Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Righteousness By Faith: The Rest of the Story

Mark Howard

Royce Snyman

01 Righteousness by Faith Primer

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, how grateful we are for a day when we can come apart and meet together.

That has taken on a whole lot of new significance.

We haven't been able to meet for 2 years.

And now as we share together from the Word of God and look at the precious, most precious truth that has been given to your people for the world in these last days, we invite your Holy Spirit to be our teacher.

And I pray that the words that I speak and that Pastor Mark speaks and that we hear today will be the words that come from the throne of heaven, drawing us to you and teaching us how to live in these last days.

Well, we are glad to be able to be together again after a pandemic season and to be able to share together some of you.

How Many of you happen to be able to attend or listen to any of the classes that I taught in the past at camp meeting.

The reason I mention that is because this is the next step.

And we are building on the history that we've already studied and that you've studied.

There are a couple of books that I want to remind you of that are very important in setting the stage for what we're doing here.

1 of them is called The Return of the Latter Rain.

Both books are by Ron Duffield, and I want to make sure that you are aware of the importance of the history that we have.

Ellen White makes it clear that if we forget the way God has led us in the past, we will have difficulty.

Now I'm emphasizing the negative, but she emphasizes the positive, that if we don't forget how God has led us in the past, it will be a blessing to us.

And you want to be able to understand God's history because it will help us in understanding the truth of the subject of righteousness by faith.

The subject of righteousness by faith has been pondered, has been studied, has been dialogued about, and even argued about in the Seventh-day Adventist church for a long time.

And that may be not all bad, because the fact of the matter is the devil does not want us to be united on a very basic and simple truth.

At the end of the day, this subject will determine eternity for us.

Especially in these last days as we're watching the prophecies being fulfilled around us, We're recognizing just how important our connection with Jesus is.

And I really want to emphasize that this is not just about head knowledge, but this is about our experience with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

But our relationship with Jesus is based upon information.

And Ellen White says this, to be able to put it into a direction for us.

Light is to shine forth from God's people in clear, distinct rays, bringing Jesus before the churches and before the world.

At 1 time in the discussion, a hundred plus years ago, in the Adventist church, 1 Christian, Seventh-day Adventist Christian leader was hearing these messages of Christ our righteousness and actually printed an article in the Review and Herald entitled, Our Righteousness, Not Christ's Righteousness.

That's how controversial the experience had become.

And it's something we need to be reminded of, and always will be, Christ, our righteousness.

Along with all the agitation and arguments have come a multiplicity of theories about righteousness by faith, often making a doctrine that really should be simple awfully complicated.

When we look back at the history and we see how God led his people from 1888 in the years that followed.

4 principal people come to my mind and there are others in terms of teaching the Word of God in simplicity.

White, and another 1 that I've come to really appreciate in my personal study is W.

And in our history time, a couple years ago, in talking about this, we had a chance to be able to look at the messages these individuals were sharing from a historical point of view.

But what we want to do today and in the days that follow, Pastor Mark Howard and myself, we've teamed up together to be able to share the message of Righteousness by Faith in its simplicity, trying not to make it complicated, trying to make it straightforward.

How many of you were able to listen to Brother Jan Ross' message last night?

You never know what another speaker is going to say.

But you always know when the Spirit of God is leading, because the Spirit of God is always saying the same thing.

The Spirit of God is consistent, unified, And he does that through his workers.

Jones, Wagner, Ellen White, Prescott, they spoke the same message.

Brother John Ross, I texted Brother Howard last night and I said, he's preaching our message.

Now there are times when I'd say, that's kind of scary because people won't want to hear it twice.

But we are going to look at it a little bit more in depth in the time that we meet here together and we're going to look at some of these things.

As we've shared the history from 18, as I've shared the history from 1888 and many other places, other seminars have done it in similar ways.

We're attempting simply to bring clarity by God's grace to this question.

I'm going to leave you with some questions before I give Elder Howard a chance to speak here.

You see, it's become apparent from the discussions that Righteousness by Faith really, what is Righteousness by Faith really?

And here's some of the questions you want to be asking yourself.

Whether or not we can truly overcome sin and to what degree?

It seems as though that is the bottom line when it comes to this question.

It seems the church has been walking around this question all over, but that really is the heart of the question.

Whether we can attain to Christian perfection and what that means exactly, whether or not the overcoming and or perfection takes place before or after Jesus comes, whether there will come a time when we will no longer need the righteousness of Christ, And finally, how our understanding of these things affects our personal assurance of salvation.

Those are questions, those are not the answers.

So that's what we're going to be looking at in the next 5 days, to seek answers to those questions with clarity and also by God's grace with simplicity.

It's not a chance in the world that we're going to cover everything in detail, but hopefully by God's grace enough to be able to give us assurance and direction of how God is leading his people.

Remember this is a subject the church has been struggling with for a century, and so we are working now to bring clarity to that message.

But we do believe that we can provide enough of the common, enough of the information that all of us, no matter whether we have degrees or we are simply students of the Bible, which by the way we all are, so that we can find the truth there and understand this foundational teaching.

So, Earl Howard, why don't you come and start to lead us into this, give us some direction as we move into the theology of Christ our righteousness.

There's a couple of things I want to bring out as we begin.

Elder Snaman had referenced the book, Return to the Ladder Rain.

How many of you have read that book by Ron Duffield?

How many of you have seen that book by Ron Duffield?

How many of you have been intimidated to read that book by Ron Duffield because it's like this thick?

I'll tell you that I can't say I never read the book cover to cover.

And I've been driving back and forth to Lansing from here for 2 years working at the conference office.

But if you want to get it free online to listen to or to download in electronic format, go to adventaudio.org.

Well, I just wanted to say, I said 2 books and then only told you 1.

The other 1 is Wounded in the House of His Friends.

02 Righteousness by Faith and Justification

Father in Heaven, the most important thing we can talk about is Jesus.

The most important person we can talk about is Jesus.

The most important subject we can talk about is what He has done for us.

And as we talk today about Christ, our righteousness, and righteousness by faith, may Your Holy Spirit once again teach us and help us to understand.

This whole issue is a real conundrum to me.

My definition of conundrum is there's so much you want to do, so much you want to say, but how do you say it all, and how do you accomplish it all?

You know, in camp meetings After 1888, Ellen White, Jones and Wagner went around preaching the gospel message, the most precious message.

And as they went from camp meeting to camp meeting, Their camp meetings were intense.

You think our, I don't mean in tense, but they were filled to capacity with Bible study and interaction.

And we do that here, but I think we're more relaxed here than those camp meetings probably were.

And they were packing every message and every presentation with a gospel message.

I mean, when Wagner and Jones and Alan White would speak, they'd speak for an hour or 2 or whatever it was and that message and then the next 1 would continue on with that and they continued on with that message all day long and however long camp meeting went.

And, you know, I think about all that we'd like to say.

In some ways, we're going the opposite direction.

Instead of trying to overload, we are trying to synthesize.

Trying to simplify the message, which has its problems, because there are things that we're leaving out that we might be able to include.

Somebody might say, you know, there's so much more we could be talking about.

What about this part of the message and that part of the message?

Absolutely, there's so much we could be talking about.

And over the last couple of years, as I said when I started yesterday, when we started yesterday, we were talking about the history of this presentation and the content, some of that content of the authors, Jones, Wagner, Prescott, Ellen White, and the messages they shared.

And I feel as though there's so much we want to talk about, and yet we want to make sure that the message is clear and simple as a way of being able to say, all right, the message of Righteous by Faith is not complicated.

And as we said yesterday, We were just talking about a primer, or a primer.

I think you say primer for that book that might be in a classroom that was the beginning of education.

But I think we need a primer to get the gospel message out and full where it needs to be.

We learned yesterday that righteousness is the holiness, rightness, goodness, uprightness, correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting, perfect conformity to God's law, among other things.

Righteousness is the essence of who God is.

God wants to see his character reproduced in his people.

And as such, as we understand this, we recognize that righteousness originates from God and is exclusive in the sense that God alone is righteous.

Humanity, on the other hand, that's us, have a problem.

We don't have a shred of righteousness in us.

And yet, without it, no 1 will enter Heaven.

It's known as the Gospel, which is good news.

And that is that God offers His perfect righteousness to us in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

When we put our trust in God and choose to accept the righteousness of Christ in place of our sins it becomes ours by faith yes we are able to receive the righteousness righteousness of God in the only way we can receive it.

There's a reason why we talk about righteousness by faith.

We get in trouble when we start putting something else in there.

And we try to say, well, it's got to have this part and it's got to have that part.

It all is centered on faith because there's no other way for us to be able to receive and accept the righteousness of Christ.

But we want to understand more in depth about that today, and so we're going to dig a little deeper as we start to look at those words we hinted at yesterday, imputed and imparted.

So brother, Howard, come and share with us where are we headed today?

Before I go into what I'm going to cover, I'd just like to ask the Lord for his guidance as we look at this topic today.

Heavenly Father, we are just grateful to be here, fellowshipping with 1 another, being able to open your word and study together, and having the confidence that the Spirit of truth will guide us into all truth.

Lord, this is our prayer this morning, not just in this seminar, but throughout this campground.

We thank you for the messages we've already heard as they have uplifted Christ.

And we just pray for more and more of the same.

I like what Elder Stain was saying there.

I mean, the bottom line is righteousness by faith is simply righteousness no other way.

You can't get righteousness by your birthright.

You can't get righteousness for an amount of money.

And you alluded to this, Elder Stamman, the Gospel is good news for a reason.

And that reason we looked at yesterday in Romans 1.

If you have your Bibles, you can look at it again today.

Actually, 16 and 17, the Bible says, I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek, because, that word for means because, this is why it's good news, because in it, the what?

Ah, that's the thing I need, that's the thing you need.

The righteousness of God, Where can I find it?

It's in the Gospel, it's revealed, notice, from faith to faith.

If you have faith in Christ, the righteousness of God is revealed as accessible to you and to me, as we learned yesterday.

David mentioned this, it certainly is a conundrum.

When you're trying to present righteousness by faith, when you have millennia of theology, You can't escape theological terms, and too often theological terms really don't edify lay people.

And even if I were to dare say non-theological terms, let's talk about imputed righteousness.

The word imputed appears nowhere in the New International Bible.

Many of the theological, biblical terms we use came when they all read the King James.

And So now, many people, I'd say the majority of Christians, don't read the King James, and yet we still have terms, and people are totally unacquainted with what they mean.

And you can't go to the Bible to find what they mean, because they're not there in the Bible.

In the King James version, in the context of the story of Abraham, where it's typically associated, well, specifically where it says Abraham believed God and it was imputed unto him for righteousness, you don't find that in Paul's account in Romans.

Take your Bibles and go with me to James.

Right after Hebrews, you have the book of James, James chapter 2, verse 23.

In fact, we're going to open up here, and we're going to close here today.

The Bible says, "...and the scripture was fulfilled, which says, Abraham believed God, and I'm reading in the New King James, it says, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

I'd have to be reading the King James to get the word imputed.

Now, in the New King James, I will find the word imputed in Romans chapter 4, where it talks otherwise about Abraham, but in this particular verse, both here and James, when he quotes, he's quoting from Genesis 15-6, When Abraham came back, we're going to get into that.

And Paul quotes from the same place in Romans 4.

03 Righteousness by Faith and Sanctification

Father in heaven, thank you for the beautiful sunshine.

And we're grateful for the rain as well, for the reasons we've talked about.

And this world is in a drought, not of physical rain, but of spiritual rain.

And Lord, we just pray that you will send your Holy Spirit to us in the abundance of the latter rain again, as you've promised.

And thank you for hearing our prayer, guide our class today.

May your spirit speak through us in Jesus name, amen.

We've got a lot of ground to cover, literally a lot of material we want to share with you today.

A couple of quick things I want to mention to you.

These are the books that we've been speaking of and those of you who've been in my classes a couple of the last couple of years know I've been referring to them heavily.

You really can't understand where we are today if you've not read these books.

And I'm telling you, I've given this to lay people, they've read the book and they said their lives have been changed.

I want to encourage you if you've not read these books that you need to read these books.

They're available, I'm not sure whether they're available at the ABC, but I know there's a booth across the way here in the exhibit tent, and I know that these books are available over there, and if you don't have them, please get a hold of them and read them.

Now you can get them free as Elder Howard said, but my encouragement to you is this is 1 of those times when you need a physical book and Don't forget the footnotes as you read these, especially in this book, you must read them.

Ron Duffield is the author of the book, both books, and you wanna make sure that you take advantage of it.

Somebody's requested, could you share the titles for the people who are, if they can't see it necessarily on the camera?

The Return of the Latter Rain is the blue 1, and it has raindrops all over it, so you know it's The Return of the Latter Rain.

And the Wounded in the House of His Friends is the other 1.

This 1 was the original book, and he's promised the second volume of this book, but He hadn't gotten the second book out, so he came out with a kind of an interim book, and we're still bugging him for the second book.

The trouble is he's such a researcher that he's digging so deep, and he's just got too much to put in.

And I'm trying to encourage him, look, you've got to get this book out.

Yeah, and he's a layperson, that's part of the challenge.

He has a real day job, and that's part of the difficulty he has.

What is the name of the booth where we can get it?

I don't remember what the name of the booth is.

Another book that we've been referring to is Faith and Works, and this is by Ellen White, a compilation of her statements in regard to this, so that's available.

I know that's at the ABC for sure, and encourage you to get a hold of that.

So we want to just dig in real quick here and review what we've talked about.

Review just gets our mind back into gear.

You go to other seminars, you go to other presentations, And now we've got to get our brain back in gear here.

We talked about the fact that when we believe God with the same quality of faith that Abraham believed in, that you can find that He, Jesus, gives life to the dead, that he creates all things out of nothing, that whatever he promises he is more than able to perform, and when we believe God like that, then his perfect righteousness is imputed, credited, posted to us through his son, Jesus Christ.

Reviewing the statement that Alan White made in Faith and Works, page 101, Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness.

Quoting from Romans 4, verse 3, righteousness is obedience to the law.

The law demands righteousness, and this the sinner owes to the law, but he is incapable of rendering it.

The only way in which he can attain to righteousness is through faith.

By faith, he can bring to God the merits of Christ, and the Lord places the obedience of his son to the sinner's account.

Christ's righteousness is accepted in place of man's failure.

And we have failure, He has victory, and that he imparts to us.

God receives, and God receives pardons, just receives pardons, justifies the repentant believing soul, treats him as though he were righteous, and loves him as his son.

This is how faith is accounted righteousness.

You know, that's about as clear as it gets.

Go home, read it, thank you for being here today.

I mean that that just kind of summarizes it.

On page 106 she says, it is the righteousness of Christ that makes the penitent sinner acceptable to God and works his justification.

However sinful has been his life, If he believes in Jesus as his personal Savior, he stands before God in the spotless robes of Christ-imputed righteousness.

Or, better put, the Scriptures are supported by what Ellen White shares with us.

Now you can't have a discussion about righteousness by faith without a date showing up in there somewhere.

You just can't within Seventh-day Adventist Church and the way God has led in this church have a discussion without mentioning 1888.

And the trouble is that some people get connected with that date and then start doing all kinds of strange things.

I actually, a couple years ago, I was teaching my class And somebody came after a couple days of class and said, they were talking to 1 of our retired pastors who had retired in another state somewhere, and he had been a teacher in a Sabbath school class, but he would mention 1888 from time to time, and people got angry at him for even mentioning it.

Ellen White makes it clear that this is something that we need.

She said, the Lord in his great mercy sent a most precious message to his people through Elder Jones and Wagner.

Why would we start getting angry about Jesus' most precious message?

Series

Righteousness By Faith: The Rest of the Story

04 Righteousness by Faith and the Heavenly Sanctuary, Part 1

Transcript

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Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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03 Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians

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Righteousness By Faith: The Rest of the Story

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1 The Sanctuary Prayer

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Righteousness By Faith: The Rest of the Story

03 Righteousness by Faith and Sanctification

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