Mormonism 08 — Gordon Fraser

Who was very actively engaged in the work down until the time he was assassinated with his brother Joseph. So, we have three, or we have four, of the Smith family. Other members of the Smith family followed along, but most of them dropped out as time went on.

Then there, and incidentally, they had no church background. There's a note that some of them joined the Presbyterian Church during the revival that Joseph Smith speaks of when he was beset with doubts and claims to have gone to the sacred grove to get an answer to his prayer, which of the churches to join.

Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the Revival Timeline

Now, this first vision is one that has been given to us in four different versions. This revival meeting took place in 1824, and Joseph Smith claims that he went to the sacred grove in 1820 and had this vision, and it was because of this revival.

Well, the revival didn't happen until 1824. This has been documented very closely. There was the Smith family, no Christian background, they had a Bible, and some of their predecessors had been connected with the churches in New England before they moved up to Vermont.

The Religious Backgrounds of Mormonism’s Early Leaders

Well, then there was Oliver Cowdery, who was a resident of, he came from Fulton, Vermont. At the time, they were translating the Book of Mormon, and he became the scribe to produce the manuscript that was used by the printer.

He was a Unitarian. There was Martin Harris, who was the man who had promised to pay for the printing of the Book of Mormon, a very close associate of the Smith family. He had been successively a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Quaker, a Unitarian, a Universalist.

Finally, he became a Mormon. He was excommunicated from the Mormon church, and he became a Shaker, and eventually rejoined the Mormon church and died out in Utah. He finally joined the Mormons again and moved out to Utah.

It was always more or less of an embarrassment to the church because it is such a peculiar character. Well, this is the man that paid for the printing of the Book of Mormon. Then there was David Whitmer and his father, Peter Whitmer, and the Whitmer family, which were Spiritists that had originally been Dutch Reformed people, but in New York State they followed the Spiritism of the Fox sisters and so forth.

They were prominent, and David Whitmer continued on with a segment of the church until he died in the last decade of the last century. Then there was Brigham Young, who had been a Methodist, or at least he was baptized a Methodist, because he said they were constantly heckling him about joining the church, and so he went and got baptized, claimed that he had an experience, and he did it to get the Maltese back.

He was one of the leaders, as we know, of course. He became a successor to Joseph Smith. Then there were two brothers, Carly and Orson Pratt. According to his biographer, who was very interested in esoteric religions and ancient religions, he in turn claimed conversion because they insisted that if he was going to be baptized he would have to have a conversion experience, so he faked one and was baptized.

His brother Orson was a young man growing up at the time, and he became one of the very prominent people in the Mormon church. Then there was Sidney Rigdon, this associate of Alexander Campbell, who had been ousted by Alexander Campbell because of his views and also the fact that his church in Kirtland, Ohio, was built on the order of Christian communism, have everything in common.

And this, of course, trade followed down through the years with what they called the United Order. When they went into new places, pioneering, they would have everything in common, and so forth. It was a splendid idea for frontier people.

This happened a number of times. It happened in one group with the Mennonites, when they established the town of Lydgetts, Pennsylvania, where Bunz Hinsendorf helped them in the beginning of that work.

Once they had the thing established, then of course they joined their families, and each one had his piece of ground. But these are the men who founded the Mormon church. There wasn't a churchman in the bunch of them, unless you count Sidney Rigdon, who was with Alexander Campbell for a period of ten years.

But none of them knew anything about spiritual principles. They knew nothing about the church except what they had heard. They all subscribed to these humanistic doctrines, and you might say the Mormon church today is a prized example of humanism.

None of them had any experience of conversion that we know of. They didn't claim this. But these were the men who founded the restored church of Jesus Christ on the earth. And, of course, Mormons today will tell you that they are today the only church of Jesus Christ on the earth.

They don't accept that, obviously. This is the beginning. They formulated an organization, and to this day it has been an organization rather than an organism. It has never been what you'd call a functioning organism.

Joseph Smith’s Claimed Authority and the Problem of Witnesses

Where did they get their authority? Well, Joseph Smith had this first vision in which the Father and the Son supposedly appeared to him. He misdated that in his final record by four years. We have a problem there.

And in all of the other records, the only one that is in his handwriting indicates that there was only one person that came and visited him. Final version, two persons, the Father and the Son. By that time, they had formulated the idea of plurality of gods, and that God was an exalted man.

So this was the confirmation of that. Joseph Smith is the only one, obviously, that saw it. In all of the instances of the ordination of priests or anything else in the Old Testament, the prophets and so forth, there were always witnesses.

It was always in a prominent place with competent witnesses. The beginnings of Mormonism have no witnesses of any kind. Now, while Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith were translating in the Book of Mormon, they came to a portion, supposedly, that mentioned baptism.

It was in the early part of the Book of Mormon, before baptism was even known. But they had it, and it's recorded in the Book of Mormon. They went down to the river to pray about this, and while they were there, according to the statement by Joseph Smith, the angel John the Baptist told them to baptize each other.

So, Joseph Smith baptized Oliver Cowdery, and Oliver Cowdery baptized Joseph Smith. And then, John the Baptist conferred upon them the Aaronic Priesthood, and made Joseph Smith the first executive, I forget the word that they called it, and Oliver Cowdery the second.

They were, then, this is their authority. Let's examine it closely. John the Baptist is still lying in the grave and hasn't received his head back yet. He shares the distinction with Paul of being there with their heads severed, waiting for the resurrection.

But, suppose it was a reincarnation of John the Baptist that appeared to them. If it was John the Baptist, why didn't he baptize them? Then they could say John the Baptist baptized them, which would be a little more distinction than to say that neither one of them, neither of whom were qualified, neither of whom were ordained, did the first baptizing in the Mormon Church.

So, we can trace back, and we discover that when they say, Where did you get your authority?, you get back to the phantom of a ghost figure, to say the best, told them to baptize each other. Actually, neither of them were ordained and could not qualify, according to the Mormon structure, to baptize each other.

Now, would John the Baptist have had the power to ordain them? Obviously not. He was a prophet of the Old Testament order, lost his head, and his baptism that he preached was not Christian baptism. That was not John the Baptist's baptism.

Besides that, he would have had no authority to do any ordaining. He wasn't a priest. He never functioned as a priest. In fact, he didn't qualify as a priest. He could have, because he was of a priestly order.

He was of the Kohavites, but he couldn't function as a priest because, in the first place, it says that he lived in the desert and ate locusts and wild honey, and clothed himself with camel hair garments and a girdle of skin about his loins.

Well, no priest was permitted to eat honey. And no priest was permitted to wear anything except linen. He would be disqualified. So, John the Baptist could not qualify. Besides that, he had never been a part of the Christian Church.

He was a part of the old order, baptized truly for the remission of sins, called Israel to repentance. Then he was beheaded, and the order ceased, you might say. He was the last of the prophets. From that time on, the Christian Church was developed.

The Lord Jesus, Peter, made his great confession. The Lord said, Upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against them. So, from the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the Church never ceased to exist, and it exists today.

The Continuity of the Christian Church Through History

Well, how does it exist? You see, down through those years, those 1 ,700 years after the last of the prophets, before 1820, in what form did the Church exist? Well, if you know your Church history, which these men did not know.

They knew nothing about Church history by their own confessions. They said, We've got to start from scratch with this vision of Joseph Smith, and with the ordination by John the Baptist, and then later on by James, Peter and John, who were supposed to have given them the higher priesthood.

From the time of the apostles down to the present time, for that matter, there has never been a time when the Church was not functioning as an evangelical body, meeting together, accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior, submitting to Christian baptism, and continuing.

Now, there was always this group, and if you want a bit of history on that, read the Pilgrim Church, which some of you may have in your possession, a very splendid recital of all of the different groups succeeding each other down through the centuries.

Not in the Roman Confession, to be sure. Not in the Roman or the Greek or the Assyrian or the Eastern Confession. Not in that, because they were an establishment of an organization, and obviously were not functioning as the Church.

But down through the centuries, there were always these who were uniters in their worship of the Lord Jesus Christ and the continuation of the Church. You say, did they have apostolic succession? No, they didn't need it.

There was no such thing. But they succeeded each other, and are in sharp focus as you read the history of the Church, especially in such a volume as Miller's Church History, or any one of the good Church histories, including the Pilgrim Church, which is the more recent volume published in 1956.

The Three Functions of the Church

Now, what is the function of the Church? To witness to the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to unite believers in one body, and to have an outreach to the world, winning the loss for Jesus Christ.

Let's say this isn't a comprehensive view of it. These are three functions, and this is how we identify the Church. When I go to a new town, as I do once in a while, I find myself in a place where I don't know anyone.

I will look through the Church page in the newspaper, or I'll look through the Yellow Pages, and I will find some little group that obviously, from their title and from the subjects that they advertise in the newspaper, are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I'll go and present myself, and they'll welcome me, and they'll say we're one, and we'll feel that we know each other right from the start. Why? Because we have this bond of union in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Spirit of God within us gives us this evidence. Not the Spirit of God applied to us at baptism. That is completely false, it never occurred in Scripture. But the ordination by the Holy Spirit of God who indwells every believer from the moment of the birth.

This is something that we experience, we know, we recognize it, and it functions in our fellowship with other believers. Not too long ago, I was in the southernmost town in Alaska, in Ketchikan, and I went through the Yellow Pages, and I found one little listing there.

There was none of our brethren listed there, but I called them up. Oh, bless your heart, come and visit us. I went, and we had a glorious day of fellowship, and I'd never met any of them before. But we were one in the Spirit, you see.

This is the church functioning, a small group, but vital in carrying out the work of the church. Now, I ask the question to those who claim that they have the restored church, when is it going to start working?

So far, there's no evidence of the restoration of a church. You say, well, what about four and a half million people who are members of this organization? They're not doing the work of the church at all.

They're not gathering together as a church. They have no real worship in the sense that we have in New Testament worship. Worshiping in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ alone, and gathering together in fellowship with one another, with him as our head and the Holy Spirit leading our worship.

This is worship. It may consist of hymns, it may consist of reading of the scriptures or a prayer or exhortation, but this is all part of the functioning of the church met together. This has never happened in the Mormon church.

Their hymnology is very sketchy. They borrow some of the Christian hymns, quite a few of the Christian hymns, and use Christian music, but the dogma that they have concocted as church literature or church hymnology is nothing of the sort.

The prophet who talked with Jehovah, well, who's that? Joseph Smith, eulogizing Joseph Smith. The other day when President Benson was on the radio, all he talked about was Joseph Smith, not the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, the church honors the Lord Jesus Christ as its head, and this is our standard of worship. What happened? Let's say 1820 or 1830, the church was formally organized and called the Church of the Latter-day Saints, later on Church of Jesus Christ, eventually Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, six years after its founding.

Christian Missions as Evidence of the Church’s Outreach

What has happened? While Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon, or the Golden Plate, supposedly, into the Book of Mormon, William Carey was just finishing up the translation of the Bible into the Chinese language, the church functioning in extension to a pagan mission, and giving them the Word of God, which, of course, has been effective ever since that time, and Morrison's version is still used.

William Carey was translating the Bible into the language of India. Aaron Judson, as the Mormons were developing their work, he had gone to Burma and was translating the Bible into the Burmese language, and on down through.

Those, for instance, at the same time when they were saying the church was not in existence, about 30 miles south of where they were, Marcus Whitman and Henry Harmon Spalding were preparing to go to the American West as missionaries to the Indians, Spalding to translate the New Testament, or the Gospel of Matthew rather, into the Nez Perce language, a very effective thing that made them a Christian nation within a generation.

They became Christians as a result of his work. At the time they were moving west into Utah, James Evans was translating the scriptures into the Cree language up in Canada, with the result that the Cree people became a Christian nation within a decade after he gave them their first scriptures.

And while they were busy establishing themselves in the mountains, no outreach, there was no outreach yet except that they were sending missionaries to various parts of the world to supposedly present the Book of Mormon and the Mormon doctrines, going on in America the church was alive and well and had never ceased to exist.

It was functioning with great results, with tremendous results in souls being saved and coming into fellowships of the Lord's people. For instance, during that century, the Salvation Army, for one, reaching down the mountains, going to the slums of England, and eventually to the slums of America, and the Salvation Army was functioning around the world.

What were they doing? Winning derelicts for Jesus Christ. You see, they had the formula, they had the cure for sin, and the cure for sin was the blood of Christ. During that period, the great mission adventure of the world started to function.

James Hudson Taylor went to the heart of China without support, without anything except the word of the Lord going to him, and he went with the word of the Lord and opened up inland China for the gospel.

The results of that work, way back in the middle of the last century, a little beyond the middle, he functioned as an arm of the church in China, and the great China inland mission developed out of that, which reached the very limits of the Chinese empire.

So this was going on, and all the way through we find key persons representing the church in out-of-the-way places. Now, I think, for instance, of the work of the Salvation Army. What were they doing?

They weren't concerned with building a church of middle-class Americans. They were going into the slums. Why the slums? Because those people were not receiving any gospel. They wept with those who wept, and pulled them up out of the gutter, preached the gospel to them, and they became believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.

In other words, they had the cure for sin, you see. And this is what, in general, salvation through the blood of Christ. And it worked. And you find Salvation Armies in every part of the world. Mormons produced no Salvation Army.

They never went to the slums. During the middle of the century, the rescue mission idea was developed. And from that time to this, the rescue missions have been developed until there is hardly a city.

Even our little town of Flagstaff out there has a rescue mission down on Skid Row. They went deliberately to Skid Row. Why? Because that's where the derelicts were, and they won folks for Jesus Christ.

Today there is a rescue mission within about five or six blocks of the temple in Salt Lake City, functioning 24 hours a day. Very lively work, winning souls for Jesus Christ on the Skid Row of Salt Lake City.

Say, is there one? Sure there is. You go down there, I can give you the address of that mission if you want. Now, when they went in there about six or seven years ago, they went to the church authorities and they said, we're coming in with a rescue mission.

They said, we don't want you here, we won't support you as you come, but we can't keep you from coming. Well, they came and they functioned. So the thing works, he says. Now, works such as our own out in Flagstaff, Arizona, and this is always, to me, a tremendous challenge and one that I can pass on to others.

Evangelism, Jail Ministry, and Restoration Through Christ

We have American Indians from many tribes coming there, studying the Bible with us for a period of years, and then going out as missionaries to their own people. Where do we get our recruits? As many as many places else, we get them from the county and the city jails.

Say, is that where you go to get recruits for Bible school? Well, we don't go deliberately to get recruits for Bible school, but we have all of our students functioning as evangelists in the jail ministry, because every jail in Arizona has Indians in it.

It doesn't matter where they are. So our women folks go down, for instance, to the county jail or the city jail in Flagstaff. That's one case history I'm going to give you. Navajo women, of course, when they go down there, they're looking for Navajos behind the bars, and they find some Navajo women in the drunk tank in the Flagstaff jail.

So they sit down on the floor, like all the good Navajos do, and the Indians come forward to the bars, and they sit down on the floor, and these Navajo sisters talk to their Navajo sisters behind the bars and win them for Jesus Christ.

Some years ago, we had the delightful case of a young woman who was in the drunk tank in the city jail, cowering over in the corner. She didn't want to come out at all. The women were there, and they recognized her as a Navajo girl, and eventually they got her to come.

She was 20 years old, and they had the great powwow there, which they have every Fourth of July, which is a miserable thing as far as morals are concerned. She stayed behind the family as a girl of 14 or 15, went down to Skid Row, became an alcoholic and a drug addict, was a woman of the street.

She had two illegitimate children by the time she was 18, and was constantly being tossed into jail, and she was so far gone with the nereal diseases that the authorities were just wishing she'd die so they'd be rid of her.

She was a constant pest to them. Well, our Indian women went in, and they wept over this Navajo sister, and finally she came up to the bars and she said, Is there any help for me? They told her about the Lord Jesus.

She accepted, and her life was changed. Now, physically, she was still a wreck, but the women came back out to the school, and they said, Can we bring this girl out to our dormitory and nurse her back to health?

They said, Yes. We have a very good Lutheran doctor that helps us there at the school, and we have a fine Navajo nurse on our staff, so the women put her to bed, and they nursed her back to health, and our nurse gave the shot with the direction of the doctor.

Within a year, she was rehabilitated to the point where she was able to join in the classroom activities, and she took the full three-year course of study. Now, when she came to us, she was a repulsive-looking sight, a derelict, an absolute derelict.

When she left us, after three years in Bible school, she was married to a fine young Navajo man who had gone through a similar life as hers earlier. They are today a very valuable missionary couple up on the reservation at a station that used to be operated by the folks at Tiznespas, the manual mission to the Navajos.

A few miles from there, they gave it up to others at one time, but that's where this young couple are functioning, and they've been functioning ever since as a valuable, bilingual pair of missionaries.

What are they doing? They're preaching salvation through the blood of Christ, and they give themselves as demonstrations. Now, that's what the Church does, you see. That's what we mean when we say the Mormons have never opened a rescue mission.

There are thousands of them throughout the country, and they're functioning day and night. If you ever went to Chicago to see the Pacific Garden mission, that is a gem of a sample of a rescue mission.

It's open 24 hours a day with all the departments functioning, and every day there are folks coming in and getting saved. They're coming to know the Lord as their Savior. Their lives are transformed, you see.

Jesus’ Mission and the Church’s Gospel Commission

Now, I say that this is the function of the Church. When the Lord spoke of why he came, he came to bring deliverance to the captives, recovering his sight to the blind, and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

That was his address in the synagogue at Galat. They all wondered at it, and then he said, today this is fulfilled in your ears. In other words, he was the one that was fulfilling that particular process.

The Lord Jesus Christ himself outlined the message of the Church. It was these purposes. The preaching of the gospel to the poor. Do you remember the Lord Jesus, when he came, and when he functioned among those people, he went to the outcasts.

They said, why, he's going to die in the sinners. He said, yes, I didn't come to call the righteous, I came to call the sinners to repentance. And this is what characterized his ministry. Why? Because everybody's a sinner.

All sin comes short of the glory of God. So, that was the mission of the Church, and then, of course, the final charge to the Church going into all the world and preach the gospel. What has happened in that life?

The Global Expansion of Evangelical Missions

Look at the record, the Nestorians going all the way to China from Persia as missionaries of the gospel. The Moravians coming out of persecution in Bohemia, and finally coming to the estate of Count von Zinzendorf, and the story is a very beautiful one.

They always had an election. Who was going to be permitted to go to the mission field, and who was going to be permitted to stay home? And there were always more on the mission field than there were in the home church.

What were they preaching? Salvation through the blood of Christ. What happened? Thousands accepted the Lord as their Savior. The Church was formed in many places. So, this was one event, the Moravians.

The Mennonites, another racial group, another ethnic group that came, and what has happened? You'd go to the state of Pennsylvania today, and you might say that certain areas of it that are taken up by these people are the safest places in the United States, as far as the villainy is concerned and mugging and so forth, you don't find it there.

Incidentally, in our Navajo reservation in Arizona, we now have many, many men out there preaching the gospel from our school, and they're forming little churches all over the reservation. And the Navajo reservation is about the safest place in the American continent to be, if you want a place to get away from the violence, you'll find it there among a very beautiful people.

But then, for instance, the missionaries who went to Africa—Dan Crawford, Henry Arnott, to name a few, many others who went to that country, Livingston—what did they do? They went into the solid bush of Africa and preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, and souls were saved, and the church was formed, and there are probably more evangelical Christians per capita in Africa than there are today in the United States, because of the men who went there with the gospel.

This is the outreach of the church, and the church in Africa is a substantial church. And what I mean, the evangelical part of it is a substantial, functioning group. Take the case of missionaries going into South America during the last centuries, winning those folks, particularly the Indian people.

Take our own missionaries that went to the Alps. Now the church is flourishing there in the blood of those martyrs. They were martyred for the sake of Jesus Christ, and the church is flourishing there today.

Take any one of these great episodes in the history of the church, and this is what I say is the outreach of the church. Now, this has all been the evangelical church of Jesus Christ that has done this functioning.

Take missionaries to the wide world, not just to a limited group, but to the wide world, and take probably the greatest episode of all in our own time, the translation of the word of God by the Wycliffe Translators in something over a thousand languages.

Giving them the word of God in their own language, and as they are giving them the word of God in their own language, folks are being saved and a church is formed and going on in these heathen lands as a functioning church.

This is the church of Jesus Christ. This is not the church of the so-called Restorations. Now the Camelot groups, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ, I mean the Church of Disciples of Christ, and the Christian Church, those three, have a total membership of about 18 million throughout the world, a sizable number.

They were based, that whole thing was based upon the Lord Jesus Christ as the head of the church, and his word as their only creed. You could go ahead and name other groups that have gone out and claiming no head but Jesus Christ.

No establishment except the establishment of the deacons and the elders in the local church. No functioning pope or priest or president or anything else, but groups functioning. I've just been reading the last two days Mr. Code's book on the history of the brethren.

Beautiful thing. Those folks deliberately went out on the authority of the word of God, and the word spread throughout all the nations. And today you have that functioning in every part of the world, winning souls for Jesus Christ.

Question and Answer: The Baptism of Jesus Christ

Now, it is two minutes to nine, and I ask if there are any questions. Very quickly. We aren't going to spend much time. Last night we spent a lot of time, but tonight not much. What about the baptism of Jesus Christ?

Yeah. Well, in the first place, it wasn't for the remission of his sins, because he had none. It was to fulfill all righteousness, and it was to identify him to the peoples to whom he had been ministering.

Not a few, but great crowds that came together and were baptized by John. And it was a baptism of repentance to Israelites who would become proselytes to Judaism. The church was not yet in sight, and he was not a functionary in the church.

He was identifying the Lord Jesus Christ, and as far as the sin element was concerned, you might say that at that point Jesus Christ assumed the sins of the world, and identified himself with the sinners, in other words.

So the baptism of Jesus Christ is unique. It's not a formula that we say, well, if John baptized Jesus, we ought to follow his footsteps. This is false reasoning. We aren't following in baptism the baptism of John.

It was a Jewish thing. Jewish proselytes were coming and submitting to the baptism of John, and also Jews who were repentant in view of the fact that the Messiah was coming. Remember, this is one of the messages of John the Baptist, that I baptize you with water, but he that cometh is greater than I, he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.

So we have this unique situation of John baptizing the Lord Jesus, not because of his sins, but as he assumed the sin burden for the people of the world. Another question? Yes? Of sin? Yes. Well, overall, their concept is that Jesus died to atone for sins, the sins of the world.

But they do not establish in their doctrine the fact that now that this has taken place, Paul said this was for all, this was unto all. But he said it's upon all those that believe. God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, but committed unto us now the word of reconciliation.

Now then, we pray you, in Christ's head be ye reconciled to God, for he hath made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. So the work of Christ, as we understand it, of course, is that he died so that we all may have eternal life.

But it's up to us to accept it. It's not forced upon us. The Mormon Church considers the death of Christ as atoning for all the sins of the world. As an individual grows to age eight, they baptize this one, and supposedly impart the Holy Ghost through the hands of the baptizing officials, which, of course, is totally untrue because we read through our Bibles and we don't find that the Holy Ghost was administered by the laying on of hands.

It was administered at Pentecost, and now every individual who trusts the Lord Jesus Christ is inbred by the Holy Spirit of God from the time of the new birth, and not before that. And there's no way that we can impart the Holy Ghost to anyone.

It must be through the new birth. It's the only way it comes. That's their coverage of sin. Incidentally, I have asked them many, many times, what is your cure for sin? For me, me the sinner. What is your cure for sin?

They have no answer. You read their book of doctrine by Mr. McConkie, and you'll find that he's very evasive in the matter of sin. He said, if you sin, go to your bishop and confess it, and then don't sin anymore.

Well, that's not the biblical viewpoint at all. Sin is something that we deal with. In other words, at conversion we are delivered from the penalty of sin, because Jesus Christ died and paid that penalty.

Confession, Forgiveness, and the Cure for Sin

After that, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins, which implies that we continue to sin to the point where we must confess it to our Heavenly Father. Now, not long ago, I had occasion to deal with a very sincere neighbor of ours who is a Mormon, and I was preaching on the subject of the confession of sin for day-to-day forgiveness.

He came to me afterwards and said, you know, he said, I don't talk to you about this, but every day, at the close of the day, I examine my life for that day and think of everything that I can that was wrong during that day, and I confess it.

I said, do you get relief? He said, no, that's my problem. Well, I said to him, maybe you're confessing it to the wrong God. Maybe you're confessing it to the God of Mormonism who is an exalted man. Maybe you're confessing it to Jesus Christ who is the spirit brother of Satan.

And that was a new thought to him. He hadn't realized that that was the God of Mormonism, a God of flesh and bones, an exalted man. Well, no one of that category can save us from our sins, obviously. It doesn't matter how much confessing we do, we'd never get relief.

And this man had never experienced relief because he didn't know God. Five minutes after, I said we would quit, so shall we bow our heads in a word of prayer? Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the peace that comes to us, the consolation that comes to us of knowing that our sins are forgiven, that they're under the blood of Christ, and that we are new creatures in Him, and we are capable of going forward and preaching the gospel to every creature.

Thank Thee for the word of the gospel that has gone out down through these years as the church has expanded and grown and functioned. Dismiss us with Thy blessing tonight. Take us safely to our homes and cause that our hearts might be quiet before Thee as we contemplate all of the good things Thou hast done for us.

So dismiss us with Thy blessing, for we ask it in our Savior's name. Amen. British Miss.