Tuesday Guy - Testimony for my Mormon Friends

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A Mormon Testimony Meeting Versus a Christian Testimony

Well, welcome everyone to the Tuesday Guy on Saturday show, a feature of No Compromise Ministries, nocompromiseradio .com. My name is Steve Cooley. And I, as many of you know, who've listened to the show, I used to be a Mormon.

And so I am somewhat fascinated by all things Mormon. I grew up in the church and everything like that. And one of the facets of Mormonism is every, the first Sunday of every month is what is called fast and testimony meeting.

You're supposed to not eat breakfast, not eat lunch to give that money to the church. And so what happens is instead of going to a regular meeting where somebody will get up and give a talk, they don't give sermons or there'll be multiple talks, but no sermon, individuals from the congregation will get up and they will give their testimony.

And I was online the other day and just looking for things about testimonies. And here's what they typically would say. Here's a quote I found. We were often instructed to give a pure testimony. That's in quotes, pure testimony, only as in, I know the church is true.

I know Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. I know the Book of Mormon is true. Now you can throw in a mention that heavenly father lives and loves us. And every once in a while, someone would mention my elder brother, Jesus, which this author notes is grammatically incorrect.

It should be older brother, not elder brother, but anyway, I wanted to get to the point here. Time or person after person after person on the Sunday morning meeting, we'd get up and say, essentially, I know this church is true or I know this is the only true church.

I know Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. I'm thankful we have a prophet today. I'm thankful for whatever. And on their testimony would go. Now, sometimes I saw online where people would say there were embarrassing revelations made during these testimonies, but that's the gist of it.

And you could be anywhere from 90 to four and get up there. Parents used to carry their kids up there. I know this church is true. What? And so the parent would be whispering in the child's ear. I don't normally do voices.

Maybe I should though. But the parent would be whispering in the child's ear, telling them what to say. And that passes as a testimony. Now, what I'd like to do today is to give my testimony in a manner of speaking.

And it's going to be, I think it's going to stand in contrast to what you would hear on a Sunday morning at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during their, the first Sunday of every month during their fast and testimony meeting.

Now, instead of saying things like, I know this is the only true church. I know Jeff Smith was a true prophet. I'm thankful we have a living prophet who receives revelation today. I'm thankful my heavenly father lives and he loves us.

All those kinds of things. Here's what I'm going to say to you today. Some things that are not subjective because Mormonism at its base is a subjective religion. What do I mean by that? It's feeling oriented.

For example, how do you know that the Book of Mormon allegedly is the word of God? Well, you're to read it and to pray about it. And if you get a burning in your bosom, then you know it's true. I saw a cartoon online that just, it made me laugh.

I mean, it's sad, but it made me laugh. Because, you know, that's just kind of how I am. But it showed different people from different religions talking about how God told them this and therefore they knew it was right.

And that's the nature of Mormonism. God is basically affirming supposedly the Book of Mormon by giving you a burning, an interior burning. I'll just turn it that way. And that is supposed to be confirmation.

Well, what is that? Supposing you get this burning in your bosom and it's completely wrong. Supposing you're reading the Quran and you get a burning in your bosom or you're reading Ellen G. White's writings or you're reading Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.

You know, the fact that you have a burning in your bosom, does that mean it's true? Is that an infallible mark of truth? And obviously the answer to that is no. And, you know, just basically Mormonism falls under Galatians 1 .8, when Paul writes the Church of Galatia and says, if anyone comes to you, even an angel of light, anyone appears to you and says, or gives you a different gospel than the one that you've already received from me, let him be accursed.

That's just my own, you know, rough, off the cuff quotation of it. But the idea that Mormonism is very much, it falls under Galatians 1 .8 because the whole basis of it is entirely subjective. You have to swallow the Joseph Smith story, hook, line, and sinker.

And if you don't, then you'll never agree to become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anyway, getting back to this, getting back to my testimony. Here's my testimony. My testimony is I know there is one church which Jesus Christ himself promised would not fail.

And I know that because the Bible says it. It's not my opinion. It's Jesus himself saying what? He tells Peter, I tell you, you are Peter, and upon this rock or on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell or Hades or death shall not prevail against it.

I know that. I know that that's true. He's going to build his church. And you know, one of the issues, and I think I mentioned this before on one of my previous shows was there's no doubt that Jesus Christ is the one who's going to build his church.

There's no doubt that if the Mormon Church is true, then Jesus himself was wrong when he said that he would build his church and nothing would prevail against it because the Mormon Church teaches that within a very short period of time, the entire church was plunged into apostasy.

The truth was gone. Many false things were subsequently taught. The Bible was edited. Many of them believe, much like some kind of fictional book, that the Bible was edited by men at the Council of Nicaea.

And this is the basis of their religion. And so, you know, when you call them on that, they don't really understand. The Mormons, by and large, and I will confess that when I was a Mormon, this is true of me, are biblically illiterate.

They don't know that much about the Bible. Here, just to give you a little bit of an idea of what it was like to grow up in a Mormon household and to really kind of be faithful. My mom used to have this thing where, in high school, she was a single mom and I was on my own a lot.

And I would, she would graveyard shift, so I would be responsible for getting myself up every morning, which you go, well, what's the big deal there? Well, I don't remember what time I had to wake up, but I think it was like 4 .30 in the morning because here's what I would do.

I would get up, I would have breakfast, I would take a shower. And the first year, anyway, that I was in seminary, I actually had to ride my bike in. It was dark outside. I could hear, it was so quiet.

I lived in the city. It was so quiet that I could hear the water rushing through the sewers. That's how quiet it was. As I was riding my three-speed with my headlights and my backpack on and all that, and riding a few miles into the church.

Anyway, it was okay with my mom if I stayed home from school as long as I went to seminary. So my seminary attendance was 100%. It didn't matter what illness I had, I went to seminary. When I had mononucleosis, I went to seminary.

I didn't have to go to school, but I went to seminary every single day. And so we would do that and we would, in seminary class, it's a class that would go for an hour in the morning before you went to high school.

And we spent a year on church history, I think a year in the Book of Mormon, year in the Old Testament, year in the New Testament. But basically what you would teach is just snippets. We would learn snippets from scripture.

One of the big things we would do is something called scripture chase, where the teacher would give you like a clue. Think of it as like Jeopardy. They would give you the clue and then you had to figure out what scripture it was and look it up real quick.

And I actually was so excited about this. I used to take a crayon and I would color my scriptures with crayons so that the pages would then kind of slip right open to those, I mean, try it sometime. You may not want to try it, but if you do that, because there's so much wax in the crayon and so it would just kind of slide right open to the right pages.

And I used to be really, really good at that and I enjoyed that a lot. But you don't really study things in context. So, you know, something like Matthew 16, 18 would not have been clear to us. Something like Galatians 1, 8, I don't even know if we ever would have even read that, let alone studied the book of Galatians to see what Paul was writing about and how he was preaching against salvation by works because the whole thrust of Mormonism is Jesus made it possible for you to save yourself.

Think about that. You know, how could that be a Christian religion? Jesus made it possible for you to cinch up your belt and, you know, climb the stairway to heaven, hoist yourself up the rope, or however you want to phrase it.

I mean, he put it on you. He basically handed the baton off to you and now you're responsible to carry yourself across the finish line. That is just crazy. But there is one church, it is a universal church.

Catholic, small C. We're all members of one body, the Bible tells us. We are baptized into one body and that isn't a wet baptism, that is a dry baptism. It means from the moment you are saved, you belong to the body of Christ.

It's his church. Now you may be a Baptist, you may be a Presbyterian, you may be whatever denomination that you may happen to be. If you believe in salvation by faith alone and Christ alone, then you're a Christian.

So there is one true church, but it didn't disappear for 1700 years to be resuscitated as it were by Joseph Smith. My second part of my testimony would be this. I know that Joseph Smith was a fraud and that by Old Testament standards, he would have been put to death.

It is, you know, as I said, I have maybe a morbid fascination now with Mormonism because it's what I grew up in. But, you know, just reading about it now and learning that Joseph Smith actually got the, supposedly got the revelation about plural marriage polygamy after, after he'd taken his second wife.

Now that's pretty interesting. You know, you would think that if God was speaking to you and God knows all things, or God has some kind of plan that he would let you know ahead of your taking your second wife that that's what you were supposed to do.

And, you know, looking back on it now, it seems like what happened was Joseph Smith, by virtue of the fact that he was a man and a powerful man and probably a little bit arrogant by the fact that he had so many people following him, decided that one wife, namely Emma, was not enough.

So he determined he would marry a second wife. Well, then he had to make Emma feel better about it. Well, how do you do that? You invoke God. You say, God told me. And so that's what he did. And, you know, a number of false prophecies.

I mean, the whole thing is a hoax. If you actually study Joseph Smith and probably many of you have, you know that he was really kind of a carny, you know, a carnival performer. He was somebody who did things now that would get you laughed out of a carnival in terms of, you know, pretending to know things from the world beyond, that kind of thing.

So Joseph Smith was a fraud and, you know, really all the prophets, so-called prophets after him have been frauds. I remember one of the things that first really bothered me was I read a book called The Mormon Murders, which talked about a number of false documents that the Mormon church bought.

And my biggest shock was Gordon B Hinckley denying, knowing this man who had perpetrated these crimes, even murder, denied knowing him when a press conference was held. And you just think what kind of prophet, because Gordon B Hinckley became the prophet.

And at that point he was a spokesman for the first presidency of the church. And you just think what sort of prophet would lie, would just flat out lie to people about what he had done and the way he had conducted himself.

And by the way, what sort of prophet would buy documents that anyone who really believed in the first vision story of Joseph Smith would know was a fraud? Because for example, there was a so-called salamander letter where Joseph Smith was allegedly led to the golden plates by a white salamander.

Well, that doesn't comport with Joseph Smith's original or with his story that it was an angel that led him to those plates. And so you just, you think, well, if somebody offered you something like that, why would you buy it?

Why would you try to suppress something like that? Wouldn't you know, you quote and unquote, know that it's a fraud? Well, that tells you something about the actual level of their faith. I think there are many Mormons who are sincere in their belief, but I think the more you know about it, the more you're just kind of hoping that it's true and it's a sad state.

So I would say, so far, I'd say there's, I know there's one church and the Mormon church is not it. I would say, I know that Joseph Smith was a fraud, not a prophet. And then I would say, I'm thankful that we have a sovereign and omnipotent God who is able in spite of the efforts of men to preserve and protect his word.

His word, his word is something that he says, says, you know, not one jot or tittle shall pass. Everything will come to pass. Everything he has said will happen. You know, you just go through the Bible and again and again, it testifies to itself when it says that it's inspired, that it is the very word of God.

We read those things and then we think about what the Mormon church teaches, which is that men, as I said, corrupted it, that men edited it, as one of the early prophets of the church said, that many plain and precious parts, that's a quote you'll hear over and over again, many plain and precious parts were taken out.

Well, when you start studying Mormon doctrine, you realize it wasn't just many plain and precious parts that were taken out. It was like the whole Bible had to be almost thrown away in order to come away with Christianity compared to Mormonism.

There really are very few similarities. Now, a Mormon can call himself a Christian all day long. It doesn't make it so. If he wants to say or she wants to say they're a follower of Christ, well, certainly not a follower of Christ as he is presented in the Bible.

But back to my point there, we have a sovereign and omnipotent God who is able to preserve and to protect his word. The whole idea that somehow men, whoever they were, were able to attack, assault, edit, however you want to phrase it, take away from the word of God and that he was not able to stop them.

It's just mind boggling. And now we're seeing more and more, I mean, of course we would, it doesn't really matter that we get these things, but they're comforting to us. I was reading the other day that there's a fragment, I think, from the gospel of Mark that they won't identify it yet, but that they're going to talk about being from the first century AD.

So really within a few decades of the gospel being written, we have a fragment of it still in existence today. It is saying, I mean, whether it's the Dead Sea Scrolls, whatever it is, over and over again, archeology, the findings that come out of that area are consistent with the Bible.

They're inconsistent with Mormon theology, let alone some massive coverup. And you would think that if men were busily editing the Bible, just cutting things out, and understanding what we know about the Bible today, you would think that there would be massive inconsistencies.

I mean, it's not like they were sitting around in computer rooms in 325 AD at the Council of Nicaea, comparing manuscripts and going, well, wait a minute, if we take this out, that's gonna make it conflict with this part.

It's just all rubbish, this whole idea that somehow many plain and precious parts, those guys at the Council of Nicaea would have had to have been the smartest men ever to have existed. They would have had to have had virtual computers for brains and just massive memories that no one has ever even, it's just mind-boggling to think that anybody could be that smart.

And yet that's what we're supposed to believe. But again, that is not what the Bible says about itself. So I would say that. In fact, you know, it might be great, I'd like to go to a fast and testimony meeting and just kind of walk up to the front.

Of course, I'd wear a white shirt. I was watching this woman's testimony the other day and just reminded how important it is for Mormons to wear a white shirt. I think it might be okay to wear a light blue one, but boy, you don't wanna wear anything else.

You know, that would be pretty shocking. You're not really a faithful Mormon if you're wearing a lot of different colors. I mean, did you ever notice that? The elders, the young men, the missionaries are always wearing white shirts.

Anyway, my next point would be this. I'm thankful that the Bible is sufficient and contains all that we need to live a godly life. Again, right out of the Bible. It gives us everything that we need pertaining to life and godliness.

What do we have or what do we not have that we need? Second Peter 1 .3 says, talking about God's divine power, The Mormons would have you believe, again, that the Bible's deficient, that it doesn't speak to a lot of things that we need to know.

Well, the Bible never says that about itself. It says it is sufficient. God breathed. It gives us everything that we need. And again, we have an all-powerful God who has preserved his word, who cares about his word, and has given it to us that we might know how to please him.

I would also say that I'm thankful that God has always existed, that his power is inexhaustible, and I'm amazed that he would set his affection upon someone like me. Well, let's just take those individual parts for a moment.

The Mormons would have you believe that not only did Jesus Christ have a beginning and an end, but that God the Father, whom they see as a separate, we believe that they're different persons, but they would have you believe that God is not one, that God is a multitude of ones.

They would say he's one in purpose, but they would say that there are multiple, if you could push them far enough, that they would say there's multiple gods. For example, they would say God the Father was named Elohim, and that he comes from another planet where he was a man and passed the test and did all the things he needed to do, including getting married in the temple, so that he went on and had a multitude of spiritual wives who had a multitude of spiritual children.

I mean, this is the bizarre nature of Mormonism. That's what they teach. Now, people go, well, how can you go there week in and week out and hear these things and not think this is weird? Because this isn't what they do.

If you went to one of their church services, and I don't really recommend it, but if you even listen to their conference, conferences, their general conferences in April and October, what you're going to hear is instruction on how to live a more legal life.

How more legally pleasing life, you know, a more structured life, how just different aspects about living what they perceive as a godly life and nothing really, no expository preaching, no teaching like that, and nothing about the Bible per se, and nothing about the nature of God.

I mean, not by and large, you're not going to hear about his holiness or which would not just mean sinlessness, which they would affirm, but his otherliness, because they believe that they can be like him, that the whole purpose of coming here, A, was to be happy, and B, is to be like him to achieve godhood, which is just, again, strange to our ears and strange to scripture.

It's foreign. We just wouldn't think like that. But the God of the Bible always existed. And, you know, one of my favorite places to go to just talk about his power is the book of Isaiah and chapter 40, and in context, he's really talking, this is talking to Israel about a future time where they would be in captivity, and it's really meant to give them hope.

But when you get to the end of chapter 40, you really get a sense of the power of God when he says, the Lord is the everlasting God, which means there's no diminishing of his power. Listen, this is the end of verse 28.

He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. In fact, not only does he not grow faint, verse 29 tells us he gives power to the faint. And to him who has no might, he increases strength.

There is no way to exhaust the power of God. It is everlasting. It never changes. It's never diminished. But they would have you believe that he grew into this. And again, there's nothing in scripture.

Their best argument for this is really when Jesus said, have I not said that ye are gods, where he's quoting Psalm 82, but it's just a misunderstanding of what Jesus says. He never says that they're actually God's people or that they're gods in training, that they're going to be gods.

What he's really saying is he's hearkening back to that, where in Psalm 82, it says, nevertheless, ye will what? Or you will die like men. In other words, this was about judges who were unrighteously exercising power.

This has nothing to do with the idea of Jesus actually saying that these were like embryonic gods, that if they just did the right thing, that they would eventually turn into gods. So his power is inexhaustible.

He's always existed. And here's a crazy thing. Again, if you listen to Mormonism, they teach not that God for no reason set his affection upon you. It's not like he chose the base things or the lesser things like in 1 Corinthians, but that he chose the good things because we were actually good in the preexistence, which they teach and they believe in, where we were allegedly all spirit beings.

They teach that we came here and that we earned places here by virtue of our goodness, our performance in the previous life. That's insanity. And it really does turn the Bible upside down. And again, you have to wonder how much editing did those guys in the Council of Nicaea do to just leave out the whole preexistence, to leave out the fact that, well, wait a minute, actually, instead of God choosing the things that are not to debunk the things that are, again, the wording not exactly precise because I'm not reading it, but that he chose the good things, the best.

And then he brought them into the world hoping that they would make themselves even better. Well, we don't read anything like that. That's not Ephesians 1 talk. Paul doesn't burst out in praise because, you know, before the foundation of the world, God saw that we were good and brought us to this world so that we would be even better.

That's not Ephesians 1. Why would he praise God for recognizing what we already know, that we're all, that we were really good? That would not be praiseworthy for God to just give us justice. That would not be right.

And there's no reason, therefore, for Mormons to be amazed that God would set his affection. They might say they're amazed by Christ's death on their behalf, but they're not amazed that God would set his affections upon them.

I'm amazed at that. I know me and I wouldn't choose to love me. I wouldn't choose to save me. I wouldn't send my son to die for me. That's amazing. And that's why if you go to a Mormon church, you won't hear them singing Amazing Grace because they don't see anything amazing about it.

Grace is provided to those who are smart enough to take it. They take Arminianism a whole other leap. I mean, they really are, you know, beyond Arminianism. But I would also testify to this, that Jesus is only my older brother in the sense that he was the firstborn of many brethren, that he was raised from the dead, you know, as a firstfruits, as it were.

But I would not say, I would not say that he is my older brother in the way that Mormons do. My spirit brother who was born before me, you know, the one that we all kind of look up to because he's just more mature and he's smarter and he was the firstborn of Elohim.

That's just not right. I would testify that we did not exist prior to coming to the earth. There's nothing in the Bible that would say that, nothing. There's no idea of this. It's just a basic misunderstanding.

I would also testify that there's nothing sacred or special about today's temples. They've built these temples. They have more and more of them. I remember when I was growing up, you know, you could put a picture of all the temples.

I still have it at home, my book of remembrance. And you could put a picture of all the temples. There were little imprints of them on the cover of this book of remembrance, which is like a scrapbook.

And, you know, I think there were 11, 12, 13 temples, something like that at that time. Well, now they've just, they've shrunk the size of them. I mean, the first ones were really massive buildings and now they've shrunk the size of them so they could put them in more places.

But there's nothing sacred or special about them. And I mean, when you look at what was done in the temple in the Old Testament, era, you know, there was an outward court, there was an inward court, and then there was the Holy of Holies where only the priest could go.

And that was just to make an offering. And they would actually, the high priest, they would actually tie a rope around him, his foot in case he were struck dead because of his sin. You know, when he went in to make offerings on behalf of the people, they don't, you know, it's interesting because you go into the Mormon temple, they don't kill anything in those temples because they believe that Jesus died for their sins.

Well, that's fine, but where do they get all this other stuff? Where do they get all the baptism for the dead? Now, you can misconstrue 1 Corinthians 15, 29, you know, all you want, but where do you come about saying that there were baptisms in the temple?

There's no record of that. There's no record of baptisms for the dead, the way they do things. There's no, I was watching this little video clip the other day, the ceremony that they perform in there where a woman has to say certain things, this is when she's going to get married.

I'm not really a perfect expert on all the temple ceremonies. I've never really cared all that much since I left the Mormon church to learn all about it. But it is bizarre. You have to learn secret handshakes, passwords.

I saw this one woman say during her testimony, she was now an ex-Mormon, but saying that she was really concerned when her husband fell away from the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was really concerned because now there was gonna be nobody to call her name and to raise her up out of the grave.

It's craziness. That is just nowhere in the Bible. Where would you get that? Where would you learn that even in the Old Testament? Where did the Jews believe anything like that? Where did they have more than one temple?

None of these things are in the Bible. They have added and added and added. There were no ceilings in the temple. There were no weddings in the temple. None of these things were true. But you know what I would like to say, if I were giving my testimony on a Sunday morning at a fast and testimony meeting, I would wanna say all those things and then I would wanna say, listen, let me tell you what is better than having a subjective feeling that you believe is true.

Here's what's better, is knowing the truth, right? John wrote his gospel, why? That we could know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the chosen one. And that we can know that by believing in him, we'd have what?

Eternal life. And the whole book of 1 John, what is it? You know, people call it the book of assurance. Well, it is a book of assurance, but how do you get assurance? Well, you look through the, basically the tests of faith that are given there and you say, well, wait a minute, this is true of my life.

I must be a child of God. That's the whole point of 1 John is you can know that you are a child of God. For example, here's a test of 1 John 1. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

Well, think about Mormonism now for a moment. What do they teach? That you can get to a state of sinless perfection. That's the state that you need to achieve in this life in order to become God in the next life.

Well, the Bible says, if you say this, you deceive yourself and the truth is not in you. Listen to 1 John 1 .9. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Listen, these are actual tests that you can look at and go, this is my life. Now, maybe not perfectly, but the point is when I sin now, I look at him and I agree with God for what it is.

That's confession. I regret it, I repent of it, I turn away from it. And that's the point of 1 John, even as you go through. I mean, we could talk about love of the world, all these kinds of things. And it's, again, as my old pastor used to say, it's not the perfection of your life, it's the direction of your life.

But what you could have here is objective evidence based on the Bible. You don't have to guess, you don't have to go into a forest, you don't have to twist James 1 .5 and say, let any of it, or anyone who lacks, if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask him of God, who gives to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given to him.

You know, the King James version of James 1 .5, you don't have to do any of those things. There is objective truth that can be known. And to my Mormon friends, I would just say, and you are my friends.

I mean, I can't even tell you, when I think about the kids that I grew up with, you know, the people that I went to high school with, I mean, those were my friends. Those are the ones I wanted to spend my Friday and Saturday nights with.

Those are the people I would hang out when I was just bummed or whatever. I mean, some of the best times of my life, Colorado River trips, trips out to Death Valley, which it is more fun than it sounds like probably, but you just think about it.

All the experiences you had growing up, you just think, I love those people. I don't hate Mormons. I'm not a Mormon basher. All I'm saying is your whole faith, everything that you believe is based on a subjective experience, is based on belief in one man, and that man is Joseph Smith.

And I'll tell you what, if you look at what he did, if you look at the historical record, if you look at what a swindler he was, why he was actually quote unquote martyred, even though he shot back at the people who killed him, he was gonna be tried for treason.

Why? Because he had an army so big, it scared the local people, they thought, and probably with good reason that he was gonna try to set up some kind of independent kingdom. This was a man who wanted to be President of the United States.

He had a lust for power. And it's just shocking to me that when people learn, this was not, we're not talking about Moses or Jeremiah or Isaiah or any of the Old Testament prophets and what their lives were like.

Joseph Smith was a whole different creature. And if you just study his biography, you will not want to invest your eternal security on his life. My friends, I would urge you to turn from it, to study the Bible and to believe that the God who keeps everything, upholds everything by the word of his power.