The Wisdom of the World, Then Two Important LDS Issues

Well, good morning. It is morning here in Phoenix, and it was in the 70s this morning. The kitties love it outside now. It's great. Some of you are going, wait a minute, you're low with like 78? Yes. But for us, that's like break out the coogies.

I mean, we're very happy when things like that happen. By the way, we have a fan over here, okay? I don't know how old it is. It's years old. It's been sitting over there for a long, long time. It's a Vornado, okay?

And I bought it because it specifically said it's very quiet, and it is. However, I can now hear it. And Rich knows why. You all know why. I mentioned on the program last week, on Thursday, that the old man is now taking advantage of technology, and I have my hearing aids in, and I'm not sure if you can really see them.

I can't tell there. They sit on top of my ears there. What, you think you can see them from that angle? Man, they really, I can sort of see the silver a little bit, and they're not going to be silver after next Tuesday.

It's just a matter of changing the shell color and stuff, and the wife wants it to be beige. So I'll go with what the wife wants now that I can hear her. Yes.

So I just want you to know that I hear just fine.

Oh, you think you do?

Yes. The ringing in my ears, I hear it really good.

Hey, look, the fact of the matter is, I didn't take it seriously until just recently. I really didn't. And when I got them, the first thing that amazed me is, did you know that on most keyboards, when you press a button, it goes clickety-click?

You all know that. I knew that once. I knew that when you press a button on a mouse, it clicks. But I couldn't hear that stuff anymore. And it happens so slowly that when you get it back, it's like...

So going to church on Sunday, especially at Apologia, where we have 47 million kids, was a little overwhelming at first. Sort of like, ah, turn that down. But no, I'm very, very, very thankful. Yeah, they were quite pricey.

But I'm very, very thankful for the technology. Now I can listen to the guy I'm debating and actually respond to what he's saying. I always have. Anyhow, lots to get to today. We're doing this early because we just picked up the RV from the dealership repair place that was working on...

We always have a little something. We may not have time after this next one. I've only got two weeks between the next two trips. I shouldn't be. Let's hope there isn't. But my family is actually going to move our Thanksgiving celebration.

Because I don't know if you've noticed, little warning, heads up here, Thanksgiving is as late this year as it can possibly be. It can't be any later. And still fit. And it's the 28th. And so I do the first weekend in December in St. Charles.

This will be the year 24. I figure we'll make 25. And then after that, we're probably done. I'm just like, guys, find someone interesting and exciting to speak for you. It's been 25 years. But we still enjoy doing that.

And by the time I get out there and then get back and stuff, it's almost Christmas. It's so late this year. So we decided, since I'm also stopping in Pryor, Oklahoma, at Derek Melton's church, where I was supposed to be preaching this last trip.

And then I ended up in the hospital in Mount Pleasant, Texas, where I was on my way to Pryor. And that's when I ended up in the hospital again for that series of three enjoyable operations. Anyway, you make a commitment to be someplace you want to fulfill it.

So I started thinking about it. I said, you know, if we moved Thanksgiving to the Saturday before with the family, do the whole fun thing. And giving thanks is wonderful. And then I could leave on Monday and I'll actually be spending official Thanksgiving day with Derek and his family.

I'll be the first time in 60 years that I haven't been with my family on Thanksgiving. But we're doing Thanksgiving early. So I just get two Thanksgivings. You know, Christians should be able to do many Thanksgivings.

That's one holiday we should not ever run out of any passion for. And so that means I'll be able to do Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday stuff at Derek's church and preach there in the whole nine yards.

I'm really looking forward to that. And then head off to St. Charles and Ken Gontars and Van Lee and all the guys there. And Brian, who beat Ken by, I think, three strokes in golf a couple of days ago.

And that's unusual. Ken is normally the victor, but Brian has been improving greatly. And so Ken got beat a couple of days ago. For years, he's been talking about teaching the young kids something. And evidently, young kids finally learned enough to start with.

Anyway, so we'll be in St. Charles our regular and we're doing a conference on the LGBTQIA plus or alphabet soup of silliness that's out there. And we'll see who shows up. It'll be intriguing. They've been fighting the good fight there in St. Charles, the suburb of St. Louis, which, as you know, is a rather troubled city as well.

So I have that coming up. But before then, we have the trip back to Mobile, Alabama, the debate on the mass, and then we'll be in Fort Worth for the Fight, Laugh, Feast stuff. I'm sure we're going to have some really interesting conversations there.

Speaking of which, let's go ahead and jump into this. I'm having to try to adjust how I speak because you can hear yourself and I can tell my phone I want less of myself and it'll do an update to the programming and the hearing aids and stuff like that.

But people were telling me at church that I was speaking very softly because I can only judge by what I'm able to hear. So it sounds to me like I'm speaking very loud right now. I don't know if I am or I'm not.

It's up to Rich to decide. And the microphone's right there, so I should be able to speak very quietly and still be able to be heard clearly. But that's not really for me. I'm trying to, you know, there's a period of breaking in.

There really, there really, really is. When I go and where? Yeah, I doubt that's, yeah. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, we need to do something in there. It's probably getting dusty. This sort of transitions well into what I had just mentioned in regards to speaking at the Repent America thing in Fort Worth.

And I'll also be preaching at two churches, CREC churches there in the area. I was looking back through the bookmarks, which I haven't gotten to bookmarked tweets and stuff like that, which I haven't actually gotten to.

And two months ago, tomorrow, Stephen Wolf posted a tweet where he quoted Phil Johnson. And this is what, this is what Phil had said now. And we need to be praying for Phil. He's really facing the tough stuff right now.

Cancer and things like that. And all sorts of other stuff going along with it, which is really hard. Phil said, I wrote this 15 years ago. And then he links to a blog article or part of a blog article on the team pyro blogspot .com, which was very, very popular back in the day when blogs were becoming the thing.

And the section that is quoted says this, as we have been saying for years, the gospel, not natural law, moralistic logic, philosophical reasoning, or political strategizing. And you got to put all those together to get his point.

But the gospel is the power of God and the salvation. God's word doesn't need an intellectuals and intellectuals rational arguments to prop it up. It may sound foolish to suggest that the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed clearly and supported only with thus sayeth the Lord carries more weight or is actually more efficacious than an elaborate philosophical argument.

But that is after all, what God himself said. And the foolishness of God is wiser than men. And the weakness of God is stronger than men. First Corinthians 1 .25. That verse comes in a context where Paul is explaining in detail why the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God and why the gospel is ultimately a more persuasive and more effective means of individual and cultural transformation than all the philosophical arguments, moralistic reason, and academic logic, the brightest minds and most eloquent orators this world have to offer.

If evangelicals really want to make an impact on our culture, we need to keep that in mind. We need to get to work proclaiming the gospel in our own communities. And frankly, we ought to leave the philosophical strategy and the culture war to people who have no sharper weapon.

Declarations of spiritual unity with moralists, academicians, and religious figures who reject the gospel are a sham and a lie. And such declarations do undermine the gospel and muddy our testimony regardless of anyone's original intent.

I agree wholeheartedly. Now, I don't take this as saying that Phil thinks that what Francis Schaeffer did or what Cornelius Van Til did or what Greg Bonson did is worthless. But the issue, as I understand it, is one of the things I love about Van Til is that everyone who knew him, and I know a lot of people who knew him.

I didn't know him. I never met him. I knew Greg Bonson, but I didn't know Van Til. And the people that I know who did know Van Til, and I remember the first time I read Van Til, we were living in this little apartment over off of Camelback Road and poor as church mice.

And I got the old Presbyterian Reformed printings of his books, which for some of them were literally courier, like a typewriter, font set was used for printing. Not a whole lot of fun. And Van Til was not a great writer because English wasn't his first language.

And you frequently have to reread a paragraph and struggle a little bit. Anyway, what everybody tells me who knew Van Til, he was known in every neighborhood he lived in as the friendly Christian man who was always talking about Jesus.

He'd go for walks with students and they would stop and they would talk to people. And he was an evangelist. He was talking about Jesus and he was talking to regular people about Jesus. And he didn't have to use, he could use all the philosophy and worldly reasoning that he dealt with all the time in his professional work, but he didn't.

He didn't have to. He was a gospel oriented person. And there was a vast difference between doing logic philosophy all the academic pursuits, doing that in a subsidiary way under the authority of the gospel.

There's all there's between that and doing those things and making the gospel an attachment to your academic work, your philosophical work. And so much of what is out there, the origin and source of what people are saying is their philosophical conclusions.

And when you try to attach the gospel to that, what you end up doing is you make the gospel just one more of many, many, many opinions that people can write papers about and well, maybe this, well, maybe that, but it's just one of an entire host of viewpoints.

And that's not what the gospel is actually all about. And so Phil was right. To say what he said, especially in regards to first Corinthians chapter one, I have said for many, many years that I think any seminary professor, I don't care what you teach.

I don't care if you're teaching history, apologetics, Greek, Hebrew, systematic theology, whatever. I think you should minimally once every three months read through and ponder and meditate upon and pray over what Paul wrote to the Corinthians, first Corinthians chapter one.

I've said that for years. And once again, the word, the message of the cross is indeed to those perishing Moria foolishness, foolishness, but to those who are being saved, us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

I'll, I do have actually have this up. So I guess since I'm looking at it, so that the contrast same message, the logos of this, of the cross is to one group, those who are perishing Maria foolishness, but to another group, those who are being saved, we who are being saved power of God, same message.

And since those who are perishing and those who are being saved are referring, they're not something that we're doing to ourselves. Then Paul is consistent because he's going to say, Hey, the reason you've accepted this message is because you've been chosen by God.

That's going to be part and parcel of what he's saying, but it's the same message. And it's the nature of the person that determines how they receive that message for it has been written, uh, chapter one, verse 19, first written.

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the understanding of the understanding ones. The, uh, LSB says clever. That's a good translation. Where is the sofas? You've heard of sophistry.

Where is the sofas? Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater, disputer of this age? That's I don't want to be a disputer of this age. I don't want to be a person who debates on the basis of the wisdom of this age.

Um, has not God there's God as not using a key made foolish more than us. Uh, more, I know to make something foolish as not God made foolish the wisdom of the world. The form of the Greek expects the positive answer.

The form of so many people in Christian academia assumes the negative answer, because if you're going to insist on bringing in the wisdom of the world at the foundational level of your theology, your evangelizing and everything else, then you are fundamentally denying what is said here in verse 20, because there isn't a question about what's being said.

There is no way to go. No, God hasn't made foolish. That's not what actually what he's saying. I mean, you'll probably find a commentary someplace, but by someone who doesn't understand the Greek language for a sense in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God.

It pleased God through the foolishness of two. The proclamation that which is proclaimed to save the understanding ones, the wise one, the well-born ones, none of those things, the ones believing, because see, you can be not well-born and believe you can be unwise, but believe.

You can be despised by the world, but believe. And so what gathers everybody together? What's the binding thing? Belief, the believing ones. So God was pleased. It pleased God. Eudaico, pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save the ones who believe.

Not through the sharpness of our philosophical argumentation. Now again, a person who wants to honor God by engaging the philosophers of the world, fine, but that's not what's saved. That's not the power of God in the salvation.

And you must understand that your finest philosophical statements of the gospel will still be foolishness to the world. If they are amongst the perishing, you can have the finest arguments in the world.

Gets you nowhere. Gets you nowhere. For we know in verse 22, for indeed the Jews are seeking after signs. What sign do you give, Jesus? And the Greeks, they're seeking after, and see, it's two different things.

The Aiteo is really to ask for. Seeking after by asking, demanding something. And then Zeteo is to seek after something like looking for something. The Greeks are seeking after Sophia, wisdom. But we, there's the contrast, we proclaim.

There's the Kerugma, that which is proclaimed. Okay, Russo, we proclaim Christ having been crucified. We proclaim a crucified Messiah, which again, we have so sanitized this stuff. We have so sanitized it that we still, it's very difficult to explain to people how utterly offensive, utterly offensive that terminology was in that day.

How it grated on the ear. From the Roman perspective, this is foolishness. A crucified Jewish Messiah? Really? That's the substance of your preaching? Yep. Yep. And that's why he says to the Jews, scandal on.

Scandal on. Scandal. Stumbling block. We didn't, we never would have crucified our own Messiah, but you did. And it was prophesied. And to the Gentiles, he doesn't say Greeks here. There are, as you can see, well, you probably can't see it right now.

But even so, up there in the little corner, the right-hand corner, you've got the textual variant there. You'd expect, especially because what's coming afterwards, Jews and Greeks right here. So Gentile, you know, was Paul just using a different term, but you'll see there's the variant there, and you'll see even the majority text is Greeks.

But the earlier text is Gentiles. So to the Jews, scandal. To the Gentiles, money on. Foolishness. But to who? We who are called. Not who called ourselves, but to those who are called. And this is where, you know, I stopped responding to Jason Breda's two Romans thing.

You know, once you utterly destroyed the foundation, all he's doing after that is just building error upon error upon error upon error. And I've seen, I saw like in the third and fourth ones, you know, I'm in the video and my face is there as well.

I just don't care. Have we had anybody asking us? No, I don't. Nobody cares. But this is a text I did cite in regards to those people who are trying to say, election is always a... But to we, to they who are called, to the called ones, whether Jews or Greeks, it's right there.

It's just so obvious. To those who are called, whether Jews or Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. So the Dunamis and the Sophia. You want to find it? It's all in Christ. It's all in Christ.

But only to those who are called. If the spirit of God is not changing someone's heart, they're going to look at you like you landed from another planet. It doesn't matter how long you try. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men.

And the weakness of God is stronger than men. And he says, look, look for, look to your own calling, brother, calling. There weren't many of you wise according to the flesh. Not many of you had your, your graduate degrees.

Not many strong, not many well-born. In fact, that's the very same. That's the Greek term for which we get eugenics. Eugenics, well-born, but the foolishness, God has chosen the foolishness of the world, that which the world considers to be foolish.

And or that he might shame the wise and, and the weak things God has chosen. That he might shame, put to, put the foolishness to strong and, and the agene of the world, the non-well-born, not the pretty, pretty people, but the not well-born, the low, the insignificant of the world.

And the things are despised by the world. God's chosen the things that are not in order that he might make nothing the things that are. He's turning everything on its head. Everything that the world would expect in God's wisdom goes, yeah, you're not going to, it's not climbing up that mountain and getting to the top and finding the guru at the top to get all your answers.

Doesn't work that way. Doesn't work that. And so that's why, since he's done this so that no flesh, literally so that not boasting all flesh before God. So put that into English in some way. So that no flesh, has the ability to boast before God.

No one can say, I figured it out. Other people didn't. No, you're totally dependent upon God. And so finally verse 30, but by his doing, X out to by his doing, you're in crisis by his doing, not by his making it possible for you to put yourself there by his doing, you are in Christ Jesus who has become to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption in order that justice has been written.

Let he who boasts, boast in the Lord. I mean, I don't know how it could get any clearer. And that's why I say everyone should read it over and over and over again. That's involved in teaching to be reminded to be a good scholar.

You need to be viewed as foolish by the world. If you're a Christian scholar and the world pats you on the back and congratulates you, you missed something. You missed something. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do really good work, but if we're talking about doing so under the Lordship of Christ, that's going to be rejected by the world.

That's going to be rejected by the world. So all of that, I love going through that text. We've gone, I don't know how many times we've gone through that over the years. Many, many, many times. All of that.

So remember what Phil wrote 15 years ago? That's what was posted. And so Stephen Wolfe, two months ago, tomorrow, quoted Phil Johnson and said, this pretty much summarizes evangelical anti-intellectualism.

And I'm just reading what Stephen Wolfe wrote. Completely moronic. Now, isn't it ironic that he used the term moronic? Because that's the term from 1 Corinthians 1. Moronos. It's used all the time. And so Phil is quoting Paul saying that the wisdom of God is moronic to the world.

And Stephen Wolfe, who is much more of a theologian or an exegete, identifies that, what I read to you, as completely moronic. It's why evangelicals remain outsiders in most institutions, even institutions filled with conservatives.

We're outsiders because we bow to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and these institutions don't. And that's where we need to stay. If those institutions make it as a part of their foundational perspective, that you do what you do outside of the claims of Jesus Christ, then we need to be outsiders.

We need to be. Until God changes those institutions, and He's not going to do that by your brilliant wisdom. He's going to do it by the preaching of what is considered by the world foolishness. Prove me wrong.

Prove me wrong. I've never, I have never had anyone come up to me. And you all know this is my Jeffrey Rice, Tyndale House, Greek New Testament. I have never had anyone come up to me. And so here's, here's First Corinthians.

All right. And so yeah, so it's right there. Can't read it worth a darn without my glasses on, but I've never had anyone walk up and say, okay, you're wrong about this and I'll show you why. But if you think I am, the only approach to me, right there, open your Greek New Testament and show me where I'm wrong.

Never had anybody even try, and I don't think it will. So yeah, I had put that in my bookmarks, as I said, two months ago. Now, then a little bit after that, in fact, one of these was same day, and that's something I'm going to play for you.

And then the other one was actually back in November, but I guess had been reposted. The Mormons are very active online. Okay. And that's, that's fine. There's no, something tells me that our initial interactions with the Mormons would have been different in an internet age.

Because for example, when I first, when I first met Alma Allred, who I've had a number of encounters with and disagreements with even recently, we ended up exchanging, I've still got them in a file in the other room, long letters.

Now I did write them on our old compact portable PC using WordStar, or maybe, maybe even Ventura Publisher eventually, and print them out on a dot matrix printer, and stuff like that. But I think things would have been different.

And Mormonism is changing. It is changing rapidly, fundamentally. It truly is. It's not that the church has come out and said, you know what, we used to believe this. We don't believe that anymore. What they're doing, and I mean, maybe they took their cues from the Jehovah's Witnesses.

The Witnesses are changing their theology too, but they're doing it very slowly and very quietly. Because, well, think about, you know, by the way, I am going to be listening to the debate tonight. I'm sure I'll be throwing things around the room in so doing, and it won't be a debate.

Yeah, I won't throw it on the TV. I'll throw stuff around for the kiddies to chase. That'll be fun. But I'm not even sure why I brought that up. I just, oh, just to say, there won't be a debate. The moderators, they have, I saw a study, especially one moderator, his coverage of Kamala since she became a candidate is 100 positive, and his coverage of Trump, 93 negative during the same time period.

So, and those are the only people that she will even deign to appear before. So, yeah, it's his uneven position, but he'll do it. She would never put herself in a position that he's putting himself in.

She's a coward. All the leftists are. But anyway, the Mormons, what they're doing is they, you know, I think the illustration I was going to use was have you noticed how little COVID is a part of this election cycle?

We're still talking about the people that locked us down. We're still talking about the people who killed people right, left, and center by forcing certain kinds of treatments and the massive amount of injury that's been done due to Joe's forced cookies.

And the fact we still have a strike on our account on YouTube for repeating what someone said that has been verified 10 ,000 times since then. Nobody says a word about it. Why? Because that was four years ago.

And nobody remembers anything from four years ago. So what you do if you're a religion and you are embarrassed by what your previous leaders taught, you slow walk it. You do it slowly and you just let people forget.

You just, you just, you know that their attention span is real small. And so, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses, they're getting rid of the 1914 stuff. Are there older Jehovah's Witnesses sitting around going, we used to talk about this all the time?

Yes. But you discourage any discussion of those things. You try to bring in the new people and they don't know that. And you hope that the old people will forget it or just not be a stick in the mud about it.

And so that's what the Mormons are doing. They're doing it by de-emphasizing the things that, when we used to go to Salt Lake City in the 80s and 90s, every conversation was on who God is, exaltation, first vision, the validity of LDS revelations, all this stuff.

And now you almost have to trip the Mormons to get them to stop long enough to even talk to you. They have become so, I mean, that's why you have LGBTQIA groups on campus at BYU. The, there was, there was no fundamentally consistent or even thought out worldview at the heart of Mormonism.

Joseph Smith certainly couldn't think of anything like that. It's, and since it's not divine revelation, the result is, well, exactly what we're seeing right now. So there is a account on Twitter called Divine Code at SLC underscore Saint.

And they, this is what they wrote. I'm not going to, I can't spend too much time, time's going by real fast here, unfortunately. And for, if anybody's wondering, well, why are you dealing with Mormonism?

Because that's how this ministry started 41 years ago. We thought when we started, that's all we were ever going to do. And the Lord had other things in mind, but man alive, I'm going to tell you that first trip to Salt Lake City.

In fact, I thought of this this morning when I was thinking about the program, the name of this webcast is called The Dividing Line. And I had come up with that as the name of our publication. And then we did the radio program and hence the webcast before Rich Pierce ever heard of us, before ever heard of us.

So we're talking within literally a few weeks of the initial founding in 83. And the dividing line was, what is the dividing line? Sufficiency of scripture. Those who believe God has spoken in scripture is the dividing line between those who believe that and those who believe he hasn't.

And everything else follows that. And so we've, yeah, this has been the issue for a long, long time. So here's what this Mormon person wrote. Dear Christians who say Latter-day Saints are not Christians.

Immediately stop. When I first started dealing with Mormons, the vast majority of them didn't want to be called Christians. They distinguished themselves from Christians. This was back when the missionary lessons would start with what?

The first vision story. Where in the first vision story, which is now becoming less and less emphasized and which historically did not take place. In the first vision story, Joseph Smith is told that Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, abomination, creeds are corrupt.

So what's the one true church? What church has the only priesthood, the only valid priesthood? LDS Church. This was what we were told over and over again. Okay, so things have changed. This is sincere.

We have no envy or desire to be counted as acceptable to your mainstream Christianity any more than Christ wanted to be mainstream. What's mainstream? Of course, the issue. The Pharisees and Sadducees were the prominent theologians of their day and slandered Christ with all manner of accusations.

They made up false charges and rallied sentiment against him. I just realized that's a type and shadow of our day, the same repeating pattern. Of course, they're making themselves the Christ figure here, the victims.

Then he quotes from John 15, 18 to 19, the world hates you, so on and so forth. We treasure our God-authored theology. Really? Sure has changed a lot over the years. It sure is self-contradictory. If it's God-authored, why are you all de-emphasizing some of the key elements of it that were central to things like that?

I am seeing a special message coming from the young man that heads up our outreach to Mormons at Apology of Church. Also happens to be my son-in-law. On the top of your program, even Hinckley knew this.

Well, Hinckley, there's a name. I'll be honest with you. I think Gordon Hinckley was the key person that has led to the changes in Mormonism we see today. You had Bruce R. McConkie Mormonism until Gordon Hinckley, and then you had the departure.

This is what Eric sent me. No, I don't believe in the traditional Christ. The traditional Christ of whom they speak is not the Christ of whom I speak. The Christ of whom I speak has been revealed in this, the dispensation of the fullness of time.

There's nothing about that that would have surprised us when we first started speaking to Mormons, and for many years thereafter. But now, the emphasis is upon sameness, similarity, can't we all get along type stuff.

What's the result of that? The majority of the Salt Lake City Council is now LGBTQIA. It is, by the way. That's just the way it is. So yes, we treasure our God-authored theology with all its heavenly power.

We are valiant in our testimony of the Savior, Jesus Christ. He is the only name under heaven by which anyone is saved. He was raised on the cross to draw all men unto him. What about the garden? What about what Brigham Young taught about blood atonement?

What about the fact that, you know, I don't know if they've changed this, but if they have, they're the last state in the union to ever change how they do capital punishment, and that they kept the firing squad as a means of shedding innocent blood.

That was a whole discussion during the Mark Hoffman stuff, and that was late 90s? What, late 80s, early 90s? Okay, yeah, I'm trying to remember what that was. Yeah. So see how this sounds evangelical if you don't know what men who claim to be prophets of God actually taught in the past, which they, you know, are running away from.

I wonder, it would be fast, there's no way of finding out, but I wonder what percentage of Mormons in 19, I first witnessed my first Mormons in, well, knowingly witnessed my first Mormons. I actually ran into a Mormon on outreach in high school when I was like a junior.

I don't count that one. But when I first started dealing with elders Reed and Reese, and then we started talking to many other missionaries after that, that was the middle of 1982. So I wonder what percentage of Mormons in 1982, very much smaller number of Mormons in 82 than there are today.

I wonder what percentage of them knew what the Journal of Discourses was then in comparison to today. Let's say 84 to 2024, make it a nice 40 year even thing. Yeah, yeah. I cannot imagine that almost any meaningful percentile of modern day Mormons have ever even read a sermon out of the Journal of Discourse and never even heard of it.

They may see it referenced in a church magazine or something, but taking it seriously as a source of divine revelation in the sense of, here were the first generation of people that they lived with Joseph Smith and power of the priesthood and founded, you know, built the temple in Salt Lake City and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, not so much about that anymore. He atoned for our sins, even though we have to atone for serious sins that his blood will atone for, and for that we cannot give enough thanks or gratitude. I don't know about the rest of you, but I can still see this kid.

I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember an LDS missionary standing in front of me, and I don't know why that night I had a tie on, or was it a jacket? Anyways, I was wearing a cross. So it was either on my tie clip.

That's how long ago it was. We had tie clips. Wow. I remember my dad, my dad's ties would have all these holes. They'd start falling apart in the middle from all the tie pins that they would use back then, and they'd tear the tie up eventually.

And nobody does that anymore. You're a complete loon if you do that. Yeah. Anyway, I had a cross, okay? And not only did he mock the cross, but then he specifically said something along the lines of, what do you think we're going to be doing in heaven?

Sitting on a cloud, playing a harp? How boring is that? We're going to be gods ruling and reigning over planets. That's not exactly what you're getting out of this. Anyways, he deeply loves you, and he deeply loves me.

And if you're talking about Jesus, that would make him your spirit brother, which is a whole nother issue. We worship and revere God the Father as well. We are deeply thankful for the ministrations of the Holy Ghost.

And why don't we just keep going and say, and we think they're separate and distinct gods. Okay, let's get it out there. Uh, we are polytheists. Okay. Um, we are not walking in your shadow. We are not chasing you to be counted in your club.

Okay. You sure are trying to sound like us though, by deemphasizing key elements of your teaching. We have our own path lit by the fire of the spirit and the glow of heaven's errands to guide our way.

Heaven's errands, that would be like the temple works that you're doing for people to try to get them out of, you know, um, so they can continue on their exaltation and all that kind of stuff. We accomplish great things in our Lord Jesus Christ who strengthens us.

And again, the great things would be temple works and stuff like that. For the year 2022, our tithes and offerings covered many, many lovely works, but they also went into big funds of billions of billions of dollars that the church controls.

And you don't even know what they're doing with it, but they're now using it to basically completely rebuild the Salt Lake temple, uh, which almost fell over. Um, here is a partial list is reported by elder Anderson and apostle October.

And it talks about, you know, 71 ,000 missionaries, 414 missions. Um, uh, currently 177 temples are in operation. I wonder how many were in operation. We started a couple dozen at most, I would say. And then it was Hinkley that was very much involved in the massive expansion, uh, of, uh, the, the temple building.