Sacrament Meeting talk

 Sacrament Meeting talk, February 26, 2023
    I was raised in a tiny farming-logging community in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.  My family was split on the subject of religion.  My father had been born in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, and his parents had migrated to the Northwest when his was a tiny boy.  His father’s family, the Lewises, were not very religious.  His mother came from a Primative Baptist tradition, a religion common in the South, which had a strong Calvinist leaning.  My mother was from an Latter-day Saint family that had migrated from Utah some years before to satisfy her grandfather’s entrepreneurial ambitions to build a large logging, lumbering business.  My parents had married during the early days of the great depression and we lived on a small farm on which my father eeked out a living with odd jobs and a little dairy operation.
    The nearest branch of the LDS church was in Hood River, Oregon, at least an hour and half or so drive over bad mountain roads and we did not have the cars or money to make the trip.  Plus my mother didn’t drive.  We attended the only church nearby, a small non-denominational Sunday school, loosely connected to the Presbyterians, having a Bible emphasis.
    When I was about 7 years old, something happened that had very significant effect on my life.  My mother had a subscription to one of the Church magazines and saw a note that Deseret Book was republishing a little book for children about the Book of Mormon that William A. Morton had written many years before and that her mother had read to her when she was little.  It was called “Mother Stories From the Book of Mormon.”  She felt that she needed help in exposing my little sister and I to the beliefs of her family’s church.  She wrote to her father who had retired and relocated to Utah.  She asked if he would buy a copy and send it to her, which he did.  
    I remember a day when I was sitting beside my mother, leaning against her arm, as she read to my little sister and me these Book of Mormon stories.  At one point she paused and said the Lord has promised that He will testify through the Holy Ghost that the Book of Mormon and the gospel are true.  She asked if we had ever felt such promptings of the Holy Ghost.  I started to say, “No, I don’t think I have ever felt any of these things” when the most unusual feeling came over me.
    A warmness and excitement came into my heart and breast that I had never felt before and I felt a sort of thrill go up and down my spine.  I came to recognize there feelings as being like those described by the two disciples of the Lord in Luke 24:32, “did not our hearts within us burn?”  
    Seven years old.  I had a witness of the Spirit and my own conviction that the Book of Mormon was true.  
    I looked forward to when I would have my eighth birthday and could be baptized, but it didn’t happen.  My father maintained that my sister and I could join the Church when we were grown and could decide for ourselves.  My 9th birthday passed.  In my nightly prayers, I asked to be able to be baptized, but still nothing happened.  
    Years went by.  When I reached early high school age, a school teacher who I greatly admired and who was a committed churchman, asked me if I would like to be baptized in the Presbyterian Church.  I thanked him, but said “No.  I intend, when I can, to be baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
    The Church grew closer to us.  Hood River became a ward and they were blessed to be able to build a Utah-type ward house.  A Sunday school and then a branch was established in White Salmon, a hour drive away, which we attended once or twice a year.  The branch president assigned himself as our home teacher.  He started to make monthly visits.  At age 15 when I started to have summer jobs with local farmers, I paid him my tithing.
    The day after I graduated from high school, President Burles showed up at our house.  He had an invitation for us.  He said that the branch had reserved the Hood River baptismal font for a branch baptismal service next Saturday at 5 pm.  Would my sister and I like to come and be baptized?  My mother somehow got approval from my dad, and we made the drive and were baptized.  I was 17.  It was so wonderful.  I recall that for a week or so it seemed like I was walking in the air without my feet touching the ground.
    I was a pretty good student and had been looking at attending college.  I had a scholarship offer from Washington State.  As soon as I had been baptized, the Spirit began to whisper strongly that I needed to go to school where I could learn more about being a member of the Church.  So I dropped plans to attend Reed College, Lewis and Clark, or Washington State, and came to BYU.  There I learned much more about our religion and especially I increased my appreciation and understanding of the Book of Mormon.
    Next, I began to have a strong sense of gratitude and that I needed to return something back to my Heavenly Father.  I determined to serve a mission.  As a young, new, Naive and inexperienced missionary serving in Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada, I had a couple of experiences that suggested that among ordinary members of our Church at that time there were some problems in our usage of the Book of Mormon and other modern scripture.  I recall my experienced companion teaching a Plan of Salvation lesson, and he apologized to the investigator for using modern scripture to teach about our premortal existence, as if our modern scriptures were inferior to or inappropriate to teach our doctrines to non-members.  
    Shortly after that, a second new missionary experience occurred as we met a Protestant man who asked sort of loaded question about what our Church believed about salvation by grace.  My experienced companion responded that we believed that we will all be resurrected through the grace of Christ but we have to earn our salvation.  I quietly thought, “But what about forgiveness?”  Through this and other experiences I concluded that there was a time in the Church when ordinary members often had a shallow understanding of the work of Christ and of his atonement.  Sometimes this understanding seemed to based more on staking out a position different than beliefs of other churches as opposed to the real, true doctrines contained in our Latter-day scriptures.  For example, professor Robert Millet tells a story when as a teenager growing up in the Bible-belt South, he asked his father who was at the time a Latter-day Saint Branch President whether we believed in the grace of Christ.  His dad said “No.”  Brother Millet then ask asked “Why not?”  And the answer was “Because they do.”
    Just after that time, there was a wonderful prophetic correction that in my opinion has made a very significant correction in and through the use and study of the Book of Mormon in the Church.  In the 1986 General Conference, the then prophet of the Lord, Ezra Taft Benson, recalled verses from a 1832  revelation in section 84: “And your minds in times past have been darkened because of unbelief, and because you have treated lightly the things you have received—Which vanity and unbelief have brought the whole church under condemnation.  And this condemnation resteth upon the children of Zion, even all.  And they shall remain under this condemnation until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon...” (D&C 84: 54-57)
    President Benson stated his long standing belief that the Church was still under some condemnation for taking the Book of Mormon too lightly.  He announced that the Lord had revealed to him the need to reemphasize the Book of Mormon.  This was the time that the Church began to emphasize the four year cycle of the study of all the Latter-Day Saint scriptures in our Church meetings, seminary and institutes.  President Benson also gave the challenge, which our President Nelson has repeated, “Nothing opens the heavens quite like ... daily feasting on the words of Christ in the Book of Mormon...”

    I believe that especially since that 1986 challenge from our prophet, the church as a whole has made significant progress in its utilization and study of the Book of Mormon.  The Book of Mormon also has become much more central in our missionary teaching efforts.  Ordinary members also have gained a much greater appreciation for Christ and a fuller understanding of his atonement and how to access its blessings.
    I am grateful that, first, the Book of Mormon provide a strong spiritual witness to me, and to us all, that Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God and that our Church is the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and second, that the Book of Mormon is the greatest scriptural witness that Jesus Christ is our Savior.  It is extremely Christ-centered.  Or as a pair of Catholic scholars concluded after they studied the Book of Mormon, “It has a very high Christology.”  Our mission president in Raleigh North Carolina challenged his missionaries to read from a clean copy of the Book of Mormon and mark every reference to the Savior.  Our missionaries found that they needed to mark almost every page in the entire book.
    The Book of Mormon is the best of all sources in this world for learning the doctrines of Christ’s atonement.  We have been taught that the 1st principles of the gospel are faith and repentance.  Read Alma 32 to really know about faith and how to grow it. “But if ye will nourish the word, yea, nourish the tree as it beginneth to grow, by your faith with great diligence, and with patience, looking forward to the fruit thereof, it shall take root; and behold it shall be a tree springing up unto everlasting life.”
    What about repentance?  When I was called as bishop, one of the first things I noticed was that there was a cabinet in the Bishops office with several copies of a book by Pres Kimball, which prior Bishops had purchased to give to persons who had come to their office to confess serious sins and seek forgiveness.  I found a preference for using the Book of Mormon to teach this process.  The repentant Alma the younger in Alma 36, in the midst of his extreme feelings of guilt, recalled his father’s teachings about Christ’s atonement and prayed, “O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me...”  And at that very moment, he reported “when I thought this, I could remember my pains [of guilt] no more... And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain...”
    Lehi described the very purpose of our lives: “men are that they have joy”
    Even the sacred and exalting doctrines of the temple are found in the teachings of Jacob and King Benjamin and Christ himself when he taught them at the temple in Bountiful, recorded in 3rd Nephi.
    The several blessings for us of the atonement of Christ are described in great detail:
    The Resurrection in Alma 40: “The soul shall be restored to the body, and the body to the soul; yea, and every limb and joint shall be restored to its body; yea, even a hair of the head shall not be lost; but all things shall be restored to their proper and perfect frame.”
    Redemption from sin 3 Nephi 27: “[The Savior says] whoso repenteth and is baptized in my name shall be filled; and if he endureth to the end, behold, him will I hold guiltless before my Father at that day when I shall stand to judge the world.”
    Strengthening blessings, Alma 7: “[Christ] will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
    Perfecting blessings: “Come unto Christ, that ye may be perfected in him” “what manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am”...and  “that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we may be like him...”
    I testify that the Book of Mormon is the word of God and is truly foundational for our faith in Christ and his restored gospel.  In the name of Jesus Christ.  Amen