Michigan Camp Meeting 2017

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Romans

Jay Gallimore

Romans- Part 1

Our Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the Book of Romans, for what it has meant to the Christian church, for what it's meant to each 1 of us.

And as we study it through this week, we want to be able that we can share it with other people.

We want to have a powerful impact on us and everyone else about us.

We want the presence of the Holy Spirit who's the real divine teacher.

All right, I'm going to, this is Romans chapter 1.

Yeah, if you'd be my helper, I'd be happy for that.

And Brother Dennis, Somebody else might have to leave early too, he's got to leave early because he's got an assignment he has to take care of.

If you don't get 1, then I will see how many extra I need and then we'll work on breaking some tomorrow.

It may not be quite in the same format, but we will go from there.

Okay, all you're going to need for this class is your Bible and maybe a pen.

Alright, chapter 1, and we will go right there.

I always like the introduction because if you think about the history of the Christian church, what's the most well-known church in the world?

So the book of Romans was written to the church in Rome because that church was destined to have a huge impact.

And I think that human history could have been really, really very different.

My apologies for running out of these, but raise your hand if you didn't get 1.

Maybe I'll do 10 more tomorrow just to make sure.

If the book of Romans had been listened to, if the book of Romans had been followed, human history would have been different, vastly different.

Now when I did this series some years ago, and I've been telling myself that I'm going to redo this series, we did not have the New King James Version, and we've got the New King James Version.

I did it based on the New International, which is a great reading Bible.

I like the New American Standard for study.

And these answers are not just fill in the blank.

You have to think about some of these answers and some of the questions that I give you.

All right, let me go down to, again, the first part here.

The ancient church of the patriarchs, come right on in.

The ancient church of the patriarchs wrestled with their human tendencies to evil.

Everybody in the room has selfish tendencies to evil and they decided to trust nature instead of the Lord.

I was just doing some study not too long ago on ancient Egypt.

It was probably 1 of the earliest, and I got much of that from ancient Babylon.

They'll name the gods different and that sort of thing, but the basic philosophy and the basic understanding is all the same.

It's all in cahoots together if you really look at it.

If you go back to the ancient Jewish church, they wrestled with a...

Come on in, we've got a couple seats here and there's some seats back there and so forth.

Okay, we'll get you settled, seated in here.

Tell Elvar Ratsar he can come and help me teach this class.

Yeah, I don't want you getting the back row, I want you in the front row.

You take advantage of all the help you can get.

So we have born to us paganism that's influenced the world.

You have Jewish legalism which has had a huge influence on the world.

And then the Church of Rome itself wrestled with all of this.

The Church of Rome had primacy because of its location.

You know, it's like being located in Washington, D.C.

So because we're located in Washington, D.C.

And because the government is there, We somehow...

And anyway, that's the way the ancients kind of thought and out of that we have a dreadful union of religions and secular power.

Terrible persecutions resulted And we're still wrestling with a lot of that kind of thing today.

I'm not going to cover every text because I've got 5 sessions and I want to get through the first 8 chapters.

I would love to get through the first 11 chapters, But I don't want to be such a speed going through this that you begin to lose me.

So this is a teaching class, not a preaching class.

So you can feel free any time to raise your hand, you can make a comment, you can ask a question, whatever you'd like, because I want it to be a teaching experience.

But I am going to not go over every text here that you will have.

I should have had more faith or something, I think.

But if you've got your Bible, you can follow along pretty easy here.

All right, I'm going to start with verses 3 and 4, and I'm going to read them not because I always like to hear my own voice, but because I'm on...

Yeah, they want to do some kind of CDs out of it.

Concerning His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead." Now, the question that I want to ask here, what is...what evidence does Paul offer that Jesus is indeed the Son of God?

And I'm using that word evidence on purpose.

Romans- Part 2

So the 490 years has been expended, so to speak, so God has been patient, patient with these Jewish people.

And looking at Verse 4, why is it dangerous to take the patience and kindness of God for granted?

You can sooner or later grieve away the Spirit of God and therefore you cannot repent.

What happens when a person takes somebody for granted.

What happens in a marriage when people do that?

What happens is that people's hearts become hardened and they don't appreciate.

That's why thankfulness is at the root of...

Gratefulness is at the root of salvation in 1 sense of the word.

Let's look at number 5 if you're looking at your...

How do God's patience and kindness build trust?

How does God's patience and kindness build trust?

These are not the fill-in-the-blank kind of questions.

They're meant to make you think just a little bit.

Well, what happens when people show you kindness?

It builds affection for that person, doesn't it?

And if affection is built, what else is built?

So that's why God's patience, His kindness, builds trust and love in our hearts for Him.

But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart, you treasuring up for yourself wrath and the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.

By what attitude does 1 store up the wrath of God against himself?" Yeah.

If you have a hard heart, what kind of behavior are you going to exhibit?

And The more bad behavior you commit, or we commit, the more we become guilty before the judgment bar of God.

Even though we can only please God by faith, our work, our result of our faith, and if our hearts are hardened, then our works show that as well, and then our judgment is shown.

We'll see that again here before we get to it.

So it's the misbehavior, but what's behind the misbehavior?

And that's what Paul and Jesus were getting to.

The longer we do this, the tougher it is for the Holy Spirit to break through.

In order to change a person's behavior, the heart has to be changed.

And the longer we resist the goodness and the kindness of God that's trying to build love and trust with us, the more bad behavior we're going to build.

Alright, let's look at verse 6, chapter 2.

Who will render to each according to His what?

And what does He take into account when He renders recompense or He renders judgment?

Do they judge you for your motives or do they judge you for your deeds?

But ultimately it's the deed, and then they may add penalties for hate crimes.

In other words, that's a motive that they tried.

The difficult is trying to judge motives.

Every time they have a terrorist act, somebody will say, Why?

Or you have some terrible, heinous act where people's lives are lost.

But it's very difficult to judge some of that.

But there's no question that you can judge the deed.

You may not understand why a person stole something, but the fact that he stole it is a fact.

And the defender may say, oh I forgive you, I know you're hungry and you have a problem with them.

But if the child is locally trying to steal them and put the militia back, then that's different.

We see that here in the Canaanite society.

That's kind of where God looks at people's ignorance and why we have to judge the heart and not man as a judge.

What kind of imagery do we use to represent justice?

No, I'm talking about the symbol that we use for justice in this country.

She's holding a pair of balances and she's blindfolded.

Romans- Part 3

Gracious Father in heaven, you're so good to us.

We thank you for your love and your mercy to us as we focus today on these great teachings of the Apostle Paul.

We pray that our own hearts will be refreshed.

There's never a time when I study this that I'm not recharged myself.

At the center of everything is the gospel.

Well, I left you yesterday with a thought about the very essence of the Gospel.

God sacrificed His own Son to His own justice and Set us free.

That's in contrast to the pagan concept that says you bring your sacrifice even if it's your own child.

But God says you can't bring any sacrifice that can atone for your soul.

So because you can't, I'll do it for you.

And it's having faith in Him who does it for us is where and how the just shall live by faith.

That's where we left yesterday and I want to go back to Romans chapter 3 because there's some parts of that that I still want to take a look at.

So if you've got your lesson number 3, we will start looking again at verse...

That whole section of verse 21 to 26 is very, very powerful.

Perpetuation is satisfying the justice of God, but that satisfaction is provided by God Himself instead of us having to try to provide that.

The thing is, you can never satisfy justice yourself.

Why could you never satisfy God's justice?

Well, that's true, but let's say that the justice of God required your life so you could never satisfy God's justice and still live.

So that's why Jesus satisfies it for us and so now we can live.

Righteousness is exhibited apart from the law.

What kind of illustration did I use to explain that?

But He has to express it different for a fish, or the fish will die.

So what He did in Calvary's cross and in Christ, He expressed His righteousness differently.

The method he used to express it is different, just like air and water.

But in the water and the expression of Calvary's cross of God's righteousness, we don't die, we live.

And so that's why this is so very, very important to us.

It wasn't, some people used that, well he expressed it apart from the law as though the law is something bad.

The law is not something bad, it's just that when we have Mount Sinai, it'll kill us.

But when you have Calvary's cross, it'll save us.

The expectations of good behavior doesn't change.

It's just that we cannot produce that good behavior with just the expression of Mount Sinai, we have to have the expression of Calvary's cross.

That's why this chapter 3 is so very powerful.

For all have sinned, fallen short of the glory of God, being justified...

Now I know if you listen to the advertisers in the world, they say free, they don't really mean free, do they?

Well, I teach Galatians, and Paul is battling with some early Christians who were having a hard time getting this straight.

They were Jewish Christians, and they'd spent their life going through all the ceremonies and all the feast days.

There were 7 Sabbaths given at the creation of the sanctuary, and they spent their life going through this.

And so when they became Christians, but they just were absolutely sure that it was Christ plus circumcision if you wanted to be saved.

In other words, it was Christ plus something.

And I sum that up, I summed the Apostle Paul up in Galatians by saying, it is Christ, you're saved by faith, alone in Christ, plus nothing.

So many of us in New York Academy were taught Romans 3.23, but Romans 3.24 was not a text yet.

Sometimes we have a, you know, I've got some young people in here, so you forgive me.

But When you're in those teenage years, there's a lot of things you don't quite grasp sometimes.

And sometimes as adults we don't do a good job.

I've told the principals here, I've told them both, I said, you know, you have rules here.

Like 1 of the big funny rules here, it's not a bad rule, it's a good rule for good reason, is don't meet you in chewing gum at Great Lakes.

Now, or not in the Ad Building, okay there's another 1.

Now there's a reason for that, because what do kids do when they...

Yeah, you're stuck under the desk, you're stuck whatever, whatever.

It has nothing to do with your acceptance with God.

It has everything to do with making the streetlights work.

Romans- Part 4

Our gracious Heavenly Father, thank You for the book of Romans.

Thank You for the Holy Spirit who inspired the Apostle Paul to write it and to give it to us.

And even though it was written in another language, we thank You for the translations that make it so very clear for us.

And we pray this afternoon as we turn our minds and hearts toward You, that You will be our real Teacher and our Helper.

Alright, we left chapter 5 yesterday, and we got ready to start on the part about the second atom, or the last atom, as it's called.

So this is a very neat area, and it's an area sometimes that has been and can be misunderstood.

And you're following in your lesson, I should get my lesson opened up here so that I am not too far off.

Verse 12, therefore, just as 1 man's sin entered through 1 man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all have sinned." I talked a little bit yesterday about original sin because our Roman Catholic friends believe that we're all guilty for Adam's sin.

We believe though that sin did enter the world through how many people?

By the way, why does he not say it entered through 1 woman?

I want you to think about that a little bit.

I would say that if he would have been the only 1 that slipped, it would have affected her only.

But when Adam slid over her, it affected the whole world.

Is it fair to say that when Satan took Eve down, he had not yet conquered the world?

He'd conquered a piece of it, But he had not conquered the world at that point.

And the world doesn't come under the dominion of Satan until he takes down Adam.

And the reason for that is not because...

Let me hasten and put the disclaimers in here in case I get in trouble.

God loves His daughters just as much as He loves His sons.

So the only way that Satan could take dominion of the world is by taking down Adam.

I'm sorry ladies, in this particular incidence, you still with me?

Adam is not gonna be quite as easy to get as Eve.

Yes, you okay with, Some people won't agree with that, it's okay.

Okay, just follow my logic here just a little bit.

When you go to the first chapter of Job, who shows up to meet with the sons of God?

What is the question that God asked Satan?

Satan is ready for that because he knows his presence is going to be challenged by God Himself.

I don't run everything going on in this camp meeting, but you'll see me riding my little cart, you'll see me popping up here, and I'm popping up there, and I'm checking on this.

I've got Jim Mitchiff answering to me, I've got a lot of people doing lots of stuff, but I'm not doing all that stuff because that's not my job.

My job is to make sure that everybody else is that's all running well.

Yeah, I show up at the juniors, I show up at the crater roll, I show up at all the divisions, I show up at the conference office, and I don't ever give anybody necessarily a schedule that I'm coming, not that I'm trying to surprise anybody, but I'm just doing my job.

So if you ask me where I came from, I came from camp meeting.

If you ask me what I'm doing there, I came from camp meeting and I'm walking and riding my golf cart all over camp meeting.

The 1 that comes closest to that would be Jim Mitchiff, and the next 1 would be Craig Harris, because they have management responsibilities.

Most everybody else is focused on whatever they're focused on.

He says, oh, and this tells you that there was an ongoing argument between God and Satan, an ongoing argument.

That means that there's been consideration before, you understand.

Now right there, you got a problem because Satan claims the world as his, that we're supposed to be his servants, and now God's claiming in Satan's domain that he's got a servant, And then he delists, he's blameless, he's all those wonderful things.

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