Escaping Mormonism: Interview w/Dr. Lynn Wilder (ex-BYU Professor)

hey what's up everybody this is danny from c4c apologetics again i'm glad you're tuning in because today we're actually speaking with somebody that uh the topic is near and dear to my heart i've witnessed two mormons for countless years and and as you can tell i collect a lot of books of mormon pro great price doctrine and covenants gospel principles jsts and things like that but i'm actually able to interview someone that came out of the lds church and so today's guest is dr lynn wilder she's the founder i believe it's the founder of uh unveiling mormonism and has written the book unveiling grace as well we have dr lynn wilder you're also an ex-byu professor and so that's pretty amazing uh before we jump into the questions can you share just a little bit about yourself maybe how you really got out of mormonism just very briefly and succinctly and anything else you'd like to share oh the story of how i got out of mormonism is a long one it's in it's in the book feeling grace but uh yes i was at byu how amazing right i worked for the mormon church uh brigham young university is run by the mormon church i actually had to have my testimony vetted by a general authority of the mormon church in order to work at byu i was tenured at byu and they actually rank advanced me to associate professor a year early because of how many publications i had and i was doing a lot of stuff internationally but even if you're tenured at byu if you disassociate with the mormon church you cannot stay at byu and that's true for both um professors and for students we signed an honor code and at the bottom it says anyone who just affiliates with a mormon church if you're a student you cannot enroll in classes and you cannot graduate from the university wow so literally we've we've worked with uh byu students they're three different byu campuses and um one of them got to within two weeks i think before the end of his semester got found out that he was going to a christian church bishop called him in and they kicked him out of the university in three days and three days to get out so that semester counted for nothing wow and that that's fairly recently now byu is a private institution no correct yes owned and operated by the lds church yes some regard i could understand apostles sit on the board at brigham young oh okay yeah so he said 12 apostles and then what role does a quorum have any role would be byu um the quorum of the twelve apostles yeah six of them sit on the board at byu and help make decisions yes so it's a my boss used to tease me that it's a theocracy at byu it's not a democracy i could understand from church leaders right decisions are made whether you can have folk on campus or not oh what that that's one thing it's not the best thing to do but anytime i get a more missionary on the door i try to give them coffee so that's stuff like that but they don't ever take it but i just want to jump into some questions got a lot of questions to ask you i'm very excited like i said just to pick your brain a little bit because how long were you actually in the lds church my husband and i joined at age 24 um and we were in 30 years exactly 30 years yeah very very active we both had lots of leadership positions and mike and i not only were temple recommend holders who wore temple garments for 30 years but we actually worked in a mormon temple for 10 years so um it's a little bit unusual there are a number of christian apologetics ministries that kind of do mormonism and research mormon history and stuff but the ministries that actually have former mormons in them are are quite rare and so our entire ministry is filled with former mormons so the role that we kind of play is helping mormons who are questioning their faith right transition to learn about biblical faith and so that they might make a healthy decision after mormonism um as to whether biblical christianity is something they want to do and mormons typically love jesus right i mean they've spent a lot of time thinking they were pleasing him with mormonism so a lot of them when they learn about things about church history and joseph smith that make them question the mormon church they still have a heart to keep jesus a lot of them that's a whole point of relearning who jesus is who god is you know what truth is and where do you go for all of that i can tell you in my transition out of mormonism i feel like it took me nearly five years of reading the bible before and i was in it every day mike and i were in a couple of bible studies a week you know in that church whenever pastor would open the door just because it's a whole new world outside of mormonism the teachings of mormonism do not dovetail with christianity at all wow that's wow well we i would love to just continue just these conversations and everything but i really like that but i want to go ahead and jump into questions and then we'll take some sidebars here and there okay so uh i always want to start off with a softball so i have a i have a son and a daughter and i asked him hey what what question do you want me to ask this ex-mormon professor and so my daughter wanted me to ask you what is your favorite food hall your daughter how old is she she is 15 probably twizzlers twizzlers i haven't really heard that one i mean i like a lot of foods but you know yeah i'll let her know that she'll watch a video as well so whenever we have mormon missionaries knock on our door at first i used to slam the door i used to be one of those people but then i realized you know what god is allowing them to come to my doorstep to witness to them so take advantage of the opportunity so one thing i've learned to do was to ask them how did they get involved within the mormon church because everybody has a story how did you and your husband get involved in the lds church i grew up presbyterian um in indiana my husband grew up hellfire and damnation baptist in indiana um i would say neither of us were born again we i went to church every week but it would have been a social thing for me i didn't get it but when mike and i were 24 and we'd been married three years we were looking for a church thinking we would have a family and we should probably do church right we believed in jesus mormon missionaries knocked on the door one day when mike was home working on his master's thesis and i was on teaching school um he opened the door to them and he was fascinated by what they were telling him now here here's the problem 80 some percent according to pew institute of people that join mormonism come right out of biblical christianity nominal christianity people like me who didn't know the bible so mormonism the mormon missionaries would talk about prophets and you're like oh yeah i've heard of prophets they had prophets in the bible you know but i i don't know that luke 16 16 says jesus themselves has the law and the prophets were until john the baptist right glad jesus came and spoke for himself um i i don't know enough about faith to know that and so those mormon missionaries were so kind and my husband was teaching at a local university and there was a professor in his department that was lds and that professor and his wife started inviting us to dinner and pretty soon we had social status university status in the church and we felt like we belonged to this very warm and welcoming family so lots of people join mormonism i think because of these teachings about how wonderful family is it's very warm and fuzzy you know and they'll take you in if you move to utah and you're not lds you might have neighbors bringing you chocolate chip cookies and pies once a week you know they're just um they know how to love people into the gospel into the mormon gospel yeah sign me up i'm i love i love some cookies plus utah is a beautiful area so i don't know i don't know how the connection is over there i'm getting a little bit of choppy if we get disconnected we'll try to connect again but okay internet's acting up a little bit but yeah if what i understand utah is a pretty area i know apologia studios that i don't wholeheartedly agree with they have a lot of work out there also so and i definitely understand the aspect there was one time we were witnessing to mormon missionaries and i asked i i didn't know this until the time that female missionaries are called sisters you know and i was gonna call her sister because she wasn't a sister in christ so i called her by her first name and had a nice conversation but i learned that she believes her like great-great-grandmother or something like that was involved and was killed in the missouri massacre so i always find it very interesting to know uh how did they be get into the mormon church because there was one time i was witnessing to a mormon and we're talking about proxy baptisms baptisms for the dead and i was like you know the passage used in first corinthians you know that's talking about it that's not what it means you know once we're we die that's it it's the judgment and we can't baptize and and so i was telling them all this then i find out like a month earlier they had done it for his grandfather in hopes for him to receive the gospel and so i've learned it's important to go ahead and reach out to them first find out their background but i was very i learned about you through your son like we were talking about before and i want to ask you this question because uh there's a lot of humility with you and your husband and i'm going to say this can you explain how you came to realize that the lds church was not true how difficult was it for you as a parent to listen to your mormon son leave mormonism and then to listen to your son to bring you and your husband out of the lds church so how difficult was that well i remember when i said mormonism is all about families they believe in something called families forever when you go to a mormon temple a husband and wife are sealed for this life and for the next life so literally mormons believe that you're married for this life you're married for the next life and if you live the commandments and do all these righteous things according to mormonism and do all the right ordinances that you can live together as a family in the next life but in mormon families the elders kind of rule i mean it's not unusual in utah for adult families to go home to mom and dad's for sunday dinner still every week it's not unusual for mom to call her daughter who might be 35 and married every day and know everything about what's going on in her life so when our son read the new testament a dozen times on his mormon mission as a mormon missionary decides it's not mormonism and that he wants the god of the bible goes to his knees gives his life to this god and then gets in lots of trouble with the mormon church did that upturn my family absolutely here's what mormonism taught me that he now could not be with my family in the next life he's he's saying he believes that he's saved by grace do you know what mormonism teaches you're saved by the laws and the ordinances of the mormon gospel that's the third article of faith so you're saved by rules and regs and works and keeping those works is really not so different from this long and that if you do all of the right things but at the end of life if you've done enough god's grace might kick in and save you mormons if you ask a mormon or you're stayed they always say i hope so right they have no assurance of salvation in this life and they have no idea that you as a christian do that you know that you're saved right these are positive things that we can offer to mormons that they don't know anything about it upturned my family it upturned your family emotionally because if you allow them that sun back into your family that cancer might spread he might convince someone else to go to christianity and then your eternal family falls apart so yes our perfect mormon family once micah got saved began to tumble micah began to share that faith with the brother with the sister and then there's all this contention in the family now we who are christians know that the life of a christian is full of trials persecutions that god can do good things with that but mormons actually believe a prosperity gospel the book of mormon teaches that if you live the mormon commandments then you will be blessed both temporally and spiritually so um nobody's supposed to leave the church right that means either i've sinned and done something wrong or he's sinned and done something wrong it's like the worst of the worst and then the mormon church leaders want you to cut him off get rid of that cancer before it infects anyone else so this is the situation that our family all of a sudden was thrust into and i'm working for the church right while all this is going on wow yeah i can and it's very similar we're going to get to this later on in the questions but again it's very similar to jehovah's witnesses and the whole aspect of disfellowship and excommunication and the fact of jehovah witness you you leave the jehovah witness faith there's no you can't have eternal life you can never be a part of the 144 000 and it's just this aspect of a fear tactic well yes the only way you go to hell in mormonism they call it outer darkness is to be a temple going mormon right who's had a witness from the holy spirit that mormonism is true and then to leave the faith so the only people going to outer darkness and mormonism would be satan his minions and apostates like me in particular if you're vocal about leaving the mormon church and if i'm not mistaken lds doctrine caused them sons of perdition those that left the lds church and everything so there you go yeah there's a lot of fear mormonism uses fear shame and guilt to try to keep people bound work space systems do that right if you have a standard and you're constantly measuring and if you don't measure up then you're just overwhelmed by this shame fear and guilt well when i read the new testament it says satan uses those things right to keep people in bondage and so that's not a good thing now you had made mention that a big teaching within mormonism is the fact of your family being together forever now we had talked beforehand about conundrums if you will but this is just something that just came to me so say a husband and a wife got married in the temple uh working on exaltation celestial kingdom becoming a god of their own planet type deal uh how does that work with them still maintaining their entire family you know what i mean it just seems like there's somewhat of a conundrum with that aspect of it well i can work you through the illogic of families forever um supposedly my husband was working his way to become a god and of course mormons believe that in the next life the righteous men should be polygamous right doctrine and covenants 132 so the idea is you live the commandments god decides to save you your pro they believe in something called eternal progression you're you're eternally progressing and learning you can eventually become a god a male can have his own planet have multiple wives and then people your own plan oh all of that's crazy okay but here's the thing if you have sons and they're righteous mormons they're going to grow up and have their own families and they're going to have their own planets so how in the world as a mother and dad and the kids living together on the same planet they're not my husband kind of jokingly says what are they supposed to do get in their cosmic station wagon and go visit their kids at christmas on another planet i mean if you think it through logically it doesn't even make any sense that families can live together in mormon philosophy right oh definitely you've explained that pretty clear so talking about all these illogical conclusions and conundrums and whatnot but no matter where i look and research or ask a mormon how do you know the odious church is true they always point me to the passage in the book of mormon talking about the burning bosom could you explain what the burning in the bosom is and why is there so much focus on experientialism as opposed to evidence yeah this is actually why my husband decided to join the mormon church there's a passage in moroni i think it's ten four and five that they challenge people who are investigating the mormon church with and it says to pray if these things are not true which is interesting you're not praying that they're true you're praying that they're not true anyway my husband prayed to find out if the book of mormon was true and then had a dream that night where he was defending the mormon people and he felt like god was telling him he had to march into mormonism but this was our first experience with all of this experientialism right mormonism is very touchy feely um look for electricity up your spine cry i honestly believe for 30 years that the more emotional something made me the more that meant it was true because that's how the holy spirit tells me that something's true so here's an example in mormonism you get something called your patriarchal blessing this is it's like telling your future there's a patriarch in mormonism and he lays his hand on your head and he gives you a blessing and then they write it down and it's supposed to be your future and here's what mormonism teaches you if you're righteous and you live the commandments this future will come true if you're not or you sin or you miss the mark then this future won't come true so see how easy that is to say oh it didn't come true you never had children like i said you would so oh you must have done something wrong very um in mormonism it's it's always about you okay so patriarchal blessings telling your future experiential events when that patriarch in lafayette indiana laid his hands on my head this was real i felt electricity flow from man's hands down through my body and i was so sure that that was a witness from the holy spirit that mormonism was true that my patriarchal blessing would come to pass and that was i had a number of those kind of experiences in mormonism so if someone would try to talk me logically out of that patriarchal blessing i would just la la la la la la not listen to them because i knew what i knew what i knew because i had this amazing experience it was not until i read the bible when i discovered things like the heart can't be trusted the heart of man is wicked about all things who can know it um and started realizing wait a minute you sometimes can't trust things that are experiential and then i realized too from the new testament that there is an unseen world and that unseen world has both angels and demons in it and that it's possible for demonic influence to happen and that that can certainly happen through feelings as well as many other ways and so then i'm totally freaked out well if i can't trust feelings as i'm reading the bible how in the world will i ever know what's true now that that definitely makes sense because even then like i've talked to more matter of fact a mormon had uh sent me inadvertently a facebook friend request and uh i guess part of what they're doing on missions now is through facebook and everything with covid but he sent me a friend request i didn't accept it but i was messaging him and we ended up having a long conversation and then one of the things we were talking about was this burning of the bosom or burning in the bosom and being able to uh test the spirits to see whether if they're from god and and he had admitted that yes he believes that too but the hard part is like like you were saying earlier is they don't necessarily believe in the bible they believe in the bible as far as it is translated correctly which would be the joseph smith translation and so from my understanding even if a mormon's like hey i have this experience so let me go to the bible not this but the jst and see what it says like you said they put more emphasis on joseph smith's teachings the church's revelation because they teach open revelation as opposed to what the bible god's word actually says and so i i see a definite conundrum there speaking of mormon missionaries could you explain regarding the mormon missions trips what's the purpose of the mission trips how are mormons selected and then what happens during those two years and why is it specifically two years so there's four questions wrapped up in one so if you could what's purpose of it uh why is it two years what do they do during the trip and how are they selected well first i probably should go back and talk about mormon scripture so this is clear okay uh the mormon church was actually sued a couple of years ago they used the king james version of the bible but they published their own so it is the king james version word by word except that the mormon for chapter headings and their own explanations for what's in that chapter and then they have their own footnotes so if you're reading a mormon king james it's going to take you to the book of mormon the pearl great other mormon sources to explain what that verse means um and the joseph smith translation is referred to often in the king james version of mormons king james but in 30 years of mormonism and even as a byu professor i did not know that joseph smith had gone from genesis to revelation and fixed everything that was wrong with the bible by 1833 like three years after he started the church yeah he'd gone through the whole bible and made a joseph smith translation i didn't even know that existed i just knew there was a source called the jst so a lot of mormons are not even familiar with the fact that joseph did that and they would not have a jst in their home okay now missionaries it is a rite of passage for young people in in mormonism particularly young males if you want a good spouse and you want that spouse to marry you in the temple and you're mormon and you're male you better be going on a two-year mormon mission where you're knocking on doors and you're doing everything you can do to spread the gospel now how many billions of people might be christian in the world of christians did something like that right yeah right here you you alluded to it earlier mormon missionaries knock on your door and beg you for an opportunity to talk about god and most christians say get off my doorstep go away or what whatever it is they're thinking and yet god sent them right to you i had christian family and mormonism i know nothing about the differences i didn't know anything about the bible and how it could be trusted i didn't know who your god was all i knew was what the mormon church taught me they tell you that you have the same god as the christians that they are lessers mormons are greaters and here's why um christians only have the bible and it's corrupt it can't be trusted and mormons have three scriptures on top of that and they're perfect so they do not mormons are not taught that you were opposite them you are potential converts you're just people that have a little of the truth you need the fullness of the truth added to it until i read the new testament i didn't realize that mormonism and christianity are as far from each other as the east is from the west there's no reconciling the two of them they teach very very different things in fact the adams road ministry my my kids uh ministry has identified 40 things mormonism teaches and then put together all the bible scripture on each of those 40 topics so the farmers can actually go to the bible and see what the god of the bible has to say about that and see how different that is than what mormonism is teaching them there is no dovetailing the two and yet in recent years mormons are saying we're christian too right i believe this started about the time they were grooming mitt romney to run for president okay when we joined the mormon church we did not want to be called christians you were lessers mormons were greater we never addressed ourselves as christians we were mormons we were proud to be mormons this weird christians too just started maybe 15 years ago and it's really muddied the water now many persians seem to believe that worms are just like them it's just another christian set right and mormons are super confused because they have no idea you have a very different god very different gospel yeah what uh during the missionary trips uh have you been on one yourself no we joined the church after we were already married this is something that you do as a young single so a few years ago the mormon church was losing so many young missionaries that they lowered the missionary age to 18 so now young men come right out of high school go straight on a two-year mission um so there's a lot of parental pressure they haven't lived on their own yet you know a lot of mormon families will say well go on a mission we'll give you a car go on a mission we'll pay for your college i mean there's a lot of pressure what all happens on a missions trip now i know they go go knock on doors and they go to a sort of like a training before they actually go to their field and the church ends up sending them the field that they're going to i guess from the prophet or whatever but once they're on the missions field and doing their missions besides knocking on doors are they doing other things what are they doing well they have very strict rules um for years they could not be they could not speak to their families except for mother's day and christmas like a 20-minute phone call twice a year the mormon church totally has control over those young men um they were only allowed on the internet once a week and that was only to send mission uh emails to their families and that server was owned by the mormon church so their communications were completely controlled they're a little looser now partly because they've lost so many young kids who didn't want to do missions i think because it was so strict they do service often on their missions they're happy to mow your yard often or sometimes they work in soup kitchens or in local libraries anywhere where they have access to people and can share the mormon gospel okay now i always hear people say all those mormons they're nice people yeah they're they're always doing good things granted articles of faith part part of the way they can gain eternal life is by doing works and it's by grace that you are saved it is by grace that you are saved after all that we can do according to second nephi i think it is but 25 23 yes it would just be amazing if someone said wow that baptist is a nice person or those verse battarians are nice you know but we just don't have the stigma like that but you had made a mention of the fact of the mormon god is totally different it took me a while to realize this because i thought jehovah and heavenly father were one and the same but i realized that they're not in that a lot of people teach that jehovah i think it was i think it was brigham young correct me if i'm wrong that had the statement that uh as god is ma as man is god once was and as god is man may become teaching the whole aspect of exaltation that was one of the prophets by by the name of snow oh there yeah lorenzo snow that's right lorenzo snow and so my thing is like here in the in one of the books of abraham in chapter four verse number one in the book of abraham it says that the lord said let us go down and they went down at the beginning and they that is the gods the gods plural now it's my understanding they hold to colossians chapter one that jesus created uh the heavens and the earth or at least jehovah did so what's the deal with the plurality of gods here jehovah and michael's jehovah created the holy ghost of the mormon temple yeah the archangel michael um who i think they say became adam but all all of that is not biblical so you okay you brought up a number of things first the nature of god the father is different between mormonism and and the bible and the nature of jesus is different between the two um and then you've brought up the creation but let's let's go to nature of god first so in mormonism there are multiple gods yes and there was a council of the gods that makes decisions and any good mormon man can earn his godhood so god the father they call him heavenly father earned his godhood at one point but that means he started out as a man did enough good works earned his godhood and is still progressing now here's one thing i learned in the bible the god of the bible knows all things from the beginning always dead always has he he's not learning every day i don't want a god who's learning every day because he's not the big he's not the big one he knows everything right so the mormon heavenly father is still progressing then jesus earned his godhood next he started out as a man sometimes even if you ask mormons well jesus was a man does that mean he would extend sometimes they say well i guess so or heavenly father maybe when he was a man but you know he did enough good stuff and then he earned his his godhood they actually believe you have to have a body of flesh and bone to earn your godhood this is all very different from the bible except the holy ghost they call in the holy ghost because of king james um is a god and they're not sure how he gained his godhood because it doesn't have a bond yeah you have three gods for this earth is what they'll say and then we don't worry about the other gods for the other earth but brigham young ryan once said that father had a father who had a father who had a father so there's a um an unlimited progression so so much i could ask you so much i'd want to ask you i need to get back to the questions and everything on the script but uh lds temple okay you had made mention that you were part of the team but of course i only got to point one on the differences in heavenly father and god the father they just go on and on and on go ahead and that is is that the stuff from adam's road lds topical guide uh some of this is from my husband in my ministry unveiling mormonism.com we're definitely going to have links to that your book the adams road ministry with your your children and everything that's fascinating that your kids have this own ministry about this that's wonderful but uh i've watched videos if you will within lds temple endowment ceremonies and receiving the tokens and things like that uh would you be able to explain what what exactly happens within a temple and what exactly is an endowment ceremony uh sure you can go to a mormon temple at age 12 for the first time and you go to the basement of the temple typically and do baptisms for the dead so if you're familiar with ancestry.com it's mormon affiliated and they gather from people who are putting together their genealogy they gather names of the dead and then they take those dead to the names to the mormon temple and someone in proxy for that person who's dead goes through nearly four hours of ordinances for that person because according to mormonism without the ordinances of mormonism you have no hope to be saved so baptism for the dead 12 year olds will go where there's this huge almost swimming pool kind of thing and some of them have the 12 oxen like the yeah like the old testament they used to do for washings and you will as a man with the priesthood will hold up his right hand and say um lynn wilder having been commissioned of jesus christ i baptize you uh foreign and behalf of mary dale who is dead and so then i get baptized i come up they give me another name i'm baptized i come up that's what the 12 year olds do wow before you go on a mission when you're like 18 um you're allowed to go through the temple proper which in a lot of temples is the next level it would be like the first level first thing you do is washings and anointings and you get a garment of the holy priesthood so mormons have underwear that they wear that's special that's supposed to protect you physically and spiritually and it's called the garment of the holy priesthood so washington anointings you get your garment you get a new name you know in revelation it says you'll have a new name um now as far as that name as far as that name is that like a common like english name or like do you know mine was caroline okay yeah and but what we've learned is anyone who goes through the temple for the first time on the same day gets the same new name so they've got a whole system that they okay you take your new name and you go to an endowment ceremony which i think is about um almost two hours hour and a half okay and part of it's live and part of it's watching a movie and doing during this endowment it's supposed to be instruction but what you learn are the signs and the tokens that you need in order to be saved in order to live with father in the next life so when you talk to mormons um rather than talking about the term salvation use the term eternal life because to them eternal life or exaltation they use those things interchangeably mean living with father okay and because you have three separate heavens and mormonism those who want to live with father have to do the most in order to get to the highest heaven and they're in the highest heaven there are actually three different areas if you want to get to the highest of the highest heaven you have to be sealed to a worthy spouse in the temple now think about that for a moment what if one of those spouses goes to biblical christianity right then you no longer can be saved to the highest heaven of the highest heaven if you're not married to a worthy mormon spouse and so as we see people get saved out of mormonism sometimes there's divorce because if the lds spouse is not open to hearing about biblical faith then they want to go on and find someone who's lds that they can be married to okay so during that endowment i i learn right the signs and the tokens which are very masonic many of them i was about to ask that because a lot of what happens at the veil if you will uh looks a lot like the masonic five points of fellowship in the handshakes and everything well they did do five points of fellowship until a certain point and then they gave that uh again uh this god changes his mind all the time so even the temple ceremony is changing constantly although they'll tell you this is the same ceremony adam went through but they they themselves keep changing it yeah so but here's here's a real problem in order to get resurrected in order to go through the veil and see heavenly father be with heavenly father if you're a man you use these handshakes and whatever if you're a woman you use the same handshakes but the person resurrecting you is not jesus or god the person resurrecting you is your husband he has priesthood authority over you so you need to go to the temple to learn all the he has to know your new name he has to call out your new name and then you have to go through these these handshakes and you have to say the right words in order to to get through the veil to the next life right yeah so it sounds like those uh undercover videos that i watched and everything were were legitimate videos because i've seen it there was new name noah yeah if if they were new named noah's yes he actually was in the temple when he did those videos i it may have been that one but i remember there was one where there's a big old basin with a bunch of oxen around and there was just this little girl just keep getting dunked over and over yeah those are baptisms for the dead right yeah so i uh i'd like to ask why is it so hard for a mormon to leave the odious church well it's hard because mormons are all about families forever and your family forever is going to be destroyed if everyone does not march to mormonism and have a temple recommend and and stay mormon all of their life right um so literally some families shun members who leave the church so if you've seen leah remini's series on scientology mormonism may not be as overt in their shunning or in what they do for instance if a mormon 21 year old tells their mormon parents that they're questioning their faith their initial reaction might be oh well honey just read your book of mormon more just go to the temple more you'll be fine you know we'll support you in whatever you want to do helped a college kid um out of mormonism to know the christ of the bible here within the last year so his mormon parents at first said all of that was fine with them that he was questioning his faith well he eventually gets baptized christian and then wants to marry a christian and then his parents are telling him we won't come right we can't support that we won't come so um it upturns the whole families forever and yes family is a wonderful thing but mormon families are what psychology calls a mesh it's not healthy really the bible says um when you get married you leave your mother and your father you cleave to your husband and you have a marriage of three you have god and you have the two believers right and mom and dad don't need to be hanging on to your coattails and knowing everything that you're doing so this is uh something i need to work mormons through as they're leaving the church because they want to tell their whole family about every question they have they want to go tell their bishop and then those people put a lot of pressure on them to stay mormon yeah now with being able to witness to a lot of mormons i try to explain biblical grace to them and it seems like i'm just banging my head against a wall and you're what is the best advice you can give anybody on how can we effectively witness and share the gospel to a mormon that's knocking on our door well those are two kind of different questions one's about grace and ones about witnessing um i have to tell you even after i read the new testament after 10 months of just obsessively reading the new testament and going this is not mormonism realizing this god was so much bigger than the mormon god i knew literally going face down one night and giving my life to jesus um even after that i didn't understand grace and and going to a christian church and reading the bible i'm hearing about it constantly but mormonism is so anti-grace so antithetical to grace all of that works you got to do you got to please you got to do that it took literally my brain two years and one day i'm sitting at the nazarene church i remember it hearing the pastor talk about grace and i got it but i had already been a believer for two years at that point that's how difficult that is for mormons and here's why mormonism is so insidious and they're so hard to witness to mormons use the exact same words as you do they're going to use angel and salvation and temple and salvation whatever they use all the same christian words and not one of them has the same meaning so when the mormon when you say that to them their brain is thinking of something terribly different and grace is the same thing their grace is if i do enough up front and it pleases god then his grace will kick in and save me the uh mormon encyclopedia has a definition for grace and that is that grace is an enabling power that god gives you so that you can live the commandments so that you can work your way there see that so when you try to talk to them about grace their idea of grace is so different you almost have to stay away from religious words and continually ask them so what do you mean by that so what are you thinking about when i say this so and so the idea of unmerited favor or a gift that god would give me a gift i don't deserve they just totally reject that in their minds because why would god give me something i didn't earn that's that's something you have to explore for a really long time they're taught that that's heretical and that that's evil and that christians teach that because they want to believe they're saved by grace not by works so that they can go live for sin and they're fine they still have eternal life that's how mormons see christian theology so you have to do and of course nice mormon missionaries aren't going to say all of those things to you up front but that's what they're thinking i did get under one of one person's skin one time and they got pretty they got pretty uh not aggressive but somewhat passive aggressive it was interesting so it if you could share just a couple thoughts on what should we do when a mormon missionary knocks on our door what would you recommend us doing if your faith is solid and the faith of your other family members is solid invite them in okay if if you've got young kids or people that might be influenced by mormonism uh meet them publicly somewhere take them to dinner or something but definitely love on them give them good positive experiences with christians they have nothing but positive experiences with mormons and christians have nothing but positive experiences with mormons they're taught to be really nice and so um they need positive experiences with christians but they need good honest conversations but respectfully right you have to believe to you have to realize they're not going to trust the bible so using that as an authoritative source is something that um you're eventually after you already have a relationship for a while and you trust each other you can begin to bring up the evidences for the bible huge for me right 30 000 archaeological digs for the old testament alone are you kidding me the book of mormon doesn't have one and yet mormons believe from ezekiel 37 that the book of mormon and the bible are two sticks in one hand so i'll work them through all the evidences for the bible sometimes wow i was surprised to learn wow i couldn't believe when i read this wow you know linguistic evidence zoological evidence botanical evidence dna evidence archaeological evidence secular historical evidence like prophecy evidence i work through all those evidences and then i'll look at them and say surely the book of mormon if it's two sticks in one hand god surely wouldn't give one overwhelming evidence and the other one not right so can you talk to me some about your archaeological evidence for the book of mormon yeah um so rather than you don't want to be direct with them because the book of mormon says contention is of the devil so they see anything you present to them that's opposite mormonism they see that as contention and they see that as coming from the devil and you can almost see them go la la la i'm not listening to you okay so um you have to be kind you have to be friendly you have to be relational you have to respect them and what i do is i typically don't ever challenge them except with questions so what i do is plant questions right so i let them do their presentation and then i'll ask them questions questions that are answered in the scriptures that i can then turn to the scriptures to ask them i don't even read the scriptures to them i'll say to them do you mind reading this out loud to us and telling me what you think this means or why you think jesus would have said that or whatever and what i'm doing is planting things that are contrary to what they just taught me right it will have been the first time they've ever seen that probably because the mormon church does not point out things in the bible that contradict mormonism they're only going to pull out things that look like they support mormonism so you can do it right from what they're teaching you whatever the topic is priesthood or whatever you know priesthood you can go to hebrews where jesus is our only high priest and stuff mormons have thousands of high priests and like you said earlier while they may not necessarily take the bible they will most likely take the words of jesus yeah so if there's any ways that we can find questions that are relevant to the conversation that jesus talks about that contradicts their view they'll be more apt to actually consider that won't they and on the adams road website this bible topical guide 40 things mormonism teaches like man has seen god you need ordinances to be saved you have to follow the old law um you have to take the sacrament every week to to get rid of your sins you have to go through a temple right to go the highest heaven all those things mormonism teaches and all they did was work through the old and the new testament and pull up everything on that topic that the god of the bible has to say about it some of these have probably 30 scriptures that would refute that one teaching for mormonism and sometimes that's really um eye-opening for them of all that there are that many things in the bible that would be opposite of teaching like the great apostasy and second of all that jesus himself would have said things opposite than what the mormon prophets are teaching them and like i said i watched one of your presentations you made out of calvary chapel you had made mention of and it's something that i'm going to put in my toolkit whenever they knock on my door is with their view of the great apostasy after death of the last apostle up until joseph smith's restoration is the fact of jesus himself said that even the gates of hell will not prevail against the church and until you said that i never correlated the two and so yeah that's definitely another one that just kindly passively bring that up you know if jesus mentioned the gates of hell wouldn't prevail you know could you explain to me how the apostasy occurred exactly or so did jesus not know his church was going to fail yeah or is that mistranslated or did it really not fail i mean what are your options here or is this not really what jesus said would they would they believe that jesus was not omniscient at that point in time [Music] i think matthew 24 he was you know they would have believed he wasn't some mormons will say he wasn't a god yet okay that's where i was wondering about that so you've answered pretty much all the main questions uh i do have some others if you'd like to continue sure sure whatever's how i i want this to be helpful for christians so that they feel comfortable engaging mormons certainly you can always engage through questions yes and that's huge because uh as we've learned the other day using the columbo tactic from stand to reason ministry as far as what do you mean by that how did you come to that conclusion you know definitely being able to employ those using the questions you're bringing up as well so have you have you read my chapter in the book i think sharing the good news with mormons i only recently found out about your writings like i said well that's exactly what i recommend the column so if you're a christian apologist look up the columbo technique it is effective with mormons yes what was that book name you said i'm going to put a link in there uh sharing the good news with mormons okay so one of the questions is how familiar are you with joseph's junior's parents well i know that they were into the custom occult methods like his father was a diviner and he was also a diviner also uh he used peep stones um here's an interesting thing for years the mormon church always said that the book of mormon was translated by the urim and thummim but but in recent years they admitted that joseph smith used a peep stone to translate the book of mormon so he put a his peep stone and a hat put his head there made sure there was no light in the hat and then he said words like a text message would appear on the stone he'd speak them out and then oliver cowdery or whoever was scribing for him at the time would write them down read them back to him so it was right and then the next but the church actually maybe four years ago did a a whole pr thing where they showed the exact peepstone that joseph smith used using a peepstone is an occult method so yes his parents were into that and so was joseph and uh i thought i read something about because i think it was lucy it was his mother i think it was lucy smith and she was heavily into abracadabra stuff and very much uh incantations if you will and have a dream yeah sandra tanner utlm.org um has some good information on that but also there's a ministry called his men out of salt lake um dennis higley is a little bit of an expert on mormonism and the occult okay our ministry focuses on the bible and the word and trying to bring questions mormons who are already questioning their faith helping them to accept the biblical option and to know how much bigger this god is and how he's real and how the bible has consistency and how different it is for mormonism that kind of stuff that's our niche and that's a big thing like you said because i didn't really put that two together until today's interview is the fact of i understand the complete difference between their jesus and the biblical jesus their view of jehovah and the biblical view of jehovah and everything but when you had made mention that the mormon god is still progressing if you will and if he has to continually progress to me that's not god there's someone greater than that being if you will and so there's a lot of wonderful questions i did have this one question uh because i'm married right heavenly fathers married and have spirit children let's uh this is one that's always stumped me from the lds view so i think it was a laminites maybe but during the name or not now what lamanites lamanites during the babylonian captivity which was prophesied that it was judgment upon israel that they were going to be in captivity for 70 years but the book of mormon it talks about how god had told this group to leave and come to the americas again maybe it's because they don't take the book the bible you know as a word of god but to me that's a huge contradiction does that ever produce any thoughts or any fruit in a mormon's life to point that out you're not gonna have mormons uh reading the bible a lot and even when they so they rotate through four years of scripture study one would be church history doctrine and covenants early great price uh one's book of mormon and then they do do old testament and new testament but they use very scripted um manuals okay that cherry pick things out of those scriptures so i used to teach mormon seminary and i taught high schoolers who are getting ready for their mormon missions right and i'm teaching them the bible but i was challenged by my mormon leaders i was threatened that i could not leave the manual each kid had to have a manual we had to go by the manual and literally they cherry-picked scriptures out of the bible into the manual so that you're not even opening ezekiel 37 and reading about those two sticks and reading two two verses down where it actually tells you that those two sticks are not the book of those mormon sticks are israel and judah right yeah yeah it totally makes sense but and it's such a shame i only have really two more questions uh first one you talked a little bit about outer darkness uh is it possible for a mormon to lose their eternal life or lose their exaltation if they're working and working if they stumble can they lose their progress can they lose eternal life period well you never have eternal life in this life you're never saved so you don't know but mormon church leaders can take your baptism away so you cannot begin the road to salvation unless you're water baptized into the mormon church you receive the holy ghost by the laying on of hands through mormon priesthood only but if you sin if i say i've been adulterous and i go to my bishop and i confess which you have to do kind of like in catholicism with the confession right you have to go to church leaders and you confess they literally can make a decision about what your punishment is and they can take your water baptism away which is horrific right and then you're allowed to go to mormon church but you can't take the sacrament everybody can see you're not taking the sacrament every you're not allowed to pray in public um there are like i said it's a lot like leah remini's scientology only probably not to the same degree right wow okay uh why are there there are no maps in the book of mormon well because they have no idea where the cities of the book of mormon happened that's why there's no geographical evidence and thank you for bringing that up because that was the one i forgot to mention a little while ago um with the tens of thousands of archaeological digs we have for the bible we pretty much know where the cities are i mean even ai now they think they found or sodom and gomorrah they think they might have found you know even the things that have been left up there hanging every year christianity today does like the top 10 archaeological finds of christianity every year they just come pouring in there aren't any for the book of mormon they used to say that the last grade battle were 230 000 um people died from the book of mormon was in new york well then they did all these archaeology and they couldn't find any spears or any dead people right so while it wasn't new york it must have been central america well they then they'll they'll look at those pyramids for the from the incas and the um and say that that's mormon well it's wrong time period from the book of mormon so they have no idea so there are no maps because there's no geology no archaeology so doing a lot of studying over here one can look at all the false prophecies and the doctrines and covenants and one that i'm big on is the whole more of a prediction rather than a prophecy of the civil war and how there's even information wrong about that a temple not being reared up and joseph smith's a generation in the area that he said he was going to be he said jesus would return in the early 1890s yeah these things you know and is there any benefit of bringing this up nicely to a missionary you you could if you're trying to tear down their faith in mormonism but but this is my personal opinion please church learning things about joseph smith and history can tear down your faith and mormonism but it does not bring you to know the true christ many many people are leaving mormonism probably at least half of them giving up a jesus altogether because they've been taught that they have the same jesus and god is yours when they learn mormonism they decide it's silly or whatever then then they want to throw the baby out with the bath water and here's the problem because christians never make it clear to them first of all that the bible can be trusted and second of all how big their god is so because mormons love experiential things right why not as a christian when's the last time you told the testimony of what jesus did in your life and it made you weak when's the last time you had an answer to prayer where you could tell that story for 15 minutes and it would make someone else weep i think sometimes we as christians assume other people know about this god but because they have an impotent and false god they haven't had any real spirit experiences that's what i decided in mormonism there might have been a few times in my life when god actually showed up but mostly it was the mormon god and mostly i was having false experiences when the real god entered my life everything changed my thinking changed who i was changed i was prideful and self-righteous and hopefully those things have been driven out of me now so the power of a changed life is one of the greatest testimonies of who jesus is and what he can do and i don't think christians are very good at articulating that and because mormons love the experiential that might be a tactic you would want to take as well as the um the logical evidential way right okay i think that pretty much covers it there's only i got a video out there it talks about the five fault lines of mormonism and in it we look at the very original 1830 translation of the book of mormon and that you can find on the internet archives and everything and it's fascinating because you could look at a book of mormon today or even some of the revisions later that they changed it just a couple years after this 1830 translation because in it it reads as though they have a trinitarian view of god yeah joseph smith did even in the book of mormon it's somewhat trinitarian a little bit modalistic but then yeah then the other thing is in the three witnesses and the eight witnesses if you will i found this interesting that what with christian whitmer jacob whitmer peter whitmer john whitmer hiram page who was married to catherine whitmer joseph smith senior hiram smith samuel smith it's two families it's two families given a witness and a testimony to joseph smith junior's writings and uh it it just brings makes it suspect and far as i'm tracking oliver cowdery was a cousin as well in that most of these have even left the lds church the religion later on too is there is that accurate do you know yes some of them came back toward the end but yeah yeah many of them left i think uh a lot of church leaders had a problem with jesus polygamy for one thing and then brigham young was had 54 wives so he was even more political so and i wasn't going to bring up the whole helen mark kimball or anything like that in the ages and how many wives but you did bring up an interesting question that i've had that i've asked a mormon before this so with the fundamental ods and with the kingston clan you got warren jeffs and then you have your mainstream if you will lds viewers in mexico yeah and romney you know there's a romney that was a polygamy colony in mexico he always said his grandfather was born in mexico and whatever he was born in that romney polygamy colony they say they're not polygamous anymore i don't know right how do they reconcile where a i would say a normal or a mainstream mormon doesn't hold too polygamy because they're apostles what i'm tracking said it it's no longer but yet your fundamentals and your warren jeffs and kingston's and all these others they hold to it well okay you've hit on one of them the main problems in mormonism the fact that polygamy is an eternal principle they call it the new and everlasting covenant or the principle it's in doctrine of covenants 132. that is a piece of scripture that mormons accept accepted scripture today their website says their scriptures is are pure truth and utterly reliable so if they teach that polygamy is an eternal principle and the prophet said we're not living it on earth now they do believe they'll be living it in the next life they have that same issue with racism it says 26 or 27 times dark skin is a curse throughout their scriptures they say we're not racist and they do everything and i don't know any mormons that seem to be racist but it's in their scriptures joseph smith put it there joseph smith put the polygamy there um he put the godhood stuff there he put the fact that god was once a man all of that's in their scriptures so if you start picking and choosing what to take out then the foundation of joseph smith falls and the entire mormon church falls maybe they'll do that someday i don't know because everything hinges on joseph smith right and that's the thing right there i mean from what i understand all the mormons i talk to they say they follow they worship jesus but it it really doesn't look like it it looks like they're following the the teachings and the writings of joseph smith jr is clearly what it boils down to especially if they don't take the bible for the word of the bible so yeah let me see if i can find this quote that will rock your world yeah joseph smith actually said he did here it is i have more to boast of than any man had i am the only man who has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of adam a large majority of the whole have stood by me neither paul john peter nor jesus ever did it i boast that no man ever did such a work as i joseph smith yup and that's found written in because i have that quote that was where was you remember where that was coming from oh i think this came from the journal of discourses which meant one of his secretaries wrote down what he preached you know um and it's in my book so this is the book i wrote unveiling grace the story of how we found our way out of the mormon church um about the time people started streaming out of the mormon church this was on amazon had no idea so many people were questioning their faith it came out in 2013. amazon sold out of this in two days they were shocked right because mormons are questioning their faith right and left so this is a time for christians to step up and try to understand their brains and step into conversations with them i don't even think you have to know mormonism a lot you just have to know how to present your jesus and your faith in a way that people want to hear right and i think evidence is for the bible i think it's really helpful to know we've run into so many christians who don't even know their archaeological dates right they don't they don't even know their stuff where you can defend the bible but who is this god he blows his nostrils and his enemies are dead he speaks and things that never were come to be you know in mormonism there there's no ex nihilo creation they don't believe that god's able to create something from nothing he takes matter that's already existed and he changes it into something else to me that's a smaller god the god of the bible is able to do so much more and so being articulate about who he is how personally he is some of the things he's done in our lives wow i mean the amazing things he did to bring me out of the church personally to get me out of byu right yeah he literally got me another professor's job i never even applied for that doesn't happen in higher ed if somebody calls you up and offers you a job but god and i fell to my knees weeping going this thought can even get you a job you never applied for like i like this god i'm sticking here you hit on the ontological argument a maximally great being you know which the mormon church does not teach and they do not have well that's wonderful because takeaways for for the interview is using our testimony knowing how to show our experience our if you will burning in the bosom of how the true god has really reached us to use the colombo tactics and ask them questions and allow them to like i've realized is it's a lot easier for someone to change their view if they convict themselves rather than us you know if they you know it's like oh that does make doesn't make sense and uh so definitely use that in fact point out the fact that god doesn't change no matter if a god that changes we can't trust his word ten years ago because he might change it tomorrow type deal and then another thing is since they don't really hold to the bible per se uh really bring out the words of christ because they'll more or less agree with that now this will be the last time i promised last time i say this okay then i'll let you go so i've asked this question to mormons as well and uh maybe based upon the mormons that i've talked to is just where they were at and asked if we're supposed to worship jesus you know because i always bring up the fact that thomas after the resurrection worshipped jesus and said my lord my god now how effective of pointing that out would that be to a mormon well in their brain they're probably thinking well uh that's after the resurrection so he's already earned his godhood at the cross right oh okay so that's why they're going to believe he's god now but that just like heavenly father he was once a man and that he earned his godhood they don't know how it happened or when it happened but i think a lot of mormons well i've even had mormons tell me that they believe he was god before he came to earth so you know there because mormon theology is all over the place they don't really care about little nitpicky stuff right and we didn't even talk about the plan of redemption that satan offered to jehovah either you know because that's another thing with the pre-existence and the plan of redemption between satan and jesus and and uh both them offering a solution and then the book of mormon or maybe a great price that talks about a temper tantrum that satan throws which really leads to law leads to his fall if you will but uh oh maybe we'll try to get you back on because there's just other you know topics and everything but i know i gotta let you go so before i do let you go are there any final words closing comments you'd like to make just some mormons really are leaving the church in droves at the moment they're a little desperate to keep people sometimes when mormons questioning their faith come to me the mormon church will send missionaries to their door i've had them offer people jobs you know offer them nice callings in the church whatever to keep them mormon so this is an opportunity for christians to step into that conversation i would start by asking god to break the spirit of blindness over them because they don't trust you pretty much what you say goes in one ear and out the other right and so i think it's helpful to ask god so that when you say something that it might stick right that god would break that spirit of blindness over them that's scripture that he would unstop their ears that he would open their eyes that he would remove that veil and i believe it happened for me when i read the bible i came to christ because my missionary son who had gotten saved my mormon missionaries that had gotten saved born again on his mormon mission challenged his parents to just pick up the bible and read it and we began to do so and god just opened our eyes to wow this is not mormonism right um and then i was forced to make a decision at some point um so getting mormons into the bible because they believe now they're christians too they'll sometimes come to your neighborhood bible studies that would be so good if you're running a neighborhood bible study or you know one you can say to a mormon you you told me you're a christian you believe the bible too right that's what we have in common let's study it right and and again you don't have to hit people with negative stuff because then they won't listen to you you just have to feed them scripture feed them scripture feed them scripture the bible says 3 800 times it's the word of god it doesn't return void god sends it out it does what he literally i think my heart was changed just by reading the word and being renewed day by day that's how that that born again experience happened so it is about getting mormons into the bible and letting the holy spirit do his work but it's little by little it's gonna be it's gonna take a while well i appreciate the time and all the wisdom and insight you've provided and like you said one of the biggest things i've taken away is questions uh show them love and i just be friendly with them because they're already taught or trained or told that christians are lower we have less of a revelation and that we don't have the truth and so they're already coming somewhat hard uh hardened and so just being able to just befriend them the whole friendship evangelism aspect and then just talk about jesus so uh lynn i just thank you for sharing your time with us today best wishes i wish you the best and everything as far as your endeavors your job and and what not the family the ministry where you get all these links on the description of the youtube and the podcast that goes out and so for anybody still watching just thank you for tuning this in and god bless

Channel: C4C Apologetics

Views: 853

Rating: 4.6363635 out of 5

Keywords: god, jesus, yesua, yhwh, theist, theism, deism, deist, christian, christ, messiah, meshiach, mashiach, nazareth, atheist, atheism, bible, canon, scripture, biblical, scriptural, adams road, adam's road, unveiling grace, unveiling mormonism, lynn wilder, wilder, micah wilder, byu, brigham young, outer darkness, lds church, mormon, mormonism, mrm, utlm, ex-Mormon, LDS missions, LDS mission's trip, Joseph Warren, Adams Road Ministry, Adam's Road Ministry

Id: Mnk8ZDw0FbA

Length: 86min 12sec (5172 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020