Podcasts about parley p

Revelation Dates: May 1831 Revelation Places: Kirtland, Ohio Section 49 - Historical Background: A man named Leman Copley was a recent convert from a religious group called the Shakers, or the Shaking Quakers. He was so excited about the gospel that he wanted to present it to his former church members located near Cleveland, Ohio. The founder of the Shakers was a woman named Ann Lee, who had once been involved in a miserable marriage. Much of her religion was built around her opposition to marriage and the relations that went with it. “Mother Lee” was regarded as the returned Christ, meat was forbidden to eat, baptism was unnecessary and a celibate life was required. Before sending missionaries to this group, Joseph asked the Lord how to approach the concepts of these people.    Recap: The Lord calls Sidney Rigdon and Parley P. Pratt to teach the Shakers, including Leman Copley, so Leman can convince his former congregation the truths of the Gospel. If they accept it, they shall be saved. Otherwise they shall be damned. The Lord specifies true gospel concepts to be taught: The Lord has not yet come the second time; Believe on Jesus Christ; Repent; Be Baptized and receive the Holy Ghost; Marriage is ordained of God; Meat is ordained for the use of man if not wasted; and Christ will return in the heavens – not as a woman or a man walking the earth. [Note: This missionary effort was completely rejected by the Shakers, and even Leman Copley abandoned the church, breaking promises and covenants he made previously.]  Section 50 - Historical Background: Numerous converts were flooding into the church, making it difficult to manage the many new branches spreading abroad. Especially troublesome were the perverted beliefs many converts brought into the church from their former religion. A false and lying spirit was beginning to infiltrate the church, including false visions, prophesies and manifestations of spiritual possession. Some church leaders became concerned and approached Joseph to inquire of the Lord. Together, they all knelt in prayer and Joseph received this revelation.  Recap: There are many false spirits in the world, intending to deceive the world and especially the saints. Within the church there are some hypocrites (pretenders) who have deceived some, but they will be detected and cut off. The Elders are to preach according to the Spirit of God – if by any other means it is not of God. If the Spirit they receive does not edify, it is a false spirit. That which is of God is light, to chase away the darkness. If one cannot discern whether the spirit be good or evil, ask God. If it is evil, humbly but firmly denounce that spirit.

April 28-May 4We live in a time when the Church of Jesus Christ has been well established and we are used to talking in terms of large numbers, general conferences translated into scores of languages simultaneously, missionaries serving in diverse countries all over the world and the Kingdom of God on the earth organized unlike any worldly entity. We are used to thinking in terms of the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Church Headquarters, the Conference Center, Temple Square—but in the era we are talking about today, the early part of 1831, none of these things were yet a reality. When Joseph and Emma arrived in Kirtland, Ohio in February, 1831, the successful missionary efforts of Parley P. Pratt and his companions had just doubled the entire membership of the Church to about 250 people!

Lift Up Your Voices … to Declare My Gospel”Doctrine and Covenants 30–36You're listening to Come Follow Me Kids! A Come Follow Me Podcast. We are an interactive game play podcast for kids. This is a Doctrine and Covenants Podcast for Kids! Our podcast is called Come Follow Me Kids. Come Follow Me for kids that are primary aged 2-12 in the Church or Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We follow the come follow me manual from the church but are not officially affiliated in any way. Some audio segments come from the friend magazine and other church sources. On this podcast we play interactive games while learning about the gospel and atonement of Jesus Christ. If your children would like to be guests on this podcast, please email us at comefollowmekidspodcast@gmail.com They can share their testimony about the restoration of the gospel, or share an experience they had with prayer, the Holy Ghost, or Missionary Work. Make sure they include their name and where they are from in the audio recording. And don't worry about your recording being perfect, we can edit out mistakes. Any sound file should work. If your children would like a baptism shout out, email us their name, and where they are from and we will add them to an upcoming episode. Use the same email listed above. Welcome to the Come Follow Me Kids Podcast! This is a scripture study podcast for children. Specifically; this is a Come Follow Me for Kids - focused on helping your kids learn the gospel! We are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and we create this podcast for primary aged children (ages 2-12) following along with the church's Come Follow Me Manual. We are a game play podcast and engage and entertain children through fun interactive games and stories. This year we are a Book of Mormon Come Follow Me Study podcast for children. We hope you enjoy listening! If your children would like to be guests on our podcast email us at comefollowmekidspodcast@gmail.com and we will send you an assignment for a future week. We are also happy to give your child a baptism shout out as well! Just email us their name, city, and ward and we will give them a baptism way to go! We are not officially affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and refer you to their website for any questions regarding doctrine or gospel information. This week we learn: These sections are full of mission calls and instructions from the Lord! Sections 30–36 focus on urging individuals to step up and share the gospel with enthusiasm and faith. This week we learn about preparing for the spiritual harvest and working together to bring others to Christ. It's a reminder that sharing the gospel brings joy, blessings, and the opportunity to make a real difference.I am called to be a witness of Jesus Christ.Whether or not you have a formal calling as a missionary, you can be a witness of Jesus Christ “at all times, and in all things, and in all places”If I build my life on the Savior's gospel, I will not fall.I should focus more on the things of God than the things of the earth.Parley P. Pratt had been a member of the Church for about a month when he was called “into the wilderness” to preach the gospel (⁠Doctrine and Covenants 32:2⁠). Thomas B. Marsh had been a member for even less time than that when he was told, “The hour of your mission is come” Orson Pratt, Edward Partridge, and many others had likewise barely been baptized when their mission calls came. Perhaps there's a lesson in this pattern for us today: if you know enough to accept the restored gospel by baptism, you know enough to share it with others.Fun podcast for kidsFun Book of Mormon podcast for kids Game podcast

Aproximadamente un mes después de haberse unido a la Iglesia, Parley P. Pratt fue llamado “al desierto” a predicar el Evangelio (Doctrina y Convenios 32:2). Thomas B. Marsh llevaba de miembro incluso menos tiempo cuando se le dijo: “La hora de tu misión ha llegado” (Doctrina y Convenios 31:3). Igualmente, Orson Pratt, Edward Partridge y muchos otros habían sido bautizados recientemente cuando recibieron su llamamiento misional. Quizás haya una lección en ese modelo para nosotros en la actualidad: si sabes lo suficiente como para aceptar el Evangelio restaurado por medio del bautismo, sabes lo suficiente como para compartirlo con los demás. Por supuesto, siempre queremos aumentar el conocimiento que tenemos del Evangelio, pero Dios nunca ha dudado en llamar a los “indoctos” a predicar Su Evangelio (Doctrina y Convenios 35:13). De hecho, nos invita a todos a que “abras tu boca para declarar mi evangelio” (Doctrina y Convenios 30:5). La mejor manera de lograrlo no es por medio de nuestra propia sabiduría y experiencia, sino “por el poder [del] Espíritu” (Doctrina y Convenios 35:13).Véanse también “La fe y la caída de Thomas Marsh”, “Ezra Thayer: de escéptico a creyente”, “Llamamiento de Orson Pratt a servir”, Revelaciones en contexto, págs. 58–74.Título: “Alza[d] vuestras voces […] para declarar mi evangelio”Categoría: Doctrina y ConveniosPrograma: Estudio de las Escrituras con Pepe y ArielReferencias: Doctrina y Convenios 30–36Autor: Pepe Valle y Ariel Cuadra_____________________Únete al Grupo de Whatsapp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JfCIDbnOXfnJzOlMChyShEGracias por acompañarnos, te invitamos a conocer todo nuestro contenido:Descarga ScripturePlus: https://scriptureplus.org/FanPage: https://www.facebook.com/BookofMormonCentralenEspanolGrupo de Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/456254818520188Central del Libro de Mormón: https://centralldm.esCentral de Doctrina y Convenios: https://centraldyc.esCentral de Perla de Gran Precio: https://centralpgp.esGeografía del Libro de Mormón: https://geografia.centralldm.esÍndice del Libro de Mormón: https://indice.centralldm.es

Celebrate Easter, and get something more out of it this year by getting the newly released audiobook version of my book the Easter Connection, available at DeseretBook.com. This book will help you think through Christ's suffering in a different way and see how He helps you in a different way. It doesn't cost much and will bless your life and enhance your Easter celebration. Consider staring to listen to it on Holy Thursday.Next week we will have a video every day that helps us celebrate Christ during Holy Week.Consider joining us on our Palm Sunday walk. It will be held on Palm Sunday (April 13), at 4 pm. It will begin on the Murdock Canal Trail, at the Lindon View Trailhead (330 N. 780, Lindon). You may want to come early to find parking. Additional parking can be found at the church nearby (325 Canal Drive, Lindon). Some palm fronds will be provided, but there will not be enough for everyone. Julianne Muhlestein and Andrew Skinner will lead and teach at this event. In this episode Kerry and Susan Easton Black go through a series of revelations aimed at new converts of the Church. They discuss who these people are, helping them and their stories come to life so that we can understand more from the revelations themselves. The focus is on the people and the context, with the hope that each person will take that context and dive into the scriptures armed with the ability to draw even more out of them. They talk about the things that helped these converts either stay strong or stray, and lessons we can learn from that. They explore the lives and conversions of men like David Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Parley P. Pratt, William McLellan, Thomas B Marsh, Orson Pratt, Sidney Rigdon, and others. They talk about the consequences those who strayed had in the suffering of others, and lessons we can learn from that. They also discuss early conferences, which is wonderful timing since we are experiencing General Conference right now. We are grateful for our generous donors who make the podcast possible, and for our executive producer B. Fisher, and for Launchpad Consulting Studios for producing the podcast, and for Rich Nicholls who composed and plays the music for the podcast.

April 7-13Parley Parker Pratt was 16 months younger than the Prophet Joseph and he was born about 140 miles east of Palmyra, New York. Parley was born curious about religion. He said to his father one day when he was 18 years old and they were laboring together in the forest:"Father, how is it there is so manifest a difference between the ancient and modern disciples of Jesus Christ and their doctrines? If, for instance, I had lived in the days of the Apostles, and believed in Jesus Christ, and had manifested a wish to become his disciple, Peter or his brethren would have said to me, 'Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for REMISSION OF SINS, and you SHALL receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.' I should then have known definitely and precisely what to do to be saved. "Now, father…I believe in Jesus; I wish to serve him and keep his commandments… How…can I observe the ordinances of God and keep his commandments?"“To these inquiries my father could give no satisfactory answer…I still continued to ponder upon these things, and to search the Scriptures to learn how to be saved.” (Pratt, Parley P. Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, Revised and Enhanced Edition, edited by Scot Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor, Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, 2000, pp 10-11.)Parley would not rest until he could discover the right path to the Lord Jesus Christ.

In this episode of Come, Follow Church History from Scripture Central, Lynne Hilton Wilson and guest Mark Staker talk about a variety of fascinating topics in Church history. The revelation to move to Ohio is received. Missionary efforts involving Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, Ziba Peterson and Parley P. Pratt result in the conversion of many Saints including Sidney Rigdon. Fascinating events from the beginning of the Church in Kirtland are explained. And the often overlooked story of an early African American revelator in the Church named Pete is described in detail. Don't miss this episode.

What happens when a star player's ambitions clash with a franchise's storied culture? As we peel back the layers on Jimmy Butler's recent trade request, tensions simmer between him and Pat Riley, prompting us to question the long-term implications for Butler's career and the Miami Heat. We reminisce about unforgettable NBA moments and scrutinize the Heat's past decisions, like opting not to trade Tyler Herro for James Harden. Our dialogue extends to the Heat's unique team culture, drawing parallels to the discipline and physical standards reminiscent of the "Patriot Way."Can analytics dilute the essence of basketball, or do they enhance the game? As we explore this ongoing debate, we spotlight the influence of media figures like Jason Whitlock, touching on how media dynamics shape sports culture. Whitlock's blend of sports commentary with larger societal issues sparks a discussion on the power and responsibility of media voices. We also ponder the ripple effects of personal and professional relationships within sports media, where the line between critique and character assassination is often blurred.If personal privacy is sacred, where does that leave public figures caught in the media's glare? Through the lens of media ethics, we critique figures like DJ Akademiks and delve into the delicate balance of sharing personal information. We then traverse the complex terrain of the music industry with Drake's legal battles with Universal Music Group, contemplating the potential fallout on his career. As our conversation draws to a close, we savor the camaraderie between Parley P and Dog Man, cherishing the connections we forge through our shared passion for sports and culture.Support the show

ETERNAL DESTINY OF EARTH AND MAN, Chapter 19 of Mysteries of Creation Episode 698 Pages 181 to 190 Click here to read this Chapter Parallels of Earth and Man: The earth, like man, was once in the presence of God, and is a living creation. Brigham Young said, “the earth is a living creature and breathes as much as you and I do.” (Tchgs. of B.Y. 3:241) Like man, the earth also had a spiritual creation or birth before it became temporal or physical. Then this sphere “fell” from the presence of God, and it, too, must follow the Gospel plan of redemption. Because of its “fallen” condition, an atonement was required to redeem the earth. According to Parley P. Pratt, this atonement for the earth was made by Jesus Christ: Christ offered himself a sacrifice for this earth, for men, for the animals, for fishes, and the creeping things. Christ died for the earth and for the elements; Christ died for all mankind upon its face. (JD 3:315-316) Prior to this atonement, however, the earth experienced a baptism by water (at the time of Noah), and it will receive another baptism, of fire, some time in the future. Brigham Young explained: This earth, in its present condition and situation, is not a fit habitation for the sanctified; but it abides the law of its creation, has been baptized with water, will be baptized by fire and the Holy Ghost, and by-and-by will be prepared for the faithful to dwell upon. (JD 8:83) Mysteries of Creation More Books for free on Restoration Theology YouTube podcast

This week on Knowing Hymn, we talk about hymn #59, Come, O Thou King of Kings with text by Parley P. Pratt. Learn about this remarkable man of faith and his passionate pleading for the Lord to come again. Our hymn this week corresponds with the Come, Follow Me reading in 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Join us as we discuss the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Connect with us! Website: KnowingHymn.weebly.com Facebook Group: Knowing Hymn Instagram: KnowingHymn Twitter @ KnowingHymn Email: knowinghymn@gmail.com Check out Steve's other podcast, Moveable Do, where he interviews living composers about their lives, their musical journeys, and, of course, their music.

Prepare to have your senses electrified as we uncover the magic of live performances, navigate the sports world, and dissect social issues. We promise you a front-row seat to the discussion on music's impact in different environments - from the comfort of your home to the pulsating energy of live gigs. We also give you an exclusive take on comedy, with a close-up on the antics of LaVelle Crawford and an in-depth look at the charisma of Drake's performance at State Farm Arena.Ever wondered about the behind-the-scenes of high-stakes NBA trades? Well, you're in luck. We take you through the intricate Blazers-Suns deal, scrutinizing its implications and forecasting the Suns' upcoming season. We also address the controversy around Colin Kaepernick's NFL comeback bid, broaching questions about his performance viability after his long hiatus. And for all you football fans, we have an analytical treat as we delve into the situation with New Orleans Saints' head coach, Sean Payton, and speculate on the potential effects of the new head coach, Parley P. So.As the conversation broadens, we turn our lens towards the Denver Broncos and their charismatic quarterback, Russell Wilson. We delve into the team's defense, contracts, and the roadblocks they face. We then pivot to the exceptional leadership of Bill Belichick and Mike Tomlin, and how they've guided their teams to triumph. Wrapping up, we take a flight from Britain to Atlanta with Zed Fair, exploring the benefits of this economically savvy travel choice. So, buckle up for a thrilling journey as we traverse the worlds of music, comedy, sports, and social activism!Support the show

In this episode Parley P. Pratt talks about how much he loathes apostates and even laid out some veiled threats against them. It is because of talks like this that LDS parents kick their children out of the house when they do anything against the Church.

Two for one!  Grace vs. works is one of our favorite topics, and the foreknowledge of God is another!  The two articles from BYU Studies we are covering today relate to each other in fascinating ways. Join us as we discuss how we can approach Grace using LDS and Protestant theology, and how the paradoxes of omniscience can be used to discover more about our own relationship with reality, time, and agency.  This was a fun one! Link to our Face in Hat discord server! https://discord.gg/MnSMvKHvwh Dialogue Podcast Network https://www.dialoguejournal.com/podcasts/ Understandings of the Relationship between Grace and Works, by Terryl L. Givens https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/understandings-of-the-relationship-between-grace-and-works/ On the Foreknowledge of God: Time, Knowledge, Reality, Agency, by Rosalynde F. Welch https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/on-the-foreknowledge-of-god/ The full issue: Yet to be revealed, open questions in Latter-Day Saint theology. Edited by Eric A. Eliason and Terryl L. Givens https://byustudies.byu.edu/journal/60-3/ (I think this is the one I was referring to! -Aaron) After All We Can Do...Grace Works, by Robert L. Millet https://deseretbook.com/p/after-all-we-can-do-grace-works-robert-l-millet-902?variant_id=132598-paperback Believing Christ: The Parable of the Bicycle and Other Good News, by Stephen E. Robinson https://deseretbook.com/p/believing-christ-parable-bicycle-other-good-news-stephen-e-robinson-3355?variant_id=108581-hardcover Aaron's top three talks :) The Mediator, by Elder Boyd K. Packer https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1977/04/the-mediator The Purifying Power of Gethsemane, by Elder Bruce R. McConkie https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1985/04/the-purifying-power-of-gethsemane Beware of Pride, by President Ezra Taft Benson https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1989/04/beware-of-pride Pelagianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism Original Grace, by Adam S. Miller https://www.amazon.com/Original-Grace-Adam-S-Miller/dp/1639930248 Book of Mormon infinite atonement: Alma 34: 9-14 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/34?lang=eng&id=p9-p14#p9 2 Nephi 9:7 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/9#p7 The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt by Parley P. Pratt https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44896 Our episode that includes the Great God by Orson Pratt https://faceinhat.podbean.com/e/52-divinization-and-deity/ Exploring Mormon Thought: Volume 1, The Attributes of God, by Blake T. Ostler https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Mormon-Thought-Attributes-God-ebook/dp/B0077YUTJE Gospel Topic: God the Father https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/god-the-father D&C 130:7, “...past, present, and future… are continually before the Lord.” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/130?lang=eng&id=p7#p7 The “eternal now” quote: “the past, the present, and the future were and are, with Him, one eternal ‘now.'” History of the Church, 4:597, quoted here: https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/knowledge-of-gods-plan If You Could Hie to Kolob https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/music/library/hymns/if-you-could-hie-to-kolob “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/14434-space-is-big-you-just-won-t-believe-how-vastly-hugely Joseph Smith and the Possibility of Comics Andrew Knaupp and Sal Velluto, Pillar of Light Mark Elwood, The Glass Looker Noah Van Sciver, Joseph Smith and the Mormons, by Eric W. Jepson https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/joseph-smith-and-the-possibility-of-comics-andrew-knaupp-and-sal-velluto-pillar-of-light-mark-elwood-the-glass-looker-noah-van-sciver-joseph-smith-and-the-mormons/

This week, we talk about hymn #196, Jesus, Once of Humble Birth with text by Parley P. Pratt, and music by Giacomo Meyerbeer. We talk about the journey of this tune from a highly-acclaimed opera to a beloved hymn. Our hymn this week corresponds with the Come, Follow Me reading in Joseph Smith- Matthew, Matthew 24-25, Mark 12-13, and Luke 21. Join us as we take joy in the second coming of Jesus Christ! Connect with us! Website: KnowingHymn.weebly.com Facebook Group: Knowing Hymn Instagram: KnowingHymn Twitter @ KnowingHymn Email: knowinghymn@gmail.com

Key to the Science of Theology

A Voice of Warning An introduction to the faith and doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

In this episode, Jane discusses some significant events leading up to the Second Coming that are especially significant to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:In 1984, Dallin Oaks and Russell Nelson were called to be apostles at the same time. Shortly thereafter, she recalled that when Dallin Oaks became a "president," either the President of the Quorum of the Twelve apostles or President of the Church; it was a time marker of significant changes within and without the church.In 2015, one of her impressions was fulfilled that apostles would die in rapid succession. This occurred when three of died within this year.She saw Joseph Smith leading a group of people, in fulfillment of his mission that has not yet been completed; it appears related to the redemption of the land of Zion. His ongoing involvement, along with other dispensation heads, during this "Dispensation of the Fulness of times, is well documented. See The autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt.; The life and travels of Parley P. Pratt : Pratt, Parley Parker 1807-1857, pp. 370-371, D&C 101:56 ("And the lord of the vineyard said unto one of his servants: Go and gather together the residue of my servants, and take all the strength of mine house, which are my warriors, my young men, and they that are of middle age also among all my servants, who are the strength of mine house, save those only whom I have appointed to tarry"); D&C 103:21 ("Verily, verily I say unto you, that my servant Joseph Smith, Jun. is the man to whom I likened the servant to whom the Lord of the vineyard spake in the parable which I have given unto you"); and Visions of Glory by John Pontius, Chapter Seven.

Next on the block is the “Emotion” component of Steven Hassan's BITE model of cult mind control. This launches us into the next installment of Saints: The Standard of Truth, covering the visionary era of the early Mormon movement and the move from New York to Ohio. Sidney Rigdon and Parley P. Pratt are introduced, as are the Partridge family, including 7 and 11 year-old Emily and Eliza. The book casually introduces the subject of polygamy, presumably to smooth over the subject in the coming chapters when the practice becomes more controversial and widespread. We end the segment discussing Ezra Booth and his expose letters after he was excommunicated from the church for speaking out against Joseph Smith. The episode ends with some good news from Minnesota about transgender health care!   Show Notes:    6 Highly Effective Tactics Cult leaders Use to Build a Raving Audience:    https://bettermarketing.pub/6-highly-effective-tactics-cult-leaders-use-to-build-a-raving-audience-ff3111c4bbf3  Steven Hassan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan  Freedom of Mind Resource Center: https://freedomofmind.com/  BITE Model: https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/    Books:  Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, by Steven Hassan  Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, by Steven Hassan Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves, by Steven Hassan  The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan    Saints links: Ezra Booth letters https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ezra_Booth_letters Jacob 2 “exception clause” links https://oneclimbs.com/2017/01/05/a-proposed-reinterpretation-of-jacob-230/ https://bookofmormonism.com/2022/01/31/jacob-230-raising-up-seed-and-the-polygamy-question/ https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/contradiction_between_jacob_and_dc_132 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/book-of-mormon-seminary-teacher-manual-2017/jacob/lesson-44-jacob-2-12-35?lang=eng   Happy news:   https://abcnews.go.com/US/transgender-health-care-now-protected-minnesota/story?id=97739240   Other Appearances:    Check out Joseph Smith vs Joseph's Myth, where Aron and Bryce discuss the Joseph Smith story: https://youtu.be/oD2Xhg6F-Js   Come see us on Aron Ra's YouTube channel! He's doing a series titled Reading Joseph's Myth BoM. This link is for the playlist:   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMKfJKvEMeRn5ebpAggkoVHf    Email: glassboxpodcast@gmail.com  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/GlassBoxPod  Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/glassboxpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlassBoxPod  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glassboxpodcast/  Merch store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/exmoapparel/shop Or find the merch store by clicking on “Store” here: https://glassboxpodcast.com/index.html One time Paypal donation: bryceblankenagel@gmail.com   

Knew More Than They Could Teach, Chapter 5 of Eternal Lives  To Read Along Click The Link below: https://at.tumblr.com/fundamentallymormon/knew-more-than-they-could-teach-chapter-5-of/zw03idc8t1bd Joseph Smith “I could explain a hundred fold more than I ever have of the glories of the kingdoms manifested to me in the vision, were I permitted, and were the people prepared to receive them.” (TPJS, pg. 305) “Brethren, if I were to tell you all I know of the Kingdom of God, I do not know that you would rise up and kill me...” (As recalled by Parley P. Pratt in MS 55:585) “If I was to show the Latter-day Saints all the revelations that the Lord has shown unto me, there is scarce a man that would stay with me, they could not bear it” (MS 13:257) “The design of the great God in sending us into this world, and organizing us to prepare us for the eternal worlds, I shall keep in my own bosom at present.” (HC 5:403. Also see TPJS pg. 30) “People little know who I am when they talk about me, and they never will know until they see me weighted in the balance in the Kingdom of God. Then they will know who I am, see me as I am. I dare not tell them, and they do not know me.” (Zebedee Coltrin quoting Joseph Smith. See Joseph Smith; The Prophet, The Man pg. 28)

Episode 21Pad the FallSuper ShoesPancakes for the poorLesson 21“Beware Lest Thou Forget the Lord”#OldTestament2022 #comefollowme #comefollowme2022 #realtalkcomefollowmeJoin hosts Ganel-Lyn Condie and John Fossum as they discuss impactful topics from this week's Come, Follow Me lesson covering Deuteronomy 6–8; 15; 18; 29–30; 34.  Explore these important themes, topics and questions: What does it mean to “bind ourselves to the Lord”?What are phylacteries?  How can parents be phylacteries for their children? How can parents “pad the fall” for their children? How does the Lord “pad the fall” for us?How blessings from paying tithing are not always financial.—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Invitation: Show your gratitude to God by serving someone else.—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quotes & Links: Link to Come, Follow Me Through the Old Testament Book:https://www.seagullbook.com/come-follow-me-through-the-old-testament.html Elder Bednar Quote: “Covenant promises and blessings are possible only because of our Savior, Jesus Christ. He invites us to look to Him, come unto Him, learn of Him, and bind ourselves to Him through the covenants and ordinances of His restored gospel. I testify and promise that honoring covenants arms us with righteousness and with the power of God in great glory.” - Elder Bednar With the Power of God in Great Glory] https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2021/10/22bednar?lang=eng Parley P. Pratt Quote: “Moses, being about to depart from his great responsibilities in the midst of Israel, laid his hands upon Joshua by the word of the Lord. After this Joshua was filled with the Spirit of God and of his calling. His works in leading Israel into the promised land, and there defending them and settling them according to the word of the Lord, go to show that he not only received a form under the hands of Moses, but he actually received the power and spirit of that form.”-JD 4:9, Parley P. Pratt, A Visit, By P. P. Pratt, Etc.—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Real Talk is presented by Seagull Book and hosted by Ganel-Lyn Condie and John Fossum.

ETERNAL DESTINY OF EARTH AND MAN, Chapter 19 of Mysteries of Creation  Pages 181 to 190 Parallels of Earth and Man The earth, like man, was once in the presence of God, and is a living creation. Brigham Young said, “the earth is a living creature and breathes as much as you and I do.” (Tchgs. of B.Y. 3:241) Like man, the earth also had a spiritual creation or birth before it became temporal or physical. Then this sphere “fell” from the presence of God, and it, too, must follow the Gospel plan of redemption. Because of its “fallen” condition, an atonement was required to redeem the earth. According to Parley P. Pratt, this atonement for the earth was made by Jesus Christ: Christ offered himself a sacrifice for this earth, for men, for the animals, for fishes, and the creeping things. Christ died for the earth and for the elements; Christ died for all mankind upon its face. (JD 3:315-316) https://youtu.be/B2Eoz8N7Hss Read this Chapter: https://fundamentallymormon.tumblr.com/post/675940759785095168/flashback-friday-03-26-2019-eternal-destiny-of Read this Book: http://ogdenkraut.com/?page_id=157 Read Other Books On Restoration Theology: http://ogdenkraut.com/?page_id=30

¿Deberíamos hablar con Espíritus? ¿Ellos deberían hablar con nosotros? ¿Qué nos dirían si pudieran comunicarse con nosotros? ¿Son los indios americanos, el Papa en Roma y el Obispo de Canterbury personas miserables y perdidas en cuanto a su salvación? El punto de vista de los primeros lideres de la iglesia mormona en cuanto al asunto quedan reflejados en este discurso del año 1853.

In this episode Parley P. Pratt talks about how much he loathes apostates and even laid out some veiled threats against them. It is because of talks like this that LDS parents kick their children out of the house when they do anything against the Church. 

In this episode I discuss a little about why the death of Jesus makes no sense and then I will discuss the issues with the talk by Parley P. Pratt on the eternity of the soul. Apparently, Parley P. Pratt thought electricity was a fluid, and say a spirit is like a fluid as well. Contact me at fortunecookieprophetpodcast.comSupport the show https://www.patreon.com/fortunecoookieprophet

Orson Pratt is less famous than his older brother, apostle Parley P. Pratt.  But it could be argued that he has had a bigger impact on the Church than Parley did.  From polygamy to the First Vision to his theological arguments with Brigham Young, Orson Pratt is one of the unsung people who has shaped […] The post Orson Pratt’s Unsung Hero in Church History (Part 7 of 9) appeared first on Gospel Tangents.

This week Daniel and Fili discuss the lessons and principles that can be learned from the interactions with those of the Shaker faith in 1831, including the example of Leman Copley and the rebuke by Parley P. Pratt. They also discuss the challenges of identifying true revelation and the counterfeits of the adversary as described in Section 50. They discuss the unnecessary and misaligned actions of the saints in the early church and how we must be vigilant to not fall victim to many of the same tendencies today.

What happens when new members come from different faith backgrounds? Dr. Lili de Hoyos Anderson joins us to discuss how the Lord, through Joseph Smith revealed the truth about eternal marriage, the Second Coming, and other doctrines as the Saints question their previous belief systems. You'll love Dr. Anderson's practical marriage advice, learning about Parley P. Pratt's fiery personality, and gain a little more understanding about the Shakers and their influence on missionary work.Show notes: https://followhim.co/episodesYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcast

"Parley P. Pratt había sido miembro de la Iglesia aproximadamente un mes cuando fue llamado “al desierto” a predicar el Evangelio (Doctrina y Convenios 32:2). Thomas B. Marsh había sido miembro incluso menos tiempo cuando se le dijo: “… la hora de tu misión ha llegado” (Doctrina y Convenios 31:3). Orson Pratt, Edward Partridge y muchos otros igualmente recién habían sido bautizados cuando recibieron su llamamiento misional. Quizá todo ello fue por necesidad: en el otoño de 1830, nadie había sido miembro de la Iglesia por más de seis meses. Pero también hay una lección en ese modelo para nosotros en la actualidad: si usted sabe lo suficiente como para aceptar el Evangelio restaurado por medio del bautismo, sabe lo suficiente como para compartirlo con los demás. Por supuesto, siempre queremos aumentar el conocimiento que tenemos del Evangelio, pero Dios nunca ha dudado en llamar a los “indoctos” a predicar Su evangelio (Doctrina y Convenios 35:13). De hecho, nos invita a todos a que “abra[mo]s la boca para declarar [Su] evangelio” (Doctrina y Convenios 30:5). La mejor manera de lograrlo no es por medio de nuestra propia sabiduría y experiencia, sino “por el poder de[l]… Espíritu” (Doctrina y Convenios 35:13). Véanse también “La fe y la caída de Thomas Marsh”, “Ezra Thayer: de escéptico a creyente”, “Llamamiento de Orson Pratt a servir”, Revelaciones en contexto, págs. 58–74."

Abstract: Embarking roughly six months after the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 1830–1831 “mission to the Lamanites” faced challenges that we pampered moderns can scarcely imagine. Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and, eventually, Frederick G. Williams demonstrated beyond reasonable dispute the depth of their commitment to the Restoration and […] The post Vast Prairies and Trackless Wilds of Snow: A Good Test of Sincerity first appeared on The Interpreter Foundation.

Abstract: Embarking roughly six months after the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 1830–1831 “mission to the Lamanites” faced challenges that we pampered moderns can scarcely imagine. Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and, eventually, Frederick G. Williams demonstrated beyond reasonable dispute the depth of their commitment to the Restoration and […] The post Vast Prairies and Trackless Wilds of Snow: A Good Test of Sincerity first appeared on The Interpreter Foundation.

Abstract: Embarking roughly six months after the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 1830–1831 “mission to the Lamanites” faced challenges that we pampered moderns can scarcely imagine. Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and, eventually, Frederick G. Williams demonstrated beyond reasonable dispute the depth of their commitment to the Restoration and […] The post Vast Prairies and Trackless Wilds of Snow: A Good Test of Sincerity first appeared on The Interpreter Foundation.

In this episode of Culture Shock: Awakening the Humanity in Our World host, Michelle Werner, discusses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with Dr. Terryl Givens. Terryl Givens' Website: https://www.terrylgivens.com Conversations with Terryl Givens: https://faithmatters.org/category/conversations-with-terryl-givens/ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/?lang=eng Dr. Dr. Terryl Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. Prior he was a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Richmond, VA. Dr. Givens is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has served the Church as a bishop. He served missions in Brazil, prior to graduating from BYU with a degree in comparative literature. He later did graduate work in intellectual history at Cornell and earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina, working with Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English languages and literature. Publications: All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between (with Fiona Givens), The Christ Who Heals: How God Restored the Truth that Saves Us (with Fiona Givens), Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections On the Quest for Faith (with Fiona Givens), The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life (with Fiona Givens), Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (with Matthew J. Grow), When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, Dragon Scales and Willow Leaves, Mimesis and the Limits of Semblance, Blind Men and Hieroglyphs: The Collapse of Mimesis, Aristotle's Critique of Mimesis: The Romantic Prelude, Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering and the Ethical Sublime, This Great Modern Abomination': Orthodoxy and Heresy in American Religion, Joseph Smith: Prophecy, Process, and Plenitude, Lightning Out of Heaven': Joseph Smith and the Forging of Community, New Religious Movements and the Orthodoxy: The Challenge to the Religious Mainstream, There Is Room for Both': Mormon Cinema and the Paradoxes of Mormon Culture, Common Sense' Meets the Book of Mormon: Source, Substance and Prophetic Disruption, Joseph Smith's American Bible: Radicalizing the Familiar, Paradox and Discipleship, Fraud, Philandery, and Football: Negotiating the Mormon Image, The Prophecy of Enoch as Restoration Blueprint --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michelle-werner/support

Introduction to Parley P. Pratt, Orson Pratt, Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge

Recordaremos las experiencias de Thomas B. Marsh y Parley P. Pratt, al conocer el evangelio.

Catch the excitement of the early days of missionary work as Dr. Robert Millet visits and reminds us why Oliver Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Peter Whitmer, and Ziba Peterson are the original Fantastic Four. Learn how their mission to the Lamanites didn't go as expected but what the Lord had in mind was much more significant. These early missionaries teach us to get people to the Grove, share from the Book of Mormon, and remember our strength is our diversity.Shownotes: www.followhim.coYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcast

In this episode, we tell several funny but a little off-color and irreverent stories about historical church leaders and prophets. This episode is meant to show the human side of these great men and help us relate to them a bit more. If these people, who were called of God, could make mistakes and still hold their calling, then maybe we can extend a little bit of grace toward them and give them the benefit of the doubt that they were trying their best. This episode features stories about Parley P. Pratt, Joseph Smith, Morris Phelps, King Follett, David O. McKay, Thomas S. Monson, and of course, J. Golden Kimball. You'll hear stories about escaping prison, breaking bones, swearing over the pulpit, peeing across a river, speeding on the road and nearly setting an entire canyon on fire.

A little path down ancestry lane

Episode Twenty Seven: The Lamanite Mission Part Two—On to the Missouri: October 1830, Oliver Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and Peter Whitmer Jr., the four missionaries called to preach to the Lamanites, set out on their journey to Indian lands west of the Missouri River. Along the way they stopped in the Kirtland area of northern Ohio where they found thousands eager to hear them. They baptized more than 125 people—and then, by the end of November 1830, they were once more on their way west. This episode of History of the Saints is the story of their journey to and experiences among the Lamanites in Indian territory. Scholars: Sherilyn Farnes, Mark Staker, Andrew Hedges, Alexander Baugh

On Independence Day, 1839, Parley P. Pratt was a prisoner of the State of Missouri.  Along with other early leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he had been arrested for his actions during the Missouri-Mormon War of 1838 (in Parley's case, the charge was murder).  Convinced he would not get a fair trial, he and his fellow prisoners decided to risk everything on a high-risk jailbreak . . . in the middle of the town's 4th of July Celebration.  This episode explores what it was like to be a locked up in Missouri in the 1830s, the way the guards mistreated both their prisoners and Black women of the town, and how Parley and the others carefully concealed their preparations (and then, in their excitement, almost gave it all away).  Finally, how Parley's fellow prisoner -- Morris Phelps -- tried to evade capture by a posse by pretending to be a "true breed" or "Old Kentucky."  Finally, it ends with the bravest member of the jailbreak team-- Mrs. Laura Phelps.     To learn more about the story, you can check out The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (first published in 1873).   To see court records, affidavits and other original sources for the Mormon War of 1838, you can visit the Missouri State Archives Mormon War Digital Collection, available at https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/mormon.asp.  

Join Lindsay and John as they talk with Joe Geisner about the famous murder of Parley P. Pratt. Pratt was murdered by the ex-husband of one of his plural wives in a violent incident. They also talk to Craig Foster about the murder of James Monroe when he started to court the plural wife of …

In the past few years, there have been two major theories proposed about where the actual events in the Book of Mormon took place. Filmmaker Kieth Merrill gave one important bit of advice to any Book of Mormon “geography hobbyist” about suggesting their theory is the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When Merrill was reviewing productions about a new major film on the appearance of Jesus Christ in the New World, President James E. Faust took him aside and directed him not to portray or use any recognizable location to imply that the Church endorses any location over another. President Faust simply said: “We do not know.” Merrill got the message. Today, two different groups occupy the stage and take turns pitching their theories: one group at Brigham Young University is convinced that it's somewhere in southern Mexico or Meso-America, a theory that was first proposed about the turn of the 20th-century by scholars in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; their group, Book of Mormon Central, backs this theory. The second theory, the one that proponents at Book of Mormon Evidence say was what Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Brigham Young. Parley P. Pratt and other early brethren supported, is that it took place in the upper midwest and northeastern states of the United States, specifically, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and as far west as Iowa. While there are new publications and studies being released by this group, Book of Mormon Evidence, about new archaeological and geographic findings. this podcasts focuses on what the Prophet Joseph said about the “western Indians” to whom early missionaries were sent, particularly to the tribes in the upper midwest. Latter Day Radio's guest in this podcast, Rod Meldrum, focuses on those events and passages in the Book of Mormon that support his “Heartland” or “Hopewell” theory. Co-author Bruce Porter, along with Rod Meldrum, suggest in their book “Prophecies ad Promises, the Book of Mormon and the United States of America” that, instead of just reading specific passages in the Book of Mormon that deal with just geography, it is better to establish a “hierarchy of multiple witnesses that are unambiguous, clear and unassailable” rather than trying to make a few passages fit a preconceived idea for a romantic notion of where the key events in the Book of Mormon took place. They point to first, what Book of Mormon prophecies and promises testify of in relation to the Promised Land and the people associated with it; second, they consider the inspired and revealed statements by the Prophet Joseph Smith associated with specific locations (like comments he made on the Zion's March, such as the reference to Zelph's grave); third, look at physical, “real world” evidence such as correlating civilizations in the correct time frame (600 BC to 400 AD), archaeological findings with the text, cultural lifestyles, genetic relationships and linguistic ties; and, fourth, they point to passages contained within the Book of Mormon that are locatable geographical indicators. Meldrum and his allies emphasize that no one knows for sure where the final events in the Book of Mormon took place, but they insist that there is one Hill Cumorah and that the final Nephite “extinction” battle took place near that hill around 400 A.D. But, they also admit that after that period–a very, very long time ago—that the descendants of that awful battle spread all over the western hemisphere taking their stories, their oral histories and the legends with them, likely as far away as South America. Now, you can decide if the “Heartland” model holds any merit. Latter Day Radio, like the Church itself, takes no official position, except this one: The Book of Mormon is exactly what it proposes: Another testament for Jesus Christ published for our day.

20 years before the Mountain Meadows Massacre, 17 Mormons were killed in Haun's Mill, Missouri.  And just four months earlier, Parley P. Pratt, a beloved Mormon apostle was killed May 13, 1857 in Arkansas.  Just a few months after Pratt's death, around 100 immigrants from Arkansas were killed.  Is it true that Mormons sought revenge for the Haun's Mill and Pratt's murder?  Barbara Jones Brown will answer that question. https://youtu.be/rv0GJLgAU5I Barbara: So I looked at that theory and all I can find is proximate cause, meaning, so okay, this happened in Arkansas, therefore these people were from Arkansas, therefore that must be the reason. But when I looked at it, I don't think that was the motive. I think these other things that I've been talking about were the motive. Here are my reasons. Quite a lot of the perpetrators eventually come out and say why this happened as well as local people. They give a whole slew of motives and reasons for why this happened. Not one of them ever said that Parley P. Pratt's murder was a motive. GT: Hmm. That's among the principal people that were involved. Barbara: Yeah. Anyone. Anyone. You can't find a single Mormon that ever said that. GT: So, do you think that's overplayed then? Barbara: I do. Were you surprised to hear Brown downplay Pratt and Haun's Mill in the Mountain Meadows Massacre? Check out our conversation…. Barbara Jones Brown disputes the idea that Mountain Meadows was revenge for Haun's Mill or Parley Pratt's murder. Don't miss our other episodes about the massacre. 256: Utah War & Mountain Meadows Massacre (Jones-Brown) 194: What is the Dead Lee Scroll? (Mayfield) 193: John D. Lee's Role in Mountain Meadows Massacre (Mayfield) 074: CSI: Mountain Meadows – Using DNA to Solve 2 Mysteries (Perego)    

Last year, I interviewed Dr. Paul Reeve at the University of Utah on his book Religion of a Different Color.  This is a first-time release on our Youtube channel, but a re-release on audio of our interview last year with Paul Reeve discussing an amazing event with apostle Orson Pratt.  You may have heard of his more famous brother Parley P. Pratt.  Anyway, Orson was not only opposed to Utah legalizing slavery in Utah, but supported black voting rights before the Civil War.  Listen to Paul Reeve describe these events https://youtu.be/t1n0o_O5P60 Matt:  We know that Pratt spoke the day before and they are in a heated debate, so how does Pratt push back?  The minutes of the legislature tell us that that afternoon of February 5th, after Brigham Young has given this very strong speech, there are two bills that are introduced that are just innocuous bills, like who cares?  It's the Cedar City and Fillmore municipal bills where they're just approving them as legal municipal entities, but within the bills are the voting rights for Fillmore and Cedar City.  Who gets to vote in Fillmore and Cedar City?  They stipulate that white men over 21 get to vote, and that's par for the course for the nation in 1852. Pratt votes against both of those bills and the minutes tell us that he does so because they don't allow black men to vote and I believe that's his effort at again, pushing back against Brigham Young, so Brigham Young got to have his say in the morning and this is Pratt's way of responding.  I'm going to vote against these two municipal bills to make my point that I believe black men should be allowed to vote in Utah Territory. GT:  To me that is absolutely astonishing because this is the year 1852.  This is pre-Civil War. Paul:  That's right. GT:  I mean how did Pratt fit in with the rest of America as far as a black man should be allowed to vote because I can't imagine that's a popular position? Paul:  It's really not.  I mean there are a few people who are arguing for this, you know radical abolitionists but like I said this is just a radical minority.  To stake out that kind of position, you would be branded as a radical minority, marginalized from the mainstream.  It really is kind of a distinct position and for him to be making it in Utah Territory really is quite unique for 1852.  Not many are advocating for black suffrage in 1852. When Brigham Young made his speech in 1852 to the Utah Legislature where he declared blacks had no right to the priesthood, and Paul says this was likely a reaction to Pratt's speech.  This is part 5 of a 7 part series with Paul.  Check out part 1, as well as our other interviews!   Orson Pratt was against slavery in Utah, and for black voting rights in 1852! [paypal-donation]

The hardest part about getting your prayers answered is being able to recognize when they are being answered. This episode will help you to learn how to get the answers to your prayers, and more importantly how to know they are coming from God. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Book of Mormon Challenge podcast. I'm so excited to have you here and I'm excited for today's episode. The title for today's episode is, The secret to getting your prayers answered and how to know it's actually from God. I'm picking up this podcast a couple of weeks after my last one and I feel kind of bad. If you remember I did a day, it was Parley P. Pratt's birthday and I decided to take the whole day off and try to read the entire Book of Mormon in a day, and I was going to do a whole bunch of mini podcasts throughout the day and afterwards and try to share with you the things that were happening, and I recorded one or two of them, but they didn't turn out amazing and I wanted to kind of put my thoughts together and really focus on helping, probably the biggest question I've been getting from people who've listened to this podcast is, “Russell, I've been reading the Book of Mormon, I'm going to try it, but I don't know how to pray. How do I pray? How do I get answers? When I do get an answer, how do I know it's actually from God?” As I've been thinking about that and kind of putting together this episode, I didn't, I decided to not post those other mini episodes, and I wanted to kind of recap it here first because actually during that day, I received answers to some of my prayers, and it was special so I wanted to kind of share some of those experiences with you on this podcast as we're talking about how to get your prayers answered. With that said, I'm going to jump right into this. As you know on Parley P. Pratt day I tried to read the entire Book of Mormon. I ended up spending about 18 hours doing it. I got about, actually I got to page 266, which is not quite halfway there. So I didn't quite hit it, but I got almost halfway there. So I'm going to block out another day, and do the rest of it. And I will keep you in the loop of how that goes. But it was amazing. It was really neat to read it that way and try to keep my focus for 18 hours. It was kind of tough, there were times where I'd get tired, and I'd have to stand up and read while I was walking around. And other times where I'd sit in different locations, or just a whole bunch of stuff. But it was a really special experience and I'm so grateful I had an opportunity to do that. And I cannot wait to do part two, coming soon. So I will let you know. But as I was reading the book, and I remember I got an answer to a prayer while I was reading. And when I did that, I jumped off and I recorded my thoughts right afterwards. And I'm not going to share that recording, instead I'm just going to kind of share the thoughts right now, because it's a pretty neat thing. There's a quote I heard on my mission, I don't know who said it, so I'm not going to give them credit, unfortunately, but whoever said it was awesome. They said, “Prayer is how we speak to our Heavenly Father, and oftentimes the scriptures are how he speaks back to us.” So I kind of heard that a lot in my life, and there have been times where I'd try to use the scriptures as a way to get answers and I knew that on Parley P. Pratt day as I was reading I was looking for some answers. But it was crazy, within the first hour of me reading, I got the first answer to my question. I was going crazy because it's so cool when it happens. I actually want to share with you guys a funny story before I tell you the prayer I was trying to get answered and how it got answered. It's funny, on my mission I got about 7 months into my mission I got the dreaded “Dear John” letter. The girl I was dating at the time, who I was convinced I was going to marry and everything, sent me the letter saying that she was not only dating somebody, but she was engaged and was going to be getting married here very soon. As a young 19 year old missionary, I was destroyed. I just remember crying and I could barely control myself, I was just like, I'm out serving the lord and this is the person who I'm supposed to be marrying. Why would you take her from me, I'm doing everything that you told me to do? I remember a day or two later, I had a chance to go meet with my mission president, his name was President Giddons, and as I was meeting with him he must have either heard what happened or he saw it on my face, or maybe I told him, I don't know. I was just broken, and I told him, “My girlfriend is getting married.” And he looked at me and said, “You know what, you can find comfort in the scriptures.” And I remember when he said that I was kind of frustrated. I was like, you know what, there's nobody in the scriptures who got a Dear John letter. There's nobody in here who could even relate to me, there's no way. And I remember going home that night kind of being a little frustrated and the next morning saying, you know what, I'm going to start over at the very beginning, start reading the scriptures and I don't care if I have to read the Book of Mormon, the Old Testament, the New Testament, everything, I don't care. I'm going to read the entire thing just to prove to President Giddons that there's nothing in here that's going to comfort me for this problem. And that was 19 year old Russell. I started at 1 Nephi, chapter 1 in the Book of Mormon and I started reading and what was crazy is, by 1 Nephi Chapter 2:15 I got my answer. What's happening in the book at the time, if you haven't started reading it yet, I encourage you once again to go to Bookofmormonchallenge.com get your free copy of the book and go and read it, but at this point, Lamen and Lemuel are the older brothers of Nephi. Nephi's this younger kid who is good, who is listening to his dad and following what the Lord says and trying to do everything. But they were asked to do a really hard thing. They had to leave their family, leave their gold, their riches, all their money, their home and go into the wilderness and to basically leave. And it was hard for them. It was not an easy thing to leave everything you loved behind and wander into the wilderness. And they're out there in the wilderness wandering and in Chapter 2 Verse 15 there was a scripture, and when I read this scripture it was like a punch in the face. It said, “And Lamen and Lemuel being the eldest did murmur against their father and they did murmur because they knew not the dealings of that God who had created them.” I remember reading that and I was sitting here listening to myself murmur about my girlfriend and how sad I was and all these things. And when I heard that, it said, Lamen and Lemuel, they murmured because they knew not the dealings of that God who had created them. And as I read that I felt the spirit and the spirit told me to quit murmuring, quit complaining, the lord's got something special for you, just wait. So I decided to wait. I stopped murmuring and I went on my way and served my mission the best I could and I got home. A few months after I got home from my mission I met a beautiful girl named Collette. A few months later than that, I somehow convinced her to marry me and since then we've had 5 amazing children. We had a family night a little while ago with the kids and we were reading the scriptures from the beginning and we read this verse. And I told them, “You guys this verse is all about you.” And we read it and I said, “That's Lamen and Lemuel being the eldest did murmur against their father and they murmured because they knew not the dealings of that God who had created them.” And the kids said, “Dad, how is that about us?” I said “Because one day a little while ago I murmured and the only reason I murmured was because I didn't know who Collette was, and I didn't know who you guys were and I'm so grateful that I stopped murmuring and let the lord do what he wanted to do with me. Because if I didn't I would never have had you guys.” And it was such a special thing, looking backwards. A lot of times it's hard to look backwards when it's happening in the moment. But for any of you guys who are going through trials, I encourage you to do what I learned this day, and that's to not murmur, because you have no idea what God's got in store for you. So that was one of the first times I got an answer from reading the scriptures. Again, prayer is how we speak to Heavenly Father and the scriptures is how he speaks back to us. So when I was going on this Parley P. Pratt day, I knew I needed an answer to some prayers and I didn't know what to do, so I was praying for an answer and I jumped into the scriptures and what was cool, within the first, still 1 Nephi, the first section of the book, I got the answer to the prayer I was looking for. So I'm going to give you some context into the question I was looking for and then the answer I got, just to show you guys the pattern of how this works. When you understand, when you see the pattern of something, then you're able to replicate it and do it over and over again. For me, about a year ago I got introduced to an organization called Operation Underground Railroad. I had never heard of this before, I found out about it through a really sacred experience that I don't feel comfortable sharing on this podcast right now, but I got a call to see if I would be willing to help with Operation Underground Railroad, and I had never heard of it, I didn't know what it was. So I went online and started Googling and found Operation Underground Railroad and started watching the videos and I found out about this guy named Tim Ballard and Tim goes to the deepest, darkest places on this earth and goes and saves little children from horrible, horrible, evil people. And I remember that night as I was watching the videos I was actually, I have a vlog that I do and I was recording myself and I said, “I feel like tonight the direction of my life is forever changed.” And I knew that it was something that I needed to be part of and to help in any way I could. So I decided I would jump in and help. I'm not super talented at a lot of things, but there are a couple of things that I'm good at. And I said, you know what, I'm going to try to help this organization the best that I know how, and I know how to do it through this thing called a sales funnel. For most of you guys, you have no idea what that is, don't even worry about it, but I was like I'm going to build a funnel for Operation Underground Railroad to try to get their message out to the world and try to shine a light on this evil, evil thing that's happening. They say when you shine a light in a room, all the cockroaches scatter to the corners. I said, if I could help magnify this message and shine a light in the room I'm going to do it. And I don't know how I'm going to do it but I'm going to do it. So I started running as fast as I could and started putting together a plan based on my own ideas and the plan seemed good, but for some reason it didn't seem….I don't know, you know that feeling where you're like, this is good but it didn't seem great? Like I'm missing something. So before then, I was supposed to drive down to Utah and meet with Tim Ballard and some other people who are involved in this organization and the day I was supposed to be heading down there I was praying in the morning, “I need help. I need inspiration. I'm supposed to present these guys with my plan and my plan's not very good.” And in the middle of that prayer I had a flash of inspiration from Heavenly Father. The inspiration was simple, you need to make a documentary and you need to call Nick Nanton. And at the time, you're probably thinking who's Nick Nanton, and that's almost how I felt. I had met him five or six years earlier, we had a conversation for less than 5 minutes and I hadn't seen him since. He's the guy who had done documentaries in the past, he had a lot of success with him. So I said okay. I messaged him on Facebook Messenger, I was like, “Hey Nick, we talked once five or six years ago, I know we don't know each other that well, but I don't know if you believe in God, but I do and he told me today that you are supposed to help me do a documentary for this group called Operation Underground Railroad, check them out and let me know what you think.” I got a message back from him a few minutes later, he said, “Brother, I'm in.” I said, okay. We're making a documentary. Then I drove down to Utah, I presented this to Tim Ballard and some of the other people down there and they said, “yes, that's it. That's right.” So we went back to the drawing board and said okay let's do it. I called Nick up and introduced him to Tim and said, “You guys, let's make this documentary.” And they went for the next 3 or 4 months, flew around the world to Haiti and all over the place to capture this story in a way that not only shines light in the darkness but helps to capture hope. We got back after the documentary, they finished the filming of it, I do a big event once a year for entrepreneurs and we had about 3,000 entrepreneurs coming to this event. We had Tim Ballard come and we had Nick Nanton come and we had them show, do a private screening for this group to show them the documentary. So we showed them this amazing documentary that talked about Operation Underground Railroad and the mission and what they were doing. And I'm sure I'll do a whole podcast in the future just on that topic alone, but after we showed that documentary, from the group of entrepreneurs we were able to raise over a million dollars right there that will go on to save hundreds of kids from sex trafficking, which was one of the most amazing, special moments of my life. In fact, if you want to see the trailer and eventually the documentary, if you go to ourfilm.org, you can see. As of right now the trailer is there, and in the future the documentary will be there. So we did that and it was such an exciting thing, but I knew that that wasn't the end. I knew that was the beginning. We had this documentary, how do we get this out to the world? How do we shine such a light on this darkness that the evil goes away? And I didn't know the answer to that. I honestly still don't know the answer to that. And I was scared and nervous once again. As I started my Parley P. Pratt day and started reading as fast as I could, as soon as I got to 1 Nephi Chapter 17 I read these versus. Some context of what's happening here, Nephi, Leman and Lemuel have left Jeruselem, they've gone across the wilderness and they found this amazing place, they called it the land of Bountiful and there's trees and an Ocean, and it's probably like sitting in San Diego. It's perfect weather, they're loving it, their family is there, they're prospering finally for the first time in years and then Nephi has a vision and the vision says, “Nephi you've got to build a boat and you're going to leave this amazing land and we're going to take you somewhere else.” So Nephi, as he always does, says, “Okay I'm going to do it.” And he starts running, comes back down and starts building a boat and what happens? Immediately his brothers Lamen and Lemuel, they start murmuring again right. That's all they know how to do. They're complaining and they're angry and frustrated with Nephi. And he's like, “No this is amazing.” They even talked about killing him, they were so frustrated. And they said, “Nephi, you don't even know how to build a boat. You don't have any actual skills, you're not going to be able to do this. The boat's going to sink, we're all going to die.” And Nephi said to them, “I said unto them that they should murmur no more against their father, neither should they withhold their labor from me. For God has commanded me that I should build a ship. And I said unto them if God had commanded me to do all things, I could do them. If he should command to me I should say unto this water, be thou earth, it should be earth. And if I should say it, it would be done. Now if the lord has such great power and has wrought so many mighty miracles among the children of men, how is it he cannot instruct me that I should build a ship?” “Russell, how is it he cannot instruct you how to launch this documentary? Russell, how is it he cannot instruct you how to get this message out?” That's the message I heard that morning as I read this.  And I felt the spirit so strongly. I was like okay, I'm just going to go forward and do it and the lord will instruct me how to do this mission he's asked me to go on. So that's, you guys, that's why I'm hoping you guys are catching some of this. I'm hoping you're feeling it. That's why these scriptures are so important. How many of you are like, “Where's God today? Why is he not talking to me? Why is he not helping us?” He is, he wants to. But we have to be willing. And this is the lesson I'm learning over and over and over again. I come doing this podcast and I'm nervous because I don't want people thinking that I am perfect in any way, because I am so far from that. I struggle everyday to read the scriptures. It's a difficult daily process for me, but man every time I do, I feel it. And that's the key. So the challenge for me, the reason why I did this whole Book of Mormon challenge, I'm hoping as many of you guys as possible come on with me, but I'm doing it for myself as well, to get me back into the scriptures. I forget these things. I'm going through this process and I felt the spirit that morning, when I'm reading this, or reminding me of when I felt the spirit earlier in my life, and it's like, the lord is there, if we'll just open the scriptures and read. If we'll pray, pray, pray, open the scriptures and read, he'll answer our prayers. Alright, so I want to jump into this now. Again, the title of this podcast was The Secret to Getting Your Prayers Answered and How to Know it's Actually From God. The whole reason why I've titled it this and why I'm doing this podcast is because a lot of you guys have been asking me that. “Okay Russell, I'm doing this thing now. How do I know that it's true?” and I tell people, “You pray about it.” “Okay, I've prayed a lot in my life, what then? Is something going to happen? Is an angel going to come to me?” Probably not, but let me explain to you how it's worked for me. And I don't know if this is the same way it works for everybody, but this is the pattern that I've learned, and I've used it and its helped guide me throughout my life. So I'm going to kind of walk you guys through that. So with that said, the two questions I want to answer in this podcast. Question number one, if you're writing these down, how do you get prayers answered? And question number two, how do you know it's actually from God and not just some voice in your head? So those are the two questions we're trying to go for. As I was breaking this down I realized there's kind of different types of answers we're looking for. So I broke it into three types of answers and there's probably more, but these are the three I was able to kind of think through and identify. So the first one, the first type of answer is a yes, or a no. This is the kind of thing where it's so important you're not going to move forward until you get an answer. The second one is inspiration and guidance, try to take you somewhere. And then the third one is comfort. So I'm going to kind of go through these. The first type of answer is a yes or no. This is the ones where you don't move until you get an answer. So a good example of this is like marriage. Before I got married to my beautiful wife, Collette, I was not going to just go on this path with my eternal companion without asking Heavenly Father first, “you have the ability to see the future and everything that's happened forever and what's going to happen, is the right companion for me? Should I really marry her? I love her, she's beautiful, I think she's awesome, but what do you think? You have better vision than me, you can see a lot more than me.” So we prayed, and it wasn't just a prayer and the answer came, it was work. I had to pray, my wife had to pray, we prayed separately, we prayed together and we thought through it and it took a while, but we didn't stop until we got an answer. I was not going to go kneel across the alter and be married for time and all eternity to my beautiful wife, unless Heavenly Father said, “Yes.” So we did that, we prayed, I'll also add that we fasted while we prayed. Fasting is where you don't eat or drink while you're praying. Usually fast for a day or two or however long you are, but fasting is amazing, fasting will amplify your prayer. So if you really want an answer, I recommend adding fasting with it as well. So that was one example. We prayed and prayed until we got an answer. And only after we got the answer did I make my movement. So that was the first thing. The next big one, that happened earlier in my life was when I prayed about the Book of Mormon. Is the Book of Mormon true? Is there a God in Heaven? Is Jesus our Savior? Those questions we talked about two episodes ago during the three givens. All those questions I prayed and I was not going to move until I had a yes or a no. It blows my mind to this day, that some people will leave the church or they'll forget God without getting an actual answer. I would never move without the answer to something that's so important. The quote I shared with you guys two episodes ago from Bruce R. McKonkie, talking about the Book of Mormon said, “These are deep, and solemn and ponderous matters, we need not think we can trifle with sacred things and escape the wrath of a just God. Either the Book of Mormon is true or it is false. There is no middle ground.” So when I was reading that book and I was praying about it, I was like, I am not moving until I get a yes or a no. There's no middle ground. I can't be like, oh I'm just going to kind of go down the middle. There's either a yes or a no and I have to know what it is. And I'm not moving until I get the answer. So those are the yes and no kind of questions. When you pray until you get an answer and those ones usually take more work. It's usually not just a quick answer and you get it. They take a little bit of time. That's number one. Type of answer number two, I called it inspiration or guidance. This is where you're trying to get inspiration for your life, for what you're doing, trying to get guidance to make sure you're doing the right things. There's a quote I heard on my mission as well, and again I don't know who said this one so I can't give it to anybody, but it said, “Pray as if everything depends on the lord, and then work as if everything depends on you.” This is where most of my answers come from. When I wake up in the morning and I know that I'm going in a direction, I kneel down and I start praying. I pray and ask the lord. I pray as if everything depends on the lord, and I end my prayer, I'm not looking for a yes or a no, I'm looking for inspiration and guidance. Then I go and work as if everything depends on me. Operation Underground Railroad, I was asked to be part of this thing, so I prayed for inspiration and guidance and I started running. I started running and running and moving forward and then every morning I would pray for guidance. I would pray as if everything depended on the Lord, and I would work as if everything depended on me. I kept moving forward and moving forward and moving forward. And there's something magic about moving forward. When you move forward, the lord blesses you. Sometimes it's not immediately. For me it was the 11th hour. It was literally the morning, getting ready to jump in the car and drive down to present my plan with these people and I didn't have the plan yet. I'm sitting there praying in the morning. But the lord knew I was moving forward. I was working as if everything depended on me, and then just when I needed it he gave me the inspiration. This is what you should do. You need to make a documentary. This is the person you need to call. I was guided. This is true in my business, I don't know about you guys if you own companies or businesses, I get this every single day. I'm trying to make the best decisions possible. I pray every morning, guide me, lead me, make sure I do the right thing so I can serve my audience the best that I possibly can. Then I work as if everything depends on me. I cannot tell you how much guidance I get. Every single day there's things that come up, there's ideas, there's things that just come to my head that aren't my own idea. They show up, and then I'm able to go and move forward on those things, because I'm praying for inspiration and guidance. And when you pray for it, it appears. Next on my list here, books. I've written two books now, and working on others. But when I'm writing my books, it's crazy, I'll be studying and praying and figuring things out and my books having nothing to do with spirituality or church. These are business marketing books, but still I'm looking for inspiration. How can I change somebody's life with these books? And I'm praying and I'm researching and all the sudden in the middle of stuff, all the sudden these ideas pop up, these patterns show up, things that I didn't know before come to my head.I'm like, “That is not my idea, I don't know where it came from, it's amazing.” Same thing happens to me when I speak on seminars and stages. Before I get onstage every single time, I pray “Heavenly Father please give me the guidance to inspire these people and know what to do and to say to actually help people to change their lives.” And then I get onstage and start speaking and the most amazing things always happen. I don't know where they come from half the time because they come out of my head, they come out of my mouth. I'm like, “I've never said that before, I don't know where that came from, but it came. It showed up when I needed it.” I talked to Tony Robbins about this and Tony said the same thing, “I have an outline of what I'm going to talk about, I get onstage and then it just, something magical happens. Something's channeled through me, I don't know what it is.” But I know, and you guys know. It just comes from me, as long as I'm in a place where I'm trying to serve other people, it just shows up. And it's true. All my callings in church, on my mission, I saw it over and over and over again. One of my favorite stories of my mission, there were these things called media referrals where somebody will see on TV an ad for the Book of Mormon or a movie called the Lamb of God or something. So I got this call one day on my mission saying, “Hey, this girl requested..” I can't remember if she requested a bible or what she requested, “if you could deliver it, here's her address.” So we jumped in the car, drove over, met her, gave her the thing she ordered and asked her if we could teach her a lesson, a missionary discussion. She said, “Yes.” We came in and taught her the first discussion, told her about Joseph Smith, about the Book of Mormon and we gave her a Book of Mormon, she was so excited to read it and we scheduled the appointment for two days later. We came back two days later and knocked on the door and her mom opened it and she said, “Sorry, she's not here right now.” And we said, “Where is she?” “She's actually in jail for a little while.” We're like, “Oh, are you serious? She was so excited, we could have helped her, we could have shifted her life. I know that this message, it could have been the thing for her.” She's like, “Yeah, I'm sorry but feel free to come back, maybe she'll be out in a couple of weeks.” So we came back a couple of weeks later, she was still gone. Came back a couple weeks later, and then finally after a couple of tries we just kind of gave up. Fast forward a month or two later, my companion and I were sitting there, and all of our appointments that morning had followed through, it was raining outside and we thought, we have to go out and knock on doors to find someone, and to be completely honest we didn't really want to go out in the rain and get soaking wet. So we're sitting there and we're like, “You know what, let's pray. Let's ask Heavenly Father where we should go. Maybe he's got someone prepared for us today.” So my companion and I sat in our car, we sat down and folded our arms and prayed, we said, “Heavenly Father, please give us the inspiration we need, please guide us to somebody today who is ready to hear this message.” We ended the prayer and sat there for a few minutes and I was like, “You know what, I don't remember that girl's name, but we visited her a couple of months ago and she's the one who went to jail.” My companion looked at me and he's like, “Are you kidding me?” I'm like, “What?” and he's like, “I honestly was thinking of the exact same person right now.” I'm like, “Are you serious?” That person, her face or whatever came to both of our minds at the exact same time, and we got so excited, so we jump in the car, we were trying to find her house, race over to her house, go knock on the door. The door opens and her mom comes out again and we're like, “how's it going? Is so and so here.” And she's like, “No you guys, I told you. She's in Jail.” And we're like, oh I guess we weren't paying attention or maybe… We were kind of frustrated and were about to turn away and walk away, and then the mom, her name was Monica, she said, “I have a quick question. You guys keep coming by, how do you know her. What are you visiting for?”and we said, “We're from the Mormon Church and she had called before and we had given her the Book of Mormon.” She said, “Oh I've seen it here. The Book of Mormon is here by her bed. What is that? I'm just curious what it is you guys do, what you talk about?” and we're like, “Do you have a few minutes and we'll tell you?” She's like, “Sure, come on in.” we were like, really? So we came in and we had a chance to teach her the first discussion. Told her about the Book of Mormon, about Joseph Smith and Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ coming to him and setting up this church and all the amazing stuff I've been sharing with you guys on this podcast and Monica felt it. She felt the spirit and she said, “Please come back.” We came back a day or two later and talked about Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for her and how he had died to save her from her sins, and how she could repent for her sins, and we told her about that and she was so excited. And we came back and taught the third discussion, the fourth and all the way on and she ended up getting baptized. It was one of the most amazing experiences. And what's cool is fast forward to the time I got home from my mission, I actually got an email from Monica's daughter after she got out of jail. She said, “Hey, I got out of jail and my mom got baptized, as you know, and now I'm going to church with her.” It was just such a cool thing. I remember thinking how special it was to know that our Heavenly Father knew that Monica was prepared, knew exactly where she was at. And as soon as I was willing to pray, as if everything depended on the lord, then he opened it to me. And showed us exactly where and how to find her. The same thing is true inside of our families. Pray as if everything depends on the lord and then work as if everything depends on you. The third type of answer we're looking for, the first one again was yes and no questions. Number two was inspiration and guidance and number three is comfort. I've used this so many times in my life. Someone who's struggled, who needs comfort right now, I testify to you that the Lord will comfort you through prayer. This is the way he answers our prayers. I know my girlfriend got married on my mission, as funny as it is now looking back on it, prayer is what gave me comfort. I have a handicapped sister who is two years older than me, and when my handicapped sister, Stacy passed away, I didn't know how to take that. It was hard, it was scary, it was all those things wrapped into one and prayer is what comforted me. There's trials in our family and society, things that happen all the time and prayer is how we get comfort. So those are the three types of answers. We have our yes and no's, we have our inspiration and guidance, and we have comfort. That's usually where we're, at least for me personally, where I'm looking for how to get my prayers answered. Alright, so I'm going to dive back into this. There's two questions, number one is how to get your prayers answered, and number two is how do you know the answer is coming from Heavenly Father, not something you just made up in your head? So question number one I broke down into a couple of steps. So step number one to how to get your prayer answered. Step number one is you have to sanctify yourself. What does that mean? There is a scripture in Joshua 3:5 it's one of my favorite scriptures. It's really simple, really easy, but it was a turning point for me. In Joshua 3:5 Joshua is actually meeting with his people and they're about to go in and try to recapture, repossess their promised land, which is obviously a scary thing. There's armies and wars and this crazy that they have to do. So in Joshua 3:5 it says, “And Joshua said to his people, sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” So what does that mean to sanctify yourself? Sanctify means to clean yourself, be prepared, be clean, the Lord wants to do wonders among you, but you have to be clean first. If you are out there breaking all the commandments and doing all sorts of horrible, evil things, the Lord's not going to come to you, he's not going to answer your prayers. You need to be clean if you want answers from God, you want his spirit to visit you, you have to clean yourself, you have to sanctify yourselves. So how do you do that? You do that through a process we call repentance. Repentance is basically asking our Heavenly Father to figure you. Maybe we'll do a whole episode on repentance because it's important and there's a lot that goes into it. But it's basically, repentance is as simple as stopping what you're doing, turning your heart to God and asking him for forgiveness. That's what repentance is. On my mission it was interesting, I told you guys before, I went in the mission field and I was praying and asking, “Is the Book of Mormon true?” and what's funny is I asked that question over and over and over again for months and I never got my yes or my no. I was asking, I was praying, I was moving forward, but I never got my yes or my no and I was always stressed out. Then I remember one day getting the answer, and it wasn't the answer that I thought. I was looking for a yes or a no, but the answer I got was not that I needed a yes or no, the answer I got was that I needed to be clean. I needed to sanctify myself. I'm like, what? I'm on a mission. If you know anything about the Mormon church, going on a mission is not simple. You have to be clean, you have to prepare yourself, there's all these things you don't do before you go on your mission to be ready. But as I heard that I started thinking, what have I not cleaned up in my life? What have I not repented of? I've stopped doing a lot of bad things that I was doing. I mean nothing grievous or super evil, but what did I not repent from? What have I not asked forgiveness of? And I started thinking back and I was remembering, oh my gosh, there's a lot of things that I've done that I never asked for forgiveness. So I started praying and asking Heavenly Father for forgiveness. And after I asked for forgiveness, that's when the answers came. So for you guys, it's important to understand, you have to be clean, you have to repent first. There's a talk by Elder Jeffery R. Holland that he gave, and he's one of my favorite apostles, he's an amazing person. In this talk he was talking about people like us, who are trying to do things, trying to have the lord help us with whatever it is, answers to questions, to help change the world, whatever it is we're trying to do inside of our sphere of influence. And he was talking to us, he said, “Brethren, if you are struggling with self control, I ask you to pray to your Father in Heaven for help. Pray to him as Enos did, who wrestled before God and struggled mightily in the spirit. Wrestle like Jacob did with an angel, refusing to let go until a blessing had come. Talk to you mom, your dad, your bishop, get the best help you can from all the good people who surround you. Avoid at all costs others who tempt you, weaken your will or perpetuate the problem. If anyone does not feel worthy tonight, he can become worthy through repentance and the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Savior wept and bled and died for you. He has given everything for your happiness and salvation, he is certainly not going to withhold help from you now.” When I hear that I just start thinking, okay I need to get away from the people that are distracting me, I need to get clean. I don't know how to explain it more than that. We've got to become clean. Sometimes we think, there's no way that based on all the stuff I've done in the past, I've done so many bad things and there's no way that I could be forgiven. I get that. It's one of Satan's great lies that he tells us, that what you've done is too bad. The lord's not going to come to you. He's not going to forgive you. He's not going to help you. And I think this last line is so powerful. “The Savior wept and bled and died for you. He has given everything for your happiness and salvation, he's certainly not going to withhold help from you now.” One of my favorite phrases that I ever heard that actually came from the Savior's lips, it was before the crucifixion and he was outside of Jerusalem looking at the entire city, looking at this people, the people who were eventually going to crucify and kill him, and in Matthew Chapter 23 he said this, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem thou that killest the prophets and stonest them  which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.” And then fast forward, this is when it comes back to the two different witnesses, so fast forward, not even that far in the future, but across the world on the other side of the world, after Christ was crucified, then he came to the people here on the American continents and what's cool, in the Book of Mormon, in 3 Nephi 10:6, the Lord actually came to the people in America, I talked about that earlier, it was one of the most amazing things. But when he came here he said almost the same thing to the people in America. He said, “Oh ye house of Israel whom I have spared, “ So these people here in America, they were part of the house of Israel that he had taken away from Jerusalem and he spared them over here in America. He said, “how oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if ye will repent and return unto me with full purpose of heart.” I hear those scriptures twice now, I think of a hen and chickens, and I don't live on a farm, but I've been to a farm once or twice, and you look around and there's these chickens running around and a hen gathers them together and the chickens run away, and they gather them together and they run away, and it keeps happening over and over and over again. And how many times do we look like those little hens, those little chickens who are running around and messing up and messing up and messing up. And the lord is like the hen saying, “Come back. Come back.” It's Satan who's telling you it's too late to come back. You can, no matter where you are, and no matter what you've done wrong, you can come back. Literally, he's looking at his people who are about to crucify and kill him and he says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathers her chickens under my wings and you would not.” He will continue to forgive us over and over again. So that's the key. So I'm going to kind of repeat this. Step number one is you've got to repent. You've got to sanctify yourself. The lord is going to do wonders. He's going to answer your prayers, he's going to lead you and guide you and help you know exactly what to do. He is going to answer your prayers and when he does that, your life is going to change, and when your life changes, you have the ability to change other people's lives. That is the marvelous work and wonder that the lord wants for you. So if you were going to go on this journey and change yourself and change other people and if you want those blessings, you have to do what Joshua said, you have to sanctify yourself because tomorrow the Lord wants to do wonders among you. That's number one, step number two, after you've cleaned yourself, you've repented and you've tried your best to do what's right, and again, we're never going to be perfect. But you've done your best to repent and try to make those shifts in your life, the second step is you've got to study it out. Now this is a really cool scripture that helped me to really understand that, a lot of times I would go and say a prayer, “Hey I have a question.” I'd pray and nothing would happen. I'm like, huh. Maybe the lord doesn't know, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he's not even there, or whaever. And I had all these thing, I'm sure all of us have had those same feelings sometimes. Oliver Cowdery was a guy who was helping Joseph Smith to translate the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith was translating and Oliver Cowdery was writing it down by hand on this paper. In Doctrine and Covenants section 9, there's some verses where the Lord's talking to Oliver Cowdery and he says something that when you read this and you hear this, it will make your mind open like, “Oh, that's how I receive answers to my prayers.” So this is what he told Oliver Cowdery, he said, “Behold ye have not understood, ye have supposed that I would give it unto you when you took no thoughts, save it was to ask me. But behold I say unto you that you must study it out in your mind, then you must ask me if it be right. And if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you, therefore you shall feel that it is right. But if it not be right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have the stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.” I want to kind of emphasize a couple of things, at the very beginning it says, “You took no thought, save it was to ask me.” So, all you did was just asked me. If you go to a teacher like, “Hey, what's the answer to the question.” The teacher's going to be like, “I'm not going to tell you. How are you supposed to learn and grow if I just give you the answer?” So the Lord tells Oliver Cowdery here, you took no thought, save it was to ask me. You have to do more than just ask me. He says, “Behold, I say unto you, you must study it out in your mind.” You gotta study it, you gotta figure it out first. Study it out in your minds, “And then you must ask me if it is right. And if it is right, then you shall feel that it is right.” You will feel the spirit. The spirit will tell you that it is right. But first you have to study  it out in your mind. And then if it be not right, then you should have no such feeling. So that's how it works. We can't just go ask him, we have to do the work first. We have to study it out in our minds, figure out the answer and then pray about it, and when we do, we'll feel if it's right. Or we will have no such feeling. So before I got an answer to my question of if the Book of Mormon is true, I had to actually read the Book of Mormon. I had to read it, study in my mind, I had to think is this logical, does it make any sense? And then I got an answer to my prayer. Before I was going to marry Collette, I didn't just say, “Oh she's cute. Let me pray. Should I marry her?” I had to study it out. I had to go on dates with her and figure it out and ask her questions and we had to figure out if we were a right fit. I had to think about it and pray about it, I had to fast about it. Allthese things I had to do and then I got an answer to my prayer. Before we moved to this home I was like freaking out. If I move to this home, is this going to be a good place for my kids, is it going to be bad. I don't know if it's going to be good. So before we made the decision we prayed about it, we studied it out. We looked at the school systems here, we figured things out and studied in our minds and prayed and then if the answer is true, we'll feel if it is right. Now one thing about this, this is especially true with yes or no questions. We don't come to the Lord, “is the answer yes or no.” because he has to have us feel something and we're like, wait was that for the yes or the no? We gotta figure out, I think this is the right way. Then we say, “Heavenly Father, I feel like the Book of Mormon is true. I read this thing, I studied it, I feel really good about it. Is the Book of Mormon true?” Boom, you'll feel it. “Heavenly Father, I met this girl, I've been dating her. I fasted, I pray with her, I've done everything I can. I know about her, I met her family. I feel like she's the right one. I think I should marry her. Heavenly Father, should I marry Collette?” Boom, I got my answer. So don't do what most people do and take no thought, save it was to ask me. Do what you're supposed to do. Study it out in your minds, and then after you've studied it out in your mind, then ask him if it is right. And if it is right, then you shall feel that it is right. The spirit will tell you, you'll feel it. If it's not right, you will not feel the spirit.  Is this making sense? So that's step number two. Step number one was sanctify yourself, step number two is to study it out, and step number three now, you have to listen, and recognize, and follow the voice of the spirit. And this is where we transition to the second big question now. How do I actually know that this voice is from God, it's not just something in my head that I'm just making up? I don't know about you, but that was my biggest concern all through high school. I would pray for something and I'd have an inspiration and I'm like, “Wait, was that from me? Did I just think that? Or was that from God? Or was that just something I thought from a movie I saw? Or was that evil?...” and I didn't know. How many of you guys have felt that before? It's scary. What if I have inspiration and it's from somewhere that's wrong or evil? I don't know. How do I know what the spirit actually is? For you guys, one of the biggest things is, and I'm going to share with you guys a really powerful tool that I've learned. The biggest thing, you need to start recognizing. I remember I had some really good teachers when I was younger and  I would be in class with them and they would teach something where the spirit would be there and they would feel it. And they would ask us, “Hey do you feel that.” We'd be like, “Yeah I do.” “That right there, that's the spirit.” I remember on my mission we knocked on a lady's door and we came in and started teaching her about the scriptures, we showed her the Book of Mormon and read about it, and then I remember showing her the picture of Joseph Smith in the First Vision. I remember I told the story of the first vision and I felt the spirit so strong as I told that story. And I looked at her and I could tell that she felt it. I said, “Did you feel that?” and she had tears in her eyes, she said, “Yeah.” I said, “That's the spirit telling you it's true.” If you listen to my other podcasts, I encourage you if you haven't or if you have, go back and maybe listen to them again, and as you listen to them, notice what you feel. If you don't feel it with me, then go read the Book of Mormon, or go read the Bible, or go…a big key for us, one of the things we have to learn is we have to learn to feel and then recognize that spirit. So you're putting yourself in spiritual situations, you're going to church, learning about Christ, doing things that are good. Notice how you feel. Because as soon as you start recognizing, “oh that's what the spirit feels like. Oh wow, that's what it is.” Then you can start becoming, it becomes a lot easier. As soon as I realized, and it was sometime through high school, towards the end of my junior or senior year, were the first couple of times I felt the spirit. And what was neat is that, fast forward on my mission when I started praying and I asked if the Book of Mormon was true, and I felt this thing I was like, “That's the feeling, there it is. That's the spirit.” So that's the thing that's going to take, and I don't' know how to explain it other than you feel something. It's like, for me, it's weird when I feel it, because I'll be reading the scriptures or something that's not, I don't know. Sometimes when you go to the movies or something and you see this big amazing thing and you feel like an adrenaline rush, it's almost like I'm in a situation where there should be no adrenaline rush and all the sudden I get this adrenaline rush. I don't know, it's hard to explain and it's going to be different for everyone. So as you feel it, I want you to start recognizing it, because that's how you're going to, the more clear you understand what the feeling is, the better you're going to be able to recognize it as you're moving forward on things. Again, the question, how do you know it's actually coming from God and not just in your head? The best explanation I've ever heard about this, ever, is from a book called Following the Light of Christ into His Presence by John Pontius. I was actually listening to the audiobook of this probably almost a year ago now, and I was listening to it and as I got into it, there was this one section that he called, The Voices. It had such a huge, profound impact on me. In fact, so much so that I'm not even going to try to teach this to you, I'm just going to read this from the book, because it was so powerful. So I'll kind of set this up. He basically said that there are three voices inside of our mind. So when you're hearing stuff inside your head, thoughts and things like that, there's three voices. We start learning how to distinguish which voice is which, man it makes things so much easier. So the three voices, I'll kind of give you what they are ahead of time. Number one is your mind, this is your brain, this is the conversations you're having inside your head. Number two is Satan's temptations, this is Satan, this is the adversary, this is the person who hates us, who's trying to destroy us. Now as I read this, there's some things that will make sense for Mormons, for those who aren't Mormon, I'll give a little preface just so you understand what this means. I think the next podcast episodes I'm going to do, I think the next three I'm going to talk about the three main questions, where do we come from, why are we here, and where are we going? But so the next episode, if that's where I'm going with where do we come from, I'll talk more about this. But as you know, we believe we came, we lived with our Heavenly Father ahead of time, and if you read in the Book of Revelation it talked about Satan was there, there was a big war in heaven and he left with a third of the stars, so we believe that a third of the hosts of heaven, a third of Heavenly Father's children came to earth here, with Satan and they are basically, they work for Satan, tempting us. So as we get to Satan's voice, the voice of the adversary, it's Satan or the people that are here, his minions that are tempting us and trying us at the same time. There's that voice of Satan that's there all the time. Then the third is the voice of the spirit. So these are the only three voices that are happening inside of our head. So when you start understanding what they sound like, now you can start becoming very clear like, “Oh, this is what that meant. This is what I should be doing.” So I'm going to read these sections. So again, the book is called Following the Light of Christ into His Presence by John Pontius. “There are three main sources of voices in a healthy mind, the first is the voice of your own mind. You hear yourself think, you talk with yourself, you discuss things with yourself, you argue with yourself, berate, praise, and jabber with yourself all day long. This voice is distinguishable because it is unsure, or in other words, it questions things. It's seldom definite or decisive. It almost always asks questions. ‘What is that? Who is that? Why did you say that? What does that mean? Do you suppose? What would happen if? I wonder…' Even when it is empathetic it leaves open the possibility of change. ‘I'm definitely going to bed now, okay? I'm going to go to town if the car will start.' “You'll notice that this voice usually takes the personal case. ‘I think I should fast today.' The Holy Spirit would have said, ‘Fast today.” Okay so that's the first voice, that's your mind. Your mind is the one always asking questions. So remember that. “The second voice comes from Satan's realms. It is unlikely that we receive much personal attention from the king of kingdoms personally, rather we deal with his minions, his messengers, and his tempters. These beings have been in the business of tempting mankind for as long as the earth has existed, perhaps even longer. They are undoubtedly very skilled and highly motivated. Each has probably tempted thousands of people just like us, they have spent thousands of years in intimate contact with mortals. They have much more experience with tempting mortals to sin than we could possibly ever have in resisting it. “They know the subtleties and the tricks necessary to entice and trick us into failing. The undoubtedly specialize in their works, meaning that there are certain men that specialize in anger, marital infidelity, family disharmony, murder, drugs, illness, depression, hate, or a million of other maladies, sins and vices. Once successful, they linger with year after year with those that they afflict. When we hear the voice from this source it will be cleverly disguised and enticing. It will appeal to the natural carnal, central, and devilish side of us. There are real intelligences in the message and malice of forethought. They plan and plot against us, and their messages are carefully chosen. “A prompting from this source will nearly always be stated as an absolute. ‘Don't let them get away with that. You're too tired to pray. You deserve better. Pay them back. No one will ever notice. It should be yours anyway. Just take it. She's your wife, not your mother. Football only happens once per year, church can get along without you for one Sunday. She wants you. It's only natural. He loves you more than your husband, how can you not love him back.' “These promptings will always lead us away from the truth. They prompt us to disobey, to not pray, to abandon church assignments and family responsibilities to commit sin and walk in forbidden paths. They have destroyed millions of souls and you're simply the next on their list. They are confident, efficient and successful and they hate us with unimaginable intensity. From their perspectives they are engaged in an all out war against us. Our perspective barely even includes a realization that they exist. It's no wonder that they win so frequently. “One of their weaknesses is that they can rarely voice just one lie. While the Holy Spirit generally prompts us just once, the tempter often voices many objections to each prompting. The Holy Spirit may prompt us to call everyone to family prayer. Thereafter the evil suggests many reasons why you should not obey. ‘Everyone's tired; they're just going to complain. You don't feel like it. The wife is already in bed, it's late, and it's useless. You can do it tomorrow.' This is actually one of the ways we may discern the voices. The Holy Spirit whispers the truth, and thereafter the opposition tirades against it.” Okay there's number two, which are Satan's temptation. This one's interesting to me the more I think about it, because when I first was listening to this as an audiobook, I started thinking, we always talk about how everyone's got their pet sins, or their things that they fall back on. And I honestly believe that when we're born, Satan's got these people tempting us to do all sorts of things, and when we find out, “the thing I struggle with is pornography.” Or “My struggle is Lying or cheating or stealing.” They figure out what our things are and then we literally have someone assigned to us that's trying to tempt us. They know, “That's what Russell falls for every single time.” They're coming back and they'll keep tempting us with that thing over and over and over again. Alright, so there's number two. Now number three…So number one was your mind, number two is Satan's temptations, and number three is the Spirit. It says, “The third source of information in our minds is the voice of the Lord through the Holy Spirit. This voice always entices us to do good. To believe, to serve, to pray, and to repent. It often prompts contrary to where you were headed. If you were just settling into the super bowl on Sunday morning, it would tell you to go to church. If you were already on your way to church, it would prompt nothing but would give us the feelings of comfort and satisfaction. The voice of the conscious is easy to recognize because it is the only one of the three that prompts us to do good. “These promptings come as an absolute statement. The Holy Spirit would say, ‘Fast today.' Your mind would have said, ‘I wonder if I should fast today? Or perhaps I should fast.' Any time you have a prompting to do good it has come from God.” So the mind has questions, it's trying to question things. Satan is typically telling you either to do bad or it's bombarding you with a whole bunch of things, and the spirit prompts you to do something once.  As I was reading this, it was interesting. The spirit will tell you to do something. Like the spirit will say, “Hey you should fast today.” And then instantly Satan's going to come tempt you and be like, “You shouldn't fast today, you're hungry. Instead you should go do whatever.” It will like bombard you with five or six different things to try to fight against that. And then your mind's like, “That's true, I shouldn't fast. What if I did this today….” And it starts questioning it. So if you look at that, almost every situation you're going to be hit by all three of those things. The spirit's going to come and say, “Go to church.” Or it's going to say, “Read the Book of Mormon.” So you hear that spirit says, “Read the Book of Mormon.” It's precise, it tells you to do something. It's a still, small voice and it usually says something once and it stops. Then instantly Satan comes in with his temptations and doesn't say something once, he usually comes in and like, “No, don't read the Book of Mormon. You don't even have a copy and it's going to take a long time and it sounds like scripture and it's going to be a lot of work. You're catholic anyway, you already have a scripture.” All these things, it won't just be one, it'll be one, two, three, four, five. And your mind will be like, “That's a good point. What about this?” and your mind will start questioning it, and that's how you'll know. So the voice we listen to is the still, small voice. The command that's leading us towards good. There's one more paragraph I want you to read because he kind of bundles these all together. He said, “We have been talking a lot about promptings, perhaps even the term needs clarification. A prompting is information that originates outside of one's mind. The Holy Spirit prompts to do good, the Devil prompts to do evil. Our mind's consider and analyze the promptings and make decisions concerning them. These promptings all appear and sound exactly like our own thoughts. The only way to differentiate between them is the way we have already discussed. Good comes from God, evil comes from the adversary, questions and analysis comes from within. It really is just that simple.” So I don't know about you guys, but when I heard that, it just made so much sense. It made things so clear. All the sudden I was like, okay. I just need to pay more attention. When something comes to me, I'm listening. Was it a still, small voice that just told me to do something once? And what happened afterwards? This isn't just church stuff. Every single day when I'm doing my work, what I do for my business, I'm going in there, I'm listening for voices. Usually it will be like, “Hey you should do this.” Something that's leading towards good and instantly Satan comes in and is like, “Oh, you could do this.” And just shortcuts to the ways that aren't serving my audience the highest will immediately come in. And my brain's trying to figure out, what was the first thing? It's interesting, I read a book a little while ago called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he's one of my favorite authors. But in Blink, the subtitle of the book is The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. And it's interesting, the premise of the entire book is like if you look at the majority of decisions, most people their instinct, their initial reaction is truth. And then they come back and try to rationalize it, and figure things out, and most of the time when they do that, they actually end up with the wrong answer. They said that the blink the decision, the immediate thing that you hit with initially is typically the right answer. And as I was reading that, listening to that, I was like, I think that that's the spirit. I think what happens, we have a situation and instantly the spirit comes and tells us what to do with a still, small voice and then the borage of tempters come into us and start fighting things and we try to analyze things and half the time we end up on the wrong path. But if we listen to the blink instinct, the first thing, that's almost always the truth. It's interesting. I just thought it was kind of an interesting tie in as I read that book and thinking about this. And I don't know how these things correlate, and obviously Blink wasn't written through a spiritual eye, but as I read that I was thinking about this, it became very, very interesting to me. So for me, as I pray for guidance every day in my business, I'm always trying to listen to the voice of the spirit. It's happening in business, happening in my family, it's happening as I'm praying and moving forward on things. Alright, so the last step in this process, step number four. Step number one if we come back here, was to sanctify yourself, step number two was to study it out, step number three is to listen and recognize the voice of the spirit, step number four is to follow the voice of the spirit. After we hear, then we must do. Movement is essential. I think a lot of times the Lord gives us little things. He tests us, tries us, gives us little things to see if we're going to be good stewards of what he gives us. And when you do little things, he gives you more. And when you do more, he gives you more. And when you don't pay attention, you fall back. It's interesting. So movement is essential. It's important when you know the truth that you act on it. In times of my life where I follow promptings from the spirit and I move forward I get more of them. Times in my life where I ignore, or I fight against them, or follow Satan instead, I've noticed the voice gets quieter and quieter and I hear it less often. So I want to kind of end this back in Joshua, back in the Old Testament because if you read the entire Joshua chapter three, the story keeps on getting good. So Joshua 3:5 is the verse I shared earlier where it said, “And Joshua said to his people, sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” Then you fast forward, the nice thing about history is we have a chance to actually see what happens. So the people didn't sanctify themselves, and then the Lord said unto Joshua, if you go down to verse 7. “The Lord said unto Joshua, this day will I begin to magnify thee, inside of all of Israel that they may know, as I was with Moses, so I will be with you.” So you remember Moses took the children of Israel out and came to the Red Sea, parted the Red Sea and everyone moved through it. So then he told Joshua, I'm going to let all of Israel see that you are just like Moses. And he said, “And thou shalt command the priest that bared the arc of the covenant saying that when ye come to the brink of the water in Jordan, ye shall stand still in Jordan.” So coming to Jordan, which is this huge body of water,

Today I'm going to try to read the WHOLE Book of Mormon in one day... but before I do, I need to answer some important questions that you've been asking. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the Book of Mormon Challenge podcast. I am so excited for today's episode. It's actually 5:30 in the morning, and I got up really early today because I'm going to be taking you guys on a really special journey, and I'll tell you about it here in a second, but I am just ecstatic. I couldn't fall asleep last night, and this morning I set my alarm for like 5:20, and I was up at 5:00 I couldn't even, which never happens for me. That's how excited I am for today. Really quick, so I launched the podcast this week, which is a huge thing, it's something I wanted to do, honestly, for a couple of years now. And then about 6 months ago or so, I recorded the first two episodes and got excited, then I got nervous and then I didn't do anything about it and then finally, this week I was like, I just need to get this live. So Monday I called my brother up, who does all my audio editing, and got the podcast live. And it's live and I just kind of shared it with friends and family and people I know, and it's been really fun to see people's feedback. And anyway, I'm just going to keep going on this journey and it'll be a lot of fun. So as I have said out there, there are a lot of people obviously, members of the LDS church that listen to it, but I've had a lot of friends, and I've got a big following online, and I didn't really, I haven't published it out there. I think I'm going to talk about it a little bit today, just let people know about it in case they're curious. But some of my friends who aren't members listened to it, and it's been kind of fun and interesting to hear some of their feedback.  Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and it's opening doors to conversations I normally don't have. So hopefully this, for those of you guys who are members of the church, who if you like this, feel free to share this with other people and hopefully it will help open up doors for you to talk about things that we should be talking about. The one thing I want to talk about really quick, the biggest question I've been getting so far by people is, “What's the Book of Mormon Challenge, Russell? What is it?” Well, there's a couple of things. The most basic and the most simple is that I'm challenging everybody, including me to actually go and read the Book of Mormon. And then not to take my word for it, or Google's word for it, but to actually go and pray and see what the Lord says, and say, ask him to find out if it's true. Because if it is true, like I talked about in episode 1 and 2, this is a huge deal and you should know about it, and you should care about it…It's huge. But you gotta find out for yourself, so that's my challenge for you. Now, when you go to BookofMormonChallenge.com, the sites up there right now and all there are is download links to, or subscribe links to this podcast on both apple and android. And a link to where you can get a free copy of the Book of Mormon from lds.org, and just basically a place you can put your email address in to get on a notification list. I'm working on a bunch of really cool things behind the scenes. We have an app coming out and a bunch of other stuff, so those things are coming but for right now I just wanted to start. I wanted to stop using the fact that the site and everything wasn't finished as an excuse, and I just wanted to start. Alright, so with that said, the Book of Mormon Challenge is for everybody to read the Book of Mormon. After you read it to pray about it, ask Heavenly Father if it's true. If it is true, then I got so many exciting things I want to share with you, but that part is up to you. So that's still the challenge. And as I was thinking about this, I thought about when did I take that challenge? And it's been, man, it's been…I'm getting old, it's been like 20+ years since I had that experience. And it changed the trajectory of my life, and I'm so grateful for it. But I wanted to go though it again with everybody. So I was like, I'm going to start reading the Book of Mormon again, in more detail. As you know, if you listened to the intro of this show, and episodes 1 and 2, I actually bought one of the first editions of the Book of Mormon, one of the first 5,000. And what's fun, I've had a chance with my kids to read it, but I don't know the book is kind of frail and fragile, and I haven't really just read the whole thing, and I've wanted to. And Monday, after I launched the podcast I started thinking about a story, and there's a story about a guy named Parley P. Pratt, some of you guys may know him. People who are members of the Mormon church probably know him, but most people probably don't. But he was one of the first people to join the church and he lived back when Joseph Smith was alive in the 1820's, and somebody gave him one of the first 5,000 copies of the book and he started reading it and I found a quote from him last night, he said, it said, “Parley P. Pratt was introduced to the Book of Mormon in an experience that will forever change his life. Later he recalled, ‘I read all day, eating was a burden, I had no desire for food. Sleep was a burden because when the night came I preferred reading to sleep.” And he actually read the entire Book of Mormon in an entire day. Like he said, sleeping and eating became a burden to him. I always thought that was the coolest story. I can't believe he read the entire book in a day. Anyway, on Monday I was thinking about that, I should do a Parley P. Pratt day and actually try to read the entire Book of Mormon in a day, just like he did. How fun would that be? And then I was like, I wonder if I could find the date that he actually did that and I started searching and I couldn't find it anywhere. Then I just went to Wikipedia and looked it up. And it turns out that today was actually Parley P. Pratt's birthday. So this was Monday I found this out. I was like, oh my gosh, Thursday is his birthday. What if I made it a Parley P. Pratt day, I took work off and I just read the entire book in a day? That was the idea, I got excited and now here we are today. I'm going to read the entire book today. So I am pumped and excited and so that's what's going to be happening. So I'm actually going to record multiple sections of this podcast throughout the day to just kind of talk about some of the stuff I'm reading in the book, obviously it's a huge book and I'm not going to have time to talk about everything. But some of the big story lines I'm going to jump back in and just record little pieces for you guys, with the hope that it gets you pumped and excited to go and actually get the book and read it. Those who are members and haven't been reading it recently, it's going to hopefully get you excited to go back in and read it. Those who have no idea what this is about, hopefully get you inspired to actually open it up and read the book. That's my goal, so it's going to be kind of fun. Alright, another couple of things I want to go through before I stop this recording and open the book and start reading. As I've kind of opened the flood gates of this podcast, the questions from people I love keep flying in, so I wanted to talk about one because I think it's really, really important as a preface to any of you guys who are thinking about, “Should I read this? Should I not? I'm scared, do I do it?” and the question a lot of people keep asking me is “Are Mormon's Christians?” and they're like, “I know you've been a Mormon for a long time, but are you guys Christians? What do you guys believe?” I actually, there's an app on my phone called Voxer, it's kind of like a walkie-talkie app, so a couple of my friends who asked me that question, I actually voxed them back a response. I kind of did a little mini history lesson. Let me explain kind of where everything fits in the world history and where Mormons come from. And I explained it and I've sent that to two or three people and they're always like, “Oh, I didn't know that. That's what you guys do? That's what you believe? That's what Mormons are?” and I'm like, “Yeah.” And then it's really fun. So I thought I would just go through that really quick with you guys because if you see where it fits in the timeline of world events and Christianity, it makes a lot more sense. So that's what I'm going to do, I want to kind of walk you guys through that process. For all my good Christian friends, I'm going to start with the Old Testament. So if you read the Old Testament right, everything inside the Old Testament is pointing to Christ. In fact, it's interesting, two weekends ago it was Easter Sunday, it was the Passover, a bunch of stuff, and we don't actively as Mormons, like most Christians celebrate the Passover, but one of our close friends, Monica Tanner who goes to church with us, she actually grew up Jewish and then she became Mormon later, but her and her family always celebrates Passover. So she actually invited us over to their house for Passover dinner, which was one of the coolest things ever. So we went through and we learned all their traditions with the Passover, how it works, and we actually had a Passover meal, we had unleavened bread, it was the coolest thing ever. And she was going through it and she was explaining all this stuff to us, the symbolism, I've always known about the symbolism in the Old Testament and how it all points to Christ, but going through the Passover, it was so cool to see. It was just amazing to see how everything pointed to Christ, it's such a cool….maybe I'll see if I can get her to come on and do an episode because it was just amazing to see how all those things, how they all pointed to Christ. So we fast forward, and we know that Christ comes. He's born from Mary who was a virgin and he lives this life. And what's so cool is we have the New Testament that documents that, right. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all tell the story of Christ and his coming, and his life and everything that happens here on this earth. There's where it's very, we believe the same thing. I have friends who are like, “Oh you don't believe, you guys are Mormons, you don't believe what we believe.” I'm like, “No, we believe the same things, I read the Old Testament, it all points to Christ. I read the New Testament. I love Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All that stuff, we believe all that stuff.” So I don't want people thinking that we don't. We do, I think I've read it and I understand it more than most people. I believe it and it's something that we cherish. So here's where I want to go into the timeline. So Christ is here on earth and before he's crucified he organizes his church and it's somewhere between 30 and 34 A.D. right. He calls 12 apostles; he gives them keys of authority to do certain things to be able to build his church. So he calls his 12 apostles and then he goes out and starts teaching and sometimes it's received really well, other times it's not so well. And as we know eventually Christ is crucified. And then 3 days later on Easter morning, he's resurrected the greatest miracle in the world. And because he was resurrected, we as human beings all have the chance to be resurrected as well, which is one of the greatest gifts ever. If not, the greatest gift. And I'll go deeper on other episodes about Christ and him being our Messiah, our Savior. By far that moment of him suffering and dying for our sins and then rising again is the most important thing that ever has, and ever will happen on this earth. We love Christ, we sustain him as our savior. So for any Christians, yes, that is the most important event in the history of time. From the beginning of time until forever, and that's huge. Now, if you look at what happened after that, I want to talk about the history side, because it's just, it's interesting. So when Christ comes back, he comes back to his apostles and says, “Okay, now it's time to go out and teach this gospel.” If you read the New Testament, the Acts of The Apostles, they're going out there and doing these things. And the rest of the New Testament, these letters they're writing to different people trying to maintain the church and there's false doctrine popping up coming from other religions and other faiths and other belief's and they get converted into Christianity, but when the apostles leave they start doing all sorts of crazy things. They're writing all these letters trying to, “No, that's not what we believe. We believe this, this, and this.” And they're trying to keep this new church together and it's hard. It wasn't in the day and age, like we live in now where there's internet and things that connect people. They're trying to spread this message around the world and it's hard, and they're going out there. And then about 65 A.D. the persecution of the Christians starts happening and it's getting worse and worse and worse, and that's happening for the next 250 years. Now by about 100 A.D. all the apostles have been killed and most of them by some pretty bad, they didn't die happy deaths. In fact, I have a list here that I pulled up. Andrew was crucified, Bartholomew was beaten almost to death and then crucified, James was stoned to death, the other James was beheaded, John as you know, was exiled and then he ended up dying of old age, Judas (not Iscariot, but the other Judas) was stoned to death, Matthew was speared to death, Peter was actually crucified upside down because he didn't want to die the same way the Savior did, he didn't feel he was worthy of that. Phillip was crucified, Simon was crucified, Thomas was speared to death, Mathias was stoned to death. It wasn't a happy thing. People weren't all excited, they didn't take this message of Christianity well. So within 100 years all the 12 apostles of Christ were gone and false doctrines among all the churches started creeping up like crazy, and it kind of just went out of control. We start moving into the dark ages and all these things because of that. Now if you look at, again, history. About 325 A.D. there was this dude named Constantine, and he was not a good person but he wanted power and he was like, “How do I get power?” And he's like, “I'm going to, there's this little thing, this cult of people called Christianity, if I take that and make that the official church it will give me ability to have power.” So he, not in a righteous, good way took all this, took this Christianity thing and made it the national church, made it this big thing, and that's when Christianity as we know it was formalized like, okay this is Christianity. Now, about that time started the dark ages, and the dark ages there's all this time going by where there's Christianity and you read about all these evil, horrible things that happened in the name of Christianity, very non-Christian things happened during this time. About 1054 A.D. the church splits into the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, that's the split of Christianity. But that's kind of what it was. Now fast forward a little bit further down the timeline, 1388 John Wycliffe, he was a Catholic priest. He denounced the Catholic Church, he didn't like it. He was branded as a heretic and then he actually went and translated the bible into English. So if you look at before, there wasn't printing presses, there wasn't computers, there's one or two people who have the bible and they're like, “Oh yeah, the bible says this. You gotta do this.” And they're like controlling people based on what they're saying, “here's the word of God. This is what it is.” So he was a big instrument in getting it translated into English so that other people could actually know about it. But still it was like, there was this book and people just didn't have it. Now fast forward a little further down the timeline, 1455 Gutenberg invents the printing press, which literally changes the world. Bibles were printed all over the place, as well as other books. Bibles were printed and now people, human beings can actually read it themselves and be like, “Wait a minute, it didn't say that. This is what it actually said.” Right, and it gives people the ability to actually know what the scriptures said. Think about that, for the first 1500 years after Christ was born people didn't have access to his words. They just had access to what not righteous people wanted them to believe about his word. It's kind of crazy if you look at it. Fast forward a little more, 1520. This is when it starts, the religious landscape starts shifting a lot. 1520 there's a dude named Martin Luther, and Martin Luther he is going through and he is reading the Bible and reading this and seeing what the Catholic Church is doing and he's like, “This doesn't make sense.” There's things that aren't quite jiving here. In fact, one of his biggest pet peeves was the selling of indulgences, which basically means people would go and would go to their church and they would pay money to get their sins removed. So they do bad things, they would commit adultery, they'd murder, they'd do whatever and they'd go to the church and say, “Hey, I'm going to buy some indulgences, here's some money.” And then the church would forgive them of their sins. And he was like, this is not doctrinal, this is not what the scriptures say, this is not a real thing. And he wasn't very happy about it, so what he did is one day he wrote up what was called the 95 Thesis', he wrote this whole thing up and depending, I was studying last night, depending on different accounts  some people say it was a letter he mailed, some people say he went up to the door of the church and nailed these thesis' to the door. But regardless he basically wrote, “These are 95 things that are not correct that we should be looking at. This is not doctrinal, this is stuff that's being made up.” And so he nailed this stuff to the door of the church, or mailed the letter, or probably a variation of a bunch of things, I don't really know. But that started what we call the Protestant Reformation, where everyone is like, “You're right. This isn't right.” And this is when churches started breaking off from the Catholic Church. We call it the Protestant Reformation, they were protesting the Catholic Church. So they were protesting, they broke off and all the sudden this when all these Christian churches start popping up. Where someone would say, “I believe this is how things should be.” And they would start their own church and they were protesting and they would start it and it became, again, the Protestant Reformation is what this whole thing was. People protesting the Catholic Church and starting their own churches. It was such an important thing because it was giving people the ability to be like, “What do I believe the scriptures mean?” and they would believe that and they could start congregations and churches based on that, so they could worship God in the way that they believed was actually true. And it was super important to the whole foundation of Christianity, I believe. So that's happening and this is happening all over the world. Now fast forward the timeline a little more, boom 1776 America is founded, Columbus comes to this land, a little bit later George Washington comes and they fight for American freedom and one of the biggest things they fight for is religious freedom. They don't want to have the government to be in charge of religion. So they come here to American, they create the constitution, they fight the revolutionary war and this amazing thing happens where they're able to actually worship God in the way that they believe is right. The first time this has happened. There was no government to say, “No, this is what you must believe.” It's scary nowadays if you look at where government is going, they're trying to make it creep back to that. But America was based on religious freedom, you could worship however or whatever you want. So it created this environment now where people could believe whatever they wanted but the pros and cons to that. So what happens is there's all these churches popping up and they're all over the place and there's tons of them. And I can just imagine what it was like then, I know what it's like today, but everyone's believing different things. And one person says, “This is the truth.” And another person says, “This is the truth.” And people are like confused and picking sides and everyone's trying to, everyone in their best interest is like, “I'm trying to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling like the scriptures say. I gotta figure out what's true. I need to know what truth is.” Which, this is by the way, the entire message of my podcast. It's not for us to say, my opinion is this. The whole message of this podcast is what is the actual truth? I'm going to put my opinion on the side and I'm going to suspend my own judgment and try to find out what is God's truth and what does God actually believe, what is the actual truth? So people are trying to figure that out the best that they can. And there are revivals and all sorts of crazy stuff starts happening. Fast forward to the year 1820, so this is where this is kind of coming to a head here in America. All these churches, everything is happening, 1820 there is a boy that lives in upstate New York, he's 14 years old, and he's in the middle of this religious environment and all he wants to do is figure out what church is true. Which one should he follow? In fact, from his history I'm going to read a little part of what he wrote. He said, “During this time of great excitement, my mind was called up in serious reflection and great uneasiness. I often said to myself, what is to be done? Who of all these parties are right or are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it? How shall I know it? While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, 1st chapter, 5th verse which reads, ‘if any of ye lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given to him.' He then said, “Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the hearts of men than this did at this time to mine. It seemed it ended with great force in every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did. For how to act, I did not know. And unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know. For the teachers of religion from the different sects understood the same passage of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the bible. “At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion or else I must do as James directs, that is ask of God. At length I came to the determination to ask of God, concluding that if he gave wisdom to them that lacked wisdom, and would give liberally and upbraideth not, I might venture.” So he reads the scripture that says, “If any of ye lack wisdom, let him ask of God. That giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.” And he's like alright, the scriptures say if you got a question go ask God and he'll tell you. By the way, it's the same message I have for you guys today. So Joseph Smith read that and he's like, “I've got to figure it out.” He's a 14 year old boy. I've got 12 year old twins right now, he's a young, young, young person. And as only a young person can do, he's like, the bible, everyone explains it differently so what am I supposed to do? So he went out next to his home and there was this grove of trees. I've actually had a chance to go there, it was one of the neatest experiences of my life. He goes in this grove of trees and he kneels down and starts praying. And his question is simple, “Heavenly Father, which church should I join. Whatever is your truth, I will do it. If you say this is the church I will go there. I don't care what it is, whatever you tell me is the actual truth, I will do because I want to follow the truth. So he sits down, he kneels down and starts praying and what happened next is not something I don't think he expected, I don't think anybody expected it, but what happened was amazing. And I'll, again, I'm going to read to you his own words of what he said happened. “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. When the light rested upon me I saw two personages whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other, ‘this is my beloved son, hear him.' So what happened to him is he had this vision from heaven. Heavenly Father and his son Jesus Christ came to him and I can just imagine, I don't know what would happen. I don't know what you would do. I can't even imagine that situation, it's the most amazing thing I've ever heard, once again, if it's true it's the most amazing thing that's ever happened. Again, this is why it's so important for you guys to, I'm going to do a whole podcast on how to get answers to prayers, but you guys have to find out if this is true. Because if it's true, if Heavenly Father and Jesus came to a boy and told him the answer to this question, which church is true, what should I join? If that's true, do you want to know the answer to the question? It's amazing. So he asks them, “Which church should I join?” and they basically came back and said don't join any of them. In fact, let me see if I can find in his own words what he said. He said, “My object to going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner therefore did I get possession of myself was I able to speak that I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right? For this time it had never entered my heart that all were wrong and which I should join. I was answered I must join none of them for they were all wrong and the personages who addressed me said that their creeds were an abomination inside, and that those professors who were all corrupt. “They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts were far from me, they teach doctrines for the commandments of men having a form of Godliness but they deny the power thereof.” So he basically said don't join any of them. What's interesting, if you look at this, all these churches are there and my belief is that there's truth in all these churches. Every one was going back to the Bible and saying, “This is what this means.” And they were trying their best to do these things, and there's truth in every single church. And I want you guys to understand that because I have friends in every religious denomination in the world and I have so much love and respect for all of them and there's truth in every single one of them. I love going to other churches and reading other people's scripture. I'm a big believer in that, because there's truth in every single one of them. But basically what Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ said to Joseph Smith was there's truth in all of them, but none of them have the fullness of the truth. And that was the key. They also didn't have the authority. When Christ was here and he called 12 apostles, he put his hands on their heads and gave them authority, priesthood authority to do things. When they were killed that authority kind of disappeared off the face of the earth. So what happened through this vision and others, was basically Joseph Smith was called to restore the true church back on earth. Now I want to talk about this, so if you look at the history of the timeline, there was the Catholic Church and it broke into two things. We have the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church and from there, there were these Protestant Churches that were protesting the Catholic church and started their own things. Where does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, where do they feel they fit? We're not a protestant reformation. We weren't protesting the Catholic Church to start our own thing, we consider ourselves the restoration of the church. We're restored back to the original church. And there's so many cool things I want to share with you guys in future podcasts about what happened. Our Heavenly Father came back, he restored, he called a prophet and 12 apostles, and he gave the priesthood authority to these men, he created temples. Have you ever wondered about, in the Old Testament temples were such a vital part of all these things and these covenants were being made in the temples and there's so much amazingness, where are those today if they were gone? Heavenly Father came back and restored temples; they restored all these things that were lost during the dark ages, during all the persecutions of Christians, during all this history. Like how I went through all these plain and precious truths, these amazing things that were there that disappeared; all those things were restored back. So the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is not a Protestant Church, it's a restorationist church. It was restored back to be the same church that was set up when Christ was here. So once again, there is a prophet today on earth, just like there was in Christ's time. There are 12 apostles, all those things have been brought back. That's the message, that's what's so exciting about this. That's kind of where we feel like we fit. And once again, we are Christians, we believe in Christ, we believe he's our Savior, all those things are the same. We just believe that his true church that was on earth when he was here, the one he set up, over the years has fallen apart and become corrupt and he came back to restore in these latter days. So there's where Mormons are and how we are Christians. The next question that people always ask me is, “What is this Book of Mormon? I already have a Bible. What's the point of this? Why do we even have this? I don't understand.” So the back story on that, because I'm going to explain it and then I'm going to, I'm anxious to jump in and start reading. I'm going to try to read the whole thing today, so I'm excited. After this first vision, we call the first vision, it's the first time that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ came and explained it to Joseph Smith. After that there were a whole bunch of other visions from other people, from angels that came to Joseph Smith. One of them happened September 21, 1823, he was praying in the upper room of his parents log home in New York and an angel came to him. The angel's name was Moroni, and he appeared to Joseph Smith and said, “God has work for you to do.” And he was like, “okay.” And he said, I'm going to read from his account. “He informed Joseph that there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates giving the account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from wence the sprang. The book could be found in a hill not far from the Smith family farm. This was no ordinary history, it contained the fullness of the everlasting gospel as delivered by the Savior.” Imagine this, an angel comes to you and says, “Okay, there's work Heavenly Father needs you to do. There's a hill not too far from your house, and in that hill there are buried these plates.” Plates, we always call them plates, but that sounds weird to most people. It's like a book written on gold pages, like scratched in. Because back in the day, paper isn't going to last thousands of years, so they had gold and silver plates and they would sketch in the writings in these plates so they would be preserved and wouldn't get destroyed from the elements. So there's this book written on gold plates, and it's over here and we're going to go get it. So eventually he went and he found it, dug it up from the earth, this angel named Moroni and he gives him this book. And he's looking in the book, and the book is written in old reformed Egyptian, it's not English, he couldn't read it. And he's like, “What is this book?” and he's like, “Your job is to translate this book from this old language to English.” And Joseph Smith is a young kid at the time and he's like, “I don't know how to translate. I'm not a translator, I don't know how to speak this weird language that's etched into these plates.” He said, “Don't worry, you're going to translate this through the gift and power of God.” I've written two books, and the reason why I tell you that is both of my books took me over a year to write. I feel like they're pretty good books, but they're not the book I'm about to read today. This book I'm about to read today, I'm holding it in my hand, it is thick, it is hard to read, not hard to read but its scripture. It's not like an easy to read, sit down and read stories and its nice and happy. It's a thick real book, it's a book of scripture. Joseph Smith begins translating and I'm not going to get into this podcast how he translates, because I don't have all the details in front of me, but he translated this through the gift and power of God. The entire translation period from the time he started, to the time it ended, was three months between April and June of that year. Three months. Now I don't know about you, I could not write my own book in three months, and I had ten years of me studying and doing and implementing to do the thing I was writing my book on. This is a book that covers over a thousand years of history, with thousands of characters and wars and geology, and theology and it's amazing. And he translated the whole thing in three months, through the gift and power of God. Now when he was translating it, the question is what's on, what were on these golden plates? What was the book? What is it about? So I'm going to give you guys a hint because I'm about to read it. But I'm going to get you guys excited just so you'll know what it is, and hopefully give you guys some desire to actually open it up and read it. Don't be like, “I'm not going to read it.” Are you crazy? If some dude told you there's a book from God, I don't know, I've read most every religious book I could find because I'm like, “If somebody else believes it, I want to read it and find out if it's true. This is important for me. It should be important for all of us.” So what did he find? So he started reading this book and found out, when you start reading the book, when you start translating it, it begins about 600 years before Christ was born, in Jerusalem.  There was a prophet named Lehi, if you're looking at the Old Testament, this was about the same time that Jeremiah was alive. So Jeremiah was a prophet, and if you read Jeremiah it talks about it in there. It said that there were many prophets in the land. So Jeremiah was a prophet, there were other prophets. And one of the prophet's name was Lehi, and that's where the book starts. It's Lehi and his family. And Lehi has this vision, he says, “Look, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, and if you look at history actually it was destroyed.” I think 12 or 13 years later. But he has this vision that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, you need to go and tell people to repent, as most prophets are told to do. So Lehi goes out and tells all the people, “Repent, you need to repent. Jerusalem is going to be destroyed.” And they're like, “Are you kidding me. Jerusalem is like the biggest city in the world, we're not going to be destroyed.” And they start mocking him, they stone him, they try to kill him and they're like, “you're crazy.” So Lehi, this dude back 600 years before Christ is born has another vision that says, “You need to get your family out of here, you're going to be destroyed.” So they gather up all their belongings and they leave Jerusalem, and that's when the book takes place, this exodus of Jerusalem. And they don't know where they're going. They go in the wilderness, and then they start having these visions, “you need to go back to Jerusalem and you have to go get these brass plates.” And they're like, “Why do we get the brass plates.” And they force them to go back and there's this whole story about how they go back and get these brass plates. They get the brass plates, and the brass plates are actually the Old Testament. It was Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, I believe, maybe some more of it. But it's these brass plates back then. So they have the Old Testament that they were able to get and they take these brass plates and they wander in the wilderness for a whole bunch of years and eventually they land on a sea shore, and then the Lord comes to them and says, “you need to build a boat.” And they build a boat, and they jump in the boat and sail across to land. They end up landing here in America, and then they become the ancient inhabitants here in America. So they were part of the ancient Indians, they weren't all the Indians, but they were a part, a big section of the Indians came from Lehi and his family. So they come here to America and the storyline is amazing. There's these two brothers and these brothers get in a fight and they split into two different groups, and one group is more righteous, they're called the Nephites, the other group is more evil, they're called the Lamenites. And the whole book is the story of their civilization and the wars between the two of them and God coming to them and prophesying and prophets coming, and all these amazing things. So it's their dealings. The people who lived here anciently, the ancient Indians and their dealings with God. And it's about a thousand year history. So it starts 600 years before Christ came, and now the coolest thing, and I cannot wait to get to this part in the book, I don't know what time I'm going to get to it. It might be noon, it might be 5:00 tonight, it might be midnight. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get there, but towards the end of the book, the prophets here in America are telling them, “Look, there's this guy, he's going to be the Savior. He's coming here, he's coming to earth. His name is Jesus Christ and he's the Savior of the world and he's going to redeem us of our sins.” Now imagine this, this is other people on the other side of the world in ancient America and they're like, “You're crazy, this isn't a real thing.” The prophet's telling them, “There's a sign when he's born, this is what's going to happen.” And the people don't believe him and they're threatening to kill them and then the sign happens. And they realize that, oh my gosh, on the other side of the world in a little manger in Jerusalem a baby is born who is going to become our Savior and they know that he's born. And they're on the other side of the world, again, there's no internet or TV. But they know he's been born and they don't know what's happening. And however many, thirty some odd years later, Christ is crucified. When he's crucified, the whole world shakes and there's earthquakes and destruction, all this stuff is happening. And the whole story of this is here in the Book of Mormon you guys, it's so cool. And all this stuff is happening and if you look at the history, Christ is crucified and three days later he rises and comes back. He spends time with his apostles, sets up the church, gets the apostles to go and at the end of the New Testament, Christ ascends back into heaven and one of the things he says at the very end, he says, “There are other sheep in my fold, them I must see too.” And he leaves. In the New Testament we have no idea what he's saying. He says, “I have other sheep I need to go visit, I'm out of here guys.” Boom, he leaves. Then what happens in the Book of Mormon, all the sudden these other sheep, this other fold of Christians on the other side of the world, who have been waiting for this day, they've been waiting for their savior, he comes to them. And you get to read it in the Book of Mormon. He comes down from heaven and they get to see him and they see the wounds in his hands and his feet and they get to worship him and he comes down and says, “You guys, let me tell you what happened, and let me tell you the story of my life. And let me tell you the story of how I suffered and died for your sins.” And here in America, he did the same thing he did in Jerusalem, he comes and calls a prophet and calls 12 apostles and sets up his church. What's cool is he sits there and teaches his people. He gives almost the same sermon on the mount to the people here in America, all these things, and so they're writing these words down in these gold plates, because that's what they had to record stuff. And they're writing them down in these gold plates, and you're hearing it straight from the Lord, the lips of our savior and they're being written down in these gold plates. And this is why this is so important. Because if you look at this, when the Book of Mormon was translated, Joseph Smith wasn't a scholar who knew a whole bunch of languages, he didn't have any ulterior motive. If you look at the history of the Bible, it was in the hands of evil people for years who were trying to get the people to believe certain things. And we don't know what happened with the translations, but things shifted and changed and there's stuff that happened. If you look at this, there was a young boy who got this record, these gold plates, and through the gift and power of God he translated them in three months, and after it was done, it was written, it was published in a book, the book I'm holding in my hand, one of the first 5000 that I'm holding here. And it didn't change. It wasn't translated over and over again, people tweaking and changing. It was done once and now it's here. So when you read this, you read the most accurate, the most pure account of Christ giving the sermon on the mount to a different people, but it's the same message. You hear him talk about these things that are confusing in the Bible, and he explains them and they're so simple and so pure and so clean and so much easier to understand, because it wasn't translated from Hebrew to Greek to Italian to English eventually, through ten different variation processes. I don't know if you guys ever played that game phone booth where you whisper in someone's ear and they whisper and like ten people down the message is all messed up. That's literally what's happened to the Bible throughout time. With that said, I love the Bible, it is an amazing thing. But when you read the Bible with the Book of Mormon, it clears up confusion. You hear what he said to the people in Jerusalem, you hear what he said to the people here in America and all the sudden you're like, “Oh, that makes perfect sense now.” The Lord said, “In the mouth of two or three witnesses will every word be established.” So this is the second witness. In fact, the title page of the Book of Mormon it says, “The Book of Mormon, Another Witness of Jesus Christ.” So what's amazing about this, you have two different people from two different sides of the world who had no communication channel through them ever, and they're both saying, “We saw the prints in his hands and in his feet.” This is what he told us, this is what the truth is. This is what the doctrines are. This is what we should believe. And because of that, that is why I know that Christ is my savior. That is why I know that what he did is true. That's why I have absolute certainty and faith in him as our savior. Because it's not just one standard, two separate people have told me the same thing. That's why it's so powerful you guys. That's why it's so exciting, that's why I cannot wait to read this thing today. Now, I don't want to give a spoiler alert, but after Christ came to America and after he preached to these people, he left after that again and after that people were righteous for a long time. And it's cool because you hear all their teachings and prophecies and angels come and all the amazingness that you learn from God from these people in the Book of Mormon, and then eventually throughout generations of time, it gets more and more wicked. And towards the end of the Book of Mormon, like 400 or so, 450 years after Christ had come to them, then the people get wicked and get more and more wicked and eventually these two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites, they fight so much that eventually all of the righteous people are pretty much destroyed. At the very end of the Book of Mormon, there's basically two people left. One is a guy named Mormon, and that's where we get our name. Everyone's like, “Why do we call you guys Mormons, that's the weirdest thing ever.” So there was a guy named Mormon and he was one of the last righteous people on earth and he was the person who, he had all these gold plates, from over a thousand year history of people, they're all writing their histories and he took all this stuff, and I don't know how many were there, I'm imagining dozens, if not hundreds of different books of histories, of records. So he took all of these records from a thousand years, and he was the one, this was back 400 years after Christ came, he went and abridged, not abridged, but he took the book and put it in order, he went through all of it and said, “Okay, this is the history that's most important for our people.” And he abridged this thing and put it together into the gold plates. Here's the abridged version of our history that's most important, the most important things for some future generation. He knew that his people were being destroyed off the earth, that this book was going to be buried up, and someday in the future God was going to bring this book forth. What are the most important things that these people can learn from our history, and he compiled them to the gold plates. And then he gave them to his son, this is Mormon, he had a son named Moroni. Moroni then wandered and eventually buried them in a hill and then he died. So then fast forward to the 1800s, this angel Moroni, this same person who buried these gold plates, came back as an angel to Joseph Smith and said, “Okay, let me show you where the plates are.” And he dug up the gold plates, and Joseph was able to translate them, and that's kind of how things fit together. So Mormon is the guy that took all the history of his people and put it together in a way that we could read and get the most important things for our day and Moroni was his son who buried the Book of Mormon and actually brought it back. So if you ever see a Mormon temple and you see there's this dude on the top of all of them, a gold guy with a trumpet, that is the angel Moroni. And it's Mormon's son, the one who buried the Book of Mormon, and actually as an angel came and showed Joseph Smith where it was at. So there you go you guys. There is the history of Christianity as it relates back to Mormons, what we believe. Yes, we are Christians. Yes, we love the Bible. Yes, there's a new book called the Book of Mormon and that's why it's exciting and how it fits into the whole grand scheme of this world. And that's why it's so exciting. So with that said, I've been talking for about 42 minutes. I am going to go and start reading the Book of Mormon right now from page number one and I'm going to try to read this entire thing today. You know what I'm going to do. I'm going to end this and have this be one episode of the podcast, and then I will do a separate episode of me kind of going through different parts that I learn today. Because this one's already getting long and I want to make sure that you guys listen to this whole thing through. That's the game plan you guys. Once again, I'm doing the Book of Mormon Challenge again because hopefully this will inspire some of you guys to do this as well, that's what the Book of Mormon is. That's why I'm so excited, that's why you should be so excited. That's why we should all be excited. This book has changed my life. This book will change your life if you will allow it to, I promise you that. But don't take my word for it. Go to bookofmormonchallenge.com. You can go request a free copy of the Book of Mormon there, or if you want, you can read it online. If you go to lds.org and search Book of Mormon, the whole thing is online, you can read it there as well. But read it. And just don't take my word for it. Just read the whole thing from beginning to the end and then go ask our Heavenly Father. And I'm going to end kind of where I started. Joseph Smith, when he was a 14 year old kid and didn't know what to do, the scripture that changed his life and changed the world as I know it and as you know it, was this, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not and it shall be given him.” So the same thing's for you. Right now, you know about his, hopefully I'm getting you excited about it, but it's up to you to find out. Okay, you lack wisdom right now, so read it, ponder about it, think about it, figure out is this true? And then go ask Heavenly Father and I promise you, if you ask him, he'll tell you. And I will do a podcast episode really soon talking about how to get answers to your prayers because when you understand, it's exciting. You don't have to take your own word for it, or other people's word for it. Our Heavenly Father wants to tell you. He wants to give you revelation. He will. He asks us. He says, “Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Seek and you shall find.” Ask, if you lack wisdom ask of God. He wants us to ask and if you ask he will tell you. I kind of want to share that with you as well. I'm diving into the Book of Mormon you guys, wish me luck. I hope I can get it all done today. Appreciate you all for listening. If this has helped you at all please share it with other people who you think will be interested as well and we'll talk soon. Bye everybody.

I wanted to start this podcast with a very important question. Is the Book of Mormon from heaven or hell? There is no middle ground and it's essential for everyone who is seeking salvation to find out for themselves if it's true. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, so again, my name is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome to you guys to the very first podcast here on the Book of Mormon Challenge. And I'm not going to lie, it's something that I have been almost starting, probably on and off, for the last year, year and a half or so. I actually first had the idea while sitting in General Conference, it was almost like a calling that I needed to do this and then I didn't. And then I felt like I should do it, and then I didn't, and I back and forthed as we sometimes do. And today's actually an interesting day. My wife and my kids are out of town and I'm home alone. I woke up this morning, getting ready for church and I felt like today was the day. So I got home from church and had kind of a really cool moment where I had a chance to start thinking through this and what this Book of Mormon Challenge was supposed to be. I had purchased the domain name, I had some ideas, but I didn't really know what, where, or how. Sometimes you start taking the first step forward and the Lord tells you what to do and how to do it. So I'm praying that I'm going in the direction that he would have me do. I wrote the intro for this podcast a few minutes ago and I recorded it and hopefully by listening to that you kind of know a little bit about what this podcast is about. So to kind of begin with, because I'm sure some of you guys who are just finding this randomly on iTunes or someone told you to listen to it, you have no idea who I am and the reality is it doesn't really matter who I am. The story and this message is not about me, but just to give you guys some context to who you are listening to, who's talking, my name is Russell Brunson. And yes, the story I told during the intro of the podcast is true. I was born in the LDS church. LDS stands for Latter Day Saints, for those who don't know, the Mormon church. And growing up I didn't know much about what we do, and I went to church and listened to the songs and those type of things. As I got older I remember hearing my dad share with me his testimony about how he found out the Book of Mormon was true. And it was probably, you know my dad is a tough guy, and it was probably one of the few times in my life I've ever seen him cry, was when he told his story. He got his testimony of the Book of Mormon while he was in the MTC waiting to go on his mission to Switzerland. I remember as I was preparing for a mission, thinking cool, I'll just take care of it at the MTC, I'll be good to go. I went to the MTC and I got there and I didn't get a testimony, I didn't have one. And then as I left the MTC I didn't have one and I started going to New Jersey where I served my mission. I'm knocking on doors and I was scared because I didn't have a testimony. I will tell you guys how I received my testimony and kind of the whole experience behind it, actually in the next episode, but I did. And because of that, I know that the Book of Mormon is true, and because of that my life shifted. Everything since that moment when I found out, when God told me, this is the truth, it set me on a different trajectory. And I look now, almost twenty years later, the fruits of that decision and that answer, it's been amazing. At the same time, now I've got a beautiful wife, we've got 5 kids, I've got a business, I've got over 100 employees, I'm doing a lot of things. If you Google my name you'll learn a little about who I am, even though, once again, it doesn't matter. I have a big company, I've written two books through a traditional publisher, I've written a lot of other books as well with a software company, a lot of things that are happening. And as happens to most of us, because of so many things happening, a lot of times we forget about the things that are most important. A while ago I was walking around my house, we live in a beautiful home, and I see Book of Mormon's laying in different spots around the house and realizing that we hadn't picked up those, as a family, for months, if not even longer. And I was looking at that one night, just looking at one of these books, it was laying there and I was like, “This book is not important, it's vitally important to salvation for myself, for my kids, for those who I care and I love and it is the key to help us understand Christ today. And we just throw them on the ground. They're just sitting there and we don't open or read them and this book that should be the most important thing in the world has become just a commodity, it's just sitting there. It didn't really matter to us as a family. I remember how much that bothered me, so I remember thinking I have to make this special again, but how do I do that? So what I ended up doing, I started searching for an original copy of the Book of Mormon. I remember when I was on my mission somebody had said, there was one for sale on EBay or something, it had sold for like $150,000, I don't know, something crazy like that. So I'm like, I'm going to see if I can find one. So I started searching and through my searching I think I found 6 that were actually for sale. Some of them were really expensive. One of them was owned by Hyrum Smith, who was Joseph Smith's brother, it was for sale for over a million dollars. There was one from Samuel Smith, who was the first missionary of the church ever, it was on sale for over a million and then it went down from there. There was a $500,000 one, a $200,000, $100,000, an $80,000 and then I found one that was cheaper as well. I ended up purchasing, not the million dollar one, I purchased one that was a lot cheaper, but it was funny because I didn't…It was actually an EBay auction and I didn't buy it, and it expired. And then later, a couple of months later he relisted it, I was like, I had all this emotional drama. Finally I decided you know what, I'm going to do it. Because I need to make this special to me again. And it's interesting because, I know there's a lot of different people listening to this. There are people who are not members of the LDS church, there are people who used to be, who left, and there's probably people who are members of the church. So regardless of where you're at, I want you to understand that I needed and I wanted this to be special to me and my family and I wanted to treat this like it was probably treated when it first came out. When Joseph Smith printed the first 5,000 copies, people financed their entire lives to be able to print this book and when they got it, it was like when it touched their hands for the first time, I can't even imagine what that felt like. You hear the stories about Parley P. Pratt, when he got the book and he sat down and he spent, he started reading and read for an entire day until he finished it. He said that sleeping and eating became a nuisance because he wanted to read this book. I think about the first missionaries, when somebody came to England and they handed one of these books to someone, what that must have felt like, and how special that could have been and should have been and probably was. And I wanted that again. So when we ordered the book, it was right before General Conference, which those who aren't members of our church, General Conference is when the Prophet and the 12 Apostles speak to us twice a year. So I called up the person I bought it from, I said, “Can you overnight this to me. I want this before conference. I want to show my kids this.” So it showed up and we had this just amazing moment with my kids where I had a chance to tell them the history of the Book of Mormon and how it came about. We talked about the Gold Plates and the whole origin story of the Book of Mormon, which I'm sure we'll cover in more detail in future episodes, But how it came about and the sacrifice that went into this thing. I showed pictures online on LDS.org of where it was printed at the Grandin Building, the whole thing. We talked about there was only 5 thousand copies that were printed and how most of them have been destroyed or have fallen apart. I said, “Hey you guys want to see something cool?” and I opened it up and I pulled this book out and let my kids touch it and it was so cool in their eyes. They're like, “Dad, this is one of the first ones? This is one of the ones you talked about?” I'm like, “Yeah, how cool is that?” Since then, it's been fun to share it with people around me. A lot of times someone has an heirloom like this and they put it in a glass case and air proof it so that fingerprints don't destroy it because they're looking at it as an investment. But for me it was never an investment for financial purposes. I wanted the investment for me and my kids, being able to read it as a real book. So It's been such a cool experience. And as we read it as a family it's been fun because, you know the first time it was printed, think about this, it was back in the early 1800's and they didn't have printers and things like that, so they were taking letter by letter and put them on these things and then they'd stamp ink on it, and stamp the ink onto the pages. It was crazy. So there's little typo's and little errors and things like that, that somewhere between the translation, you know the people reading it, to the people putting the metal pieces in to spell all the words out of this huge book, the little issues. So as we say something in the book that sounds different, like “Shall” versus “shalt” or just little typos like that, the kids will raise their hand and it's come to be a really cool, special thing. That's why we did it, and shortly after that I felt like I wanted to share this experience with more people. Because if other people, if I can make the Book of Mormon more real for other people as well, it will transform their lives as it has transformed mine. So that's why this podcast and this challenge and everything has been created. I'm just not sure exactly what's going to happen on bookofmormonchallenge.com but it'll be a challenge for all of us to go through, to find out if this book is true, or if you're a member who left, or if you are a member who believes, how to actually take this book and use it as a tool to radically shift your life and the life of your family. So that's what this is all about. And again, I don't know the path of where this is all going yet, I just know that this is the direction that I am supposed to go. My biggest fear with this podcast, honestly, and why I don't think I've done it for the last year, year and a half since I first had the idea was, I teach, I'm an educator, I've written books, I speak at seminars all around the world, I have audiences of…our next event coming up we have 3500 people will be there, I'll be speaking for 3 days onstage. I'm not afraid of speaking or teaching, I do that all the time. My biggest fear is teaching within the church, teaching about God, because it's not me. I'm fully aware of that. I can speak at an event, I can get people excited, I can tell stories in a way that motivate and get people excited. But if I go on this mission to serve you guys in this way, if I don't have the spirit with me, I know that none of this will matter. Because this is not about me being a good teacher, it's about me, allowing or letting or having, or whatever, the spirit speak through me to you. So I pray as I do this that I'll have the spirit so that you will not just hear what I say, but you feel what the spirit wants you to learn through these messages. And I'm going to try as close and as hard as I can to stay close to the spirit so I can deliver this in a way that will give you the ability to feel the spirit and make the changes you need to. With that said, as I'm going through this I am 100% fully aware that I am going to mess up a lot in this. I'm going to teach things that maybe aren't doctrinally correct, things that I think are right, things that are my opinions, or things like that. So a big thing, this is not the doctrine of the church, this is according to Russell. I'm going to try to stick as close as I can to the doctrines, what we know are true. But if I mess up, don't blame the church, blame me. That's a big thing. The second thing is if I say something, don't take my word for it. That's the most amazing thing about God is that the power he has given us is not take things blindly on faith. Faith is not about blinding believing and walking. He says, learn something and then bring it to him, and pray, and ask, and he'll tell you if it's true. So if you hear me talk about the Book of Mormon, about concepts, about doctrine, about ideas, about things that I believe are true, the reason why I'm sharing them is not because I'm a genius or because I made them up or anything, it's because I heard them, and then I prayed, and then the Lord told. I know that God answers prayers and I know he'll answer your prayer if you ask. So if you're confused or you wonder or whatever, ask. I'm sure we'll do a podcast going deeper into how to do that and what to look for and what you're trying to feel, but he is the ultimate giver of truth and he will let you know if it's true. Alright, so why am I doing this podcast? A couple of reasons. Number one, I've got the 5 most amazing kids on Earth, by far. Someday I'm not going to be here and I want this to be archived forever. I want my kids to know what I believe. I want them to know that forever. My kids, my grandkids, I want people to know what I believe. And I want my testimony to stand. That's number one. Number two is because there's a lot of people in my world around me who see what I do in the business side of things or other places, and I want them to be very clear on where I stand and what I believe. I'm hoping that I have people who aren't members who wonder, “Why is Russell so happy all the time? Why is he so excited? What is wrong with this guy?” I want you to understand what is wrong with me is this. I am happy, I have this spirit, I understand where did I come from, why I'm here on Earth, and where I'm going. And when you understand those things with absolute clarity, you can't help but be happy and be excited. Yes, there are sad, depressing, horrible things that happen but when you understand the plan, it makes you free, it makes you happy. So for those around me who are wondering why I'm so happy, I want this to help you understand where I stand, what I believe and hopefully it will give you the boost, the inspiration, whatever you need to figure it out for yourself as well. Because the third reason I have here on my notes is, if I can help one other person understand this and feel what I feel, they say in the scriptures if you help one soul come to Christ how great will be your joy in Heaven with that person. And I hope this will be a tool to help at least one other person. And if I do that it'll be worth the time and the energy that I put into it. And number four, the last one is that I know how I work and I know that when I'm focusing on something I will learn it and I will get more from it. For example, when I have to teach a lesson in church and I have the whole week to prepare, I prepare, I study, I learn, I get so much value in that week I'm like flawless. Satan can't tempt me. I can't struggle, I can't deviate, I do everything perfect and I love that feeling. And then when I don't, it's harder, life is harder to focus. A little while ago I gave a talk in Sacrament meeting and I told the Bishop from the pulpit, I said, “If there's ever a calling for a full time sacrament speaker, please tell me. Call me to do that. I would love if every week I just had a chance to give a talk.” And after I sat down, I had this epiphany. I was sitting there thinking, maybe I can't give a talk in Sacrament every week, but I can have that feeling, what if I……and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to start this podcast. If every Sunday I have a chance to record a podcast, and I have all week to study and prepare and get ready for it, and then I record it, it'd be the same thing. I'd keep the spirit with me throughout the entire week. It gives me focus on my studying, it gives me a reason to do it and when I do that I'll enjoy it. And each Sunday I'll have a chance to record this for you guys and hopefully it will help you as well. But honestly, it's a selfish reason for me, to help me stay on the straight and narrow path, which hopefully is okay for me to do. I hope you guys do the same thing. I think everyone should be publishing. We don't talk more about our beliefs. We should be writing blogs and doing podcasts and talking. So hopefully, if this inspires one other person to do the same thing as well, that is awesome. That is another purpose behind it. Alright, so before I wrap up this session, I want to just talk about two things. Because this is why I'm doing this podcast, and this is why it matters, and this is why it matters for you to listen and to pay attention and to read the Book of Mormon and then to pray about it. Because I have so many friends who, I'm not shy about, my friends know I'm Mormon, they know my beliefs. They're always like, “Oh that's nice Russell. That's cool that you guys believe that.” I'm like, “I don't just believe that, I know it.” And I don't want people to dismiss it. So I'm going to talk about two things that can be seen as kind of harsh, but it's important because I need you to understand how important this is. I remember on my mission I would knock on people's doors and I'd share the message of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ coming to Joseph Smith. I'd share this amazing experience that literally has transformed everything, and I'd share with somebody and they're like, “Wow, that's so cool.” I'm like, “I know. Can we come back and teach you more?” or they'd say, “That's awesome, I believe that's true, I believe that actually happened.” I'm like, “That's amazing. So will you read the Book of Mormon?” and they're like, “No, I'm good.” And I'm like, “What?” Do you understand? You need to understand the severity of this. If this is true, this is the most important thing that's ever happened on planet Earth outside of the atonement of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. This is the most important thing that's happened on Earth besides that one thing. What's cool is they actually tie together directly. So I'm like, I would almost bring concerns to people's minds initially because I'm like, “I need you to understand how important this is.” So that's kind of my goal right now. I'm going to probably raise some concerns, but that's good because it's going to help you understand why this is important. Because I don't want you listening along and be like, “Oh that's nice, I'm going to listen and get inspired once a week or whatever.” No! This is not about inspiration, this is about change. If you don't make a change in your life, there's no purpose to this at all. And you have to understand the severity of what we're talking about for you to understand why you need to make that change. So these are two quotes. One is from a father, and one's from a son. The father was one of the 12 apostles. He's my favorite dead apostle, he's no longer on Earth now. And I will talk about my favorite living and dead apostles, but my favorite one who has passed away, his name is Bruce R. McConkie and speaking of the Book of Mormon this is what he said, “These are deep and solemn and ponderous matters. We need not think we can trifle with sacred things and escape the wrath of a just God. Either the Book of Mormon is true, or it is false. There is no middle ground. Either it came from God or it spawn from the infernal realms. It is not and cannot simply be another treaty on religion. It either came from Heaven or it came from Hell. And it's time for all those who seek salvation to find out for themselves whether it's from the Lord or if it's from Lucifer.” Alright, now that's about as dramatic of a line draw in the sand as you can make. You're here today listening to the Book of Mormon Challenge podcast and as I've just stated, there's not a middle ground. Either this book, that I'm holding in my hands right now, again this is one of the original 5 thousand books. Either this book was given to us from God, or was given to us from Satan. That's it. There's no middle ground. So for you, you need to understand that, and be like, “Okay, if this came from God I need to get it in my hands and I need to read it and understand. I need to ask God if it's true. If it came from Satan, then everything Russell's talking about is pure evil.” There's no middle ground. It's not like, this is a nice book, this is a good book. It's either from Heaven or Hell and that's it. So for any of us, who are true seekers of truth and want to understand why are we here, the three big questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? And Where are we going? If you want to know those answers to those questions, they are here within this book and you will understand them with perfect clarity, but you have to understand first that this book either came from Heaven or Hell. It's vital for you to find that out. I can't tell you. I can tell you what I believe, but you have to know. And it's so vitally important that if you don't figure that out, if you're like “it's not that big of a deal.” If you're wrong, “oh yeah, it's gotta be evil.” Or “It's got to be good.” Or whatever. You can't just be like, “Oh yeah, I'm sure it's a good book.” No, it's not a good book, it's either from Heaven or from Hell and you have to figure this out for yourself. That's how important this is. So I'm putting that on you. This is the challenge that we're going through, the Book of Mormon Challenge. The challenge is for you to figure that out. Is this from Heaven or is this from Hell? I promise you as you read these pages, you will feel and you will know and you will understand where this is from. But also understand that when you understand and when you find out where this is from, you have to change your life in accordance with that. That's the second half of the challenge. We'll get to that later. But right now that is the challenge for you to find out. Is this book from Heaven or from Hell? As Bruce R. McConkie said, “It's time for all those who seek salvation to find out for themselves whether this is from the Lord or if it's from Lucifer.” So that's the challenge you guys, and I want you to understand that. I'm saying it as boldly as I possibly can because it's that important. People always talk about, “Oh yeah, it's a good book…” No, it's not. It's not another treaty on religion. It either came from Heaven or from Hell and for all those who are true seekers for salvation, you have to find out for yourself. Alright that's number one. Number two, my next question I get a lot and I understand is people ask, “Why do we need a Book of Mormon? We have the Bible, we have these other things, why do we need that? Why would God make this other thing come to us? What's the purpose of it, what's the reasoning?” Okay, I'll get into that the next episode. We're going to go deeper into that, but there's a quote from Bruce R. McConkie's son, his name is Joseph Fielding McConkie. When I heard this the first time I got it, and I understood it. This is what he said, “Why a Book of Mormon? Because it's the perfect test of spiritual integrity. Acceptance of the Book of Mormon requires the same faith that was necessary to accept Christ in the Meridian time. As he was opposed by false traditions and a corrupt priesthood, so the Book of Mormon is opposed today. The doctrines are the same, the opposition is the same, and the courage and the faith necessary to accept it are the same.” So what that means is this book right here, that I'm holding in my hands, how we treat this book is the exact same way we would treat Christ if he was here today. I want you guys to understand that. How do you treat the Book of Mormon right now? People always say, “If Christ was here I would have been one of the one's that fought for him. I wouldn't have let him be crucified. I would have been on his side. I would have been one of his disciples. I would have been one of his followers.” Well, he's not here today, he's risen, he's back in heaven, he will be coming again for the second coming hopefully sooner than later, anxiously waiting that. But he's not here today, so what did he do? He sent something and these words, inside of this book, they're his words. Everything it talks about is his. The words, the lessons, the messages, the stories, the doctrines, this is Christ's doctrine. How you treat this book is how you would have treated Christ if he was here today. This was the test. This is our test of spiritual integrity. So think about it, the reason I started this whole challenge is because I was looking at that. I was looking at this book sitting on the ground, you know my kids have kicked around, it's sitting there, laying there a Book of Mormon, a blue one, sitting there. I'm looking at that thinking, how am I treating this? How I treat that book is how I would treat Christ if he was here. I'd just lay him on the side and I walk around and do my other stuff. Too busy with my daily life. Too busy with my work, with my kids, with school, with all this stuff to even notice he's there. When you think about it that way, it changes things. How you treat this book, is how you would treat Christ if he were here today. So for me, I thought I need a change or else there's going to be a day when it's too late. I'm going to see him again and at that day I don't want to be someone who said, “I didn't cherish your message, I didn't listen, I wasn't paying attention.” I want that day to see him and be able to give him a hug and know that I treated him the way that he deserved to be treated. So this book, this amazing book that I cannot wait to get into with you guys, and for those who have not read it yet, I cannot wait for you guys to read it. For those who have read it, I cannot wait to re-inspire you, re-get you excited about it because this book, the way we treat this book is how we'd treat Christ. And if all of the craziness of our days is keeping us from this book, and keeping us from this message and keeping us from this thing, then we're missing it. We're missing the whole point. All the other things are just distractions. How we treat this book is how we'd treat Christ if he was here on this Earth. So this challenge is about a couple of things. First off, this challenge is for you to figure out where this book is from. Either it came from Heaven or from Hell. Either it came from the Lord or From Lucifer. It's time for us, for all of us who really care about salvation, those who want to return back to our Heavenly Father, it's time for us today, to figure out if this came from Heaven or from Hell. That's number one. Number two, after we find out and we understand who this is from, we understand that these are Christ's words, this is his teachings, his message, his doctrine, his principles, everything wrapped into a perfect book. As soon as we understand that, then the next challenge is how we're going to treat this book. How are you going to treat this message?  Is it going to be something you read every once in a while, like I've been guilty of doing? Or is it going to be something you grab onto and hold with your hands and share with other people? My goal with this challenge is for the latter. I want all of us sharing this message and this podcast is my initial attempts towards that. Bookofmormonchallenge.com that's coming my next challenge towards that. And I'm encouraging you guys to participate in this, and I hope that you do and I hope that you take this for the importance that it is. This is literally the most important message you'll hear in your life. This book as you will find, will teach you about God, it will teach you about Christ, it will teach you about his sacrifice he made for us. It will teach you about the way we can repent and return back to him. It will teach us how to be there together as a family. Everything that you need to know to answer the three questions. Who are you? Actually the first one, where did you come from? Why are you here? Where are you going? Those questions will help you understand who you are and when you know who are, it'll change everything. Your life will be happier, your future will be brighter, and life will be better. So that's my goal with this podcast. I'm so excited that you are listening to this, and next episode I'm going to be talking about a concept I call the three givens. I'm really excited for that. This is a talk I gave in church a little while ago, I've been preparing and talking and thinking about this for a long time and I'm so excited to share that with you. With that I'm going to end this intro episode. If you know anybody else who you think would be interested to listen, tell them this story, “I met this crazy guy, he went and spent a fortune, bought one of the original 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon, and he did that because he wanted to find out if it came from Heaven or from Hell and you should listen to this podcast.” And tell them that and let them subscribe and let them listen to this message and then give them the challenge. Tell them, “You've got to find out for yourself. Russell figured it out for himself, I figured it out for myself, other people have figured it out for themselves, now it's your turn. Is this from Heaven or is this from Hell? You need to find out.” This is not something you should be trifling with, not something you should just wash away and be like, “Oh, I read something online so it's evil.” If you're trusting people's opinions on Google, you are insane. Being an internet marketer now for over 14 years I know how simple it is to publish anything you want online. Do not trust other people's opinions. The only thing you should trust, is God's opinion. This is something that is so vitally  important to your salvation, to your happiness, to everything. It's not something you should trifle with, “Oh, I read this article about this.” Or “Oh, my friend said this.” Or whatever. The only person that needs to tell you that this is true or not is God. I can't tell you that. I'm going to be excited because I am and I'm going to talk about this, share ideas, my only goal is to inspire you enough to go and ask God if this is true. That's it. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. That's not my goal or my purpose ever. I cannot convince you of this. If I logically convince you that this is true, guess what's going to happen? As soon as you start moving down this path, Satan's going to come and he's going to turn the heat up and you will not be able to withstand the trials and you will leave. I have family members people I love more than anyone on Earth who have left the church. Because they didn't know this book is true. They hadn't read, they hadn't prayed, they hadn't gotten the message, they had not had Heavenly Father tell them that this is true. So when the heat came up, they left. I have friends who were members of the church, went on missions and when the heat came up they walked away. The heat will be turned up. I want you to understand that. When you accept this, and you understand it, temptations and trials and people will come around you and try to pull you and rip you away from that. That's how Satan works, he does not want you to be happy. He will do everything in his power, so if I logically convince you of this, someone can un-logically convince you just as simple. Now I say that as, not to be cocky or anything. I've written books on persuasion, I think there's few people on Earth who understand persuasion better than me. I can persuade people of anything. But if I can persuade you of one thing, you can be persuaded away. My job, my goal of this podcast is not to persuade you of anything, it's to get you excited enough to dive into the book so that you will then go and ask God, and he will tell you. And if he tells you, then you will know it's true. Over the last probably 20 years or so, since he told me, I've had insane amounts of pressure from every single side trying to pull me away from this message, but guess what? God told me it was true. So nothing can, I can't be moved. I believe him. And there's nothing that anyone can do ever to take that away from me. You need to have that same thing. But you're not going to get it from me logically convincing you of anything, so I'm not going to. All I'm going to do is hopefully get you excited enough to read the book and then to pray. God will tell you and then you'll know, just like I know. That's the goal you guys. Thank you again for listening to this podcast, please invite others you know to listen to it as well, and on the next episode I'm going to talk about the three givens. And this is the core foundation of your testimony. In God, in Christ, and in the restoration of the church through the Book of Mormon. So thank you guys again so much for listening. I appreciate you guys and I'm excited to start this journey with you. I hope that this message gets you excited enough to read the book and to treat it the way that it deserves to be. And that's all I got today. So thanks again you guys and I'll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

On this episode of the LDS Perspectives Podcast, Russell Stevenson interviews Elizabeth Kuehn, a Joseph Smith Papers historian and documentary editor, about one of the lasting blemishes on the Mormon Kirtland experience – the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank. Most agree that the Panic of 1837 was the proximate cause of the failure of the bank, but many have long speculated about Joseph Smith’s culpability in the episode and how the practical fallout from the collapse led to the falling away of some of Joseph’s closest associates. When we talk about bank panics, it is natural to visualize It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey has a savings and loan company and all these people run into the bank, and they want to withdraw their money. He says, “Well, you know, your money’s in this person’s home, and your money’s in that person’s home.” But this is not at all like it was within Kirtland. The Kirtland Safety Society was not a deposit bank, so it doesn’t have that It’s a Wonderful Life connection. It’s funded by shareholders who are slowly paying for their stock, and that’s the funding for the bank. The bank exists because John Johnson and Oliver Cowdery and Emma Smith had all paid a portion for their stock. The establishment and failure of the Kirtland Safety Society is a rather complicated issue – one that deals with specie, 1830s finance laws, bank vetoes, and practices foreign to modern financial practices. Kuehn deftly walks Stevenson and listeners through the ins and outs of how the bank is established, its short life and demise, and the fallout. Sometimes the Kirtland Safety Society is presented as this weird or reckless endeavor when actually, it was born out of ambition, and it made a lot of sense for the Kirtland community to try and jump start the economy. Even their detractors noted that it made sense. Joseph tried it, and it failed. He was disappointed by this, but it didn’t consume him. He was able to move on. Many others were able to move on. Kuehn shares a spectrum of examples of how members reacted to the failure. There is Parley P. Pratt who came out strong and angry, then became one of the most repentant. Next you have the quiet acceptance of Wilford Woodruff and the staunch acceptance of Brigham Young, who realizes some of Joseph Smith’s shortcomings but is able to move forward. You also get some poignant descriptions in the letters of Vilate Kimball, where she recognized what the dissenters are feeling and experiencing. They feel betrayed; they feel this sense of being unheard; they’re not being part of the decision making process that they want to be part of. She says, “You know what? I feel a lot of sympathy and pity for them, but the Lord requires His people to be chastened.” That’s kind of where she ends it, with this expectation of, “You have to get in line with the Prophet if you’re going to continue with the Saints.” Later in Utah Joseph Young called this a stumbling block for the Saints — a moment where they have to decide whether or not Joseph is a prophet and whether or not they will follow him. For Kuehn, that’s the larger take away. This question of “What are the expectations of a prophet?” and looking closely at this period of dissent, this period of faith crisis, and these questions of “Where do you draw your lines? How do you voice your disagreement?” Tune in to hear Elizabeth Kuehn discuss religious and financial crisis during the Kirtland years. To read more from the Joseph Smith Papers on the topic, check out Documents, Volume 5: October 1835-January 1838. Extra Resources: Episode 64 Transcript Documents, Volume 5: October 1835-January 1838

[paypal-donation] In this episode, we'll discuss Ugo's DNA critics. Of course there are critics of Dr. Perego, as well as Joseph Smith.  At Wheat & Tares, commenter Mike posed a question wondering if Emma had sex with one or more of Joseph Smith's brothers, would that affect Dr. Ugo Perego's test results?  (Apparently he is parroting questions popping up in ex-mormon rumor mills.) The simple answer is it would have zero impact on Dr. Perego's results.  Here's why. For the record, I don't like Mike's assertion, but for a moment let's assume that Mike is right:  Emma was fooling around with Joseph Smith's brothers.  Even if this were the case (and there isn't a hint of historical evidence to think this was remotely true), it simply wouldn't matter with regards to Dr. Perego's DNA test results, which state that 0% of Smith DNA has been found in any of the potential children. Let me repeat, even if Emma had sex with Joseph Sr., Hyrum, Don Carlos, William, Samuel and gave she gave birth to a child of Joseph's brothers (or even father for that matter), all the while Joseph Smith is completely clueless (or somehow didn't care) to this improbable scenario, 0% of Smith DNA was found in Josephine Lyon, John Hancock, Oliver Buell, etc.  That rules everyone in the Smith family out.  It simply doesn't matter if Joseph's DNA is confused with his brothers because 0% of Smith DNA is in the suspected children.  None.  Not only has the entire Smith family been ruled out as father of the potential children in Dr. Ugo Perego's test, but the real father has been identified (Parley P. Pratt, Levi Hancock, Windsor Lyon etc.)  It is not simply ruling Joseph or the Smith family out, it is ruling Parley in, Levi in, etc.  It simply doesn't matter if Emma had sex with anyone outside of Joseph.  Smith DNA is nowhere to be found, and the father of Josephine Lyon has been identified, and it is Windsor Lyon.  The father of John Hancock has been identified as Levi Hancock.  The father of Moroni Pratt has been identified as Parley P. Pratt.  Cases closed.  There is no question about who the fathers are. So even if this highly unlikely scenario is true, Emma's sexual habits simply don't matter at all since the entire Smith family has been ruled out and the real fathers have been ruled in and identified. What's bothers me that most in this ridiculous conspiracy theory is that it seems to be an attempt (1) to discredit Dr. Perego's results by throwing up a diversion while (2) impugning the Smith family as sexually licentious.  I know that several in the ex-Mormon community have no problem throwing Joseph under the bus, but it seems especially insidious to accuse Emma of being licentious as well.  There isn't even a hint of Emma having sex with any of Joseph's brothers (or anyone else) in any journals, records, newspapers, etc.  None.  I find such "brainstorming" extremely distasteful and beyond ridiculous.  The science is settled.  If you don't understand the issues, read them.  They are published and these questions are not only distasteful, but the issues are completely settled.  If you still have questions it is because you are too lazy to read the articles.  (I posted links in my previous show notes.) Ugo Discusses Smith's Critics, and his own This leads into my next episode.  Dr. Perego discusses a particular critic who said several derogatory things about Dr. Perego, as well as the Smith family. Ugo:  You have to understand that there are people here.  No matter how curious you are about history, and how much of a National Geographic experience it is for you, or a Discovery Channel, whatever it is, there are real people involved.  People that are alive, people that are descendants of these individuals, and they have a relationship with their ancestors that is a lot different than you have with them.  You look at them as historical figures that you can trash, play with, speculate, say whatever you want about them.  But to some people,

[paypal-donation] We started this conversation by talking about the paternity of Josephine Lyon.  It turns out that Dr. Ugo Perego is also testing other potential children of Joseph Smith.  We'll talk about the historical relationship between Joseph Smith, Orson Hyde, and Marinda Johnson, as well as Parley Pratt and Mary Ann Frost.  What are the results of the Joseph-Parley paternity test? Ugo:  Mary Ann Frost was the second wife of Parley P. Pratt. He was born December 1844, Moroni Pratt, which placed him 9 months within the death of Joseph Smith.  Mary Ann Frost was sealed to Joseph Smith, was never sealed to Parley.  In fact Mary Ann Frost is recorded as one of the first females, if not the first group that received the temple ordinances in the Red Brick Store.  She was there when Joseph Smith introduced the first temple endowment.  Eventually she was sealed to Joseph and children were born.  The first one, Moroni was linked to Joseph Smith as a possibility.  I think Fawn Brodie mentions that as a possibility in her book. ... I found a document while I was researching this when I was doing this project that had Parley P. Pratt's statement that every child he would have with Mary Ann would be Joseph's in the eternity.  Are you with me?  So every child he would have with Mary Ann Frost would have been Joseph's in the eternity.  It sounds to me very much like the Levirate marriage where the man dies, his wife is still alive, we're talking about spiritual wife here because we are talking about celestial marriage, the next of kin, which would be brother Pratt to Joseph, spiritually is raising a posterity in eternity for Joseph. GT:  Hmmm. That is very interesting interpretation. Ugo:  That's what he said.  That's what Parley said.  It's not my words. GT:  Parley said that? Ugo:  Parley said that. GT:  So let me make sure I'm clear on the thing.  So you said that Frost, what was her first name? Ugo:  Mary Ann Frost. GT:  Mary Ann Frost was sealed to Joseph but that was after… Ugo interrupts:  but married to Parley. GT:  Was she married to Parley before she was sealed to Joseph? Ugo:  Yes. GT:  That just seems so strange. Ugo:  She was married to Parley for time, but to Joseph for eternity. GT:  See I think most people would be so surprised to hear that they would have a polygamist marriage that would be not for eternity.  I mean when you read D&C 132, that's what it seems like and so it seems so strange. Ugo:  We still don't know a lot of things about it.  If you are very negative about the whole thing, you're always going to look for the dirtiest reasons why there were these things:  polyandry, promiscuity, sexual interest, control over women, whatever you want to bring up. But if you are more on the, well let's see.  If they are really trying to establish some celestial order on the earth; Who are we?  We are all children of Heavenly Father.  It doesn't matter how we are connected as long as we are connected to him at the end, right Ugo also makes some interesting points regarding potentially polyandrous relationships. Ugo:  We have to wonder, what was the nature of a woman being alive and having some certain documented tie, a union, or marriage to more than one man?  We are trying to speculate and guess what was the nature and the practice and the environment and the sexuality that surrounded this union.  Was it the same?  Was it different from husband to another husband?  We are left with wondering on this issue. Besides, the fact that we don't have children of Joseph Smith from polygamous relationships does not tell us anything about his sexual interactions with this woman.  We all know that you don't have a child every time you have intercourse.  But it does bring up some interesting alternative answers when you see that there are absolutely no children.  Brigham Young had no problem having children with all his wives, or Joseph F. Smith, or anyone else,

Join Lindsay as she interviews Joe Geisner about the murder of Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt. Links and text mentioned and read in this podcast: A Voice of Warning by Parley P. Pratt Writings of Parley P. Pratt Quest For […]

Parley P. Pratt. Even his name is interesting. Minister, missionary, poet, author, and Apostle; he lived only 50 years, but left a powerful legacy including an autobiography and some 50 hymn texts -- many of which are still favorites of the Saints. Now "Parley P. Pratt's Greatest Hymns" gives new arrangements to these favorites, and musical life to many others for the first time. The writers, arrangers, and producers for this project are Pete Peterson and Roger Hoffman. Pete is former Executive Vice President of WordPerfect Corporation, currently a volunteer with the Perpetual Education Fund, who says he would have been an excellent musician except for his problems with rhythm and intonation. Roger is is a Clio and Peabody Award-winning songwriter, singer, and arranger -- the writer of "Consider the Lilies," a Tabernacle Choir favorite. Today we talk to Roger and Pete about bringing the hymn texts of Parley P. Pratt to life. Thanks for listening! - SKP

Join Lindsay and John as they talk with Joe Geisner about the famous murder of Parley P. Pratt. Pratt was murdered by the ex-husband of one of his plural wives in a violent incident. They also talk to Craig Foster about the murder of James Monroe when he started to court the plural wife of Howard Egan. Egan claimed he did this “not for anger but for justice,” and cited mountain law as justification. Are these murders justified or plain old revenge? And what the heck is mountain law? Listen to this episode here.