From Mormon Apologist to Christian: The Story of Michael Flournoy

hey guys so my name is michael florinoy i am uh an ex latter-day saint been out for four years now um so i'm just gonna be talking a little bit about my story tonight and uh just want to encourage uh those of you that are here to feel free to interrupt me at any point and ask me any questions that you want to know more details about as i go but aside from that i'm just going to pummel through here today um the founder of uh the founder of mormonism was a man named joseph smith jr and uh he claimed that he went into a grove of trees and he prayed to god asking which of the christian sects he should join and allegedly he was visited by god the father and the son jesus christ in his own words in the joseph smith history he said i saw a pillar of light exactly above my head above the brightness of the sun which descended gradually until it fell upon me when the light rested upon me i saw two personages whose brightness and glory to fight all descriptions standing above me in the air one of them spake unto me calling me by name and said pointing to the other this is my beloved son hear him he said that he asked them which of the christian sex to join and he and god answered that he must join none of them for they were all wrong i went on a mission to anaheim california for two years and i testified to every soul that would listen to me that this experience was true that christ's new testament church had fallen into apostasy after the death of the apostles because there was no one left to pass on the priesthood keys or to receive revelation on behalf of the church i testified that joseph smith was called to be a prophet in the latter days to restore christianity back to its former glory and ever since its establishment in 1830 the lds church has been run by a prophet his two counselors and the twelve apostles they restored temples back to the earth they've built hundreds of temples across the world and they introduced new doctrines one of those is the concept of the godhead the latter-day saints believe that the father the son and the holy ghost are three separate gods and that the father and the son possess bodies of flesh and bone as tangible as man's and they believe that they resemble mankind because genesis says that we were made in the image of god on top of that they believe that we are literally the children of god and that makes us god's an embryo and by obeying the gospel covenants and the commandments we can eventually progress to become gods ourselves over our own universes this is the religion that i was born into i would remain a latter-day saint for 32 years as a captive and i never knew that i was a prisoner until god opened my eyes and by his grace he rescued me out of that religion now before he did that he planted a couple of seeds of truth in my heart and it would be several years before those seeds blossomed and i was able to come out but before i get into that story if you will just indulge me briefly i'd like to just talk a little bit about my family background so on my mother's side they were faithful loyal latter-day saints almost since the inception of the church i was a seventh generation mormon there were members of my family that knew joseph smith personally he held my great-great-grandmother in his arms as a baby as he sat in their house my family was there when the lds church had to flee from missouri and go with handcarts to salt lake city and they have several stories about spiritual experiences that they they had as a family now my dad was a convert to the church and he told me often that he related to joseph smith because he'd gone to from religion to religion seeking the truth and it wasn't until the mormon missionaries found him they went to his house my grandma turned them away said i'm not interested but you should come back and talk to my son because he's a jesus freak and so they returned a couple of days later and they gave my dad the book of mormon he read it in a single day and a few months later he was baptized into the church he met my mother and they were married now my mother tells this story that when she was in college she went to the doctor and the doctor told her that she had a condition she would never be able to have children and that devastated her because like many mormon women it was her dream to be a mother and so she went home heartbroken to her dorm and on the way there her home teachers which are the men assigned to assist you in the in the ward the mormon congregation they found her and they said are you okay and she said yes and they said no you're not and they actually gave her a what's called a priesthood blessing they laid their hands on her head they evoked the melchizedek priesthood and then they blessed her and in that blessing they said that she would have children a couple of years later i was born and she calls me her covenant child to this day because in her eyes my my birth is evidence that the priesthood is real it is legitimate and that the lds church holds the keys to that authority and therefore the lds church must be true now i uh i grew up in this faith i i wasn't super excited about about church as as most young people are it was three hours long my family forced me to go there every sunday but about the time i became a young man i started to make friends in the church they had a really excellent youth program and so i started to feel like i belong there and when i was 16 i went to a week-long retreat called especially for youth and in this in this activity they they had several activities they had lectures faith promoting stories dances uh and then on a thursday night they ushered us into a room and they showed us a video about jesus christ and had people testifying that he was their savior that he had changed them and jesus was not very high on my priority list if he was on my priority list at all but as i sat there uninterested in what was being said thoughts began to flow into my head my mother had had a miscarriage before i was born although it was the oldest the possibility of having an older brother came into my head and i thought what would he be like if he had been born and i imagined this this man that would just be amazing he would love me to know and he would stay up all night to talk to me because the things that i thought were significant would be important to him i looked up at the screen and there was jesus and the spirit fell on me like a blanket and i realized that it wasn't my own thoughts it was the spirit that was revealing something to me and i was suddenly faced with the holiness of god the glory of god and and as a result of that you know at 16 and in mormonism the view is that when you are born you are pure you know all humans are are inherently good and at 16 i thought that i hadn't committed that much sin but it became it was revealed to me my eyes were open that i was totally depraved i was a wretched sinner um i i just all the things that i'd done wrong came to the forefront of my mind and in that moment i would have been completely satisfied if god and his justice had erased me from the world but he didn't instead of wrath god sent me his love and it was unlike anything that i had ever experienced in my life it was unconditional now latter-day saints do believe that god loves his children unconditionally but they don't believe that he accepts them unconditionally and what i received was unconditional love and acceptance that night it was almost like i could hear the words of god saying you're quick to do evil and slow to do good and many of the things that you do just displease me but i love you anyway and i wept for hours that night because of this undeserved love that i had received and that was the first seed of truth that god planted in my heart and i would learn a few years later that that was contrary to lds doctrine but i had a lot of misconceptions along with that truth because i still thought that jesus was a created being that he was my spirit brother and that he was the spirit brother of lucifer you know the son the literal son of heavenly father and i attributed this experience to the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints being true because after all i was at a mormon-sponsored event so at that time i decided that i was going to be loyal to the lds church a few years later i turned 19 and i turned in my mission papers in in mormonism all the young men are expected to serve a two-year mission when they turn 19 and the apostles pray about where you're gonna go and then you receive your letter in the mail and it's a really big deal because you sit on the couch and you open that letter publicly and you find out where you're going and if you're gonna speak a different language at that time and i had a friend named thomas who had gone to hong kong and he was speaking mandarin chinese and i thought how exciting would it be if i go somewhere foreign i learned to speak another language i was hoping for spanish just going to be honest here and after waiting for months i finally got my letter in the mail and i opened it and i read through it and it said you're going to the anaheim california mission speaking english and i think i read it a couple of times through before it really hit me like i'm not going anywhere exciting you know i'm not you know like a lot of my uncles they'd gone overseas and had all these amazing experiences i'm like nothing's gonna happen in california um you know i didn't think god had anything in store for me there i you know i'm just i'm not gonna have any exciting stories to tell my girlfriends when i come home in fact i'm probably never going to have girlfriends because of this so i went i went on my mission and i was i was trained in the missionary training center in provo utah and i was amazed at the other missionaries there they uh you know i was really timid i didn't have a lot of doctrinal knowledge about mormonism i was really just there for the social reasons but these young people were very brave they weren't afraid to to stick their necks out there and preach and they had really strong gospel knowledge and i thought that i would never catch up to them well one day we were cleaning one of the rooms at the mtc and there was an older guy supervising us and at the end of it he said how many of you guys have girlfriends waiting back home for you and even though we were going to be gone for two years with almost no contact with the outside world some of these guys had girlfriends that were waiting for them and then he said did you know that only one percent of lds women will wait for their boyfriend to come home well i will tell you that the missionaries in that room were not happy to hear that statistic but he said i found a way to make it 100 well he had our attention then he said i it is possible to make a covenant with god and he said that when he was on his mission they the missionaries in him they prayed that if they would serve god the way he wanted to them to that he would protect their relationships and he boasted that the missionaries who did this went home and married that girl that was waiting for them and so a lot of the missionaries got real excited decided that they were going to do this challenge well i didn't have a girlfriend um so i i tried something different and i prayed and i said god if if i will serve you the way that you want me to please teach me to speak and i felt this impression that god was saying yes now nothing ever changed like that whole mission i struggled um with awkwardness and but when i came home i was suddenly able to to speak over the pulpit and string sentences together you know like a normal human being so i kind of attributed that again to the church must be true because this happened and i was serving a mission and that's why god blessed me because of my good standing in the church so i went to anaheim california i began to to do my missionary work there and when i was only three months out they put me with a missionary who'd only been out for four months so we were both novices and this is kind of unusual for mormon missionaries usually they want to leave you with somebody who's more experienced for longer and so we kind of knew that we were going to get in trouble we just didn't know how much trouble we were going to get into so never underestimate the power of two young men um but one day he felt prompted by the spirit to go down a certain street thinking that there were gonna be people that he could teach the mormon gospel to and baptize so he went down the street there was nobody there his tire slipped into a crack in the sidewalk it was covered with thorns and it went flat instantly and we're sitting there thinking that's kind of strange uh why would god do this to us like what did we do so we were walking our bikes to the nearest bike shop where we were very well known and popular because we didn't know how to fix our own bikes and they broke down constantly and on the way there this man comes out of a house across the street and he starts calling out to us waving his arms you guys are mormon missionaries right can you come talk to me i haven't talked to mormons in a long time so we looked at each other like this is it this is why the spirit did it because this man needs the gospel he needs to be baptized so we went into his home he sat us down gave us some water and he introduced himself as eddie knox the head of the evangelical debate society and then uh he said before you guys start telling me that joseph smith was a prophet and the church was restored i have three questions for you who is god where do you get your authority and how are you saved by faith or by works and then for three hours he pulled out these bible verses one after another just pummeling us with these verses that we never knew existed i thought the bible was on our side i never i didn't think that this was possible and i instructed my companion his name was elder mitchell so we go by elder on a mission we don't go by our first names i instructed him i said find the verse in the bible that says men can become gods and so he started flipping through it he never did find that verse by the way but but at the end of it eddie knox told us that he worked with several college age students who didn't know much about mormonism and he proposed doing a small dialogue at starbucks where we could talk to them about our faith and then he would say a few words to them so i agreed i gave him my phone number in the hopes that he would you know kind of lose interest and actually never talk to us again so that we could just live our lives and not have to deal with what he was talking about and i didn't really want to go to starbucks either because in mormonism there's this thing called the word of wisdom and you're not supposed to drink coffee and you're supposed to avoid the appearance of evil which i couldn't do if i was sitting in a starbucks i kept envisioning members of the ward driving by and seeing us you kind of stick out like a sore thumb as a mormon missionary you've got this white shirt and this tie like you can see a mormon missionary a mile away in those clothes now after we left we continued to walk to the bike shop and and elder mitchell and i didn't talk much this conversation with ed had left me convinced that the church was not true and it it broke my heart i felt so heavy inside just thinking about it i thought about my friends and my family my bishop all the people that i respected that were such intelligent people not to mention seven generations of my family going back and i thought had they all devoted themselves to a lie on top of that i loved the lds church i thought that they had the best people the best music the best architecture i thought about the beautiful temples that had been built all over the place and i couldn't believe it i thought is it really just a beautiful lie but god had planted another seed of truth in my heart because listening to ed enoch's talk he had a passionate testimony of the bible as god's word and i came to believe it as well i believe that the bible was god's infallible word and that's kind of a strange doctrine for a latter-day saint to embrace but nevertheless i believed that it was true and so i decided that i couldn't take ed's word for anything i was gonna go home and i was going to study the bible and whatever it said is what i would believe so if it if it said that the mormonism was false i would pack my bags and i would leave my mission despite what i would have to deal with with my family however i still had my mormon sunglasses on i only knew how to interpret the bible one way and so i went home and and i started studying it and of course i found all these passages in the bible that seemed to promote the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and so i retained my faith in fact my conviction to the lds church was stronger than it had ever been before now ed called us shortly after he said hey a couple of college students haven't expressed interest in attending this dialogue and then he made an agreement with us that he would come to church with us one week and we would go to church with him the next week so the week he came to our church we happen to be the primary speakers um in sacramento meetings so they don't have like a pastor that does the message they they invite members of the congregation to get up and prepare a message each sunday and that sunday it was us and so i had prepared diligently from james chapter 2 a message saying that faith without works is dead to say to them specifically our evangelical visitors that they could not be saved by faith alone the next week they they invited us to calvary chapel uh so we went there and the first thing they did was they passed out flyers to the mormon evangelical dialogue and we looked at these flyers like wait a second this is our mormon evangelical dialogue it had a picture of two men standing at podiums with one pointing at the other in accusation and i thought what have we done this is really bad after that we uh we began to encounter people in gorbalinda who had these flyers just random people or knew about the dialogue in a matter of weeks we were getting calls from missionaries in neighboring cities saying that they had encountered someone with one of these flyers as well and they wanted to know what the dialogue was all about we ended up getting our board mission leader and two of the assistants to the mission president involved and we secured our ward building to do it in and so we finally had the dialogue and i thought you know maybe 75 people would come so we set up 75 chairs um eddie knox and his friends came and they started setting up more chairs um in a hurry and then we went to go pray and and i came back and the entire gymnasium where we were doing it it was full the final count ended up being about 325 people seated and then there were several more in the halls because we simply didn't have room for the audience that came then there were cameras set up in the aisle and that was probably the biggest scare of my young life at that point i was the first speaker so i got up and i i rehearsed the story that jesus had come and he established his church and that that church had fallen away into an apostasy that joseph smith had been called to restore the church back to its former glory and that he just had been led to the book of mormon by the angel moroni which was an account of scripture written on the american continent and that he translated it into english by the gift and the power of god and i said i'm not ashamed of my beliefs but don't take my word for it there are copies of the book of mormon in the foyer take one and read it and pray about it you'll get an answer so that was the first dialogue but this whole event exploded into three separate dialogues a few months later we had a second one at calvary chapel with over 600 people and then early on in the next year pastor greg johnson and robert millet flew down from salt lake city and addressed an audience of over a thousand and i was amazed that god could orchestrate something that big from a mere flat tire on a thorny street what i didn't realize at the time was that god was not finished with his work he was just starting to draw me to him and it was a process that would take another 13 years and what was interesting is ed enoch's caught me before i left on my mission he said something really strange happened in that dialogue a lot of the people who were there think that you're elect i didn't know what that really meant at the time but i'm like okay you know of course i'm elect i'm a latter-day saint you know what lds person isn't i was surprised he recognized that um but i discovered after after 13 years when it came out that some of the people that i ran into during that first dialogue had never stopped praying for me and so i just want to offer a word of encouragement for any of you that are talking to latter-day saints just to be aware that even if it takes a long time and it feels like it's not going anywhere that god is relentless when it comes to searching out his children and miracles do happen now i had gained a logical testimony of the lds church but every time we went and talked to an investigator we were giving them something called the moroni challenge so the book of mormon has this passage in moroni chapter 10 verses three through five and it basically says that when you read the book of mormon you need to pray about it and if you shall ask with a sincere heart with real intent having faith in christ he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the holy ghost and by the power of the holy ghost you may know the truth of all things so it was an encouragement to to read the book and pray about it and you could receive an answer several of my companions claimed that they had taken this challenge and that they had received a burning in the bosom or some other subjective feeling saying that the church that the book of mormon was true and therefore joseph smith was a real prophet and the lds church was the restored gospel i had never received anything of the sort and i envied them greatly i wanted to have that experience because i knew that since my testimony was grounded in logic that a smart person could come along and could dissuade me by logic but if i had that spiritual testimony from god himself the highest authority then nothing anybody said was ever going to make my testimony falter and so i diligently prayed over the book of mormon several times and i never received any sort of witness that it was true elder packer one of the 12 apostles had given a um had spoken in a general conference to the church and he said that a testimony was to be found in the bearing of it and so throughout my mission i was bearing a testimony that i did not have in the hopes that god would see that i was worthy to receive that testimony that he would put some weight to my own words and that i would feel some kind of subjective feeling telling me that i was speaking the truth but throughout my entire mission it never happened there were other spiritual experiences that i began to have instead and i took those to mean that the church was true and some of them had already occurred so for instance uh me me making this covenant to god and and being able to speak i accepted that as evidence that the church was true i had dreams while i was on my mission and i'll just give you one example but i had a dream that i was in one of the uh one of the rooms in church and i had a priesthood leader interviewing me uh giving me a worthiness interview and in the middle of it a grizzly bear walked into the room and it came right after me and i got up and i found this pole on the ground it was probably about as strong as a fishing pole and i started trying to defend myself with it meanwhile my leader was standing over there watching and giving me instructions you know oh use this tactic block like this hit it on the side of the head and you know i was following exactly and it was having no effect whatsoever and and i could feel that this pull was about a break and i was about to die and i felt this very strong impression actually heard a voice saying that i needed to trust more in the lord and i threw my pole down and i was immediately endowed with the power to defend myself with my bare hands no pun intended and and defeat the the creature and i woke feeling really inspired like okay like this is god telling me that i just need to trust a little bit more in the lord in addition to the obedience that i'm you know that i'm doing to the leaders of the church and so i had those experiences and the biggest one was when i came home from my mission i had the next biggest hurdle and that is to get married that is the next thing that the lds culture expects of you and my friends came off their missions and they got married within about a year and it took me several years to get married and and my patriarchal blessing you know there's a man called the patriarch in the stakes and he gives a prophetic blessing to all the members and mine said i would get married but i was so awkward i hadn't even talked to girls in like two years because i was busy doing missionary work and i'm like this is not possible you know i'm like god you can do miracles i saw what you did with the flat tire like take away my awkwardness like make me look better you know just whatever it takes like you can do this and nothing ever happened and i got to the point eventually where i felt you know bitter about it but i finally met met a woman and i was dating her and i was in church one day and i felt this very strong impression like that god was sitting there right next to me and and was saying it's okay to marry her everything's gonna be okay and i was filled with this euphoria it's like i'd never had an experience like that where i felt like god was was right there telling me to do something and giving me an assurance that it was the right thing to do that it was not going to fault her and so i went and i told her and she said you know i had a feeling something like that might happen and three months later we were married in the san antonio temple for time in all eternity we'd been together six months and it just felt like such an easy commitment to make after uh after we got married i i decided that was going to become an uh amateur apologist for the church so you know i'd run into these evangelical christians on my mission and i was like man there's probably other people out there like me that aren't really prepared for the onslaught that that's coming and so i wanted to prepare my own uh my own people for that and i started going online on facebook and and joining groups and debating christians um i wasn't i wasn't too into it um you know until about 2012 i was going to school i was a junior i was studying english literature and that's about the time that mitt romney was running for president and of course he was a mormon like me and i really wanted him to win i was like man if if a latter-day saint makes it to the white house what is that going to do for our religion people will be forced to respect us then you know and and then i saw in the news people calling mormonism a cult and saying that they wouldn't vote for him because he was mormon and i thought how can people be so narrow-minded if only they knew how virtuous this institution was they would change their minds and i thought that it was up to me to change the public's opinion and so i dropped out of school and i started writing a book called a biblical defense of mormonism even though i had no following and nobody had a clue who i was my wife was not thrilled when i made that decision but who was i to fight against god's calling in my life and so i wrote this book it did nothing to change the course of the election of course after the book was was published i began to give presentations to local latter-day saint groups that were interested in in hearing about how to defend the church from those cunning evangelical christians and so i gave a couple of those and my bishop heard one of them and and he let me give it in front of the entire congregation so basically you know i kind of tell the story about what happened on my mission and then i would talk about how to dismantle the trinity that was my favorite thing to go after um and i talked about about grayson works i talked about how james and paul were really giving the same message you know james was just being more technical and when when james said faith is dead without works he was basically you know i use the analogy that it's like yeast and bread you know bread is dead without yeast it is a necessary ingredient to make it work and i said if a man came out of the desert and collapsed with dehydration would you offer him hydrogen or oxygen i said no because those are components of what he really needs i said that's why paul never talks about works because it's implied when he talks about grace and so that was my answer for for all those things i was invited to go to debate ed he was going to seminary in fort worth and so i went and i debated him and i basically said you know the trinity is a a beautiful man-made concept but if god if it kills us to see god and god is omnipresent then how come we're all here with our eyes open that should prove that it is false and so i had a lot of a lot of arguments like that i thought i had it all i thought i had it all figured out and uh i actually ended up doing a couple of different podcast debates as well so i ended up debating um lynn wilder she's a an ex-mormon as well she was a byu professor so i debated her on a podcast called unbelievable and it didn't go too well afterwards my dad said that she had me for breakfast uh which is true and uh one of the things that she said that just really uh kind of knocked me off balance when she said you know that christianity was at odds with mormonism and i didn't believe that was true i thought that you know christians were just you know kind of at a lower level they were still studying uh arithmetic but us latter-day saints we'd moved on to calculus and eventually they would get there like there was really nothing that protestants believed that was actually contrary to what we believed in it was just kind of a partial truth or they were on their way there but she said it was contradictory and that kind of made me think about things for a while now before i go on i do want to talk just just about three different kinds of conversion that all latter-day saints have and this is something that i've i've kind of come up with to explain how latter-day saints think and what tethers them to the church but first of all you've got your spiritual conversion and that is anything any evidence or subjective feeling that you have that makes you believe that the lds church is true and i had several of those and i've kind of talked about about some of those um there's a social conversion and that is just uh having having your friends in the church believing that it is a virtuous institution that joseph smith was a a man of moral upright character all of those things tie somebody to the church as well and then there's the doctrinal conversion and i got that after debating ed enoch's and having to go to the bible and try to defend my faith so in those three ways i was tethered to the lds church what happened in the years following is god began to attack all of those legs of conversion so starting with my social conversion the lds church came out with a new policy in 2015 stating that children of gay parents could not be baptized and i had a big problem with that policy i thought first of all you know the second article of faith and mormonism says we believe men will be punished for their own sins and not for adam's transgression and i thought how can we punish children for something that they have nothing to do with they had no decision in this matter not only that but baptism is what put you into a covenant with god and that was the only way that you could receive the gift of the holy ghost and have the holy ghost as a constant companion and so by saying that they could not have baptism it was saying that they couldn't be members of the church and they were outcasts and i just didn't think that that was fair within 24 hours there were lds apologists online defending the policy and i couldn't believe it i thought you haven't had time to mull this over how can you just just jump in there and and defend it right away is there anything that the prophet could say that you wouldn't immediately jump to his defense about i was on a forum and somebody said i don't have a problem with the policy but if i did i would just pray about it until i didn't anymore and that sent me over the edge i thought that's not how you pray you don't pray telling god what to tell you you pray being ready to do whatever god tells you and i said to him i said if that is not a cult mindset then i don't know what is well it was a public forum and my family caught wind of that statement and so they had a little intervention for me and they said that i needed to be careful about what i said in public about the church well i did not like that at all i remember i got in trouble once with my with my wife because i was spinning her her ring around on the table you know she's like stop that i'm like why it's a diamond you know it can take a little bit of abuse and that's how i viewed the the church i thought if it's true i can be as rough with this as i want and it can withstand it if it's true so i'm not afraid to be rough with this i got into an argument with my wife too um about the policy and she responded that it wasn't our place to question the leaders and that throwing the prophet under the bus was the same thing as throwing jesus under the bus and so that shut me up and i decided you know what it is just a policy that's what they were calling it it's not worth all of this negativity so i'm just going to shut my trap and i'm just going to go with the flow well maybe a week into that decision elder nelson who is now president nelson was giving a a talk on byu tv to millennials and he said that it wasn't a policy that it was a revelation from god that all 15 of the leaders of the church had received unanimously and so that changed it from the realm of just being a social issue to being doctrine and so that made it a much bigger issue for me i'd seen what jesus said in the new testament about those who offended little ones and that when the when the disciples tried to keep the children from him he said you know forbid them not but let the children come to me and and then the implication of that was that if i didn't accept this revelation from god then i must unwittingly be a pawn of satan and i wished that they had led with that when they first introduced the policy because maybe i would have accepted it then but now it was too late i strongly believe that it was incorrect and in mormonism you've got three pillars of truth you've got the leaders you've got the scriptures and you've got the holy spirit and i had two of those telling me that the leaders were wrong but it was all 15 of them and so i really began to doubt whether i could trust them whether they could even accurately receive revelation in the first place and that's the whole reason that you have prophets and apostles is because they are god's mouthpiece and so that caused a lot of problems for me so that was that was the first the first leg of my conversion the social conversion that god attacked a couple months into that i learned that a lot of latter-day saints young latter-day saints were committing suicide due to the policy because they felt so trapped over their identity versus the doctrine of the church that they felt like there was no other way out and that really gave me pause i thought you know they actually call mormon doctrine the plan of happiness that's its nickname because that is the only way to achieve real happiness in this life and in the life to come is to follow that gospel plan and i thought how can the plan of happiness cause so much suffering and for the first time i was ashamed to call myself a latter-day saint now at the same time that all of this was going on god attacked my doctrinal conversion as well i was online one day and i saw one of the other lds apologists say hey have any of you guys heard of this uh argument called the impossible gospel approach i need some help countering it and i thought well it's that's fine you know i've heard every argument that that protestants make you know nothing's gonna surprise me so i i went i watched some videos by keith walker on youtube and he lays out the impossible gospel basically saying that grace is unattainable for latter-day saints and so one of the verses that he quoted was moroni chapter 10 verse 32 it says that after if you deny yourselves of all ungodliness then is grace sufficient for you and and you know he explains that we cannot be perfect without grace and yet according to this scripture it doesn't kick in until we've denied ourselves of all ungodliness there's another one in second nephi 25 23 says that we are saved by grace after all we can do and then you ask have you have you done all that you can do and i was really starting to think about that i'm like wow this is this is a really tough argument this falls on me to figure out a way to take down this argument so i started studying grace in an attempt to be a more effective weapon against protestants and i was immediately frustrated because there are six definitions of salvation in mormonism one of them is just to be resurrected you're saved from physical death and some of those people who are saved still go to outer darkness with the devil and his angels there are three levels of heaven there's the highest heaven which is the celestial kingdom the terrestrial kingdom and then there's the intellectual kingdom and so whenever it said heaven i had to stop and say okay which heaven is this talking about and i'm a really logical guy i like it when the puzzle pieces fit together really easily and they couldn't fit together really easily and it just frustrated me meanwhile i'm debating these christians online and when i ask them how are you saved it is the same answer every time it is simple and it is elegant and i'm i'm like i want that i want to be able to explain my my beliefs in two or three sentences and for it to make sense and for the scriptures to just clearly indicate that this is true the more i was defending the church the more i felt like i was a lawyer to a guilty party and the evidence was pointing away from my case and i had to bend it to make it fit now somewhere well the other thing is i was trying to be perfect in practice too i was like well maybe i can't you know find the answer in the scriptures but you know it says in matthew 25 jesus says be there for perfect even as as your father which is in heaven is perfect in the book of mormon there's a passage in 1st nephi 3 that says the lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men savi shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them and so i didn't think god would give us a commandment that we couldn't keep and so i thought you know if i just try a little harder i can reach this perfection and so i was trying my hardest to be perfect in mormonism they don't expect you to be perfect but they do say like oh just be a little bit better tomorrow than you were yesterday and so i was constantly judging my worthiness from the day before and it's supposed to be a stairway to heaven but in my case it was like a roller coaster some days were great some days were really bad and i didn't feel like i was i was getting closer to god no matter how hard i tried it felt like i had this invisible parasite that followed me to church and to work and no matter how much fun i was having there was this little voice in my head saying you are not doing all that you can do you've not denied yourself of all ungodliness and you are not worthy to go to heaven if you die right now and so i was in in constant anguish over this until one of my christian friends introduced me to a doctrine called imputed righteousness i'd never heard of imputed righteousness before it was a whole new level because i talked about grace and works i said hey i believe in grace you know i would even say i believe i'm justified freely by grace what i wasn't saying is that that only meant the terrestrial kingdom you know but then exaltation was the next level after that and i still had to go to the temple and obey the commandments if i wanted to achieve godhood that was never on the table but yeah grace is free and it it saves me but when they brought up imputed righteousness i had no idea what that was and and what that doctrine was is that christ lived the law perfectly and he went to the cross vicariously on my behalf and there on the cross he traded his righteousness for my sin and and one of the things i i saw was like oh this the story of lazarus was are not lazarus uh barabbas it's a perfect example you know he was condemned he was guilty he was on death row and then and then christ took his place and even though christ was innocent he was condemned to die as if he were guilty and even though barabbas was guilty he was allowed to live because of christ and so i began to really study this doctrine i was really intrigued by it and what happened first is i actually found it in the book of mormon first um for instance in first nephi chapter two it calls it says that god is the fountain of all righteousness and so you know i always believed that grace was an enabling power that it gave me the ability to repent of my sins and just you know stop sinning eventually and that i could reach perfection but now i was learning that grace came from outside of me um i saw that in uh in galatians as well you know uh paul said that he had a righteousness that was not his own and so i kind of found it in both places and i thought well this is really cool because in mormonism uh the bible in the book of mormon you know they're supposed to bear witness to one another and so when i saw them both giving the same message i said this is really cool and the biggest thing was the lds temple because in the eldest temples you do work for the dead you know everybody has to be baptized but not everybody was alive when the church was restored there was a great apostasy and a lot of people died during that time and so they do genealogy to find their dead ancestors so they can go and do the work for them vicariously and when they do the work vicariously for the dead all the dead person has to do is accept it and that righteous act is imputed to them as if they had done it themselves and the more i thought about it the more i realized that the cross acted exactly like an lds temple and uh and so i was really excited i i embraced imputed righteousness i didn't fully understand it but i embraced it and the power of the impossible gospel argument lost it lost its grip on me because i said hey it's not my righteousness it's christ's righteousness so it doesn't matter if i'm not doing all that i can do or if i've you know erased all the ungodliness in my life and so i didn't have that that guilt anymore and i went back to uh you know i was the ward mission leader at the time i was bringing people into the church and i went back to kind of debating people online and i thought i am the the smartest mormon apologist on earth who else would have thought of using imputed righteousness against this argument and a couple of days later god opened my eyes and i started thinking about it and i was like well okay hold on a minute because in mormonism christ was following the same path that that we had to follow and so that meant that he would have been baptized he would have received the gift of the holy ghost he would have had the temple ordinances a lot of mormons believe that jesus was married and so that he was sealed in the temple and so if imputed righteousness occurs at belief it's like okay jesus is an infinite being of infinite righteousness and infinity can't be divided so if he gives me any percent of his righteousness he's given it all and if if his acts of righteousness are being imputed to me then why do i need to do any of them and i was like wow god wow i'm i'm a protestant i realize that i become a protestant and i was never aware of the change that was happening in my life by then it was too late to change course i knew that that doctrine was true i knew that it was all over the new testament and so i knew that i was going to have to leave the church i actually uh i'd been planning you know keith walker the guy that just does the videos he lives in uh in san antonio which isn't far from me and i've been planning to meet with him for a while to put him in his place and tell him how wrong he was and by the time i finally got down there i had no fight left in me you know i was just like hey let's let's talk about this one last time and so we talked about the gospel and then we got up to leave after about an hour or so and i said you know there's really nothing to stop me from accepting christ right now is there he's like well no not unless you want to go to hell and he's like i'm just i'm just kidding i'm like well i mean yeah you're you're half joking but you're completely right and so i said a prayer right there and i addressed jesus which you don't do as a mormon you don't address jesus and uh and i pledged my life to him and uh you know accepted him as my personal savior and uh nothing really felt different right then but i was like okay so i'm good right if i get hit by a bus i'm going to heaven he's like yeah yeah you are i'm like okay um the changes kind of started to happen gradually after that um you know i thought that i was going to be like actually perfect after that but it turned out that that wasn't the case at all um i continued to to sin and the difference was that when i did i didn't feel condemned by god i still felt accepted i still felt like god loved me and it was such a difference because when i was mormon my relationship with god was like that of you know having some great uncle that lived in a country across the ocean that i never talked to but he had an inheritance and i was going to inherit it someday but now that i was a christian it felt like god was right there every moment of my life just uh just leading me through uh through these changes through a sanctification process um just guiding me in my life and uh and i was i was loving it i was like so this is this is what grace is this is what everyone's been telling me about for so long and i remember just driving one day and and there were raindrops on my windshield and they were reflecting the street lights above and i'm like these are this is so beautiful i never i never noticed the beauty in a raindrop because i'd been so focused on being perfect and you know i was talking to a lot of my christian mentors and things after i left and they're like well have you told your wife yet i said [Laughter] no why would i do that you know it's like i've i've seen what happens um so many times when when somebody leaves the church it ends in divorce and i was like i just i just found grace let me enjoy it for a little while before i bring this upon myself you know it's like i just i just want to enjoy this you know it's been 32 years and i've never experienced god's love in this way and so i dragged my feet i resisted telling anybody in my family for a while and then the spirit finally convicted me and and said that i couldn't keep going to the ward um you know i kept going because my wife was lds and i'm like okay can't stir the pot so i'm gonna keep coming here but inside i'm a christian but outwardly i'm still it was a really compromising situation because i was still the ward mission leader but i wasn't actually actively bringing anybody in anymore i was a bad board mission leader um but i decided i was gonna give my testimony one last time and so keith walker came up to support me and and i i got up and i i bore testimony it wasn't very in your face it was very subtle but i didn't talk about anything except for jesus and his unconditional love and his sufficient grace and at the end of it i said that i was only special because i was his but it was the strangest thing because in the middle of my message all the small children and the babies in the ward began screaming and and crying and they really drowned out my voice but i went to sit down and i waited till the very end but there was one man that got up and he was the older guy he was really angry and he stomped past me went up to the pulpit and then he talked about joseph smith and he said if it wasn't for the saving ordinances that joseph smith restored none of us could go to heaven basically just dismantled everything that i said and so i figured that was the last straw um you know i'd actually this is one of the other things that broke my conversion to was people were starting to share facts about joseph smith that i'd never heard in my life i never knew that when he engaged in polygamy that he lied about it in public and lied about it to his wife i never knew that he married other men's wives while they were still alive and initially when i saw this i thought well he's just a man you know he's abusing authority that god actually gave him and you know what he might not make it to the celestial kingdom but the church is still true i held completely to the doctrine but eventually all of that stuff started to weigh down on me too much but after this experience um in the ward where the guy got up and talked about joseph smith i went to the bishop and i handed him the keys to the building in my temple recommend and i said i am resigning as a word mission leader i don't believe the church is true he kind of smiled at me and chuckled he's like good one you're joking said no bishop i'm not joking i mean he'd seen me give my presentation and he was a new bishop too so i felt kind of bad he'd just become bishop over the lord and and i did this but uh he said what what makes you think that and i said i don't believe that the holy ghost abandons us when we sin and i said i also believe that christ's grace is sufficient to save us all by itself and he said isn't that what we believe i said no bishop if you believe that you have to have ordinances like baptism and you have to keep the commandments in addition to having christ's grace and that makes christ's grace deficient not sufficient and he was a little put off by that but he you know we kind of ended our conversation he said i was welcomed back anytime so i called the sister missionaries and i said i'm not going to be coming back i'm no longer the ward mission leader i wasn't rude about it or anything but you know i kind of left and then i was like okay i need to tell my wife now because she's gonna find out because i just committed not to come back and you know they gave me a week but i knew she was gonna find out before that because gossip spreads really fast in these wards so i gave myself 48 hours to muster the courage to talk to her about it and and what was really bad is that our marriage was already struggling severely um and that's what made it extra hard um it gotten to the point you know where we'd fallen completely out of love and you know i was like well you know this spiritual experience you know i thought for sure god had told me to do this and that everything was gonna be okay but that turned out not to be true and i thought how can i trust any of my spiritual experiences if this is the case and so everything that i'd gone through all the spiritual experiences as a mormon came into question but i got to the point where i was considering having an affair because i just i wanted to be with somebody that actually cared about me that was before i was saved by the way but after i got saved it was like having an affair because i was having a secret relationship behind my wife's back only it wasn't with a woman it was with the one true god and i thought that she would be devastated when she discovered that i wasn't relying on the church to bring me to christ well i took my son to go see finding dory at the movie theater the next day and i got back and and she called out to me from the other room and she said we need to talk i thought oh my goodness you know i don't know how she knows but she knows this is bad and so i went up to the room and she had a letter that the sister missionaries had dropped off for me basically saying we know you've left the church we hope you come back we know it's true and she read the letter and so she knew that i had left she said why didn't you tell me about this before and so i explained that i i'd been concerned because of how many people their marriages are destroyed when somebody leaves the church and uh you know she kind of said like stop treating me like i'm one of them i'm i'm your wife and so i was like okay she ended up taking a break with me but it was for different reasons she had she was overloaded with callings at the church she was the only one that played piano and so she was the uh the main ward organist she was over the the choir organist the youth choir organist and then the small children she did their music time as well and so she was constantly being called into meetings to practice and told to play this and play that and she just wanted a break that's what it was for her and so we both stopped going to church i started going to a christian church locally and it was amazing it was uh it was totally freeing and i introduced myself to the pastor his name was pastor cole and uh you know he i told him my story he's like well that's not the way most people come into christianity uh i don't think he was expecting some some ex-mormon to show up at his congregation but he he took me under his wing uh met with me weekly for a while and was was teaching me doctrine and then and then he baptized me and unfortunately things began to go worse with my marriage my wife told me that she wanted to get a divorce and that there was nothing that i could do to change her mind and that she saw the good things that i was doing and the changes that i was making but it was too late um it really hurt me because god was working a miracle in my life he changed my heart and i actually fell back in love with her i loved her just as much as the day that i proposed to her um but it all meant nothing to her and so um she did file for the divorce and and that happened despite my best efforts and so for a long time i uh i went into depression after this as a new believer i think uh in in 2017 i cried more that year than in any other year before and nothing could console me and i got to the point where you know in mormonism they actually have this saying that says no success in life can compensate for failure inside the home you know it's just been beaten into me my whole life that your family is a sign an outward sign of your righteousness before god and so i just i felt um i felt worthless and i thought that everybody around me would kind of see that same thing but then the hurt was so bad that you know i actually got to a point where i let go of god but he didn't let go of me you know my heart had turned into like this lump of coal and i said i'm never gonna love anything or anyone again and somehow within three or four days after thinking that god healed my heart completely there was no sorrow in my soul at all and i was happy and i was like how is this possible and and i was like man i think i think god let me get down to that absolute lowest point to show me his power to show me that i don't need a family to be happy all i need is him he's the only thing that i need you know everything else that i had had crumbled away but god god reached out and he pulled me out and it's amazing because for a while i was going through this dark tunnel and i thought there was no light at the end i thought i would never be happy again and somewhere in the midst of that i remember driving home one day and my my little toddler nathan was in the back seat he suddenly spoke up and he said did jesus really come back to life i was like yeah he did and he wanted to know all about jesus he asked me questions for 30 minutes straight but a lot of them were just you know funny little kid questions like can he read our minds does he know what we're thinking can he see me right now like if i hide here can he can he still see me i'm like yeah yeah he can why did he die i said so that people who believe in him can go to heaven he said i believe in him um so yeah i got um i ended up getting a new church family you know kind of replaced that family that i had lost and uh you know i actually waited forever to talk to my family about leaving too and this should be a lesson to to anybody who leaves the church like just go ahead and tell your family because it's better than them finding out on the on their own but um dave bartozzo had flown down to uh to austin and he interviewed me and he put that interview on youtube and i thought you know what it's conspicuous enough like my family doesn't go looking for this stuff i have plenty of time to tell them well on christmas eve my brother called me and he said just so you know dad's watching this video right now i said really cause uh i'm supposed to go see all of them tomorrow for christmas i'm like well you know and my brother had left the church um a couple years back he was the only one that had left before me um and i've got i got three brothers and a sister all the rest of them are still active members of the church i said try to smooth things over for me okay and he's like okay so he kind of called me late and he's like they agreed to sweep everything under the rug for christmas they're just gonna it's christmas they're gonna pretend nothing happened okay well on christmas eve the same night i mean i went to um my first ever christmas service and i thought it was amazing um but my my father and mother-in-law were staying with us at the time and mormons don't have local christmas services that you go to and so they started asking my my wife at the time when we were still together um where's michael oh he's at church which church uh the connection church in buda texas oh why is he over there you'll have to ask him that um so the next day my father-in-law started to kind of corner me you know so i heard you guys aren't i heard you're not going to church oh yeah well neither of us are really going to church right now i just i didn't want to i was so scared i didn't want to just be bold and and talk about it but he finally cornered me he's like you were at church last night weren't you and i finally he got it out of me i said like i don't believe that the church is true anymore and he said really you of all people you were so good at defending it and he said i know what happened you stopped praying and reading your scriptures i said no i i started reading my scriptures and praying and and he didn't bother me again after that but then i went to my family's house for christmas and it was the most awkward christmas that i've ever had in my life because even though they weren't saying anything i could see it in their eyes that this was the only thing that they were thinking about especially my mom because there's nothing more important to a mormon mother than her eternal family and now that eternal family was in jeopardy first my my younger brother daniel left and now me the covenant son the torchbearer and i knew how hard that must be but they finally opened up to me the next day and they said why didn't you tell us that this was going on i same same line you know i i was worried that it would hurt our relationship and then they told me that they loved me and nothing was gonna harm our relationship my dad said that when he converted to mormonism his family threatened to disown him and he wasn't gonna do the same thing to me and i finally got to my senses you know i called the rest of my family and i told them and they all said we we disagree with you but we respect you and so i still have a really good relationship with my family what i wasn't expecting um was that god was going to put another woman in my life um i actually sworn off women after the divorce i said i'm never going to talk to a woman again if i can help it um and and i didn't want to date anyways like if i were i'd have to be a christian woman and no christian woman is going to understand what i've been through so it's just not it's not worth the trouble um but one of my friends encouraged me to to pray to god and and have him put the right woman in my life and the next day i met um brianna um in a forum called ex-mormon christians and we weren't trying to do anything romantic but we just happened to connect so well and before long we were talking on skype and over the phone and we were boyfriend and girlfriend before we ever met in person and uh and i went went up to california and brought her down to texas and and now she's my wife and uh it's just it's just amazing because you know uh when i was mormon god was so small you know you had to do the ordinances in the mormon church in a certain order and you were blessed based on your obedience by god but then when i left i realized that god was so much bigger than that i couldn't put him in a box the odds of me coming out of the church and becoming a christian which most latter-day saints don't and the same thing happening to brianna and then us finding each other after that if i didn't know better i would say that that was a thing called providence it might just turn me into a calvinist i don't know we'll see but uh before i before i go on do any of you guys have any any questions before i i conclude with my testimony the question that he asked was do mormons consider themselves to be depraved sinners and to that i would say absolutely not um i think a lottery has to come to a certain point before they would say that they're totally depraved they might say that they're sinner but they're not even likely to say that really usually latter-day saints will say that they've made a mistake but they're very hesitant to say that it's a sin and it's very strong in the culture to have this outward mask of perfection because that is what you're what's expected you know your the commandment is to be perfect and so nobody ever divulges their sins when i went to a christian church for the first time and i was attending there and i actually saw people confessing their sins to each other and asking for people to pray over them i thought this is this is amazing this is so freeing nobody expects me to be perfect we all acknowledge that we are sinners now i mean i've i've actually talked to some latter-day saints that say that they are sinless but but most of them will admit that they've got some problems but they're on the path to righteousness and they're a little bit better today than they were yesterday to which i usually respond okay well since you're seeing the progression you must have an eta on when you're going to reach that perfection right um the last person i said that he said he was speaking metaphorically and i should have i should have known that um but yeah that's and to what you kind of said earlier i've thought about that a lot too you know why did why didn't god pull me out while i was on my mission because i had that moment where i was ready to leave i was ready and willing but god left me in the mormon church for years 13 more years after that and i struggled to understand but i do think if i had left at that time i probably wouldn't have become a christian i probably would have become an atheist because over the next 13 years for one thing yeah he got me more involved in understanding my own doctrine versus christian doctrine i never would have understood that imputed righteousness was such such a a powerful tool to use when talking to latter-day saints um if i hadn't stayed in the church no i don't i don't consider myself like a paul or anything like that by the way but uh but yeah i do think that he left me there for a purpose and that is to be able to relate to latter-day saints a little bit better than if i just left at that time um it enabled me to understand both sides of the debate and and because of that i feel like i can talk to to both groups really effectively and i can talk to latter-day saints in their own language but i can be talking about christian doctrine and it's a lot less abrasive that way and so that's something that i that i can do that god has allowed does every young mormon man turn into mission papers and do the females do it that's a good question um the females can it's very optional for the women to do it and i actually saw a lot more sister missionaries when i went to the mtc than i thought there would be they go a little bit older and a lot of times they're married by then uh mormon women get married pretty young i think my sister was 19 when she got married so usually they don't they don't make it there and if they do there can be a stigma like oh well you were undesirable and that's why you're serving a mission so it can be viewed negatively a little bit when it comes to the young men they're not required to do it but the social pressure is so strong that a lot of them do it regardless i had a couple of companions on my mission that didn't want to be there and they'd gone because their girlfriend wouldn't have any more interest in them if they didn't yeah they told me yeah yeah they said they didn't really want to be there it's just my girlfriend said she wouldn't marry me unless i went on a mission a lot of the young women are taught from a young age that they should seek a return missionary and so that is just part of the indoctrination um a lot of times in utah you get a better job if you're a return missionary they view you as being more trustworthy more stable uh more mature and so you can get those jobs and it just kind of depends on on where you are but i had one companion who said he prayed about going on a mission and he got an answer not to go and he still went because it just wasn't um thought of as being acceptable to not go on a mission it's just you are a cultural outcast if you decide not to do it so you don't have to but you have to you asked if uh if a mormon can ever have assurance of eternal life while alive and i would say mostly not in response to that because mormons say that you have to you have to keep all the commandments you have to have all the temple ordinances including a ceiling but even after that you have to endure to the end so that means that if you make it your whole life but then on your deathbed you give up on god you didn't endure to the end so you never really have that assurance in fact in one of the debate forums one of the latter day saints recently asked challenged the evangelicals and said what do you have that we don't and i said assurance another is uh there is a temple ordinance that is not well known and that's called the second anointing and and that's where somebody receives this ordinance and their exaltation is made sure no matter what they do basically at that point and a lot of times i'll kind of use that to talk to lds apologists and i'll say hey protestants have all had their their second anointing we've all had our calling in election made sure that's that's what they call it so basically my eternal life is assured at this point so but yeah 99.999 percent of the time no they can't have assurance while they're alive can i explain the lds position on the trinity most latter-day saints don't understand the trinity at all when they try to attack the trinity they're actually attacking modalism and i've had this recently even with my own brother recently he said well uh was jesus just praying to himself in the garden of uh that kind of in the garden of gethsemane i said well no you know that's not what we believe we believe that he was praying to the father and so you know i even thought for a while there until i got more in depth with talking to christians that you know the baptism of christ disproved the trinity because you've got the dove the holy spirit coming down in the form of the dove and you have the father's voice coming out of heaven so you know they believe that it's a man-made concept from the council of nicaea that it's just something that protestants pieced or catholics and protestants pieced together um from the fragmented bible but the book of mormon says that precious truths were removed from the bible and so presumably one of those precious truths was that we're the same species as god and god isn't some mysterious three-in-one being he's actually just like us and so they've they've remade man or they've remade god in the image of man yeah so did i ever believe in the endless recession of gods that the father was once a mortal man like us and that he sinned and achieved godhood himself yes that was on my radar in fact my entire mission um if somebody asked me and i was pretty direct about it i would say yes i believe that that i can become a god i believe that the father was once a god like us there's some debate among mormons that will say like well maybe god wasn't a sinner because jesus didn't sin so maybe you know he was like the jesus of his generation and he came and lived a perfect sin sinless life and he performed an atonement so those mormons believe in an infinite number of atonements as well for the different generations of of gods i believed in that until i started writing my book a biblical defense of mormonism and i originally had a chapter in there that was called man may become god and so i started looking for the biblical evidence of that and i ended up changing the name of the chapter to may man become god question mark and in that chapter i said that uh that the father was never created that there was no evidence to support that so i abandoned the view that there was an endless recession of gods i did believe that we could still become gods but it said that he was he was the most high god and i thought even if i became a god even if i had spirit children they wouldn't worship me they would worship heavenly father and i tried to explain that to my family members and they just kind of shut their heads at me and said well that's not essential doctrine you can still believe that and go to the celestial kingdom it was a little bit a little bit patronizing but uh yeah i did change my my position on that i believe that i still believe jesus was a created being but i kind of had doubts whether the holy ghost was created as well i couldn't find any evidence of that in scripture so yeah my views were sort of inching towards evangelical christianity and you know if you were to pick up that old book of biblical defense of mormonism there's still copies out there that i can't get rid of completely that come back to haunt me but i had taken up a couple of positions and one of them was prima scriptura for a while and that was the view that scripture took precedence over what my leaders were saying i believe that if they said something that contradicted the scripture that it was not true of course that eventually led me to sola scriptura because i left the church and i thought okay well what other source is there that can be authoritative because this one that i thought was authoritative took control over the word of god and tried to usurp it and so i don't believe that there is another authority out there i think it's the bible alone now but you can kind of see uh you can trace my my journey um by kind of looking through that old book one of the other things that i said was that um joseph smith we needed to stop emphasizing him so much i said you know the gospel is all about christ's bride the church being restored we're talking about a wedding here heaven forbid one of the guests should get all the attention and so i was beginning to de-emphasize joseph smith even at my most active in the lds church i saw that there were there were issues and i was trying to kind of back away from them so uh he said most of the lottery saints he talks to say that their conversion comes from reading the bible when they've been converted to christ yes thanks i think that's very true but it involves reading the bible with uh with some humility and with the eyes of a child because as long as you've got those mormon glasses on and you're reading it and you are using isa jesus to uh to come up to make it reach your your goal this is the difference between uh christianity and mormonism is in christianity we start with the problem and we take the evidence in the scripture and we come up with a solution but in mormonism you start with the answer and then you go to the scripture and you make sure that it fits that answer and so yes reading reading the bible is is paramount i mean they'll tell you oh we read the bible um you know every every fourth year we'll read the new testament every fourth year we'll read the old testament but then they have their other scripture but when they're actually reading it it's just for an hour in sunday school and they're skipping through most of it to just talk about the verses that you know in isolation that seem to support the mormon church there's no context there's no the whole of this chapter is saying this you know i uh i got i got out of the church and i started reading romans 4 and i'm like this was here all along it said this the whole time like this is the same bible right like and it was it was the same the same book it just felt like a totally new book and so i think it's just you gotta you've gotta really read it you've gotta be be willing to let the spirit teach you to let god lead you to what it actually says but if somebody does that uh then yeah the bible's the absolute best tool for a latter-day saint to come to the truth um just to just to conclude i just want to um i just want to say you know that christ christ is sufficient christ is all that we need that's one of the biggest things for me is just realizing um that christ the cross is my temple christ is my exaltation jesus is everything everything that i need and i'm i'm so blessed to have him in my life and i just hope that any latter-day saints listening will will take this to heart and and seek the jesus of the bible read the bible with an eyes of a child and leave your preconceived notions at the door i think you'll be amazed at what you can find at what god can do

Channel: undefined

Views: 87,104

Rating: 4.7298784 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: fi5XP1Qh6Os

Length: 83min 58sec (5038 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020