Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Going the Distance

Mark Howard

1. Not Far

2. The Little Engine that Couldn’t

3. Tragic Tale from Tinker Creek

4. Justification by Faith

5. Identifying Your Superpower

6. It’s Complicated

7. The Peril of Prayer

8. Finishing Strong

What a powerful As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

I want to welcome you as well as our viewing and listening audiences and those watching at Camp Losable.

I understand some are up at our summer camp watching and tuning in.

So praise the Lord and God bless you and what you're doing and continue to do for our young people there.

I was telling somebody here just I it just dawned on me I live in Cedar Lake.

How many of you here live in Cedar Lake in the area?

I mean, I've been here for a few years, but I'm looking at the weather this week and I'm thinking, it really isn't normally like this here.

I think that people who come to camp meeting probably think it just rains and is cloudy for 342 days out of the year.

It really isn't that way, but camp meeting, we get hit.

And that's in part because the enemy really doesn't like what's happening at camp meeting, which is really kind of exciting, isn't it?

I mean, if the enemy was happy with what was happening at camp meeting, that wouldn't be a good sign.

But praise the Lord That He is among us, His Spirit is with us, He has a message for us this morning.

And I want to pray that He enable me to deliver it correctly and for us all to hear and receive it.

So bow your heads with me if you would please as I pray.

Heavenly Father, Father I thank you again for another new day of life.

A day in which we can come to know You better, and Your Son Jesus Christ whom You have sent, and a day when we can better understand how to share Him with those who don't know Him.

Now Father, we don't want to just be hearers of the Word, deceiving ourselves, but we want to be doers of your Word.

So Father, give us ears to hear and hearts to respond this morning before we ask and pray it in Jesus' name.

I've entitled the series we're going through, Going the Distance, as I have shared, because I really believe this is the generation that can see Christ come in the clouds of glory.

And today's message I've entitled, Identifying Your Superpower.

You have a superpower, and we're going to talk about it today, and it may not be what you thought it was.

I want to review a little bit of what we looked at yesterday.

Yesterday we were talking about righteousness by faith, justification by faith, and we looked at the story of Abraham.

Well before we got there, we looked at what righteousness is in the Bible.

Righteousness is what's right according to God's idea.

We learned that righteousness is defined by God's 10 Commandment law, that it reaches beyond the outward actions to the very heart.

We learn that righteousness encompasses our thinking, our feeling, and our acting.

We learn that righteousness is required for heaven, and we learned that we have absolutely none of it.

But we also learned that God does have it.

God alone is righteous, And He offers that righteousness to us by faith.

In the Apostle Paul, using the story of Abraham, the father of the faithful illustrated what that saving faith looks like, believing that God is able to raise the dead to life and call into existence things that never had an existence before, and that whatever He promises, He's able to perform.

Believing like that appropriates to us the righteousness of Christ.

When we believe God like that, not considering our personal weaknesses and shortcomings, not allowing our circumstances to weaken our trust in His promises, His righteousness will be put to our account just as it was put to Abraham's account.

That's what we looked at yesterday, and that's powerful good news, isn't it?

Now here's what I want to get into this morning.

As I've said for those who've been coming, I've loosely based this on the book Steps to Christ.

But 1 thing I discovered is that steps to Christ is written in chapters, but those chapters aren't chronological in the Christian experience.

And so, for example, yesterday I was going to go over the chapter on consecration, and then today faith and acceptance, but the faith chapter kind of, in my mind, I wanted to get into that step first.

Consecration and faith and acceptance and the test of discipleship, all those things are kind of happening together in some way.

Yesterday we talked about Abraham's faith.

Today I want to talk about the effect of it.

What do we see when Abraham had that kind of faith that we've talked about, that unquestioning, unwavering trust in God.

When Abraham believed God, what did he do?

And we've got a challenge today in the Christian world, and it's even creeping in among us that we don't know where to put obedience.

Because obedience, that's legalism, isn't it?

I mean, obeying, that's all about you, and we want to be all about God.

But I want you to understand that when Abraham believed God, he obeyed God.

That's what James meant when he said, was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?

We looked at that at the end of the message yesterday.

He wasn't saying that Abraham was justifying himself.

He was saying that Abraham's act of offering Isaac was the evidence that he had appropriated the righteousness of Christ by faith.

We looked at this statement yesterday from Patriarchs and Prophets.

Obedience is 1 of the most striking evidences of faith to be found in all the Bible.

If there's no obedience, there's no faith.

I like this statement from the book Testimonies for the Church, Volume 2.

When we receive Christ, we receive his righteousness, and we are made righteous.

Wagner, in his comments on Romans 3, verse 24, makes this comment.

Let no reader forget the simple meaning of justification.

Now we've got people and their theological, big theological arguments, and I talked about it a little bit in 1 of our seminars yesterday where people say, oh no, no, justify doesn't mean make righteous.

Don't include anything that the Holy Spirit does in us in the work of justification.

But that's exactly what happens is when God declares anything.

Some people say, well, when God declares us righteous, it's not the same as making us righteous.

Answer me this question, when is any time God declared something that it didn't become a fact?

Why is believing in the six-day creation so important?

Because it brings our understanding that our God can do anything by just speaking it.

And when I read this, the Same powers in this word.

And so Wagner's just building on that point.

We're transformed when we accept Christ, when we believe in Christ.

Notice from Steps to Christ, page 57, if the heart has been renewed by the Spirit of God, the life will what?

While we cannot do anything to change our hearts or bring ourselves into harmony with God, we've talked about that, while we must not trust at all to ourselves or our good works, our lives will reveal whether the grace of God is dwelling within us.

A change will be seen in the character, the habits, the pursuits.

The contrast will be clear and decided between what they have been and what they are.

Series

Going the Distance

5. Identifying Your Superpower

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

ECYC 2012: Plenary Sessions

Messenger Without a Message

1h

ECYC 2012: Plenary Sessions

The Almost Christian

54m

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

John’s Work, Our Work, Part 2

55m

GYC SE 2012 Plenary Sessions

Where Am I Going?

1h

Testimony

1h 5m

Do You Love Me, A Question to Seventh-day Adventists

56m

Our Best Intentions

35m

On the Outskirts of Jerusalem

True and False Disciples

57m

Plenary Meetings

When The High Priest Leaves the Temple

1h

The Science of Surrender

52m

A Concise Guide to Primitive Godliness

08 - A Concise Guide to Faith

35m

Leadership in an Immoral World: Inescapable Culpability

42m

Sound Doctrine