Mormon Leaves Mormonism For Christ!

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Okay, so tell everyone who you are. My name's Brian Duke. I came down from Maricopa, or came up from Maricopa, I guess.

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I'm originally from central Illinois, and I was raised in the RLDS church. Tell everyone what

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RLDS is. So RLDS is the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. It formed after the death of Joseph Smith, and kind of everybody scattered.

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Brigham Young took people out to Utah, and his son, Joseph Smith III, reorganized the church.

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Actually, I think most or all of Joseph Smith's family stayed behind. And my genealogy's done.

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I'm related to Joseph Smith's sister, Catherine Smith. Oh, wow. Sixth generation, and God got me out.

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So they're about to end here, so we have limited time. We're going to have to move. Give everyone, hopefully this is encouraging to people who are thinking about witnessing to Mormons and reaching out to them.

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What did God use to get you out? People. People sharing the gospel. Everybody thought

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I was a Mormon. It was like, I'm not a Mormon. But it didn't matter because they kept hitting me with the gospel.

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They kept challenging the Book of Mormon. Everything that I was brought up to believe about the Bible being corrupted or that God had to restore his church.

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The RLDS church is very small. It's now called Community of Christ. 250 ,000 worldwide members or less.

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And I thought, if God's true church is this, then what are all these other people doing?

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Because God had taken me to youth groups. It was about a two, two and a half year process before I gave my life to Christ.

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Just hearing the gospel message over and over again. And then probably another year and a half to deprogram.

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And finally just accept the Bible as it's written. To be not corrupt, but to be

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God's preserved word. Right. So was that a central struggle for you in coming to Christ?

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Thinking because Mormonism had taught you the Bible had been corrupted. Was that a central theme for you? Really accepting the fact that God had preserved his word?

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Yes. Very much so. Growing up at first, I thought everybody had a

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Doctrine and Covenants. Or a Prolegra. Not Prolegra. We didn't have the Prolegra. Doctrine and Covenants or Book of Mormon in the

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Bible. I thought everyone had that. But then I finally, as I got older, I realized, okay, we've got this Bible. We actually used what's called the

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Inspired Version of the Bible. Which is what they call the Joseph Smith Translation. But we actually have it with the verses in there.

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So our verses were different. Right. And I'll share real quickly. Dr. White was talking to a woman earlier this evening.

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And I got a chance to share with her that I asked an elder one night, does the

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Bible talk about the Book of Mormon? He said, yes, look in Isaiah chapter 29, 11. And so we start reading.

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And we read about this book that you can't, it's sealed. And then there's all these extra verses about Joseph Smith and the

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Book of Mormon almost. And so I ran home after this because I was really excited.

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And I looked for the only non -inspired version of the Bible I could find, which was a

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King James Version of the Precious Moments Bible. And I opened it up, and the verses weren't there.

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And my heart sank. I was disappointed. I was very, very upset. And that was the first time

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I heard Galatians 1, 6 through 8. Where Paul says that even if we were an angel from heaven, were to preach a different gospel, let them be accursed.

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Yeah. Those were times where I just, I knew that an angel came to Joseph Smith. And I knew then it was not an angel of the

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Lord. Very powerful. And my standard was the Bible. If the Bible can back this up,

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I'll believe it. Right. And obviously it can't, and it doesn't. And that's my challenge to Mormons.

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That's why I'm out here. Right on. Praise God, man. Hey, that's actually a good thing to finally end on.

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Here's a man who was a part of this entire movement and one sector of it.

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And he was cut with the simple text from Galatians 1 that we often use as Christians.

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Where Paul is chastising the Christians in Galatia. And it's over the fact that they've departed from the simplicity, the purity of devotion to Christ, the grace of God and the gospel for another gospel.

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And he says there's really not another. There's someone who's troubling you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ ultimately. And he says that if even he comes back with a different gospel, let him be anathema.

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If an angel comes from heaven, we quote that and maybe not enough to our Mormon friends and family.

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Because that's a verse that God used to really challenge this man and bring him to faith. It really is powerful. Yeah. Because you look at that and you look at history.

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Look at Muhammad, visited by an angel, right? Yeah. And it's a different gospel.

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Right. Every time it's a different gospel. Yeah. And when you look at the message of Galatians, it's what is it?

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You've departed from the gospel. Yes. And you are now looking to a work of the law. And I challenged a young man out here earlier tonight.

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I said, you know, laws and ordinance of the gospel, that's not in the Bible. You're working your way, but the

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Bible doesn't talk about this. Simplicity of the gospel is it's good news because it's good news that you get

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God. It's good news of His rule and the world of His kingdom. It's the good news of peace with God.

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And that only comes because of the work of Jesus, God in the flesh, who lived a perfect and sinless life, who died in the place of His people and rose again.

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And the call of the gospel is to turn from sin to Christ and to trust in Him for salvation.

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And, of course, the beauty of the gospel and what Paul says in Philippians 3 is that he wants to throw away his whole resume and his life of obedience and be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of his own derived from the law, but the one that comes from God through faith in Jesus.

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So Christians have hope in that the righteousness they stand before God in is the righteousness that's not theirs.

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It's Jesus' righteousness, and that's only given through faith. That's the sweetness and the beauty and the simplicity of the gospel message, and that's what

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Mormons need to hear. So I encourage you guys to go love a Mormon, go tell them the truth, go be bold.

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The last thing I was about to say before this brother came up was that we had a good conversation today on Apologia TV with Pastor Toby Sumter from Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

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And one of the things he pointed out, I thought it was a really great thing to point out, he said that a lot of these movies about Jesus really irritate him because in all the movies made about Jesus' life, he never looks like he's done anything to warrant being killed.

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He looks too nice. Why would they kill him? He's too nice. He's a sweet guy. He barely furrows his brow.

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And if you look at the message of the New Testament, Jesus actually picked fights.

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He created conflict because he loved people, because he loved the truth of God. If you look at the apostles and their witness and testimony in the book of Acts, they didn't do evangelism like we often do today in the

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West where it's sort of invite someone to church to sort of give them the softball of the gospel.

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You know, just come to church with me and listen to this guy talk on the stage. I don't want to be general and try to be hurtful to other

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Christians, but we generally despise the kind of conflict that creates a riot like Paul did or the kind of conflict that puts somebody in jail not because of our behavior but because of the offense of the gospel itself.

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If you look in the New Testament, you see a principle of this kind of evangelism, public proclamation of the gospel in the public square, preaching the gospel, going to where people are to read some of the message of the gospel.

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And I admit we look weird. I confess that. We look weird to these people.

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They look at us sideways. We seem like strange people. But if you love people, you will risk being hated by the very people you love in order to reach them.

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Dr. Walter Martin said that. I've never forgotten it, and I think it's true. So I encourage you guys to go love a Mormon.