Revelation Lds Quotes

But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.

Modern scientific findings harmonize with revelation through the ages. No conflict exists between the gospel and any truth .... All true principles are a part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no principle that we need to fear.

If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea; If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee from the bosom of thy wife, and of thine offspring, and thine elder son, although but six years of age, shall cling to thy garments, and shall say, My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us? O, my father, what are the men going to do with you? and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword, and thou be dragged to prison, and thine enemies prowl around thee like wolves for the blood of the lamb; And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?

No matter how righteous you are, no matter how carefully you cultivate the companionship of the Holy Ghost, there are vast amounts of knowledge which you need to acquire and which you are not going to receive through revelation.

There were men in those dark ages who could commune with God, and who, by the power of faith, could draw aside the curtain of eternity and gaze upon the face of God, have the ministering of angels, and unfold the future destinies of the world. If those were dark ages, I pray God to give me a little darkness.

To nineteenth-century leaders the principle was not just an optional revelation - they viewed it as the most important revelation in Joseph Smith's life, which is what he undoubtedly taught them. If they accepted him as an infallible prophet, and if they wanted full exaltation, they had no recourse but to marry many plural wives. Their devotion to Joseph the seer outweighed their experience of polygamy's impracticality and tragic consequences for women, which many men probably did not even recognize. But it is worth noting that the women who suffered so much under polygamy gave it their unqualified support in public rallies and wrote impassioned defenses of it. They too were devoted to the idea that their church was led by practically infallible, authoritative prophets, especially Joseph Smith.

There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord’s word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly “king’s portion” of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God’s great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body. If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with “king’s meat and wine,” even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can “run and not be weary and walk and not faint.” If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God.

Changing what we think is always a sticky process, especially when it comes to religion. When new information becomes available, we cringe under an orthodox mindset, particularly when we challenge ideas and beliefs that have been “set in stone” for decades. Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift to represent this often-painful transition to a new way of thinking in science. He argued that “normal science” represented a consensus of thought among scientists when certain precepts were taken as truths during a given period. He believed that when new information emerges, old ideas clash with new ones, causing a crisis. Once the basic truths are challenged, the crisis ends in either revolution (where the information provides new understanding) or dismissal (where the information is rejected as unsound). The information age that we live in today has likely surprised all of us as members of the LDS Church at one time or another as we encounter new ideas that revise or even contradict our previous understanding of various aspects of Church history and teachings. This experience is similar to that of the Copernican Revolution, which Kuhn uses as one of his primary examples to illustrate how a paradigm shift works. Using similar instruments and comparable celestial data as those before them, Copernicus and others revolutionized the heavens by describing the earth as orbiting the sun (heliocentric) rather than the sun as orbiting the earth (geocentric). Because the geocentric model was so ingrained in the popular (and scientific!) understanding, the new, heliocentric idea was almost impossible to grasp. Paradigm shifts also occur in religion and particularly within Mormonism. One major difference between Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift and the changes that occur within Mormonism lies in the fact that Mormonism privileges personal revelation, which is something that cannot be institutionally implemented or decreed (unlike a scientific law). Regular members have varying degrees of religious experience, knowledge, and understanding dependent upon many factors (but, importantly, not “faithfulness” or “worthiness,” or so forth). When members are faced with new information, the experience of processing that information may occur only privately. As such, different members can have distinct experiences with and reactions to the new information they receive. This short preface uses the example of seer stones to examine the idea of how new information enters into the lives of average Mormons. We have all seen or know of friends or family who experience a crisis of faith upon learning new information about the Church, its members, and our history. Perhaps there are those reading who have undergone this difficult and unsettling experience. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed at the continual emergence of new information understands the gravity of these massive paradigm shifts and the potentially significant impact they can have on our lives. By looking at just one example, this preface will provide a helpful way to think about new information and how to deal with it when it arrives.

The many references to "light" in the stories about these apparitions that circulate among Mormons seem especially significant in view of what the Bible says about Satan transforming himself into an "angel of light."" Moroni, the key messenger who "restored" truth for Joseph Smith, is usually described as an "Angel of Light."26 Interestingly enough, the reference for "Angel of Light" in the late LDS Apostle/scholar Bruce McConkie's encyclopedic work on Mormon doctrine reads "See Devil." Moreover, the "Personages of light" that brought revelations to Joseph Smith (later identified as the heavenly Father and His Son) are reminiscent of the "being of light" that convinces the "clinically dead" that they aren't really dead and that there is no judgment but only acceptance and love. The similarity between this idea and Satan's lie to Eve that she wouldn't really die is clear.

My knowledge is, if you will follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, every man and woman will be put in possession of the Holy Ghost; every person will become a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and an expounder of truth. They will know things that are, that will be, and that have been. They will understand things in heaven, things on the earth, and things under the earth, things of time, and things of eternity, according to their several callings and capacities.

3  But this is not all; they had given themselves to much prayer, and fasting; therefore they had the spirit of prophecy, and the spirit of revelation, and when they taught, they taught with power and authority of God.

Latter-day Saints must find a way not simply to coexist with but to truly embrace the diversity that already exists within the family of God. To that end, believing Mormons must come to understand that disbelief is possible. People can have genuine reasons for opting out of the church without being dissolute sinners (at least, not any worse than the rest of us). Disbelievers can be good, solid people who love their spouse and children and live ethical, productive, meaningful lives. At the same time, disbelievers must understand that educated, informed, and sincere people can believe in the reality of Joseph Smith's revelations, the truth of the Book of Mormon, and the divine inspiration behind the church. They are not covering up secret doubts nor are they victims of false consciousness when they bear testimony. There are informed people who genuinely believe in and belong to the church. I am one of them.

Saints, Slaves, and Blacks found itself the victim of bad timing, appearing just three years following the LDS Church’s 1978 Black Revelation. Mormons of all stripes anxious to move on focused on embracing their black brethren and sisters as ecclesiastical equals while ignoring the Church’s recently abandoned practice of black priesthood denial and prohibition on African-American entry into the temple. A climate of institutional amnesia prevailed, wherein Latter-day Saints chose to forget this now embarrassing practice, previously promoted as essential doctrine.

Mormon Thought, the first appearing in 1969 and the second in 1973. In his 1969 essay “A Commentary on Steven G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins,” Bush excoriated Taggart for his limited, incomplete research.7 Bush systematically dismantled Taggart’s central thesis that Joseph Smith initiated black priesthood denial in response to Latter-day Saint difficulties in Missouri. Bush supported his refutation with extensive documentation.8 Bush further developed his arguments in a second in-depth Dialogue article entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview” published in 1973. His fifty-seven page essay containing some 219 footnotes constituted by far the most comprehensive examination of Mormon racial policy up to that time.9 Bush’s essay drew heavily from a four-hundred-page compendium of primary and secondary documents compiled over some ten years. Covering the period from the 1830s to the 1970s, Bush’s “Compilation on the Negro in Mormonism” contains First Presidency minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, and other General Authority interviews and writings.10 Bush’s carefully written text found minimal evidence to support the LDS Church’s official position that the priesthood ban resulted from divine revelation—thus contradicting a major justification for its existence. Seeking to undermine its legitimacy and thus prod the Church toward change, Bush summarily dismissed the ban as the unfortunate product of socio-historical forces present in the larger nineteenth century American society. The scholarly studies of Stephen Taggart and especially Lester E. Bush Jr. greatly influenced my own work, which commenced as

the extent to which Mormons wish to continue to dissociate themselves from any of the three major branches of Christianity makes it harder for them to credibly claim to be Christian at the same time. Imagine a young man raised in a not overly devout LDS home today who begins to go around describing a vision he had received in which he saw three identical looking men who identified themselves as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They instructed him to associate with no existing church but to await further revelation. Eventually an angel guides him to dig up silver tiles that are covered with writing he cannot read but looks a little like pictographs on totem poles. Later he announces he has been enabled by God’s Spirit to translate them. They tell the story of a group of Mormons who migrated to the Yukon in the late nineteenth century and who mingled with the Inuit there until they were all killed off except for one who had buried these tiles with their story engraved on them. Later God reveals to this young man extensive instructions for the founding of a new group restoring the original Mormonism of Joseph Smith, which had begun to be corrupted by Brigham Young, lost its moorings considerably in the mid-twentieth century, was reformed and improved by LDS church president Ezra Taft Benson but still needs a full restoration. After all, Joseph Smith died before he could pass on his authority to his divinely ordained successor, so no existing Mormons have true priesthood authority. The Salt Lake City-based Mormons, the rural Utah fundamentalist Mormons, and the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) are all illegitimate, and it is time to restore original Mormonism under the leadership of this upstart young man. Anyone who wants to be in God’s best graces has to be baptized into the new church this man is organizing, which is to be called the Restored Church of our Holy Lord Jesus Christ of Last-day Disciples. Existing Mormon baptisms are not good enough for membership in his church. Indeed, this new Restored Church is the one true church on the entire planet. At the same time, it wants to call itself Mormon and be treated as fully Mormon by the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency in Salt Lake City, by all the renegade fundamentalist Mormons, and by the Community of Christ. What is the likelihood that anyone in these three groups would agree? Yet that is very close to how the rest of Christendom perceives, rightly or wrongly, the desires of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.