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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jeff Horn

Righteousness by Faith

Dear Lord, we come to you this morning, and we're thankful for your Sabbath day.

We're thankful for so many blessings that you've given us, especially during this holiday season.

Thank you for the gift of technology, especially right now that allows us to still get together and learn more about you and study your word.

So I just ask that you would empty me this morning and just speak through me God because I just want it to be your words and I ask this in your name, amen.

The title of what I'd like to share today is Righteousness by Faith, the Heart of the Gospel.

And I know that we can't interact how we normally would, but I still wanna ask you some questions for you to think about.

And I'm gonna do that maybe at a couple of points today.

So the first question that I have is, do any of you have anything that's really important to you?

You know, think about maybe your children is probably a big 1 or family members of some sort.

Maybe a job, a career that's important to us, or just things of value that we own.

What if we were to start out by losing everything we own, but not only that, we lose our source of income, So we can't even buy those things back.

But not only that, something happens, something terrible happens to the members of our family.

Well, this is the situation that Job found himself in the Bible, but as we read through that story, we come to the point where we read, but in all of this, Job did not sin, nor charge God with wrongdoing.

And so what I wanna talk about today is that kind of faith.

That's the kind of faith that Jesus is looking for, and that's the kind of faith that will be prepared for heaven.

So how can we have that faith where we trust God even in the worst circumstances?

We're gonna talk about that as we consider the heart of the gospel, which is righteousness by faith.

So I actually want to start off in a little bit of a different place, and I think you'll see why we're starting here.

But consider what Ellen White says about the 3 angels' messages.

She says, the theme of greatest importance is the third angel's message, embracing the messages of the first and second angels.

All should understand the truths contained in these messages and demonstrate them in daily life and get this, for this is essential to salvation.

And I don't know about you, but if it's essential to salvation, that's something that I'm pretty concerned about knowing.

So let's talk about the 3 angels messages a little bit.

You know, this is something that If we've spent some time in the Adventist Church, we've certainly heard about, we're probably familiar with this is a message that we have to share with the world.

In many of our home churches, there may even be some pictures or images of the 3 angels.

I know there is in my home church where I grew up in Michigan.

But to me at least, until this further study on righteousness by faith that I've had the last couple years, the 3 angels' messages seemed more academic in nature than something that I could, I couldn't explain, you know, what is in there that I could actually demonstrate, could be demonstrated in my daily life, you know, but it's something that's essential to salvation, so we better find out what that is.

So what is at the heart of the 3 angels messages?

Well, this was a question even in Ellen White's time, notice what she said.

Several have written to me inquiring if the message of justification by faith, I'm gonna say, or righteousness by faith here, and I think you'll see that the term is fair, it's fair to interchange these terms here, is the third angel's message.

I have answered it is the third angel's message in verity.

The 3 angels message at the core of it really is righteousness by faith.

That's what we're going to spend the bulk of our time on today, is talking about righteousness by faith, and how can we actually have this experience?

How can righteousness by faith be something that is demonstrated in our daily life?

And apparently, it's pretty important that it is.

Now if you think about what the first angel has right at the beginning of the 3 angels messages, the first angel comes in and he has the everlasting gospel, correct?

So what the 3 angels, and this is what Adventism has maintained all along, is we are not sharing a new gospel with the world, it's the everlasting gospel, it's just that the gospel has been distorted over the centuries and we want to return, call people to return to the truth.

And so we understand that the 3 angels' messages are the everlasting gospel, but also at the heart of them, they are righteousness by faith.

And I wanna suggest to you that that's because that's what the gospel is all about.

So let's try to unpack that as we go through our study today.

So we're going to start in a place that might be, you might be wondering, you know, we're trying to talk about righteousness by faith.

But I think you'll see the reason why we are doing that.

I think the first thing that comes to mind usually when we talk about what is sin, we have 1 John 3, 4 in our minds, which says sin is the transgression of the law.

But I wanna tell you that if you listen to speakers throughout Christendom and within Adventism, you're gonna hear different definitions suggested of what sin is.

And some of them are kind of intricate, they may sound good, it may even be something that sort of feels good, but Bible and spirit of prophecy are very clear that sin is the transgression of the law.

And actually by my count, 13 different times, Ellen White said something similar to the following, which is the only definition we find in the Bible for sin is that sin is the transgression of the law.

Now, of course, the law is exceeding broad.

The law is not just external actions, but also our thoughts and our heart.

And so we can be guilty for something that we think, but that we never actually do.

There's also 2 conditions that need to be in place, according to the scriptures, that for God to actually hold us guilty for sin.

Notice how Spirit of Prophecy puts it, if light comes and that light is set aside or rejected, then comes condemnation and the frown of God.

But before the light comes, there is no sin for there is no light for them to reject.

James 4, 17 says, "'Therefore to him who knows to do good and does not do it, "'to him it is sin.'" You know, these things to me, they just speak of a reasonable God, and I'm very thankful to serve a reasonable God because he's not up there, you know, marking things down for that we had no opportunity, no chance to know, and no opportunity to make our own choice about.

With this understanding of sin, this definition of sin and these requirements, we're able to address another question that's going to be important for us.

Can I be guilty or an act or a sin that was committed by somebody else or a previous generation?

If we think about, we can go all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Our parents and their parents and all the way back have made many mistakes.

Of course, the first, and you could say the greatest in some ways was the mistake of Adam and Eve.

Those impact us probably in different ways today, maybe some more directly than others, but certainly, I mean, we live in a fallen world with all sorts of problems because of the mistakes made going all the way back to Adam.

But how does God look at us when we come into this world through no choice of our own?

How does he look at us in light of this, the mistakes that others have made?

Well, based on what we've learned so far about sin, I think this passage in Ezekiel 18 makes sense to us.

The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son.

The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.

So here we have it laid out pretty clearly that God holds us accountable for our own acts.

And again, I just find this to be reassuring because I feel that we are serving a reasonable God.

He's not holding us accountable for something that we had nothing to do with.

All right, so let's recap the key points of what we've learned about sin.

It requires our choice to do something different.

We have to know the law, what it says, and choose to go our own way.

And we stand guilty because of our own choices.

We all have sinned, the Bible is clear about that in Romans, we all have sinned and that's the reason that we stand guilty before God.

It's important because what we're going to talk about next is the human nature of Christ.

We always learn growing up that Christ came and he assumed humanity but he was still God.

I don't want this to come across as if I understand every nuance of the nature of Christ, because I don't think it's possible as humans for us to understand that.

But there are some key points that we can and need to understand.

And so if we start out from a place where we believe that we are guilty for the sins of our ancestors when we are born, then Christ can't really have taken the same nature as you and I when he is born because of course Christ can't be guilty.

And so what we have to do is we have to find some way to exempt Christ from our nature, and that has other ramifications down the line in how we understand righteousness by faith.

And so let's take a look at what nature Christ came in.

Hebrews 2 says, in as much then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same.

Notice the repetition there just for clarity.

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Righteousness by Faith

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