Almost Arrested at a LDS Temple

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Amazon Delivery Service partners are hiring full -time delivery drivers to meet growing customer demand.

00:07

Receive compensation of at least $20 per hour at select stations, plus benefits, and a sign -on bonus of $2 ,000 from participating

00:15

DSPs if you apply now. No delivery experience required. Must be 21 years or older.

00:21

Terms apply. Apply today at amazon .com forward slash driver. That's amazon .com

00:27

forward slash driver. There could be cash waiting for you at findmassmoney .gov.

00:33

You might have checked before, but they're always updating names. So check again. The Mass State Treasury has over $3 billion in unclaimed property.

00:42

Maybe it's a long -lost bank account, forgotten shares of a stock, or an old paycheck you somehow forgot to pick up.

00:48

Some of it might be yours. There's a lot of money that could be yours. But you'll never know until you go.

00:54

So go to findmassmoney .gov. That's findmassmoney .gov.

01:26

Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rappaport, where we provide

01:34

Biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

01:40

Christian Podcast Community. For more content, or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:52

Okay, we have been telling you that we are headed to Israel, Striving for Eternity, and we're going to be discussing that in detail with the organizer of that trip in just a moment.

02:01

First, let me give a review that we recently got in. This comes from someone that is going by GrowingInTruth, and they gave us a review.

02:10

Excellent, understandable, and exegetical. One of the many things I appreciate about this podcast is its exegetical and easy -to -understand approach to whatever is being spoken of.

02:23

Andrew is very humble in his speaking and always brings the gospel to God be all the glory.

02:30

I'm glad he said very humble in his speaking, because otherwise I was going to say he doesn't know me very well. I think my guests would probably agree he does know me well.

02:37

So our guest today is Eric Johnson from Mormon Research Ministry, which may give an indication on why we're going to talk about Mormonism.

02:45

So Eric, you obviously grew up hating Mormons. You grew up in a Mormon home, and you converted.

02:51

You were forced to live in Utah. You obviously, you know, grew up with a hatred for Mormons, right?

02:58

Wow, that's news to me, because that's not what I think. Yeah, I actually learned a lot about Mormonism back when

03:09

I was in high school. I started to research religions in 1978 after Jim Jones and a thousand people committed suicide in the jungles of Guyana, and I asked myself was what

03:20

I would believe, was it true? And so I ended up doing a lot of research. Whenever the missionaries would come to my door,

03:27

Jehovah's Witnesses and others, I would talk to them, and I did a lot of research on my faith.

03:33

And so long story short, in 1989 I met Bill McKeever of Mormonism Research Ministry.

03:40

That's mrm .org on the website, and I've been working with him since that time.

03:45

I taught for a number of years in Southern California. And then in 2010, I decided to move my family away from Southern California, where I had a good job.

03:55

I was working in the community college district there, as well as the

04:00

Bible department head of a Christian school, and came to Utah so I could be in full -time Christian ministry.

04:06

And we look at it as if we really care, we would tell them the truth, because if we hated

04:11

Latter -day Saints, then the best thing we could do is just leave them alone and let them just flounder in their faith, which is impossible to achieve.

04:20

And so we want to be able to share with people the truth of what Christianity is all about, what the

04:27

Bible really teaches. And so we live amongst the Mormons. We live at the heart in Utah, the

04:33

Salt Lake City area, and share our faith, have a website. We do podcasts as well, and are on five different radio stations.

04:42

So we put a lot of energy into trying to share in a gentle and respectful manner.

04:49

Yeah, but this is the argument that many people give, is that you must hate Mormons, or you were a Mormon, and neither you nor Bill McKeever were

04:57

Mormons. You didn't do it because of some conversion out of Mormonism.

05:02

And I should say at the beginning, at the outset, for anyone that might be listening, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

05:09

Saints has determined that the proper phrase, their latest prophet has stated that the proper phrase is,

05:18

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. We're not supposed to refer to people as Mormons, but it's really hard to say over and over again in a podcast,

05:28

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. We're going to say Mormon, people understand that term, or we might say

05:33

LDS. It is not trying to be disrespectful to them. It is just very hard in a podcast to keep doing that.

05:43

But many LDS members would say that people like you and Bill, who spend your life researching

05:49

Mormonism and trying to tell people about it, it's almost as if somehow you must have some hidden agenda, and you really don't care about their soul and where they spend eternity.

05:59

It must be that you're an anti -Mormon. Well, and again, as you pointed out, if a person is not a

06:05

Mormon, and you're not supposed to refer to people as Mormons, then how can you be an anti -Mormon?

06:11

But we're still called that. Yes, a lot of people would say, why would you spend your life doing that?

06:16

But if you consider that the Latter -day Saint people are, I would say, a people group, just like any missionary agency is going to people that they feel needs the gospel.

06:27

And if anybody needs the gospel, it is the Latter -day Saints, because they have a gospel that tells them that they have to achieve perfection.

06:37

Their leaders talk about being fully obedient. They have to jump through a lot of hoops.

06:42

It's all about what they do for God, rather than what Christianity says, what did God do for me first?

06:48

And certainly good works are important in Christianity, but it's not what we do to get justification and the grace that God provides as a gift.

06:59

And so I want to make it very, very clear when I'm talking to Latter -day Saints that, again, if I hated you,

07:05

I wouldn't be here. If I'm outside this temple or if I'm outside a general conference that happens the first weekend of October, I'm going to be there because I really want you to know the truth.

07:17

And I know that's the case for you as well. I mean, you could do a lot of other things than go to the city in New York on a weekend and just spend all your time doing that, when you could be doing other things.

07:29

And so we're not with a vendetta. We're not with hate. We actually do love. Paul went to the synagogue because he loved the

07:36

Jewish people. And even when he said that he would wipe the dust off of his feet and he would go to the

07:42

Gentiles, he kept going to the synagogues because he had a love for those people. And so that's kind of the attitude that I want to have.

07:50

And the Bible says we're supposed to contend for the faith. And so we challenge

07:56

Latter -day Saints to, if what they believe is true, then they need to convince me. Show me from the

08:02

Bible where what they are teaching and saying is true. And I'd like to have my turn to be able to show them where I think

08:09

Mormonism is contradicted by the teachings of the Bible. And if it does contradict, Mormonism and Christianity are opposite as far as their belief system, and both cannot be true.

08:20

Somebody's got to be wrong. We both could be wrong. But neither of us is convinced we're both wrong.

08:25

We think one person is right. We think we're right. But that's where we need to come up with the evidence and see what really is there.

08:33

And what I want to do later on in this show is talk about you have a very creative way to reach out to Mormons using some of their own books because we're going to end up talking about some outreaches that you've done and different ways of reaching

08:47

Mormons. But we also wanted to talk about something that you're doing with us at Striving for Eternity, which is this trip to Israel.

08:56

You've organized many trips to Israel. So obviously the first person I reached out to when our board director said, let's do a trip to Israel, was you.

09:04

Let's talk about this trip, what we can expect to see and have happen, and really how folks can sign up.

09:14

Yeah. Well, in fact, if you go to the website, 2021israeltrip .com,

09:20

just one word, 2021israeltrip .com, and you can see the website.

09:27

And if you go to the bottom of that website, you can see all the trips that I have taken I first went in 1990, and I was a passenger on a tour that was led by my professor at Bethel Seminary San Diego, Dr.

09:40

Ronald Youngblood, one of the translators of the New International Version. And I fell in love with Israel right there.

09:46

My wife and I both had a chance to go with him. And so in 2009, I taught at a school,

09:52

Christian High School in El Cajon, California. It's the school where David Jeremiah is a pastor.

09:58

And so I was able to take 47 students, teachers, parents, staff from that school that year.

10:05

And then I realized when I got back, and I had students coming up to me and telling me that they were reading their

10:11

Bible again for the first time in four years, even though they were supposed to be reading their Bible in Bible class, then

10:18

I realized the power of the empirical, of being able to touch, to be able to see, to be able to hear what the

10:26

Holy Land is all about. And it really does change the way that you read your Bible. And so since that time,

10:31

I've taken close to a dozen trips, I've taken more than 350 people on these trips, going usually once a year, sometimes twice a year, to be able to take people to a place where we're going to be able to actually go and see what the

10:47

Bible talks about, the very cities, the very places. And the people that are talked about, there's evidence for them.

10:54

And so this thing that we call Christianity, we certainly have to have faith. But being able to go on a

11:01

Holy Land pilgrimage and be able to experience this for yourself, it makes it become more real.

11:07

And like I say, it will change the way you read your Bible. You'll understand the geography better.

11:13

You'll understand all of this evidence that maybe is so confusing, but when you go there, it's going to make so much more sense.

11:21

And that's why I like taking people. People ask me if I get bored going to Israel.

11:26

And my response is, well, I took my kids to Disneyland probably about 40 times over the years.

11:33

And I've been to Disneyland many times before. I lived in Southern California. And no, I never got bored because I enjoyed watching their expressions and be able to experience it through their eyes.

11:45

And even the first time they would go, and even later as they got older, I really enjoyed it. So I'm planning on going on this trip as well.

11:53

I will be there to make sure everything runs smoothly. And, man, it's a great itinerary we have for people.

11:59

You know, one of the things when I teach our Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminars in churches, the thing that always amazes me is the fact that people take for granted the geography.

12:12

I give an example in there about understanding the geography of the Sea of Galilee.

12:17

We read the account, here's Jesus with his disciples. They're in a boat.

12:23

There's a storm that comes up. And the disciples are scared. And people don't really think through it. They just read this and think, okay, it was raining.

12:30

It was bad. Okay, let's put it into the context of the geography and the background of these disciples.

12:39

Several of them, at least four of them, were fishermen on that sea. They would be used to being on the

12:44

Sea of Galilee fishing for a living. So they grew up there. But the geography makes a huge difference in understanding that account because when you're in the

12:54

Sea of Galilee, you start to realize it's a valley. And so you can't see storms that come over a mountain range until they're there.

13:01

We're not on motorboats, right? So if a storm comes up seemingly out of nowhere, and it's not that it's out of nowhere, it's just that being in a valley, you can't see that storm.

13:12

And then all of a sudden, when you can see it, it's on top of you. So now you're in a storm, and you've got to get back to land.

13:21

That would happen naturally for them if they've been used to growing up on the sea there.

13:27

So now you put that in the context. People get desensitized when they're in storms like that all the time.

13:33

I grew up on a boat. I was used to being at sea in stormy weather.

13:40

But I could tell you that I got desensitized to it. But there was one storm I remembered very well. As I'm piloting the ship,

13:49

I'm on a bridge that's probably about 30, 35 feet above sea level, and I am literally at the bottom of a peak of wave, and I'm looking at the peak of the wave we're about to go up.

14:01

And my dad was like, you make sure that we don't turn. You've got to go straight into it because if you don't, we capsize.

14:07

It's like, yikes! So I was nervous then because that was the most severe storm

14:14

I had ever been in. It was different than any other. That's the same case here. These guys were used to being in storms like that just by the nature of the geography, and now they're very afraid?

14:24

That tells you this was not a typical storm. This was a storm that got seasoned fishermen on that land or on that sea where they would have been used to being in storms very nervous.

14:37

It tells you this was something more than a regular storm, and that adds to when you start to realize that they come to him and they're like,

14:44

Lord, wake up! Don't you know that we're perishing? And he, of course, is like, no, you're not perishing.

14:50

I'm right here. You're right on that, Andrew, and it is, if I consider it like a bowl, that you have the mountain range around and then the waters down below, and what's fascinating, we will take a boat ride out on the

15:04

Sea of Galilee. You'll have a chance to experience that, but you'll also have a chance to see the Jesus boat.

15:10

The Jesus boat was discovered in the 1980s when there was a drought going on in Israel, and so it was in the mud with the receding waters of the

15:20

Sea of Galilee. So it took them days to be able to figure out how to get this out of there, and we will actually see a boat that is 2 ,000 years old, and they call it the

15:31

Jesus boat. It's 27 feet long. It's 7 1⁄2 feet wide.

15:37

It tells you it's not very big to fit in 13 guys, 13 men, and it's only 27 feet long.

15:43

It's not a boat in the same sense you would think a sailboat would be, and its maximum height was 4 feet.

15:51

And so they were in a storm, and they were scared, and I have an experience that took place for me in 1990.

15:59

We went out on a boat like we're going to be going out on, and it was calm as could be, and we were enjoying our time as you float along in the boat, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a storm, and it wasn't as big as the storm you're talking about with Jesus.

16:15

I'm sure this was just a very common storm, and the waves started to happen, and the boat started to rock.

16:22

We all held on. It lasted a good five minutes, and even my camera lens that I had the cap on, and this was the old 35 -millimeter daze,

16:32

I had it attached on there. The wind was so severe, it took my lens off, the cap off, and it blew up,

16:40

I'm going to say maybe 10, 12 feet in the air, and it landed in the water. It's probably down at the bottom of there right now.

16:47

And for me, when I read this passage, and that storm I went through was probably nothing like what the disciples went through on that storm that you were referring to, but the smallness of their boat compared to what

16:59

I was in, a big boat, and it wasn't dangerous or anything. We weren't going to capsize, but I had a healthy respect now for this, and that's one of the things that you get when, as many times as I've been to Israel, there have been things that have happened that just make me say, wow,

17:16

I understand better because I had a chance to experience the Sea of Galilee, being calm, and then all of a sudden there was a storm.

17:24

And I bet they would not have allowed us to sail if that storm had been happening when we were on the shore.

17:29

But it didn't happen until we got into the middle of the water. It's not a very big lake. A sea, it's a lake is what it is.

17:36

And you can see easily to the other side, but I think when people actually go to these places, they can see it for themselves, and when they see the locations as well.

17:46

And how small Israel really is, it really isn't that big. You could drive from one end to the other across in just less than a couple of hours, and from north to south in three, three and a half hours.

17:58

When people realize how small this country really is, even though we hear about Israel so often in the news because of its importance, well, two major religions do consider that to be, three major religions actually consider it to be so important that in Jerusalem, you have the western wall for the

18:17

Jews, the holiest place. Right above there is the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock is, and that's the holy place for Muslims.

18:25

And then just a block away is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

18:31

And so these are three very holy places, and that's why there's so much antagonism and disagreement and discord, because these three religions all claim

18:40

Israel for itself. But, I mean, when we look at the Old Testament and we look at the New Testament, to be able to see how much of it happened right where we're going to be, it's just totally amazing.

18:51

Yeah, I mean, the thing that you think about with this, it's about the size of New Jersey, which is one of the smaller states, but, you know, why is it people always say they go down from Jerusalem?

19:03

Now, you think about it, we often think of down as going south, but even when people head north, it's down from Jerusalem.

19:09

When you get to Jerusalem, you're going to understand why it's always down, because you're going down a mountain. There's so much that just being there really helps.

19:19

When you think about going to where Jesus did the Sermon on the Mount, and you stand there, and think about 5 ,000 people.

19:25

I've been there, sitting there and going, wow, 5 ,000 men standing here and Jesus speaking to all of them, and they heard him.

19:34

It's really neat to be in these places. We're going to get to go to the Qumran area, which is very important for anyone who knows about the

19:42

Dead Sea Scrolls and understand here's this little shepherd boy just, shall we say, by chance, we would realistically say by God's providence, just throwing a rock in, hitting some pottery, and discovering something that really just discredited years, many years of liberal

20:00

Christianity with one discovery. Yeah, we're going to have a chance to go to Qumran, the village, and see where Cave 4 is, and Cave 1 is up in the hills, and we're going to get a chance to see some of those scrolls that were uncovered when we go to the

20:17

Israel Museum in Jerusalem and be able to see actual pieces. And what the

20:23

Dead Sea Scrolls did for us is help us to understand the accuracy of the

20:30

Old Testament, because before 1947, the earliest manuscripts that we had came from around 900

20:38

A .D. So 900 years after the death of Christ was the earliest manuscripts that we had, and then with one false swoop of a boy throwing a rock into a cave, as you mentioned, into Cave 1, there were 11 total caves, we were able to find the whole scroll of Isaiah, for instance.

20:58

The whole scroll of Isaiah, and when they looked at it, it was from 125 B .C.,

21:04

more than a century before the time of Christ. The prophecies were all the same as what we find in the later manuscripts that even were 1 ,000 years after the time of Christ.

21:16

So those who had said, well, maybe that scribes had taken it and changed it to the way they wanted were disproven.

21:24

Besides Isaiah, they found pieces of every book but one, and all of them help us to better understand the

21:31

Old Testament that we have to see how accurate it was, and for good reason it was accurate, because the

21:37

Jewish scribes took great care in preserving the actual text, and if they made too many mistakes, the manuscript would be thrown away, it wasn't worth anything.

21:47

And so that's something I think that a lot of people don't even think about, reading their English Bibles. It's been pretty easy for us in the 21st century, how many versions of the

21:57

Bible we have, but to realize the ancient Hebrew that came from the Old Testament, and also the

22:04

Koine Greek, we have great manuscript evidence, and a discovery like the Dead Sea Scrolls helps us to be able to have confidence that what we're reading is actually what was written back in the time of the

22:15

Bible. Yeah, and so let's talk about the trip, before we go to a break, that we're going to be doing. Let's give some details of that specific trip.

22:23

People can go to 2021israeltrip .com, get all the details, register.

22:31

Now, this is March of 2021, so some people are like, oh, it's so far away.

22:38

What would be the incentive for them to book this now? And then the flip side is, but if I book it now, I have no idea what's going to happen that far out.

22:45

What if I have to cancel? Here we go. It's March 6th through the 18th, 2021. It is a 13 -day trip, and I like going a little longer than many trips do, because there's more we can actually see.

22:58

And so if somebody signs up in this next week through October 11th, which is

23:03

Friday, they're going to get $100 off as an early bird discount for the cost of the trip.

23:10

And so for everybody who registers in your family, you'll get $100 off by getting that registered.

23:15

And you can go onto the website that you mentioned, 2021israeltrip .com. There is a link at the very top to register for this trip.

23:24

It says, click here. You would click there, and you would be able to do that. So they'll get that, plus I'm going to be sending them a book on Israel.

23:32

I'm going to send them a DVD. And there's going to be information they're going to get over the next year and a half, and it gives people plenty of time to save their money.

23:42

Although you can use credit cards for this trip. For the $500 deposit, you will be able to use a credit card.

23:49

And at the very end, December of 2020, that you will be able to use a credit card for that.

23:55

But that $500, you're only risking $125. If you cancel before Thanksgiving 2020, that's more than a year away, then you would get back $375.

24:07

So you do risk $125. If you're not quite sure, but you think you're pretty much wanting to go and you just need to put your money together and make sure you get the time off, you're not really risking much to sign up for this trip, put in your $500 deposit.

24:23

I'll be sending you emails throughout the course of the next year and a half before this trip happens. And I'm going to say the more money you can save in the next year and not have to put it all on a credit card is probably better for you.

24:35

And then you have more time to anticipate the trip. Because I'll be doing teachings throughout the year and giving you plenty of articles from different places.

24:47

I have a number of YouTube videos with archaeologists that I have been with.

24:53

And we'll try our best to teach you. And if you go to that website, you can actually see short little videos under each of the days.

25:01

Like, for instance, Monday, March 8th, you can see a short video, two or three minutes, on Caesarea, Megiddo, and Beit She 'an.

25:08

We're going to visit all three of those places. So if you want to spend an hour or two on the website, you could actually go on to these videos and get an idea of what you're going to see.

25:17

That was taken by a pastor friend of mine in 2017, who's going to be going with me on another trip

25:24

I'm doing in the next year. And so these videos are really well done, and I think people will enjoy those.

25:31

And, people, you really want to make sure you register early, because we're already 30 % to capacity.

25:38

We'll probably fill up quickly. We're going to be having the speakers at Striving for Eternity. That's Pastor Frank Mullis, Anthony Silvestro, myself.

25:46

They'll be doing devotions. We're also going to be joined by Justin Peters, who will also be doing some of the devotions.

25:52

And so the four of us will be doing teaching, along with Eric. He's going to be doing the one at the, be teaching at the, well, not really, doing something special.

26:00

I won't say teaching. It's going to be something special at the place of the Sermon on the Mount. So, you really want to make sure that you register quickly, like as in right now.

26:10

Okay, if you're driving, don't stop the car on the highway. But you can pull over and go to 2021israeltrip .com.

26:18

Register quickly, because once this fills up, it's done. You'd have to be on a waiting list. We are limited in space to 55 people, because that's the size of the bus, and we're trying to keep it to one bus.

26:30

Therefore, you need to make sure that if you want your spot on this trip, be able to hang out with the guys at Striving for Eternity and Justin Peters on a trip to Israel, then you want to make sure you register right away.

26:44

So, now, let's, after this break, Eric, I want to talk about Mormonism, talk about some of the outreaches you've done, and some different things with a new course that you have available.

26:55

Let's do that right after this break. The good news is Striving for Eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them

27:06

Biblical hermeneutics. That's right, the art and science of interpreting Scripture. The bad news is somebody attending might be really upset to discover

27:14

Jeremiah 29 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to strivingforeternity .org

27:20

to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. Looking for strategies that will help you engage in meaningful conversations with members of the

27:30

Mormon Church? Well, if so, take a look at Sharing the Good News with Mormons, a new book produced by Harvest House Publishers and edited by Mormonism Research Ministries' Eric Johnson and Sean McDowell.

27:42

Sharing the Good News with Mormons includes 24 helpful essays from two dozen Christian apologists, scholars, and pastors.

27:49

Pick up your copy at the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore or order directly from mrm .org.

27:56

And as we've told you, that is also available at strivingforeternity .org. Just go to our store, you can pick that up.

28:02

And we are speaking with the editor and brainchild of that book. Eric, let's talk about this book,

28:09

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. You came to me one day with an idea. Yes, I came to you and I was planning on having some friends put together a chapter on the way that they did evangelism.

28:22

And I was asking if you wanted to do a chapter on what it would be, what you like to do, the street preaching.

28:29

And so I thought, because you have done this in Utah, you've done it at Manti, the

28:35

Mormon Miracle Pageant. And I like your approach, I like the way you do it, because street preaching is kind of, in some people's minds, controversial.

28:43

And they hear the screechers, the way that it shouldn't be done. And so I appreciate the fact that you do it the right way, you don't scream at people, you don't put them down, you don't make fun of them.

28:54

And so anyway, you heard that idea, and then you, and you actually contacted a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours,

29:02

J. Warner Wallace, and the two of you guys said, are you thinking about self -publishing this book?

29:08

Why would you do that, because nobody's going to read it? And I said, yeah, but I just don't think any publisher is going to want a book on evangelism.

29:16

They just don't usually sell very well in the 21st century. And let's just be honest, many Christians don't share their faith.

29:23

And so I'm thinking, and I have published books before. I published with Bill McKeever, Mormonism 101, in 2015 with Baker.

29:31

In 2013, we did with Kriegel, Answering Mormon's Questions. I've self -published a book myself,

29:38

Mormonism 101 for Teens. So I've been with book publishers before, and I know how hard it is to get them to take a book.

29:46

But you guys convinced me that I needed to try. And so I did try with one of my publishers from a previous book, and they wrote me an email.

29:56

I don't have it in front of me. It's somewhere. I posted it somewhere in this office, and I can't find it now.

30:01

But basically, they said, oh, it sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately, it's just not going to be a bottom -line book.

30:08

It's not going to make its money. And that's what the publisher, I understand. They have to make money.

30:14

So they basically declined. At first, they showed great interest, and I thought they were going to take it, and then they weren't.

30:19

And so I became very disappointed. But I called my friend Sean McDowell, who is in Southern California, and I told him we go way back, many years, and I told him about this book idea.

30:32

And I said, man, I've been encouraged by these guys to find a publisher for it, but, man,

30:39

I just don't know where to look. Can you help me? So he said, let me do some checking. Well, it turns out that he contacted

30:46

Harvest House Publishers, and he has done a book or two with them.

30:51

He's written, I think, 20 books. And he got them to accept the book. They were very excited about it.

30:58

So then I was able to expand my offering to get 24 different chapters. I put them all together in different ways that people can share their faith, because that's the question we get on a regular basis.

31:08

What's the one magic bullet question or tactic that I can use that will win a

31:15

Latter -day Saint? And I always like to say, if you find it, please let me know what that is so that I can write a book just on that one tactic, because it's not there.

31:25

Everybody has different abilities and different likes and dislikes and ways of sharing the good news.

31:30

And so that's how this book came about, and you're in it, along with other people that we know, good friends of mine.

31:37

And we have Sandra Tanner. We have Lynn Wilder, a number of important people who have evangelized

31:44

Latter -day Saints for many, many years. And so I think that's the value of this book.

31:49

I only wrote the introduction in my own chapter, but the value is we have all these different people.

31:55

And if you don't like my tactic, then maybe you'll like hers. And if you don't like hers, then maybe you'll like this person's, and so on and so forth.

32:02

And so we've had a lot of response to that book of people who have said, man, that has really helped me to come up with some new ideas of how

32:11

I could share my faith with Latter -day Saints. Not just Latter -day Saints. This is the thing that I tell people. There's 24 different tactics.

32:18

Some of them, like Bill McKeever's and yours, are specific to Latter -day Saints. However, that's not always the case.

32:25

Matt Slick's on textual criticism, mine on open -air evangelism, those could be used anywhere.

32:31

There's actually ideas that I picked up on here where, as I was just reading through different chapters when the book came out, and there's someone that writes articles for papers, and there's others who create.

32:47

I know you do this as well. When you go to a Mormon temple opening, you create a newspaper that people would actually read at an event like that.

32:54

And I was like, boy, that's a great idea. We can do this at ballparks. People go and evangelize at sports parks all the time, but if you created a paper for the sports team, they hand out these schedules and everything.

33:06

You could put the schedule for all the home games and things like that and then have the gospel in there.

33:11

People pick those things up because it looks like it's from the sporting event, and they take that, and a lot of times people are bored, they're sitting there, they start reading these things.

33:22

So it's basically a very large gospel tract. Creative ways like that that I picked up, and that had nothing to do with evangelizing just Mormons.

33:30

So even just learning different tactics to evangelize, it's an excellent book. And the nice thing is you kept us off to a limited number of words, which is really hard sometimes, but it makes it where every chapter could be read within about 20, 30 minutes.

33:47

It's only about six pages. Not even, I would say 10 minutes for the average person. Yeah, it's only like five or six, seven pages long.

33:52

And if you don't like the chapter, you skip it and go to the next one. Yeah, I mean, I did not read anyone else's chapter until mine was done.

34:00

So it's not like you have to read them in order. You can read them in any order. It's really good.

34:05

But let's talk about your style, what you've done at years at different events, because you have a very unique style for Mormons, and this is going to take some explanation of Mormonism to understand this.

34:17

But you have a style, and it sometimes can, as we'll talk about, you have some other things that you've recently got in maybe a little bit of trouble going out to some temples.

34:25

But how is it you go and try to reach Mormons? If I have people walking by, my favorite tactic is to use a book called

34:33

The Miracle of Forgiveness written by one of the top leaders of the church back in the 1970s and 80s.

34:39

His name was Spencer W. Kimball. He was the 12th president of the church, and he wrote this book in 1969 as an apostle.

34:47

So it's the 50th anniversary of this book. And by the way, in Mormonism, the top leader is called the president or prophet, and he has two counselors, and those three men are known as First Presidency, and then you have the 12 apostles.

34:59

And so a lot of people like to say, well, you know, he was just an apostle. Well, he had the same position that Paul had, and if the

35:06

LDS Church is the restored church, then you're going to quibble with a man who was an apostle, much higher than anybody

35:13

I've ever talked to. I've never met an apostle. I've met 70s, but never the apostles. But this book has been a godsend.

35:21

In 2014, I was standing outside a Mormon temple open house when they reopen a temple or build a temple, they open it up for the public.

35:30

So anybody can come in for a week to three weeks. And I was outside in Ogden, Utah, of this temple, and I was trying to hand out the newspaper you were referring to.

35:40

We do have a very good newspaper, and you can see that newspaper by going to sacred or secret .com.

35:47

Sacred or secret .com has a PDF of this newspaper that we're trying to hand out. Well, I wasn't handing out any of them, and then

35:54

I got frustrated. After about an hour of doing this, I told my friend Randy Sweet, you know, I think maybe

36:00

I'm going to go get my, I had four or five copies of the book The Miracle of Forgiveness in my car, and I said,

36:05

I think I'm just going to try to hand these out just for the fun of it. So I did. And in the next hour,

36:11

I didn't hand out one book, but everybody was surprised that I was handing out one of the books that they all recognized, because most

36:18

Latter -day Saints, especially over the age of 40, have read this book. And so I ended up in four or five short, five, ten, 15 -minute conversations, and I was busy the entire time.

36:29

And then I realized how valuable this was, because what Kimball says in here, he says several things.

36:35

Number one, he says it's possible to keep the commandments of God. He quotes from Standard Works, which are the four scriptures in Mormonism.

36:44

They do have the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants. And so he does an excellent job of explaining from those unique Standard Works, besides what the

36:55

Bible teaches, of what you have to do in Mormonism to receive forgiveness of sins. And so number one, he says it's possible to keep the commandments of God.

37:04

He quotes from 1 Nephi 3 -7, that God would not give any commandments that could not be kept, or he wouldn't be a good

37:12

God. So it's possible to do that. And number two, he says you can do it in this life. He quotes from Alma chapter 34 in the

37:18

Book of Mormon. Chapter 1, the title is, This Life is the Time. And he goes through and makes it very clear.

37:25

It's possible to do these in this lifetime, not have to wait until the next life, and that you have to abandon all your sins.

37:34

And so as I've used this tactic, I have handed out over a thousand books. I buy them at used bookstores here in Utah.

37:42

I pay usually $1 to $2 per book. And lots of them out there at the

37:48

Deseret Industry Thrift Store. And there's a bunch of them. And so I have purchased over these years, over the last five years, over a thousand.

37:57

And I've handed these out, highlighting them in the right places, and wanting Latter -day Saints to read them.

38:02

And when they ask me why I'm doing this, I say, I think everybody ought to know what your scripture says.

38:08

He does a good job with your scripture. And therefore, I think you need to read this book as well.

38:13

With three million copies out there, again, most people have read it. But when I'm handing it out, and they're walking by, and they like to proudly say, oh,

38:22

I already own the book, or I have read the book, then I ask this question. So are you doing everything that Spencer Kimball said you're supposed to do?

38:32

Because he said that perfection is an achievable goal. And I'm going to guarantee you, 80 % to 90 % of the time, the response is no, but I'm trying, or no, but I'm doing my best.

38:45

And then I'll recite for them pages 164 and 165 of the book, where it says that trying is not sufficient, nor is repentance complete when one merely tries to abandon sin.

38:58

To try is weak. To do the best you can is not strong. You must always do better than you can.

39:05

This is true in every walk of life. And so all I'm doing, for people who would never come and talk to me, maybe, is put a pebble in their shoe and let them walk away going, you know what?

39:16

I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do, and I should be able to do it. Why can't I do it? Well, the problem is you're trying to do something that's impossible, and that's why we call this the impossible gospel.

39:27

But you can read about that in the book. I've written a chapter in Sharing the Good News with Mormons. And you can go to our website that we have designed specifically for that kind of a tactic called themiracleofforgiveness .com.

39:39

That goes to our mrm .org website. But themiracleofforgiveness .com, I encourage

39:45

Latter -day Saints to go there. I do this at General Conference.

39:50

I do it at pageants. I do it at BYU football games. I love talking to college students who have never seen this book and show them what their own scriptures have said they have to do.

40:01

And when they realize they're not doing it, they don't have a whole lot of excuses, but I just got to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

40:07

Well, you're never going to get there, and it's impossible to do. So, yeah, that's a tactic that has worked for me.

40:14

It might not work for others in stranger evangelism. But I tell you what, if you have a

40:19

Latter -day Saint friend, I recommend you buy the book. Go on to the website that I have, and you can see all the places

40:24

I highlight. Read the book for yourself, and then go ask your Latter -day Saint friend, have you ever heard of this book?

40:30

What if we were to go through this book together? I guarantee you, you have tons of quotes in this book that will keep you busy for hours.

40:40

All you have to do is know the difference between justification and sanctification. And since they listen to your podcast,

40:47

I would say, Andrew, they probably already know that. They probably know their Christianity. If they're practicing by listening and studying, then if you know your

40:55

Christianity, it will be no problem to use this book and to show them how the imputation of what

41:02

Jesus did on the cross, that he credited us with righteousness, not based on what we did, but based on what he did.

41:10

Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins, and it's a free gift of grace. Not by works,

41:16

Ephesians 2, 9 says. Otherwise, we would boast, and we can't boast. But in Mormonism, you boast every time you go to the temple, because you have a little temple recommend card that says you are deemed worthy to go into that temple and practice the sacred and actually secret ordinances that are found in there that are essential if you hope to be with your family forever and attain exaltation, which is the same thing as saying godhood.

41:45

Now, you recently were out doing some evangelism, and, well, let's just say it didn't go so well.

41:53

Well, you got the evangelism part. You were able to do that, but you had some hang -ups that occurred when you were down in North Carolina.

42:00

Let's talk about that, because this is not uncommon when we go out and do evangelism, and it's happening more and more and more where we're being threatened with arrest, we're being moved around so that we can't just hand out tracts, and you were doing something so offensive as holding up a sign?

42:16

That was it? Yeah, and that's in our book as well. Rob Savoca writes about that in our book.

42:22

So holding up a website sign when people don't have to walk by you. When I don't have people walking by me and they're driving by in cars,

42:29

I put up my sign, sacred or secret .com. It's a handheld sign that people can see.

42:34

Well, the first day we did this, this was a one -week open house near Raleigh, North Carolina.

42:40

It was actually the city of Apex, North Carolina, and we were standing on public property on the public sidewalk with these signs, and around 10 .30,

42:49

less than an hour after we got out there, we had three or four police cars stop with their lights going, and we were told that we were illegally holding up signs that needed a permit.

43:01

And so I explained that, well, First Amendment says that we have freedom of expression, and they said it doesn't matter.

43:08

We have an ordinance. You have to have a permit, and you have to apply for that Monday through Friday.

43:14

Today's Saturday, and so you're not supposed to do that. Well, I argued. I said, so basically I have nowhere to go.

43:20

Can I go across the street? Can I go anywhere in town? No, you can't go anywhere in town without that permit.

43:25

So after I pleaded my case, finally one officer said, I tell you what, we'll let you stay today, but you have to pace back and forth, and you cannot stand in the same spot.

43:35

And so I agreed to that, but the LDS security had come out as well, and when they heard that, they didn't like that.

43:42

They thought that was wrong, and I had established already a relationship with the inside people there because we had been in the night before and had a personal tour with the stake president and his wife, and so they didn't like that.

43:55

So they said, tell you what, if you would like to stand on our temple property, we'll let you do that until we resolve this thing.

44:03

And so I had never been – I've done this 25 times before, these open houses, and I've never been invited to stand on the temple's property before.

44:13

So that was wonderful because otherwise we'd have to go back and forth. Well, it's a long story, but that afternoon we're standing on the temple property, and a police lieutenant comes up to us on private property and says he's going to arrest us for holding up these signs.

44:30

And I said, but I'm on private property. He said, doesn't matter, I can still arrest you. So I ended up calling the security from inside the church.

44:39

This is – I mean, it's ironic and bizarre, whatever you want to call it, but I had to have these guys come out.

44:44

I have this all on video. Actually, we put it up on our website. We've taken it down now for personal reasons, but it had 60 ,000 -plus hits on that site because it went viral.

44:57

In the four days that we had it up – and when you see this video, it's not available right now, but when you see the video, he screams into the phone that I put on the camera, and he tells me,

45:11

I'm lieutenant so -and -so, and you're under arrest. And I kept telling him. I said, but I'm on private property.

45:17

How can you arrest me on private property? So they were able to come out of the temple, the temple security, and they convinced the officer not to arrest me because I was not standing on public property.

45:32

I mean, I should have been allowed on the public property, but it didn't happen. Then on Monday, it was closed on Sunday, and on Monday we stayed on the temple property all day until 4 o 'clock when a couple of officers who were doing traffic said that we were allowed to go on public property.

45:48

So that was wonderful. So we did. We went on there. That morning, by the way, on Monday, we tried to apply for this permit we needed to be able to practice our

45:57

First Amendment rights, and the town hall did not know about what we were talking about.

46:03

They had never processed this before. And so it was almost like a rule that had been made up somehow to create problems for us.

46:11

And in fact, the police chief had told the people at the temple that nobody would be protesting because they were going to use this obscure law.

46:20

Section 20197, permit required. And the reason for permits would be group demonstration, parades, or picket lines.

46:29

Those are illegal in this town unless you have this permit. But we didn't have the ability to get a permit, and nobody would return our phone calls.

46:36

We went down to the town hall, and they had never heard of this. So we stayed on the church property until that time at 4 o 'clock, and then we went back on the public property when the officers said we could.

46:48

All day Tuesday we had no problems. On Wednesday we had three police cars come up again and said we were going to be under arrest.

46:56

And so I complained that the town hall was not the place, and one officer insisted it was.

47:03

It turns out we were supposed to have gone to the police station. So we ended up applying for this, and a day later we ended up getting this permit.

47:11

But all day Wednesday then we had to be on church property once more. So of the seven days that we were doing this,

47:19

Monday through Saturday and the previous Saturday, seven total days, three of them were spent on the

47:25

LDS church property holding up these website signs, which was not as good of a location as if we could have been right on the public sidewalk because it was closer to where the cars were.

47:35

So it really was a travesty that the city police were able to keep us off public streets.

47:43

And I'm going to say this right now, Andrew. If we were not given the permission by the church to stand on their property, we really had nowhere to go because they said they were going to arrest us three times.

47:56

And I have all of this on video. Everything has been documented. And it's just frustrating that for a short -term type of outreach that we're doing that we were not allowed to practice our

48:09

First Amendment rights. And I know that's happened to you as well. Yeah, I mean this is not uncommon, unfortunately, but this is happening more and more.

48:17

And the reality is on that day you lose. I mean you may win it in court if you want to get arrested.

48:23

I have a friend of mine who when we have this happen, he just literally once in New York, he handed us his keys to his car, his wallet, everything.

48:31

So he had nothing in his pockets because he knew, I'm going to get arrested. I'm not going to stop. I'm going to let them arrest me so I can fight it in court because it was in a place in New York where we have this happen often, and he wanted to have it in court showing that we had the right to be doing this.

48:46

And you go and you try to fill out a permit, and you can't find any place where anyone knows anything about it.

48:53

We had once in Wyoming, we were doing an outreach. They had a rodeo. We're doing an outreach.

48:59

The organizer already talked to the lawyers, already found out exactly where the permit line was for the permit that they got for the rodeo.

49:08

So what was considered public property, we went over to where they had these buses, they're unloading people, and every time a bus shows up, we have about 55 people getting off that bus every time and then 55 people getting on.

49:19

And so we stood right there handing out tracks and doing some open air preaching further down. Well, right at that spot, they're like, oh, you have to move on.

49:27

There's security for the rodeo. You got to move on. And I was like, well, we have this thing here.

49:33

Here's where your permit is. He calls a police officer over telling him to arrest us if we don't move on.

49:39

And I said to the officer, I said, look, here's the permanent area. This is where we're right now where we are is called public property.

49:46

We're following First Amendment rights. We don't need a permit and we're not infringing on theirs. And the security guy tried saying, well, we have this whole thing permitted, but you need to produce that documentation, sir.

50:00

What ended up happening was when he couldn't produce that, he tried saying, well, this is public access way.

50:05

Well, if it's public access way, like a mall or a train station, if you go any to those places, that's a public access way.

50:12

They have to have a written location, times and manner policy.

50:19

And if they don't have that, then it is considered public and you can evangelize. But if they have that written, you have to follow whatever they have.

50:27

So by me, for example, the mall, we're only allowed in once a month by a different mall. We're only allowed in once a quarter.

50:33

So we'll go into the malls as much as we can. But they'll put us in a specific location and tell us what we you know, we can have signs that are this big or whatever.

50:43

But whatever the rules are, we follow it. However, in this case in Wyoming, they didn't have that.

50:49

I asked, I need this in writing. And they're like, well, the offices are closed. I said, well, if you can't produce that, this is this is

50:54

First Amendment. This is public property. And the officer was about to agree with us when the security guy turned his back to me, flashed a retirement police officer badge because I heard him say he's retired police officer and named where he was at.

51:08

And then all of a sudden the officer decided with him and we had to move on or we were being arrested. This is not uncommon.

51:13

Now, could we have sat there and fought it? Sure, we could have. We wouldn't have been able to evangelize that day.

51:19

And the reality is that was the day to evangelize. After that, this rodeo was going on and you missed that opportunity.

51:24

So do you want to spend that day in jail so you can fight it for the next time? Or do you want to go and evangelize?

51:30

Well, we wanted to evangelize. We just moved on. But this is happening more and more.

51:35

And for evangelists, you're just going to have to realize you got to know your

51:40

First Amendment law. You need to be polite with officers. One of the things I really encourage people when it comes to dealing with police is ask questions.

51:49

Don't tell them the law as much as ask them the law. When I was talking with the one officer, I was saying, you know, help me understand this.

51:56

This is what we were told is the permitted area. Can you tell me where we're wrong? Now, I'm putting him in charge.

52:02

He's the authority. He's the one that's going to make the decision. So I'm asking. By doing that, it's not you versus the officer.

52:11

Because I'm telling you, if you want to fight with an officer, you're going to lose that day. You may win in court on another day, but you're going to lose that day.

52:18

So you've got to decide, is the evangelism worth it? I mean, I have had times where we were at the U .S.

52:23

Open tennis tournament and we were evangelizing one spot. I didn't want to get too close to the tournament property.

52:30

And we actually were in a spot we didn't think was so good, but we thought it would be enough away from their security, we'd be okay.

52:37

Well, an officer actually told us we were in a bad spot. We needed to move to a different spot.

52:43

Put us right into a great spot right at the opening. We're like, you're sure, officer? This is where you want us?

52:48

Yeah, this would be the best place for you to be doing this. Okay. So sometimes the officer moves you to a better location.

52:54

You never know. Yeah. You know, this isn't the first time that this has happened with us either at these kinds of outreaches.

53:04

In 2012, for instance, we actually went to the police department in Brigham City, Utah, which is very

53:11

LDS. It's in northern Utah. And we explained to them what we wanted to do and where we were going to be.

53:18

So they said, okay, thank you for letting us know. So we were going to go out there, and then they came running down the hall and said, hold on.

53:26

We need to talk to you further. And so it turned out that that city had put an ordinance in specifically for the temple open house outreach.

53:34

It was a three -week open house. And it said that the only place you could stand on public property would be a free speech zone, which was a street that was near the temple, but it was not where the people were getting unloaded and where they were walking.

53:51

And so it was on the wrong side. You did not want to be there. We complained. We had to be at this spot, but we complained to the police and said this wasn't right.

54:00

It was the mayor, the city attorney, and the police chief who had come up with this rule and had put it into the law books.

54:09

We ended up contacting legal representation while we continued to stand on our spot, not getting as many people as we would have liked.

54:17

And there was an organization that was going to help us, and then they decided not to because they said it was

54:24

Deep Pockets Mormon Church. They didn't think they wanted to go up against the Mormon Church because the Mormon Church was in on the city with us.

54:31

They had gone into it together, and so they decided they didn't want to do it. So we had to make a big decision.

54:37

And so the second week of this, we ended up contacting ACLU. And that sounds like strange bedfellows than it is,

54:47

I guess, if you would say. But at the same time, they're experts on the First Amendment. And within a day, their representatives agreed to take our case.

54:55

And then the third week, we ended up having the pastor from that town, one of the main churches there, go to the mayor, set up an appointment so he could plead with them, please let us be on the public property like everybody else is allowed.

55:12

And they laughed at him. They laughed him out of the building. And so that afternoon, or actually the next day, the

55:19

ACLU filed in federal court. Well, within a day, we were allowed to be out there.

55:24

Long story short, we won the case. The city was at liability.

55:30

They had to pay the ACLU for all the lawyers and everything. And that is a case that I brought up to the police captain here in Apex.

55:41

And he even told me, without saying so, he told me that that law probably is not the best law they should have on their books.

55:49

Again, it's Section 20, 197 in the Apex Town Code. And this is what it says.

55:57

It shall be unlawful for any person to organize, conduct, or participate in any parade, picket line, or group demonstration in or upon any street, sidewalk, or other public place within the town, unless a permit, therefore, and therefore is misspelled, has been issued by the town in accordance with the provisions of this article.

56:21

And when we were told to go apply for this, we did on Monday, they said, the police had told us it would take two to five days to get the permit.

56:29

Well, we were only going to be there for a week. So I said, if I get a permit and I don't get it until this thing is over, it does me no good.

56:35

But we still tried our best to apply. But then, again, when we didn't get any response back and nobody knew where to send us, we gave up.

56:44

But this town code, I told the officers it's as unconstitutional of a law as what we dealt with in 2012, that people could not be on a public street doing any kind of evangelism with a sign or handing things out, unless you were on that particular street.

57:01

And the captain said, well, our law and that law was different. Not much different, because it prohibited us from being anywhere unless we had to go through jumps.

57:11

We had to jump through these hoops that the First Amendment is very clear. We shouldn't have to have to do this in order to be able to practice free expression.

57:22

Well, you know, we've seen this when the miracle pageant there in Manti, Utah, where the church actually bought a public street and then they were actually able to put signs up.

57:32

Now, this is the irony of this. They have this pageant the whole time. You're hearing over the loudspeakers, if you have any questions about Mormonism, come talk to our missionaries.

57:42

And they're all there to evangelize. And yet they have these signs that say you're not allowed to evangelize past this point.

57:48

I'm like, wait a minute. If I go past this point, aren't you going to evangelize me? But you're not allowed to.

57:54

I almost wanted to go across that line to be evangelized and call the police on the

57:59

Mormons and say, wait, but the sign says no evangelism. They are evangelizing me. You know, and it's specific.

58:06

What's fascinating about that whole situation is the church did buy a street right in front of where the temple was.

58:14

But it was a dead end street. And so the city offered to sell it to them for $75 ,000.

58:20

And the church says, we'll give you $150 ,000. And so they had plans of making it so that people would never have to leave the grounds to see any evangelists outside once they got inside to this area.

58:32

But what's fascinating, that happened in 2017. So 2018 and 19, we weren't allowed on that street.

58:39

But you know what? It did not stop our evangelism. And in fact, it caused Christians to spread out through the entire area.

58:46

And we felt that we were actually more productive. And then the church decided to close this pageant.

58:54

And so 2019 was the last pageant they're going to have. So now the church owns a street they paid $150 ,000 for.

59:02

And the only reason they bought it was to keep us off of where their temple was on a public street.

59:09

And it's just going to be useless for them because the street doesn't do them any good now. Yeah, and the thing that's interesting with it is,

59:16

I think they closed down the pageants because so many Christians were having a good effect.

59:22

I know that, I forget who it was that gave the statistics, that when you look in Utah, the places where they have the pageants are the least

59:29

Mormon areas. And we think it's because of all the evangelism that goes on year in, year out. So I do want to talk about something after this break.

59:37

You have a new course, and I want to talk about this because I think this will be helpful. We've been talking a lot about Mormonism, but there's probably a lot of people who are going,

59:44

I don't know much about Mormonism and what they believe. And so therefore, I want to let people know about a new course that you have available right after this break.

59:57

Ephesians chapter 4 verse 25. Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth.

01:00:04

Each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another for his namesake.

01:00:10

What's up, everybody? I'm Jamal Bandy, the host of the Prescribed Truth podcast, where I seek to distribute the truth that the doctor prescribes to the church and the world today.

01:00:20

The Lord graciously brought me out of a cold in 2010, saved me in 2013, and in 2017, prescribed truth began.

01:00:29

My mission has been to spread the truth of God's word while refuting dangerous lies affecting most churches and the culture at large from a biblical and reformed perspective.

01:00:38

Join me on Sundays at 6 p .m. Eastern time for the live recording of the podcast on YouTube and download the audio version wherever podcasts can be found, including the

01:00:49

Christian podcast community. If you would like to know more about prescribed truth, please visit my website at prescribed truth dot com.

01:00:57

And remember, this world is full of errors, but the only thing that the doctor prescribes is truth.

01:01:04

Blessings. Are you just watching? Do you enjoy watching movies, the special effects, the interesting characters, the great stories?

01:01:16

There's a lot to enjoy that comes out of Hollywood, but sometimes it's best to approach secular media with a healthy dose of critical thinking.

01:01:24

Join me, E Franklin and Tim Martin as we discuss our favorite movies and share critical thinking for the entertained

01:01:31

Christian. So visit are you just watching dot com to subscribe and don't just watch.

01:01:37

And those are two of the podcasts that you can hear on the Christian podcast. You go to a Christian podcast community dot o r g to get all of our grown list of podcasts.

01:01:47

I think we're up to 14 or 15. And so good podcasts out there. And I should mention we've been discussing and you mentioned it early on,

01:01:54

Eric, but you have a podcast. It's called The Viewpoint on Mormonism for folks that want to learn more about Mormonism in depth.

01:02:00

You guys do great research and it's only about 14 minutes long. So it's it's long enough to get some good detail.

01:02:07

Not so long that you have to allocate a lot of time, maybe enough for one car ride to work for some folks.

01:02:14

But that is a podcast to go check out. Viewpoint on Mormonism.

01:02:20

They were one of the ones that were got awarded with one of the top podcasts of the

01:02:26

Christian podcast community. So it is one that we think is very valuable for folks to listen to. Eric, let's talk about a new course you have at it's available at Crash Course Mormonism dot com.

01:02:38

And it is a crash course on Mormonism. Let's let's talk about that in the remaining minutes that we have left.

01:02:43

Why did you do this? Yeah, we think that a lot of people who come to our site may not know very much.

01:02:50

We have a A to Z. If you go to MRM dot org slash A hyphen Z, you can find out a lot of the short little one paragraph explanations of the unique terms.

01:03:02

Because when when you're talking to a Latter -day Saint, we use the same terminology, but our meanings are different.

01:03:07

And I guarantee you on that. So when they say Jesus, when they say God, when they say salvation, they have a particular meaning in mind.

01:03:14

And so one of the questions you always ought to ask a Latter -day Saint or anybody for that matter is, what do you mean by that?

01:03:20

When you say we're saved by grace, what do you mean by that? And get them to to explain that.

01:03:26

But I wanted to put together something that would have an introductory course. And I did this with Crash Course Mormonism dot com and over 30 different introductory kinds of things like, for instance, creation or pre -existence.

01:03:40

That's in the first part called Issues of Beginnings. Those two chapters and issues of authority, issues of the

01:03:47

Godhead, issues of salvation, issues of church ordinances and practices, and then issues of the afterlife.

01:03:54

Kind of like an overview from a Christian point of view, but very objective. I really don't put a lot of emphasis in trying to debunk what

01:04:01

Latter -day Saints believe, but rather what do they believe about grace? And it goes through using their own standard works, the four scriptures that I mentioned earlier.

01:04:13

It uses their leaders and their manuals. And in my best way, objectively, to explain what does

01:04:20

Mormonism teach as far as the leadership goes about the issue of grace, with a short paragraph at the end that would explain what

01:04:29

Christianity would say, why we differ on the view that Mormonism would have on grace.

01:04:34

And then at the very end of that, a short quiz, five questions, multiple choice, just to see if you were able to understand the basic concepts of that chapter.

01:04:46

And we kept the chapters to 1 ,000 words. And I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.

01:04:53

We're talking maybe, if you're talking about double -spaced page, maybe two or three pages at the most of a paper that you were to write.

01:05:01

So it's really straight to the point. I don't mess around. I don't get into long diatribes.

01:05:07

I do give additional articles that somebody could actually go to, and they could find out more information on our website.

01:05:14

But at the same time, I'm just wanting to make sure that they have a good idea of whatever it is that I'm talking about.

01:05:22

And I'm going to say probably about 60 % to 70 % of everything that I write is something that comes from their own writings.

01:05:30

And these are authoritative sources. Either they're leaders, apostles and prophets, or manuals, church manuals.

01:05:37

I put a lot of emphasis in that. I'm not just quoting a missionary or a bishop who really, they don't really have much authority.

01:05:44

I'm quoting their scriptures and other things to help me explain this. And I'd love to have

01:05:50

Latter -day Saints go through it and show me where my take of these different doctrines is wrong, because I'm willing to change it.

01:05:58

Of course, on the Internet, articles are living documents. You can always change things. But for the most part,

01:06:05

I just wanted people to be able to have access to information if they didn't know very much.

01:06:10

And so what you had said earlier, if a person says, I don't know much about Mormonism, and you live in an area where there are

01:06:17

Mormons, and I'm going to say that's all through the United States, especially for those of us who live in the West, well, then it behooves you to learn as much as you can.

01:06:26

So when they do use salvation by grace, you have a concept, an idea of what they are talking about.

01:06:32

And you can ask intelligent questions rather than saying, oh, well, I didn't think you believed in grace. I thought you believed in good works.

01:06:40

Well, they do believe in good works, but they also believe in grace. But the grace that Mormonism teaches is different from the grace that the

01:06:46

Bible teaches. Because in Mormonism, 2 Nephi 25 -23 says that you are saved by grace after all you can do.

01:06:54

That's opposite of what Ephesians 2 -8 -9 says. Yeah, and I think that the thing of saying, look, we are trying to say what it is they believe.

01:07:03

This is what I tried to do in my book, What Do They Believe? And not to refute them so much, but say this is what they believe.

01:07:09

It's very short, very concise, so that people can pick up very quickly what it is

01:07:15

Mormonism teaches. You know, one of the things that was funny is there was a guy, Bob, he was a regular down at the Manti Festival, and he told me there's no

01:07:22

Christian that can ever write about Mormonism and be accurate. So I made him a deal, and I said,

01:07:29

I'll tell you what, I'll ship you a free copy of my book. If you can find some serious issues that I got wrong, you can keep the book for free and I'll correct them.

01:07:40

I said, but if not, you send me the $15 plus $5 shipping for the book. Needless to say,

01:07:47

I've never seen the money. But he did admit he found six things, three of which were grammar issues, so they didn't count.

01:07:56

Two, he admitted they're so minor, so nitpicky, they weren't even worth mentioning, but he was desperate to find something.

01:08:04

The greatest thing, the biggest thing he could find, and he admitted that this was a really minor issue and doesn't really affect doctrine, is the fact of the birth order that they would have between Jesus and Lucifer.

01:08:17

I think my book had it at that point saying that they were born together and there's a difference in order.

01:08:25

There is some discussion, I guess, in that with Mormonism, but he admitted that was really a non -issue, which gave me to feel good because I had run that book by different people.

01:08:36

I ran it by rabbis, the chapter on Judaism. I ran it by some

01:08:41

Mormon leaders, the chapter on Mormonism. So I tried to be accurate with it. And I think that when you do that with your crash course, the advantage that gives a person is when you're not misrepresenting that other person and they know that, they realize that they could speak to you in a more educated way.

01:09:04

I've had this with Muslims a lot where they're like, oh, you really understand Islam. And they'll drop the pretense of pretending because they know they can't get away with it.

01:09:14

And that's the advantage. But if someone misrepresents, like when I speak to Muslims and they say, well, you believe in three gods.

01:09:19

And I go, no, no Christian does. And they're like, yes, you do. It just shows right there,

01:09:25

I discredit anything they're going to say about Christianity. They're not going to convince me because I now know they don't have an accurate view of what

01:09:33

I believe. I don't want to do that same thing to a Mormon. I don't want to sit there and say, you know, that they believe something that they don't actually believe because then they're going to just write off when

01:09:43

I try to share the gospel with them because they go, oh, you don't understand Mormonism. But if you can accurately represent what they believe, and this is where this crash course is,

01:09:50

I think, going to be very helpful for people. Because when you understand what it is that someone actually believes, then when you speak to them, they're like, oh, oh, he understands that and understands all the differences.

01:10:03

I had, as you know, I had some three young ladies that were coming to the house, which I don't know how I got back on the list.

01:10:09

I was very glad I'm off the list now of being able to get visitors. But I had three Mormon missionaries coming to the house.

01:10:15

And they're very surprised that I understood as much as I did about Mormonism and I didn't misrepresent it.

01:10:21

It got them a little bit more worried when I understood some things about the book of Abraham that they didn't know.

01:10:29

And they were saying that I was inaccurate about it until I produced the, you know, the gospel.

01:10:35

They're on the website, the topic, Gospel Topics. What is it called? Gospel Topic Essays.

01:10:44

So when I produced that, that was the last day. After that, they didn't come back. Once they told me that I was not accurate on what they teach and then

01:10:53

I showed them something from their own church website. Then the game was up and they weren't allowed back.

01:10:59

Irony of irony, my wife and I go to a restaurant. We just, it was a beautiful night. We said, let's just walk around the town.

01:11:06

And who do we find? We find one of those three Mormon missionaries with another one.

01:11:12

Now, the interesting thing with it was the one girl we knew was leaving.

01:11:18

She was done with mission. She was going home. The other one was not. So she was supposed to stick around, but we found out she wasn't around.

01:11:28

She was one that I really focused on that last visit because when I shared the gospel with them, I turned to her and she had given up a volleyball scholarship, a four -year scholarship to be able to be on this mission trip.

01:11:40

And I turned to her, I said, I know you gave up a lot to be here, to be able to be in my home right now.

01:11:47

You gave up four years of college being paid for doing something you really love, a volleyball, so that you could be here.

01:11:54

But the question you have to ask yourself, did you give it up for a lie? And that was something that really got her thing.

01:12:02

And she was one that out of the group, she was the one that was, I think, maybe being impacted the most by the visits.

01:12:09

And she was no longer on the mission. So I met the one girl with another person that had replaced the other two.

01:12:16

And so maybe we gave her some things to think about. And, you know, it wouldn't be the first time that I know of missionaries that were sent home after meeting with me, because we do know two guys that got sent home after we sat down with them.

01:12:32

And we were told from the missionaries that replaced them, they didn't realize they were talking to the same two guys. But we were told that they were sent home because they were believing some wrong doctrine.

01:12:43

We think they were actually believing some right doctrine and got sent home for it. But look,

01:12:49

Andrew, you don't know what you're going to say that might have an impact, as you have expressed here.

01:12:55

I have a friend who served in California in the 1990s, who served under Jeffrey R.

01:13:01

Holland, one of the apostles of the church. It was his mission president. And he was in a restaurant one day, and he was getting a person ready to be baptized for the next day.

01:13:12

And so they were at a hometown buffet. My friend, who's now passed away, walked up to the table, seeing the two missionaries there, and introduced himself as Dick Bair, and said, hey,

01:13:24

I just wanted to say a couple of things. And so he just spent five minutes sharing with them a couple of verses.

01:13:30

He shared with them D &C 82 .7, that all your former sins come back upon you. That verse haunted my friend all through the rest of his mission.

01:13:39

And then when he went home, he ended up believing Mormonism, because he was so distraught that he was not able to keep all of the commandments he was promising.

01:13:47

Every Sunday when he went to the sacrament service, he ends up living for the world for a couple of years.

01:13:54

And then he ends up finding Jesus. And so a few years later, I met him, and we went out to dinner.

01:14:01

And he was telling me this story, and he mentioned Dick Bair. Well, we had Dick Bair's phone number, so I phoned

01:14:08

Dick Bair right in front of him, and he had it on the phone. And so this former missionary said, hello,

01:14:16

Mr. Bair, this is Dave, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm now a Christian. And he says, who are you?

01:14:22

And he says, well, I met you in a restaurant in California. And Dick said, are you the one with the deep blue eyes?

01:14:29

And my friend said, yes. And he said, I've been praying for you. Oh, wow.

01:14:35

He said, thank you for calling me. So Dick had an amazing ministry. He was a former Mormon himself.

01:14:40

But he remembered my friend, and they ended up, for the next four years or so, five years, until Dick passed away, they were good

01:14:48

Facebook friends. And Dick called him every birthday, called my friend and wished him a happy birthday.

01:14:54

So you just don't know. Now, for every story like that, there could be 10 others, 15 others you're not going to find out about until someday.

01:15:02

It's going to be amazing, Andrew. We're going to be walking around heaven, and people are going to walk up, and they're going to say, hey, Andrew, I remember when you told me that, when you were street preaching.

01:15:11

That shook me to my core. I never said thank you. And so can you imagine? So when people come to your door, and they knock on there, and they are

01:15:20

Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons, the two groups most likely to knock on your door, what a shame if you hide behind the couch, or you pretend you're not home, or you treat them rudely.

01:15:30

But rather, you treat every opportunity as a chance to be able to share in what the

01:15:38

Bible says in 1 Peter 3 with gentleness and respect. And I think that you might have the ability, as you have had, to be able to have somebody right there hear the gospel maybe for the first time ever.

01:15:51

So I'm going to encourage people who are listening, don't give up. I know it's hard when people come to our doors.

01:15:57

It doesn't seem like much happens. But my friend Dick Baer talked to my friend, and he's one of my best friends now.

01:16:02

And he loves Jesus, but he probably would not be a Christian today without one man spending five minutes in a restaurant, seeing a missionary, and being very polite, but being very straightforward as well.

01:16:14

Yeah, and this is the thing, I'll close out with this story, is the fact that I remember having

01:16:21

Mark Dever, who is with Capitol Hill Baptist Church, he was speaking at my seminary's conference they'd have each year.

01:16:30

And what he would do is bring up one of his interns, and he'd give their testimony.

01:16:35

Well, listen, one intern gave his testimony. He was at University of Pittsburgh, and he had been listening to some open -air preacher, got mad at the guy, cursed him out.

01:16:47

But he went home, and he said for three days he couldn't stop thinking about what the guy said. And he eventually got out a

01:16:52

Bible, read the Bible, and got saved. And now he's in seminary, he's done with seminary, he's now in an internship at one of the largest churches in America.

01:17:02

And there's an open -air preacher that doesn't know. Well, this occurred 17 years prior to when

01:17:09

I heard this story, and I heard this about 10 years ago. And so I said, look, back then, and this is before Way of the

01:17:17

Master kind of made open -air evangelism popular, there weren't a lot of us doing it back then. And I said, where did this occur?

01:17:24

Let me see if I can find that guy. It turned out that I put a message out on Facebook and all these different places, and there's a lady that contacted me and said, you know, my husband goes and evangelizes with this guy that's been going to University of Pitt for, you know, like 25 years.

01:17:43

So she put me in touch with this guy, and I said, well, where would you have been on Saturday nights at that time?

01:17:49

He says, well, I'd be at this place. And that was the place where this guy said he listened to a preacher.

01:17:54

I said, was anyone else at that place, you know, at that time? He said, no.

01:17:59

You know, I would go there every week. I was the only one. There was no one else with me. I said, okay. I said, can

01:18:05

I have your email address? I want to introduce you to somebody. He's like, okay. So I emailed the two of them, and I just said, you know,

01:18:12

I think his name was, the preacher was Jeff, if I remember correctly. I think the other guy was Matthew. And I said, you know, Jeff, meet Matthew.

01:18:17

Matthew, meet Jeff. And then I explained the situation from Matthew's testimony and, you know, from what

01:18:23

Jeff had said. And I said, I think that, I said, Jeff, I think this young man was listening to your preaching 17 years ago.

01:18:30

And he was overwhelmed. And I think we're going to have a lot of that. People always ask me, well, how successful is open air evangelism?

01:18:38

I'll let you know in heaven, because I really don't know until then. Right. You know.

01:18:44

That's going to be the beauty of it. And I think, I think that when we're in heaven, and we don't have a body tainted with sin anymore, we're going to have a sanctified memory, a glorified memory.

01:18:57

We're going to remember everything. We're going to see that person that shared the gospel with us. And I'm looking forward to running into Chuck, the bus driver, that was instrumental in leading me to Christ.

01:19:07

And just to be able to say, hey, you didn't know that after that trip, I went on to become a pastor, to be an evangelist, to be an apologist, and, you know, be able to work for this ministry.

01:19:18

And literally, the gospel, because of what you did in my life, went around the world.

01:19:24

Because you shared with me, God used me to bring others to know him. And that's like,

01:19:30

I think that we're going to probably sit around and be listening to stories and telling stories to one another for like a while when we first get to heaven.

01:19:37

You know, after we get done, you know, on our knees before Christ. But it's going to be a thing, I think, that is really going to be an enjoyable part of being in heaven, is finding out the real impact that we all made.

01:19:49

I think there's going to be many people that were Mormons that converted to Christianity that are going to come up to you and Bill McKeever and be like, because of Mormon research ministry,

01:20:00

I repented and came to know Jesus Christ. And I'm just going to, like, love to sit there and listen to the story after story.

01:20:07

As you and Bill have this long line of people, you know, waiting to tell their story. Because you guys have had a huge impact.

01:20:16

And I know that because just coming out to an event, you know, we went to a

01:20:22

Mormon temple opening. And just coming over and saying hi to you got me in trouble because they were quickly taking my picture.

01:20:29

And, you know, I went to go through a tour and they were like, nope, this is a silent tour. No one's allowed to ask any questions.

01:20:36

So I'm blaming that on you. I'm just saying. Yeah, you don't want to associate with me there because they have our picture on the wall.

01:20:43

Actually, Rob Zavolko, a friend of mine in the Oklahoma Temple open house, I think it was back in April, a security guard took him to a room, wasn't supposed to, and showed him the wall.

01:20:56

And they had pictures of all of us up there, including Rob. Rob's picture was actually there.

01:21:02

And these are people you're supposed to watch out for. Supposed to watch out for Rob, but they bring him back there.

01:21:10

Yeah, that was funny. I mean, we've never had anybody come and show us our pictures, but he got to see the room.

01:21:16

And he said there was a number of pictures there. And these were all the who's who lists, I guess.

01:21:22

I sure hope I was on there because they've taken enough pictures of me throughout the years. They know who we are, and so we do our best.

01:21:31

Well, like I said, with the previous Temple that we just did last week in North Carolina, that was incredible that they let us stand on their property.

01:21:40

We didn't just get that invitation just because. It's because we had developed a relationship. They're people, and we're trying our best to do what the law says.

01:21:50

But at the same time, when there was an unjust law, they realized it. And I think they did what I think was probably the right thing.

01:21:56

Okay, we'll stand on our property to do your First Amendment right. You know, I had that once at a college university where the police were kicking us off because we weren't part of a ministry on campus.

01:22:07

We weren't part of any of their clubs. And there was an atheist there that was heckling us just a few minutes ago. But when the police came up to kick us off, he walked up and said,

01:22:16

Well, they can be here under my organization. I'm the president of the atheist club. And so we literally had the freedom of speech because the atheist club sponsored us.

01:22:27

And he ended up inviting the whole club to come out. And he said, Look, I disagree with you.

01:22:33

But for them to say you don't have the right to do this, you have freedom of speech. Even if you disagree with me, and I disagree with you, you should have the freedom to do that.

01:22:41

So he invited his whole club out, which gave us a great crowd. So it really was God's providence. But Eric, thanks for coming on.

01:22:47

And I do want to wrap up by saying, folks, go to 2021israeltrip .com. Join us in Israel.

01:22:54

Also go to mrm .org and check out Mormon Research Ministry, the work that is going on there with Eric and Bill.

01:23:01

It is a great ministry, one that deserves your support. They're doing what very few are doing.

01:23:07

They're not trying to just attack Mormonism. They're actually doing research and producing things that very few people actually do.

01:23:14

I don't know anybody that knows Mormonism better than Eric and Bill.

01:23:19

So if you have any questions about Mormonism, the best place to go is mrm .org.

01:23:25

They probably have an article answering whatever question you have. If you're new to Mormonism, you don't really know it, go to CrashCourseMormonism .com

01:23:35

and take the course. It wouldn't take you very long. It'll give you a great education, a great foundation for what

01:23:42

Mormonism is. And it'll really help you, especially if you start talking to Mormons. So check out those resources.

01:23:49

Hey, and I just want to let you know one quick thing looking at the charts. We don't know what's going on there over in Ireland, but hey, thanks.

01:23:55

We are listed as number 86 of all podcasts. Think about that. There's about 700 ,000 podcasts.

01:24:03

And in Ireland, we hit the top of that chart on religion and spirituality, which is the largest category, 86.

01:24:09

But even more, we hit a new top in Ireland. We are number 25 in the category of Christianity.

01:24:16

So give a shout out to you folks over there in Ireland. We thank you for listening and sharing this podcast.

01:24:24

And remember, until next time, to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. This podcast is part of the

01:24:31

Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:24:38

You know that education changes lives. But did you know you can get a degree at Cambridge College while you work full time?

01:24:45

It's because their programs are designed for busy adults with flexible schedules, 24 -7 support, and affordable tuition.

01:24:52

Plus, at Cambridge College, you can go at your own pace, which is helpful because, you know, life.

01:24:58

Whether you're considering a degree or certificate, you owe it to yourself to check out Cambridge College. Ready to change your future?

01:25:05

Get started today at cambridgecollege .edu. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

01:25:12

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to... Has anyone seen the bride and groom? Sorry, sorry, we're here.

01:25:19

We were getting lucky in the limo and we lost track of time. No, Lucky Land Casino, with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guest registry.

01:25:26

In that case, I pronounce you lucky. Play for free at luckylandslots .com.

01:25:32

Daily bonuses are waiting. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply.