writing to Packer about his newfound faith, the friend expounded on justification by faith from Romans 3. Confused as to the meaning of this “saving faith,” Packer felt something was missing from his walk with God. More than a year later, while listening to a preacher at St. Aldate’s Church in Oxford recount his conversion at a boys’ camp, Packer gave serious thought to whether he was an actual Christian. The sermon ended with a challenge to commit oneself to the Lord, followed by the hymn “Just as I Am.” Packer trusted in the justifying grace of Jesus Christ, and he later became one of the preeminent evangelical theologians of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Protestant history, and much of church history, is indeed a Romans Road. From the confessions of Augustine to the revival meetings of Billy Graham, Paul’s letter to the Roman church has changed the world one soul at a time, calling sinners out of darkness and into God’s marvelous light. May the church continue to preach its saving wisdom for another generation.
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