Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Christ Our Righteousness

Royce Snyman

01 - 135 Years Later

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Father in Heaven, we are grateful for all that You have done for us.

What Jesus did for us, we truly don't comprehend in its fullness, in the wonderful message of the righteousness of Christ, that you want us to understand, you want us to know about.

I pray that you will spend this time with us, that you will give us instruction through your Holy Spirit.

That's the most important source that we have available to us.

And you've told us that we need to ask that you will guide us and that you will lead us.

So I pray that you will indeed take charge of this class, what I say and what we all hear and I pray this in Jesus name, Amen.

The person who's in charge will be here in a few minutes and we'll see what she does about the chair situation if we happen to need it.

We still got a couple to do, so that's all right.

As you can see on the screen, as I bring up the big slide here, I know the title of our class is Christ Our Righteousness.

I want you to know there's a connection here.

I'm going to give you a little bit of a background as to why I'm beginning at this particular point and sharing this with you.

Please note that the opening slide says this original presentation was by Ron Duffield.

Have any of you ever listened to Ron Duffield and so on?

At the moment I think we're okay, but you probably need about 5 chairs.

So, I knew I was going to do this presentation and I had material that I had that I was planning to use and share.

I've been so blessed by Ron Duffield's materials.

How many of you have read Return of the Lateran?

It's not good because this is the right place to be, because I need to tell you, you need to read that book.

I've asked people to read that book before and they came back and told me it's changed their lives.

And I can tell you it changed mine, so that would be a good place to be able to start.

I can't get into all my own personal journey with all of this, but I do want you to know that I've been tremendously blessed by Ron Delfield's work and his faithfulness and sharing the message and giving us especially the approach that he's taking and sharing the history of God's work in our church.

And that's really a major part of our focus during this time.

And I had this material that I was going to share but you know you just kind of I wish I'd talked to Ron Duffield you know I just thought I really ought to talk to him and find out what's happening.

The last time I talked to him was about 3 years ago.

If you get a chance to go back and some of the camp meeting presentations and listen to some of the things he shared here, you'll be tremendously blessed.

There are other places you can get many of his presentations on the Return of the Latter Rain and all, lots online and all of that.

But I got on the phone and I called him and I didn't know if he remembered me but he did.

And I asked him, I said, you know, I know that you're working on volume 2.

Because like us, the rest of us, we're wondering if we'll ever see Volume 2.

And the only thing I hope prevents Volume 2 from coming out is the return of Jesus.

And if that doesn't, that's fine, because then we can get it from the source directly and we can spend that way and we still can.

But with a conversation I decided I needed to talk to him and asked him what was happening.

And he told me that it's interesting that the last 2 to 3 years have really given him a slightly different focus.

And so I was interested in what he had to say about that.

And we had a conversation for the time we had available on the phone.

And by his graciousness, He said, I'll be happy to send you the presentations that I did.

Because it gave me a chance to really digest what we talked about a lot more.

And I said, really, I've got to be able to share this.

Not only did he give me permission to do it, but he also gave me permission to use it as I saw fit.

Which is good because there's 6 hours of presentations and I've got 3.

So I want to dig into this and that gives you a little bit of a background.

Those of you who don't know me, this is my family.

I think many of you know my wife, Lori, and also our kids.

My daughter, Kristen, is in the middle with her husband, Kevin.

And Carlo is a part of our family as well.

He originally was born and raised in Haiti and by miracles of God's grace he made it to the United States literally 1 week before the major earthquake that hit Haiti.

And if he had been there, he probably wouldn't be here, because of where he was.

Carlo came into our family, my daughter and Carlo are pretty close to the same age, And Carlo was not married when we got acquainted with him, but 3 years ago, we had the privilege of marrying him and his wife, Chiara.

She's a physician, and both of them are finishing up school.

That's a whole other story that I'll spare you from today, because we want to get into this.

Lori and I currently live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Saudi Daisy to be specific, and right north of Chattanooga about 30 minutes.

And we're enjoying retirement because we get to choose what we want to do instead of somebody else telling us all the time.

The Lord gets to tell us and we want to do that, right?

So in talking to Ron Duffield, he mentioned the fact that 1 of the things that really came to light for him was the issue of liberty of conscience.

And the question, of course, is what in the world does that have to do with Righteousness by Faith?

And the answer is, especially in relationship to 1888, it has everything to do with it.

And as we will see in our presentation today, it also is going to have a direct relationship with the content of our understanding of righteousness by faith.

I think that you will pick up some of these connections.

Ron Duffield made a couple of comments that I want to share with you because they are helpful to us.

He mentions the fact that, like myself, he grew up a Seventh-day Adventist, and had always understood religious liberty in relationship to the last days as tied to, what do you think?

I mean, isn't that what comes to your mind?

I know Elder Cody is doing a class on Sunday laws and so on, and that's great because it's related and it's connected but he said over the last 3 years he began to realize that there was more at stake and so he He happened to look on his shelf, his bookshelf, and saw a book up there by A.T.

And ironically, with all the work that he has done, he's a respiratory therapist, but he ought to have a degree in history, a doctoral degree, because he seems to know more about this area of history than anybody I've ever met.

And his understanding of it is phenomenal.

And so he pulled his book off the shelf and he said, I've had it there but I've never really looked at it.

Jones, and I'll tell you the title a little later, it's blanking out of my head right now.

And he opened it up and saw in the introduction the basic fact that this material was actually more or less, I'll use the word which is not quite accurate, but the transcripts of the presentations that he made at the 1888 General Conference.

And he was floored by that because we've always understood that there were no transcripts or there was no record of what was shared at 1888 and then General Conference in Minneapolis.

And so he was fascinated with that and so he started to read through it.

Based upon his experience together with what he was reading there, he realized that in many of the things that he was presenting, he needed to include this ingredient, which is why I bring it to you now, and I think you'll understand why it fits in so well.

02 - Return of the Latter Rain

Father in Heaven, grateful we are that Your Holy Spirit has been promised to us, but we also realize as human beings that we get confused from time to time.

Well, the truth is we get confused a lot.

And we just know that we need your Holy Spirit to give us the wisdom and insight.

And we need clarity from your word to be able to know exactly what you're trying to tell us and how you want us to be connected with you and how you want us to be connected with you, and how you want us to learn to live by faith.

So we pray that your spirit will guide our conversation today as we spend some time reviewing some history as well as seeking to understand the truth for these last days.

So to give you a little bit of a synopsis of what we talked about yesterday, In essence, if you will read the newspapers for today and realize that exactly what's happening today is exactly what happened 140 years ago, you'll get the context correctly.

I'm talking about the nature of what's going on around us constantly, from immorality to political upheaval and conflict and things that we just didn't associate with what was happening before, and I had never realized how broad that whole situation really was and how challenging it was to God's church in those days.

We shouldn't be surprised because it's very clear when you read our history and you read what Ellen White has to say, you recognize that Jesus wanted to come before now.

She tells us and makes that pretty clear, that He could have come before now.

He wanted to come then, and that's what I'm trying to help you to recognize that number 1 he wanted to come But number 2 he couldn't come and there's a reason and I know that's kind of a strong statement, but maybe you'll stay with me until I have a chance to try to prove that point a little bit to you, and I think today will help.

Immorality was 1 of the things that was going on during that time.

The nature of politics was a challenge, that was huge.

The newspapers from those days looked like newspapers from today.

The liberal movement and the political right movement, the development of the NRA, not the National Rifle Association, but the National Reform Association.

They were rebelling against what was going on on the liberal side of politics, and they were concerned about losing America.

They used the same kind of language that we're hearing today, that we've got to take our country back.

They were even willing to go to civil war.

They were using that language and understanding that they were willing to go to civil war after the civil war had just happened in order to be able to get their country back.

How many of you have heard that in the news in our day?

And I could share a lot more with you, but I'm not gonna take the time to do that because I want the emphasis to be on where we're going and what I have to share with you.

And that whole context provided the direction that God said, look, I wanna come back, I'm ready to come back, And I have a way to prepare you for what's coming on the world.

And that's what we want to talk about today.

The preparation that God had in mind came about in Minneapolis.

I'll give you a little bit of a background.

But by the way, here is the book I was telling you about yesterday.

It's the book Civil Government and Religion by A.T.

And he was part of the team of Jones and Wagner.

And to summarize what I said to you about this yesterday, Ron Duffield, who wrote the book, The Return of the Latter Rain and wounded in the house of his friends, which I'll come back to a little later.

He found this book on his shelf, opened up the introduction and realized that what Jones had been sharing with the ministers and the delegates in 1888 was actually revealed in here because it says that this basically, my words, was this was the transcript of what Jones shared.

And that's important because he said, we didn't realize we had that information about what it was that Jones shared.

And so as he read that book, he started to say, I've got to include that with what I share in relationship to 1888 and that whole experience.

I think you can get both of them on Amazon and you may be able to find it on PDF if you don't mind reading a PDF form or doing something like that.

So I just want to let you know about that.

History is critical to us because we're condemned to repeat history if we don't understand it.

The Bible, Anybody of you ever read the Bible?

Well according to Paul, there's a good reason.

1st Corinthians 10-11, now all these things happened unto them for examples, "'and they are written for our admonition, "'upon whom the ends of the world are come.'" Are the ends of the world coming upon us?

So We especially need to be paying attention to this.

But that doesn't mean that we only need to look back to the Old Testament or even the New Testament to understand their history.

But that sheds a tremendous amount of light on our situation.

But it also includes the fact that we need to know our own more recent history, because God wasn't done with the work in the experience of the disciples.

They spread the gospel to the world, but the work was not finished.

The Reformation came along and the message of the scriptures only went to the world and it was not done yet.

And there were other, there was other work to be done.

We talked about William Miller yesterday, and he brought the message of the return of Jesus, and all over the world there were hundreds, and he even says thousands, of people who were preaching the message around the world.

That was setting the stage for Jesus' return.

That was the message of the first angel going forward.

The gospel together with the judgment and together with the Sabbath.

Notice the gospel comes first and then we need to understand the sanctuary message and they're combined and they work together and the 10 Commandments are together all in that short little package of 2 verses in Revelation chapter 14.

Ellen White made it clear also how important our history is, including our own history, where she said this famous statement you can all quote.

As a matter of fact, let's read it together and you can just simply quote it if you remember it.

We have nothing to fear for the future except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us and his teaching in our past history.

You cannot afford to miss that connection.

After the great advent movement of the 1840s, the great disappointment of 1844, the scattered flock as they sometimes called themselves began an intense study of the scripture.

You know sometimes we have to go through great disappointment before God can get our attention and say, you know, maybe you really need to read the Bible.

Now you're gonna say, wait a minute, you know, William Miller, he read the Bible through, and he wouldn't go from 1 verse to the next until he understood the 1 before it.

They did too and they still didn't get everything.

Because we're human beings and we have a hard time assimilating everything and understanding it.

But God says, I've got to get the whole thing done.

I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but that's this human being trying to say that's what God's trying to help us to understand.

So there were Bible conferences that took place after the Great Disappointment.

And through those Bible conferences, God's believers, the Advent believers, the Adventists, not yet Seventh-day Adventists, believers, hammered out the doctrines, most of which you and I, not most of which, but the foundation for what we have today.

And those doctrines form what we need today.

But along the same time, the moral conditions in America were deteriorating greatly.

It says, Ellen White said in the review, many who profess to be looking for the speedy coming of Christ are becoming conformed to this world, seek more earnestly the applause of those around them.

Then the approbation of God, rather than seeking the applause of those around them rather than the approbation of God.

They are cold and formal like the nominal church that they, but a short time since, separated from.

So she's reminding them they've gone through this whole time of separation from the churches because they had begun to understand the message of Revelation and even more deeply than they did before 1844 and yet now they were beginning to turn around and become worldly like the churches they had lived.

The words addressed to the Laodicean church described their present condition perfectly.

Notice, I want to remind you, I'm going to highlight these dates because those dates are important in helping us to grasp what is progressing and taking place.

She's beginning to try to say to the church that Laodicean message is important for us.

Now that's important for us also to understand because up until this point, the message of the Laodicean church in Revelation chapter 3 had been understood by the Seventh-day Adventist Church as applying to the Sunday-keeping churches.

And this is the first time that we begin to see Ellen White and the pioneers beginning to direct the Laodicean message to where it really needed to be, and that is into God's church.

And that, by the way, sets the foundation for what took place in 1888.

Ellen White describes that there are divine remedies in the Laodicean message.

Faith and love are the gold tried in the fire.

And then in Faith and Work, she says, they need the divine love of God, which is represented by gold, tried in the fire.

03 - Christ Our Righteousness

Father in Heaven, as we begin our study again today, we invite your Holy Spirit to be here.

Lord, we are pleading with you for the return of Jesus and especially for the return of the latter reign that will prepare us for the return of Jesus.

We know that we are compacting a lot of information and a lot of what you've done in our past into just a brief period of minutes, literally.

I pray that we might all go home and be challenged to study more deeply and especially to develop a closer relationship with Jesus that you have been longing for us to have.

And I pray that you will bless our study now, in Jesus' name, Amen.

So we left off yesterday talking a little bit about the Minneapolis meetings, which I want to pick up and continue on today.

And I'll pick up a little bit of where we were and then launch into the rest of it.

Again, I reminded you that The Return of the Lateran is an absolute must-read.

And if you cannot, For whatever reason, you can't read the whole book, you must at least read chapters 3 and 4.

As I mentioned last time, when we had the background of all the things that were going on in the civil liberty area that A.T.

Jones was placing his emphasis on, along with his emphasis and Wagner's emphasis on the message of righteousness by faith, Christ our righteousness, justification by faith, all that they were talking about.

They placed that emphasis, Jones was placing a lot of direct information in the hands of people relative to what was going on in the civil liberty world.

If you weren't able to be here on Monday especially, please be sure and get some of the material there.

I've mentioned a book as well and it'll be in some of the other notes that Jones wrote, but I don't have time to go back into all of that.

That whole setting of what was happening in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, and 1870s, and into the 1880s, was a transition that I dare say the devil was setting the stage for what he wanted to accomplish.

The devil knows prophecy so he knows what he's got to do to try to thwart what's coming, because he knows that what's coming is that God is preparing his people to finish this work, And his goal is to thwart that and defeat it.

And so in those days, with all that was going on in the political world and that whole experience, A.T.

Jones was preaching about those issues and helping people understand it and using the American Sentinel to be able to alert the world and the people around, not just Adventists, but what was going on and why, what the NRA was doing, National Reform Association, not rifle, and what he was trying to help them to realize how dangerous what was going on was.

But they were coming up to the time of the Blair Bill and the introduction of a constitutional amendment establishing the United States as a Christian nation, and all in the effort to try to defeat what was going on in the liberal world, and God was saying to His people, this is what I've been telling you about and now it's here.

But I don't want you to worry about that, that's My words.

I don't want you to worry about what's going on, be aware, but I want you to know that I am here and that your need is my salvation and my experience that I want to give to you.

So Ellen White talked about the measuring of the temple of the worshippers.

Remember we talked about it, she saw an angel standing with a measuring tape and as people came through into the going into the temple, they were being measured as to whether they could go in or not.

And that was all symbolic of the fact that God was trying to help his people and those that were preparing for the return of Jesus, that not just anybody was going to be ready.

It was only going to be those who were fully and completely surrendered to Christ.

Ellen White said, we should seek to have our actions of such a character that we will not shrink from having our Savior look upon them.

Christ is here this morning in this presentation she was giving on October 19.

Angels are here and they are measuring the temple of God and those who worship therein.

The history of this meeting will be carried up to God for a record of every meeting is made.

The spirit manifested, the words spoken and the actions performed are noted in the books of heaven.

It is amazing to me what had become a reality in the hearts of God's people and God's leaders and God's ministers.

And let me tell you that when I say these things, I keep looking and saying, wait a minute, I've been a leader, I am a minister, and I have to be listening to this.

They were gathered at the general conference and the only thing you got to do is bring a chair for yourself.

So When these meetings were taking place and Ellen White was being shown the evenings, in the evenings she was being shown what was taking place in the sleeping rooms of the ministers and what they were talking back and forth and making mockery of the of Jones and Wagner and of the message and all that they were hearing.

And then Ellen White would in the next morning would get up and stand in front of the ministers and say, this is what you were saying in your rooms.

Now, I don't know, I'm hoping that I would say, oh wait a minute, if she knew what was going on in the rooms, maybe God's trying to lead her to something.

But instead, what in reality happened is the minister started to rebel against Ellen White and actually began to consider her as becoming senile, old, and no longer a prophet of God because obviously she was going against what they believed.

I mean, I stagger to understand that, and I'm not making this up, folks.

I'm trying to be realistic, because the same thing can happen to us.

And the truth of the matter is the same thing is happening to us in many cases, and we don't really pay attention to it.

She said, here I want to tell you what a terrible thing it is.

If God gives light and it is impressed on your heart and spirit, for you do as they, the Jews, did, God will with, if you do what the Jews did, God will withdraw his spirit unless his truth is accepted.

She realized what was happening because the Spirit of God.

So she was warning about these things because the possibility of what she was warning about was very real.

Series

Christ Our Righteousness

01 - 135 Years Later

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

From Shame to Grace

05 A Biblical Journey of Healing

1h 1m

Healing Remedies Through the Storm

04 Contrast Shower, Heating Compresses, Steam Inhalation

53m

Healing Remedies Through the Storm

03 Hot Foot Bath, Contrast Bath and Home-style Russian Bath

43m

Health, Science, and the Bible: Making Good Soup

05 The Battle for the Mind

47m

Reasons to Believe

05 The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

50m

What Did Jesus Do?

05 The Perfect Priest

52m

Christ and the Heavenly Sanctuary

04 The Day the Devil Dies

1h 4m

Berry Bounty: A Guide to Growing Your Own Delicious Berries

03 Growing Blueberries

58m

How to Introduce Ellen White to New Believers

03 How the Early Church Related to Prophets

50m

Plenary

The Mother of All Conspiracies

1h 13m

How to Tell Children's Stories Well

How to Tell Children’s Stories Well Part 3

1h

Studies in 1 Corinthians

03 Sexual Immorality in Corinth

53m

Sound Doctrine