From Mormon to Christ.

The Words Outlive the Prophet I get the monthly reader from In Touch Ministries, the devotional booklet from Charles Stanley's ministry. Tonight I opened it to the first page, and the reading pointed me to Zechariah, chapters 11 through 14. Here's the honest part. I had studied about Zechariah in a school textbook. I had never sat down and read the book of Zechariah itself. Tonight was the first time. So I pulled out my ESV Student Study Bible and read the introduction, the outline, and the map. The outline has two halves. Chapters 1 through 8 are oracles and visions. Chapters 9 through 14 are the return of the King. The reader also invited me to follow an idea: places where a prophet said something, and it came to pass later, sometimes long after the prophet was gone. I started looking, and I didn't have to look far. Thank you, In Touch Ministries, for the nudge. In Touch is not a random stop for me. A Charles Stanley sermon, "Grace and Continuing Sin," was one of the voices the Lord used on the afternoon I spent thirteen hours in the Bible, when Genesis 15:6 finally broke grace open for me. The same ministry that pointed me to Zechariah tonight had a hand in the day the word took hold of me. The Verse That Started It It was right at the front of the book. Zechariah 1:5-6 says: "Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they returned and said, Like as the LORD of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us." Read it slowly, because there's a whole story in it. First, "the prophets, do they live for ever?" No. The fathers are gone, and the prophets are gone too. Second, God's "words and statutes" were "commanded" to the prophets. The words came from God, and the prophets carried them. Third, those words "took hold" of the fathers. Many of those fathers ignored the prophets while they lived. But the words didn't die with the men who spoke them. Later, a generation "returned" and admitted that the LORD had dealt justly with them. Notice what God does here. Right before this, in Zechariah 1:3, He says: "Turn ye unto me, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the LORD of hosts." The invitation to return comes first. The words of the prophets are the road back. That's my idea for this post. The prophet dies, and the word keeps working. Isaiah and Cyrus The word spoken. Isaiah wrote that God would raise up a man named Cyrus: "That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (Isaiah 44:28). A few verses later: "Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus" (Isaiah 45:1). The gap. Isaiah was long dead. Well over a century passed, and Jerusalem fell to Babylon in between. The fulfillment. "Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom" (Ezra 1:1). The decree goes on through Ezra 1:2-4, and 2 Chronicles 36:22-23 records it too. What I take from it. A prophet named a king before the king existed, and the word waited. Nobody had to rescue it. When its season came, a Persian ruler did exactly what had been said. Jeremiah and Daniel The word spoken. Jeremiah told the exiles how long it would last. "For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place" (Jeremiah 29:10). He said it earlier, too, in Jeremiah 25:11-12. The gap. Jeremiah's life ended and the years rolled on. The fulfillment. Here's my favorite part. Daniel was reading Jeremiah. "In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem" (Daniel 9:2). Daniel opened the scroll, saw the number, and started to pray (Daniel 9:3). The return followed under Cyrus, and Ezra 1:1 says it happened so that Jeremiah's word "might be fulfilled." What I take from it. A word written down by one prophet was still working years later, in the hands of another prophet who was willing to open it and pray. Scripture kept doing its job after the writer was gone. Elijah and the House of Ahab The word spoken. Elijah pronounced judgment on Ahab and Jezebel. "And of Jezebel also spake the LORD, saying, The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel" (1 Kings 21:23). The gap. Ahab humbled himself, and God answered: "I will not bring the evil in his days: but in his son's days will I bring the evil upon his house" (1 Kings 21:29). So the word was held back. Elijah was then taken up (2 Kings 2), and he was not there when it landed. The fulfillment. It came in the next generation, in 2 Kings 9:30-37 and 2 Kings 10. Of Jezebel, the text says: "This is the word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite" (2 Kings 9:36). What I take from it. This is a sobering example, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it shows that God's words don't expire and don't get lost. Some of them wait for the next generation. Samuel and David The word spoken. Samuel anointed a shepherd boy. "Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward" (1 Samuel 16:13). The gap. David did not become king the next week. He spent years running from Saul. Then: "And Samuel died; and all the Israelites were gathered together, and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah" (1 Samuel 25:1). The fulfillment. "So all the elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron; and king David made a league with them in Hebron before the LORD: and they anointed David king over Israel" (2 Samuel 5:3). The full account runs through 2 Samuel 5:3-5. What I take from it. Samuel never saw David on the throne. He planted the word and went home to God. The anointing outlived the man who gave it. Micah and Bethlehem The word spoken. "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting" (Micah 5:2). The gap. Centuries. A great many centuries. The fulfillment. When Herod asked where the Christ should be born, the answer came straight from the scribes: "In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet" (Matthew 2:5). See the whole scene in Matthew 2:1-6. What I take from it. The people who answered Herod knew the verse. Micah's word had been sitting in a scroll for hundreds of years, and it named a small town. Malachi and the Messenger The word spoken. "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me" (Malachi 3:1). Malachi also looked ahead to Elijah in Malachi 4:5-6. The gap. Malachi was the last Old Testament prophet, and then came roughly four hundred quiet years. No new prophet spoke in all that time. The fulfillment. Jesus said of John the Baptist, "For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee" (Matthew 11:10). And a few verses later: "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (Matthew 11:14). See also Matthew 17:10-13. What I take from it. Malachi's words bridged the silence between the Testaments. Four centuries of quiet did not make the word weaker. Zechariah and Christ I saved the one that brought me here for last. The book I opened tonight points past itself to Jesus, about five hundred years later. A King on a donkey. "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass" (Zechariah 9:9). It is fulfilled in Matthew 21:4-5 and John 12:14-16. John adds something honest: "These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him" (John 12:16). Even the disciples only saw it afterward. The One they pierced. Zechariah 12:10 says, "and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced." John quotes it at the cross: "They shall look on him whom they pierced" (John 19:37). The scattered sheep. "Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered" (Zechariah 13:7). Jesus said on the night He was betrayed, "for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad" (Matthew 26:31). What I take from it. Zechariah never saw any of it. He wrote, and five centuries later it happened in front of the disciples' eyes. What This Means for Us We usually measure faithfulness by how fast someone responds. If they don't answer, we feel we failed. Scripture often runs on a longer clock. The fathers in Zechariah's day didn't listen. The prophets died. Then the words "took hold" of the next generation, and they returned. Samuel never saw the throne, Isaiah never saw Cyrus, Malachi never saw John. I know something about a word that waits. I spent nearly four decades as a Latter-day Saint, and I had heard Scripture quoted all my life. But there came an afternoon when I sat down and read it for myself, and verses I thought I already knew took hold. My life did not change because the words were new. It changed because their season came. Here's what I'd say to a brother or sister who has shared Christ with family or friends and heard only silence: silence is not the same as failure. Plant the seed. Speak the truth kindly. Let God's word do its work in its season. The generation that repents may be the next one, and we may never see it. I'm not saying this makes the waiting easy. It doesn't. But I'm saying we're not asked to make the word work. We're asked to carry it faithfully, and trust the One who sent it. A Word to You If you've been quiet about your faith because nobody seems to hear, I'd ask you to keep your door open. Keep it kind. Conversation, not confrontation. God's words have a way of outliving everyone who spoke them. And if you're simply curious, I'd invite you to do what I did tonight: open a book you've only studied about, and read it for yourself. Notes on Sources This post was prompted by the monthly reader from In Touch Ministries, which pointed me to Zechariah 11 through 14 and invited me to study it and to follow the idea of prophets whose words came to pass later. I'm grateful for it. The study aid I used tonight was the introduction, outline, and map for Zechariah in my ESV Student Study Bible. The outline of chapters 1 through 8 as oracles and visions, and chapters 9 through 14 as the return of the King, comes from that Bible's outline. In following Isaiah and Cyrus, I'm following the Bible's own presentation of Isaiah. Some scholars date parts of Isaiah later, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend there's no discussion. I've left out the thirty pieces of silver on purpose. Matthew 27:9 attributes that quotation to Jeremiah, and that question deserves its own careful post. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #Bible #KJV #Scripture #Zechariah #Prophecy #Prophets #Faith #Jesus #Gospel #Christianity #Grace #Truth #Hope #Patience #BibleStudy #Devotional #WordOfGod #Pastoral

The Question Was About Tithing. The Question They Meant Was About Marriage. New post is up on Substack. Some of the most honest questions I hear are about money, and very often they aren't really about money. A person asks about tithing, and what they mean is, "If I follow my conscience, will it cost me my marriage?" This piece takes that second question seriously. It states the Latter-day Saint position as fairly as I can, walks through what the Bible says about giving and about peace in a divided home, and ends with a few gentle principles for a hard conversation. It describes a pattern, not any one person. Free to read, like everything on the Substack. Read it here: https://frommormontochrist.substack.com/p/the-question-was-about-tithing-the "What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." Psalm 56:3 Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #Mormonism #LatterDaySaints #Marriage #Tithing #Conscience #FamilyAndFaith #Doubt #TruthInLove #Pastoral #Christianity #Bible #KJV #Scripture #Gospel #Grace #Truth #Jesus #Faith

Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Parents: The Longing, the Record, and the Bible. New post is up on the Substack. I sang O My Father for years. I know the longing in that verse about a mother, because I felt it. In this piece I state the Latter-day Saint position as strongly as I can, from the Church's own words, and then I take it slowly to the Bible: how Jesus taught us to pray, what Scripture's mother-language actually is, and whether the tenderness people are reaching for is already there in the one God of Israel. Read it free here: https://frommormontochrist.substack.com/p/heavenly-mother-and-heavenly-parents "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Isaiah 49:15 Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #Mormonism #LatterDaySaints #HeavenlyMother #HeavenlyParents #MotherInHeaven #Theology #OMyFather #ChurchHistory #Christianity #Bible #KJV #Scripture #Gospel #Grace #Truth #Jesus #Faith #Respect

Episode 4: After All We Can Do: What 2 Nephi 25:23 Really Says. New podcast episode is up. It may be the most quoted verse in the Book of Mormon on grace: "for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." It is also the verse I reached for the day I tried to answer my pastor's sermon, and that attempt started the long Bible study where grace finally broke through for me. In this episode I read the verse in its own setting, I lay out how Latter-day Saints understand it as fairly as I can, and then I take the same question to the Bible. Eighteen minutes, and free to hear, like everything on the Substack. Listen here: https://frommormontochrist.substack.com/p/after-all-we-can-do-what-2-nephi "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Ephesians 2:8-9 Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #Mormonism #LatterDaySaints #BookOfMormon #2Nephi #Grace #Podcast #ChristianPodcast #ExMormon #LeavingMormonism #Christianity #Bible #KJV #Scripture #Gospel #Faith #Truth #ProveAllThings #Respect

Nothing But Leaves I'm writing this the same day I heard it, so it's still fresh. This morning I sat in church taking notes while my pastor preached through Mark 11, the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple. He was teaching the passage. He wasn't talking about Mormonism. But somewhere in the middle of it, something dawned on me about my own 38 years as a Latter-day Saint, and I haven't been able to shake it. What follows is my application, not his. STEELMAN: THE LATTER-DAY SAINT POSITION, STATED FAIRLY A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you the temple is not a hiding place from God. It is a house of prayer, a place to draw closer to the Savior, make covenants with Him, and worship Him. They would say they are saved by Christ and not by a building, and that the Lord commanded temples to be built. They would also point out, fairly, that Jesus was speaking to the leaders of one particular temple at one particular moment, and that I shouldn't treat their temple as the same thing. I think that's a fair point, and I'll come back to it. QUICK REFERENCE Doctrine and Covenants 88:119 describes the kind of house the Lord asks for: "Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;" Doctrine and Covenants 97:15-16 gives the promise: "And inasmuch as my people build a house unto me in the name of the Lord, and do not suffer any unclean thing to come into it, that it be not defiled, my glory shall rest upon it; Yea, and my presence shall be there, for I will come into it, and all the pure in heart that shall come into it shall see God." "House of prayer" is the same phrase Jesus quotes in Mark 11:17. THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE (KJV) Mark 11 gives us a strange scene. "And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet." (Mark 11:13) My pastor pointed out that it wasn't the season for figs. Jesus was using the tree to teach, the way the Old Testament prophets acted out their sermons. From a distance the tree had life. Up close it had nothing. Then Jesus walks into the temple, and it is the same story. From a distance it looked great. Up close it was defiled. The Old Testament had warned about this. My pastor took us to Jeremiah 7 and Shiloh, where God's people used the temple as a hiding place. Their religious activity made them feel safe because they came to the temple. Possessing the house of God did not protect them. His point was that they became so committed to their religious system that when the Son of God stood before them, they chose their religion. The withered fig tree points ahead to the coming judgment on Jerusalem and the temple. I want to be fair here. I agree with the last point in the steelman above. I'm not saying a Latter-day Saint temple is the Jerusalem temple of that day, and I'm not saying Latter-day Saints are like the leaders who rejected Jesus. Many of them love Him and are sincerely trying to follow Him. I'm saying this warning is for anyone, me included, who is tempted to trust a place or a practice instead of the One it points to. I can only speak for myself. I was a Latter-day Saint for 38 years, and I know what a hiding place feels like. I know what it is to feel safe because I went to the temple. Temple attendance, callings, worthiness interviews. From a distance my spiritual life looked full of leaves. I believe that can happen in Mormonism, because it happened to me. Possessing the house of God never saved anyone, and I know because I lived it. When grace stood before me, I almost chose my religion too. That is the honest truth. If you are a Latter-day Saint reading this, brother or sister, I'm not assuming your life is empty, and I'm not asking you to make any decision today. I'm asking one honest question, the one I had to ask myself. When I stand before Jesus, what am I really trusting? Religious appearance is not the same as spiritual life. Jesus was not angry at a tree. He was showing what judgment looks like when religion has no reality behind it. And He is still standing there, offering something better than a hiding place. Himself. NOTES ON SOURCES The sermon points above come from my own notes on my pastor's message on Mark 11:12-25 this morning, and the application to Mormonism is mine, not his. All Bible quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. The Doctrine and Covenants passages are quoted from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' standard edition. A Latter-day Saint reading this could rightly say that I'm drawing on my own experience and not proving anything about every member, and that is true. Where Our Hope Is The passage ends with faith, prayer, and forgiveness (Mark 11:22-25). The danger is thinking religious systems can bypass them. Have faith. Hope is not in religious performance. Not in the leaves. Our hope is in Christ. And when He gives you life, fruit will follow. "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him." (John 4:23) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #Mormonism #LatterDaySaint #Christianity #Testimony #Grace #Temple #Mark11 #FigTree #JesusSaves #BibleStudy #KJV #Gentleness #ConversationNotConfrontation #TruthMatters #Faith #Hope #SpiritAndTruth

I want to talk about this video at this link: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1343637844373133 I came across this reel from Taco Talks, and I want to be honest. He tells a good story. Quick, sharp, well put together. And on the basic question in the video, I'm not going to argue with him. I lived inside that world for 38 years. I know what the doctrines say and what the history shows. But I want to talk about how he tells it, because the telling matters as much as the facts. In about a minute, every Latter-day Saint watching that video heard themselves described as either deceived or deceiving, and their church called a cult and an abomination. I can tell you exactly what happens next, because I was that viewer for most of my life. The door slams shut. You don't hear another word after that, no matter how right the facts are. That kind of talk made me shut down and get angry when I was in, and it kept me from hearing the gospel for years. So I tell it differently. Not because the facts are different, but because the audience is. I was one of them. I sustained Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Thomas S. Monson by raised hand. I taught those lessons. So when I talk about Mormonism, I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking to them, and I want them to stay in the room long enough to actually hear what I'm saying. That's why I lay out the Latter-day Saint position the way a believer would state it before I ever open my Bible. That's why I don't use words like cult or abomination, no matter how I feel about the doctrines. That's why it's conversation, not confrontation. It's not softness. It's not compromise. It's the method that finally reached me. Nobody yelled me out of Mormonism. A 13-hour Bible study, grace from Romans 5 and 6, and someone who took my beliefs seriously enough to answer them honestly. That's what opened my door. Taco tells it to Christians about Mormons. I tell it to Mormons about Jesus. We both want the same ending. I just want the door to still be open when I get there. "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." (Proverbs 15:1) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #Mormonism #LatterDaySaint #ChristianApologetics #Christianity #Apologetics #ConversationNotConfrontation #Testimony #Grace #JesusSaves #BibleTruth #Gospel #TruthMatters #Faith #Baptist #Salvation #ComeUntoChrist #ShareTheGospel

The First Vision Every Latter-day Saint knows the story. A fourteen-year-old boy, confused by competing churches, walks into the woods to pray and is answered by God the Father and Jesus Christ themselves. It's the founding moment of the whole Restoration sequence, the claim that the existing churches were wrong (Joseph Smith, History 1:15-20), which is what makes a restoration necessary in the first place. I sustained three prophets who trace their authority back to that morning in the grove, and for most of my life I never thought to ask a simple question: which telling of that story am I actually sustaining? Steelman: The Latter-day Saint Position, Stated Fairly. A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you that Joseph Smith told this story more than once over his lifetime, in different settings, to different audiences, for different reasons, and that variation between tellings is exactly what you'd expect from anyone recounting a real, personal event years apart. They'd point out that even eyewitnesses to the same event naturally recall and emphasize different details depending on the moment, their audience, and what mattered most to them at the time. They would say the 1832 account, written in Joseph's own hand, was likely the first time he'd tried to put the experience into words, and that writing was harder for him than speaking. On the specific question of one figure or two, they'd point to the Church's own Gospel Topics essay, which offers a harmonizing reading: that "the Lord" in the 1832 account can reasonably be understood as referring to both divine beings under a single title, consistent with the 1835 account, where one personage appears first and a second follows soon after. On that reading, the 1832 account isn't describing something different from the later accounts, just describing it less completely. They would also point out that Scripture itself shows this kind of variation without anyone calling it a contradiction. When Paul recounts his own conversion on the road to Damascus in three separate places in Acts, the details shift slightly each time, depending on his audience and purpose, and nobody reasonably concludes Paul fabricated his experience. They'd ask why Joseph should be held to a stricter standard than Paul. That is the strongest form of the argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off. Quick Reference. There are four firsthand accounts of the First Vision, three written or dictated by Joseph Smith himself and one written at his direction: 1832 account, in Joseph's own handwriting (with Frederick G. Williams), the earliest and most personal version. 1835 account, Joseph's description to a visitor in Kirtland, Ohio, recorded by Warren Parrish in Joseph's journal. 1838 account, written for the official history of the Church, later canonized as Joseph Smith-History in the Pearl of Great Price. 1842 account, the Wentworth Letter, a summarized version written for publication. Key differences between the 1832 and 1838 accounts: Who appeared. The 1832 account says, "I saw the Lord," describing one figure. The canonized 1838 account says, "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!" (Joseph Smith-History 1:17). His age. The 1832 account says he was "in the 16th year of my age." The 1838 account says "in the fifteenth year of my age" (Joseph Smith-History 1:7). His stated purpose for praying. The 1832 account says, "I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go and to obtain mercy," focused on personal forgiveness. The 1838 account says, "My object in going to enquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join" (Joseph Smith-History 1:18). A religious revival. The 1838 account describes "an unusual excitement on the subject of religion" in the area (Joseph Smith-History 1:5) as the reason he sought an answer. The 1832 account, written first, does not mention a revival at all. The Church's own position, stated in its Gospel Topics essay, is that the accounts "tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail." In 2024 the Church added further Gospel Topics pages addressing these multiple, differing accounts directly. The Biblical Response. I want to start by granting what's true in the steelman, because it matters. People really do tell the same true story differently at different times, and Scripture isn't free of that kind of variation either. When Paul retells his own conversion in Acts 9, 22, and 26, small details shift between the tellings, most famously whether his companions heard a voice. Acts 9:7 says, "And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man." Acts 22:9 says, "And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me." I don't think that's a fatal contradiction, and I'm not arguing it is one here either. Where I'd ask you to slow down is on what kind of detail is varying. Paul's variation concerns a secondary detail, whether his companions understood the words they heard. The core claim, that the risen Christ appeared to him personally, never moves across any telling, and Paul's experience had outside witnesses present who could be asked what they saw. The First Vision has neither of those. Joseph was alone, by every account, so no second witness exists to weigh the versions against. And the differences between 1832 and 1838 touch the center of the claim itself, not the edges: one figure or two, personal forgiveness or the identification of the one true church. Here's the piece I think deserves real weight. James 1:5-6, the verse Joseph said prompted him to pray in the first place, reads, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering." That's a promise about receiving wisdom. The 1832 account describes exactly that kind of answer, personal assurance of forgiveness. The institutional claim, that he was told to join none of the existing churches because they were all wrong (Joseph Smith-History 1:19), appears only in the later, more polished retelling. I'm not in a position to tell you what Joseph did or didn't see in 1820, and I'm not going to pretend I can settle that from here. What I can say is that the doctrine of a Total Apostasy, the claim that required a Restoration in the first place, rests on this vision as its historical foundation. Given how much is riding on it, I think 2 Corinthians 13:1 states a fair principle to bring to any extraordinary claim: "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established." I'm not applying that as a courtroom rule to a private prayer in the woods. I'm saying that where a claim this large rests on one man's account of a private experience, an account that grew more specific with each retelling over the following decade, it's worth the same patient, honest weighing James 1:5-6 itself calls for, not a quick verdict in either direction. The Church has its own harmonizing reading, and I've laid it out above honestly. I'd ask you to read both side by side, the way I've tried to present them here, and weigh for yourself how much interpretive work that harmonizing reading is doing. Notes on Sources. The text of the 1832 account, the 1835 account, and the historical grouping of all four firsthand accounts are drawn from the Joseph Smith Papers project's own published page, "Accounts of the First Vision," at josephsmithpapers.org. Joseph Smith-History 1:5, 1:7, 1:17, 1:18, and 1:19 are quoted from the Pearl of Great Price as published by the Church at churchofjesuschrist.org. The Church's harmonizing explanation and its "consistent story" language are drawn from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "First Vision Accounts," Gospel Topics Essays, accessed July 30, 2026, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/first-vision-accounts. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. I want to be fair here. Latter-day Saints would point out, correctly, that the Church itself has published these differences openly rather than concealed them, and added further pages on the subject as recently as 2024. I'm not suggesting otherwise. My disagreement isn't that the accounts exist or were hidden. It's a genuinely open question I'm laying out rather than resolving, how much weight the harmonizing reading can bear against an account that grew in specificity over time. Some of the earliest documentary work cataloging these differences, by independent researchers, has held up well enough over the years to be engaged seriously by LDS historians themselves, including scholars affiliated with the Joseph Smith Papers project. I've treated that kind of material as a starting point for where to look, cross-checked against the primary accounts and the Church's own essays, not relied on as the final word. This was hours of work, reading the actual 1832 handwritten text and the canonized 1838 account side by side myself, rather than trusting my memory of a story I heard told only one way for 38 years. I never once heard the 1832 account in any lesson, manual, or Sunday School class in all my years as a Latter-day Saint. When I finally read Joseph's own handwriting for myself, years after I'd already sustained three prophets who stood in the line that vision produced, it was one of the first cracks in what I'd always assumed was settled ground. I don't say that to shame anyone still standing where I stood. I say it because testing a foundational claim against its own earliest telling, and sitting with both sides honestly, is something I wish someone had asked me to do far sooner than I did it myself. "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established." (2 Corinthians 13:1) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FirstVision #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #JosephSmith #SacredGrove #Mormonism #LatterDaySaint #ChurchHistory #ChristianApologetics #Christianity #Apologetics #BibleTruth #Gospel #Testimony #TruthMatters #Baptist #Salvation #JesusSaves #KJV

To the Missionary Reading This I've touched on missionary work in other posts before, usually just a passing line about the years I spent sitting in on those lessons, but I've never given this its own space until now. I sat beside missionaries just like you for years, as a branch mission leader, helping them teach the very lessons you teach today. I sustained three different prophets with my own hand before I ever understood the gospel of grace. So this one isn't written about missionaries. It's written to them. The Missionary's Conviction. If you're a Latter-day Saint missionary, you didn't wake up one day and decide to knock on doors for fun. You gave up two years of your life, or eighteen months, paid your own way or had your family pay it, left your friends and your girlfriend or boyfriend and your bed, and went to a country you may never have seen, to talk to strangers about Jesus Christ. You believe you're doing this because a marvelous work has come forth in the latter days, and the field is white and ready for harvest. You believe the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ, and that anyone who reads it with a sincere heart and real intent can know it's true by a witness of the Holy Ghost. You believe the priesthood authority to act in God's name was lost from the earth and restored through Joseph Smith, and that faith, repentance, baptism by immersion, and the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost are the first principles and ordinances of the true gospel. None of that is a small thing to believe. It costs you something every single day you're out there. I know, because I sat close enough to it for years to feel exactly what you feel. Quick Reference. Doctrine and Covenants 4:1-5, on the call to missionary service and the field white to harvest. Moroni 10:4-5, the promise that a sincere prayer about the Book of Mormon will bring a witness by the Holy Ghost. Articles of Faith 1:4, the first principles and ordinances of the gospel as taught by the Church. The Biblical Response (KJV). Here's where I have to be honest with you, as someone who sat beside the missionaries teaching those lessons for years. Paul wrote about people just like the two of you. Romans 10:2-3 says, "For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God." That's not an insult. It's a description of sincere people running hard in the wrong direction. Paul loved the people he was talking about. He wanted them saved. That's exactly how I feel writing this. The gospel Paul actually preached is laid out plainly in Ephesians 2:8-9. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Not baptism plus faith. Not ordinances plus grace. Grace alone, received by faith alone, so that nobody, not you and not me, can ever point to what we did and take credit for our own salvation. That matters because Paul was also willing to warn people about a different gospel, even one brought by someone claiming heavenly authority. Galatians 1:8-9 says, "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed." Paul says the same thing again in 2 Corinthians 11:4, warning about someone who might come preaching "another Jesus, whom we have not preached." A message doesn't get a pass because it comes with sincerity, or even because it comes with an angel attached to the story. It has to match what was already given. That leads to the last thing I want to say, and it's said with respect, not mockery. You've been taught to trust a feeling, a burning in the bosom, as the test of truth. But Scripture points somewhere else first. Acts 17:11 praises the Bereans because "they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." And 1 John 4:1 tells us, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." A feeling can be real and still be wrong about what caused it. Scripture asks you to test the message against the text, not just against your chest. Notes on Sources. The Doctrine and Covenants and Moroni 10 citations are quoted from the Church's own published text of those books. Articles of Faith 1:4 is quoted from the Pearl of Great Price as published by the Church. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. I want to be fair here. Latter-day Saints would say the "burning in the bosom" is meant to work alongside study and reason, not instead of it, and that Moroni's promise assumes a sincere, prepared heart already searching the text. I'm not pretending otherwise. My disagreement isn't that Latter-day Saints never study. It's that the final test they're taught to trust is a subjective spiritual confirmation that, as I read Scripture, can't override or add to what God already revealed once for all through the apostles and prophets. Before I wrote a word of this, I went back to the sources themselves. You deserve better than my memory of what I used to teach. If you're the missionary this found its way to, here's the only thing I really want you to hear. I'm not trying to get you to leave your family, deny your service, or throw away years of sacrifice. I'm asking you to do the one thing your own faith already tells you to do: test everything, even this post, against the actual words of Scripture. I did that thirteen years into being active, and it's the reason I'm writing to you as a Baptist today instead of still sitting beside missionaries teaching those same lessons. You gave up a lot to go tell people about Jesus. I'm asking you to spend just as much honesty finding out who He really is. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #ExMormon #FromMormonToChrist #LDSMissionaries #Missionaries #ChurchOfJesusChrist #LatterDaySaint #Mormonism #Christianity #Apologetics #GraceNotWorks #Ephesians2 #BookOfMormon #DoctrineAndCovenants #ArticlesOfFaith #Gospel #JesusSaves #BibleTruth #Baptist #Salvation

What Leaving Really Costs I've mentioned pieces of this before in passing, a comment here, a line in another post, but I've never actually sat down and given this the full weight it deserves until now. Nobody warns you, when you're inside, how much it can cost to leave. I know that cost personally. This post is for the person sitting on the edge of that decision right now, afraid of what's on the other side, and for the Christian who loves someone in that position and doesn't understand why the family's reaction feels so much bigger than "we disagree." The Doctrine Behind the Distance. If you weren't raised Latter-day Saint, it's easy to assume family estrangement over someone leaving the Church is just wounded pride or social pressure. It's usually something much deeper than that, and it deserves to be understood fairly. A Latter-day Saint who has been married in the temple believes that marriage and family were sealed together not just for this life, but for eternity, by priesthood authority. Doctrine and Covenants 132:19 describes a couple sealed by "the Holy Spirit of promise" as inheriting "thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths" together, a glory that is "a continuation of the seeds forever and ever." Doctrine and Covenants 130:2 adds, "And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory." Family isn't a metaphor in this theology. It's the actual shape of exaltation itself. When someone in a sealed family leaves the Church, many Latter-day Saint family members aren't just losing a person's company at Sunday dinner. In their theology, they may genuinely believe that person has stepped outside the covenant that binds the family together forever. Some fear that continuing closeness might jeopardize their own standing, or that grieving too openly might look like doubting the Church themselves. Some pull back because they've been taught, sincerely, that this is a spiritual danger, not just a family disagreement. That fear can look like coldness from the outside. From the inside, a lot of the time, it's grief wearing coldness as a coat. I say all this as someone who does not believe the sealing doctrine is true. But I don't think the families who react this way are being cruel for the sake of it. I think they're trying to hold onto something they've been taught is the most important thing there is. Quick Reference. Doctrine and Covenants 132, given at Nauvoo, Illinois, recorded July 12, 1843, on the new and everlasting covenant of eternal marriage. Doctrine and Covenants 130:2, from instruction given by Joseph Smith at Ramus, Illinois, April 2, 1843. Temple sealing ordinances, administered in Latter-day Saint temples, are taught to bind marriage and family relationships beyond mortality. The Biblical Response (KJV). Jesus never pretended following Him would be free. He said it plainly in Matthew 10:34-37. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Luke 14:26 says it even harder. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." That word "hate" there means something like "love less by comparison," but Jesus chose a word strong enough to make sure nobody missed His point. He wanted people to count the real cost before they signed on, not after. That's exactly what He says next, in Luke 14:28. "For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?" I don't think Jesus wants anyone to walk into this decision blind. I think He wants you to walk into it with your eyes open, knowing some relationships may genuinely change, and choosing Him anyway because He's worth it. But Scripture doesn't leave you there with just a warning. It also gives comfort to the person who loses family over this. Psalm 27:10 says, "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up." And Jesus made a direct promise to people who lose family for His sake, in Mark 10:29-30. "There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life." Notice He doesn't promise it will be easy. He specifically includes "with persecutions." He just promises you won't be left alone in it. Notes on Sources. Doctrine and Covenants 132:19 and 130:2 are quoted from the Church's own published text of the Doctrine and Covenants. The historical dating and setting for both sections come from the section headings published by the Church and confirmed in the Joseph Smith Papers. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. I want to be fair here. Latter-day Saints would say the family closeness this doctrine promises is a genuine comfort to them, not a control tactic, and that most families who pull back are doing it out of real spiritual conviction, not spite. I believe that's true of most of them. My disagreement isn't with their sincerity. It's that I no longer believe a priesthood ordinance performed by a man is what binds a family for eternity. I believe that belongs to God alone, sealed through faith in Christ, not through a temple ceremony. This one I sat with for a while. Checking a citation is the easy part. Writing about your own family honestly, without bitterness, that's the harder work. I was a Latter-day Saint for 38 years. I served as elders quorum president. Although I was married legally years before, I was sealed in the temple in December 2009. I didn't fully leave until October 2025. I was baptized as a Christian on November 9, 2025. My wife was the one who walked with me into that decision more than anyone else. I've become something like the black sheep of my own family over this, and I've tried hard never to call anyone a name for it, never to say the word "cult," never to misrepresent what my family believes, because none of that is true or fair, and none of it would honor Christ. But the cost has still been real. My grandmother passed away recently, and I didn't hear it from family. I found out from a Facebook post by someone connected to her, and it was only then that I realized how completely I had been cut off, quietly and without a word. I found out about my own grandmother's death third hand. That's its own kind of hurt, separate from the grief itself, being shut out by family right when something that significant happens. My grandmother herself was a passionate, lifelong believer in the Church, sharp and witty about it right up until the end. I don't think she would have agreed with a lot of what I've come to believe, or with the book I wrote about my journey out of Mormonism. But I don't believe she would have ever estranged herself from me over it. Disagreement and estrangement are two different things, and I think she understood that better than some of the family who came after her. I like to imagine she'd have said something like, well Rex, that's nice that you found something that makes you happy, and then just agreed to disagree, the same gracious way she handled most things. I can't know that for certain, that's my guess at her, not her own words. But it's the kind of person she was. I'll be walking into a room full of family who've quietly distanced themselves from me over this. That's still ahead of me as I write this, not behind me. I don't know exactly what that day will feel like yet. I only know I plan to walk in the same way I've tried to write this whole post, without calling anyone a name, without pretending the cost isn't real, and still convinced this was worth it. If you're standing where I stood, counting the cost, here's what I'd tell you. It may cost you people you love. It may not. Every family is different, and I've talked to people on both sides of that outcome. But whatever it costs, Christ has already promised He won't leave you standing there by yourself. "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up." (Psalm 27:10) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #ExMormon #FromMormonToChrist #LeavingMormonism #Shunning #EternalFamilies #Mormonism #LatterDaySaint #ChurchOfJesusChrist #Christianity #Apologetics #FamilyFallout #CountTheCost #Gospel #GraceNotWorks #BibleTruth #Baptist #Salvation #Testimony #JesusSaves

WHO'S REALLY IN CHARGE. LET'S TALK ABOUT IT. President Dallin H. Oaks is now the 18th President of the LDS Church. Most members can tell you that. Fewer could tell you exactly how he got there, or what that process actually says about where authority in the church comes from. Let's look at it honestly. Steelman: The LDS Position, Stated Fairly A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you the church is never without a head for long, because God has built an orderly system into it. When a prophet dies, the First Presidency dissolves. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles takes over, led by whoever has served longest in the Quorum. That senior apostle becomes the new prophet. He then chooses two counselors, guided by revelation, to form a new First Presidency. They would point to the church's own explanation of this: succession follows seniority specifically to avoid the disputes and power struggles that plague other institutions. It is not a campaign. It is not a vote among rivals. It simply happens, in order, the way it has for generations. They would also say the lack of a contest is itself evidence of divine design. God doesn't need to orchestrate fresh drama every time a prophet dies, because He set the order in place from the beginning. They would also say the membership isn't cut out of the process. Every new prophet is presented to the whole church at the next general conference, where members vote by raised hand to sustain him. That is real common consent, rooted in a revelation Joseph Smith gave in 1830, not a rubber stamp invented later. That is the strongest version of the case, and it deserves to be heard before any of it is questioned. Quick Reference Where Seniority Succession Came From. The system wasn't handed down complete at the church's founding. When Joseph Smith was killed in June 1844, there was no clear procedure for what came next, and it showed. Sidney Rigdon argued he should lead as "guardian" of the church. Brigham Young, then President of the Quorum of the Twelve, argued the Twelve held the authority instead. Members voted, and Young's side won. Even then, Young wasn't sustained as President of the Church until December 27, 1847, three and a half years later. The seniority system used today was clarified and settled over time, not fixed from day one. The 2025 Succession. President Russell M. Nelson died September 27, 2025, at age 101. His funeral was held October 7, 2025. For 17 days, the church had no First Presidency. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles led the church during that gap, with senior apostle Dallin H. Oaks at its head. On October 14, 2025, the Quorum of the Twelve set apart President Oaks as the 18th President of the Church. He chose Henry B. Eyring as first counselor and D. Todd Christofferson as second counselor. How Seniority Actually Works. Seniority in the Quorum of the Twelve is based on the date a man was ordained an apostle, not his age and not a vote of his peers. The senior apostle automatically becomes the new prophet. The Sustaining Vote. President Oaks was formally sustained as "prophet, seer, and revelator" during a solemn assembly at the April 2026 general conference, the church's 196th annual conference. Members voted by quorums and groups, raising their hands. The church describes solemn assemblies as rare and sacred meetings, held on occasions that include a new president's first conference, not exclusively that. General Conference Itself. The church holds general conference twice a year, every April and October, broadcast worldwide from the Conference Center in Salt Lake City. Sustaining votes happen at every general conference, not just for a new prophet. Opposition is technically permitted and has happened publicly before, most visibly in April 2015, when a small group of members shouted "opposed" during the vote and the moderator acknowledged it had been "noted." The church's own Handbook, at the time, instructed that a presiding leader meet privately afterward with anyone who cast a dissenting vote, to learn why. That is a documented part of the process, not a guess on my part about how it's received. The Biblical Response On The Single-Prophet Model: I want to give this its full weight, because an orderly succession really is better than chaos. Nobody benefits from a power struggle every time a leader dies. But orderly is not the same as biblical. When the New Testament describes how local churches were actually led, the pattern is plural, not singular. "And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed" (Acts 14:23). Paul told Titus the same thing: "ordain elders in every city" (Titus 1:5), plural elders, plural cities. Nowhere does the New Testament describe one living man holding supreme prophetic authority over the entire church on earth, with the rest of the leadership existing to eventually take his place in strict seniority order. On The Revelation That Isn't Needed: The church describes the choice of its supreme prophetic voice as "divinely guided," and I want to represent that claim accurately rather than dismiss it. What can actually be observed, from outside that closed meeting of the Twelve, is the mechanism itself: the outcome has never once deviated from strict seniority since the system settled into its current form. What happens inside that room, and whether revelation plays a part in it, isn't something I can see or claim to know. The church says it does. I can only speak to what's observable, which is a fixed rule that has always produced the same result, regardless of what is or isn't sought privately before the outcome is announced. On What The New Testament Actually Shows About Succession: When the apostles themselves needed to fill a vacancy, they didn't use seniority. After Judas, the eleven cast lots between two candidates, and "the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles" (Acts 1:26). That happened once. It was never repeated as a system. When James, the brother of John, was executed by Herod, nobody replaced him at all. Scripture simply records, "he killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:2), and the book moves on. No seniority-based successor is named or implied. Paul wasn't promoted up through the ranks either. He was called directly by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, entirely outside any chain of succession. Peter is clearly prominent among the apostles, and Jesus really did tell him, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 16:19). But the New Testament never shows anyone succeeding Peter into that role. At the Jerusalem council, where the church's biggest doctrinal dispute of the era was settled, it's James, not Peter, who renders the final word: "Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God" (Acts 15:19). There's no pattern here of one office passed down in fixed order. There's a group of men, each given authority in his own way, with no succession plan at all. On Who The Church's Head Actually Is: Scripture already answers the "who's in charge" question, and the answer isn't a man at all. "And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence" (Colossians 1:18). The New Testament church had apostles, and it had elders. It never had a single living head standing between Christ and His people, passing that role down by seniority to whoever served longest. On Sustaining Versus Testing: I want to be fair to what sustaining actually means inside LDS theology before I say where I land on it. It's rooted in a real principle, "all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith" (D&C 26:2), and Latter-day Saint leaders have taught for generations that a raised hand is a covenant, not a formality. I take that seriously as a description of what the vote is meant to be. My question isn't whether the vote is sincere. It's whether sustaining, however sincerely meant, is the same act Scripture actually asks of believers when someone claims spiritual authority. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Bereans didn't just vote to sustain Paul, an actual apostle. They tested him. "These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). A covenant of support and a daily search of the Scriptures to see if a claim holds up are both real things. They're just not the same thing. Notes On Sources The dates and details of President Nelson's death, the 17 day interregnum, and President Oaks's succession are drawn from Church News and Deseret News reporting from October 2025, along with the Church's own newsroom announcements. The 1844 succession crisis and Brigham Young's December 27, 1847 sustaining are documented in the Church's own Religious Studies Center biographical material and cross referenced against independent historical sources. The description of succession as "divinely guided" and the church's own framing of the process come directly from FAIR, a Latter-day Saint apologetics organization, in material published following President Oaks's succession. The April 2015 opposing votes and the church's private-conference practice for dissenting votes are documented in Church News coverage from that conference and in the church's own Handbook guidance on the subject, both publicly reported at the time. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. My Own Part In This I was born in 1982, so a number of men have been sustained as prophet in my lifetime. But I was only actually there to raise my hand for three of them: Howard W. Hunter in 1994, Gordon B. Hinckley in 1995, and Thomas S. Monson in 2008. I was no longer active by the time Russell M. Nelson or Dallin H. Oaks were sustained. Three times, then, I raised my hand and never once thought to ask what that vote actually meant, or didn't mean. I assumed the system itself was evidence of God's hand, orderly, predictable, unbroken since Joseph Smith. What I never sat with was how different "orderly and predictable" is from "biblical." The New Testament doesn't describe a single man at the top of a chain of succession. It describes elders, plural, shepherding real people, under a Christ who never needed a successor because He never died and stayed dead. I don't need a living prophet anymore. I have a living Christ. That trade wasn't a loss. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." (1 Thessalonians 5:21) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDSChurch #GeneralConference #Prophet #LDSLeadership #Mormonism #ChurchHistory #ChristianApologetics #LatterDaySaints #Christianity #FaithJourney #LeavingMormonism #Scripture #JesusSaves #TruthMatters #GraceNotLegalism #DallinHOaks #BodyOfChrist

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN THE TEMPLE. LET'S TALK ABOUT ALL OF IT. I've touched on pieces of this in past posts, but never in this kind of detail. Today I want to lay it all out, the full picture, and deal with it honestly. This was hours of work, making sure I had the sources right, and referring to old journals I kept on my thoughts years ago. For 38 years the temple was the most sacred place I knew. I was endowed, I was sealed to my family. Most Christians outside the church have no real picture of what happens inside those walls, and most members are taught to keep it that way. I'm not writing this to mock anything I once held sacred. I'm writing it because I think the ordinances at the center of temple worship, baptism for the dead, the endowment, the initiatory, the sealing, the second anointing, and the garment, deserve to be looked at honestly, in the light, against Scripture. STEELMAN: the LDS position, stated fairly A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you the temple is not a burden but a gift, the place where God restores ordinances lost to the earth during a long apostasy. They would say baptism for the dead extends God's mercy to those who died without the chance to hear the gospel, and that Paul himself references the practice in 1 Corinthians 15:29 without condemning it. They would say the endowment is not borrowed from anywhere but is the restoration of instruction and covenant-making patterns as old as Adam, taught through symbol because some truths are meant to be approached with reverence rather than casual explanation. They would say the second anointing, rare and largely unknown even among members, represents the fullest measure of God's promises, what Peter called making your "calling and election sure." And they would tell you the garment is not strange at all, that God clothed Adam and Eve Himself after the Fall, and that every believer who takes the Sacrament already uses a physical object to remember a spiritual covenant. That is the strongest version of the case, and it deserves to be heard before any of it is questioned. QUICK REFERENCE The Temple Recommend. Entry to any LDS temple is restricted to members in good standing who hold a current temple recommend, a card issued for a limited period after a private worthiness interview with a bishop or branch president, and periodically with a member of the stake presidency as well. The interview covers belief, tithing, obedience to the Word of Wisdom, sexual conduct, and support for church leadership. Baptism for the Dead. Living church members are baptized by proxy on behalf of the deceased, so the dead may accept the gospel in the spirit world (Doctrine and Covenants 124:33-34; 128:1-18; 138:30-37). The practice was introduced by Joseph Smith in Nauvoo beginning in 1840. It has also been a source of real controversy: the church agreed in 1995, after pressure from Jewish organizations, to stop performing proxy baptisms for Holocaust victims, with a narrow exception for victims who are direct ancestors of living members, and later acknowledged that violations of that policy had continued in isolated cases. The Initiatory (washing and anointing). The ordinance that immediately precedes the endowment on a temple visit, first introduced at the Kirtland Temple in 1836 and revised in Nauvoo in 1842. Historically it involved a ritual washing and an anointing with oil applied directly to the body. The ceremony was simplified in 2005 so that participants wore the garment beneath a shield, with the washing and anointing reduced to a symbolic touch on the head rather than the earlier physical washing and anointing. In later revisions the shield was reportedly phased out, leaving participants fully clothed throughout. The Endowment. Understood as conveying the knowledge, covenants, and power necessary for exaltation (D&C 131:1-4; cf. D&C 124:33-34), the ceremony as practiced today was introduced by Joseph Smith on May 4, 1842, in Nauvoo. The timing matters: Smith had been initiated as a Master Mason in the Nauvoo lodge only seven weeks earlier, on March 15-16, 1842, in the very same building. The Church's own Church History Topics essay on Masonry acknowledges the resemblance in teaching form: "Masonic rituals deliver stage-by-stage instruction using dramatization and symbolic gestures and clothing," and "the endowment employs similar teaching devices." It reports that Joseph and his associates understood Masonry as "an institution that preserved vestiges of ancient truth," in Heber C. Kimball's phrase "taken from priesthood but has become degenerated," and concludes that "the endowment did not simply imitate the rituals of Freemasonry," since "Joseph's encounter with Masonry evidently served as a catalyst for revelation." The ceremony has also been revised over time; in 1990, specific penalty oaths tied to the covenants, including symbolic gestures representing throat-slitting and disembowelment, were removed, and portions were shortened. The Sealing Ordinance. Performed only in the temple, sealing binds husband and wife, and children to parents, "for time and for all eternity" rather than until death. Its scriptural basis is Doctrine and Covenants 132:19-20, part of the same July 12, 1843 revelation that commands plural marriage. Verse 19 promises a couple sealed under "the new and everlasting covenant" that the sealing "shall be of full force when they are out of the world; and they shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things," and verse 20 states plainly, "Then shall they be gods, because they have no end." I'm quoting that line alongside the verses around it, in its own context, not lifting it out on its own. Read in context, "then shall they be gods" is not a shocking outlier phrase. It is the plain conclusion the surrounding verses are building toward. As with baptism for the dead, sealings are also performed by proxy for deceased couples and for children who died without being sealed to their parents. The Second Anointing. Also called the "fulness of the priesthood," this is the most obscure of the temple ordinances, given only to select married couples nominated by top leadership, and its existence is still not widely known among ordinary members. It began on September 28, 1843, when Joseph and Emma Smith themselves were the first to receive it. In the ordinance, a husband and wife are anointed king and priest, queen and priestess, and are told their exaltation is guaranteed, connected to the promise Peter described as making one's "calling and election sure" (2 Peter 1:10) and receiving the "more sure word of prophecy" (2 Peter 1:19). By 1941, roughly 15,000 living members and over 6,000 by proxy for the dead had received it; it is far rarer today. The Garment. Introduced alongside the endowment around 1842, worn under clothing day and night for life once a member is endowed. The original garment carried four marks, cut directly into the fabric before later being stitched in: a reverse-L "mark of the square" on the right breast, a V-shaped "mark of the compass" on the left breast, a horizontal mark at the navel, and a mark at the right knee. The square and compass are also two of Freemasonry's best known symbols. There is no surviving firsthand account of how Joseph Smith arrived at the garment's design. The church's current handbook teaches that faithfully wearing it serves as both a reminder of covenants and a form of protection. THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE On Baptism for the Dead: Paul's line in 1 Corinthians 15:29, "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?", is genuinely one of the hardest verses in the New Testament, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend it's simple. But look at what Paul is actually doing with it. He is arguing for the resurrection generally, pointing to a practice apparently already happening in Corinth as evidence that even his opponents' own behavior assumes a resurrection, not commanding the church everywhere to adopt it. No other New Testament passage describes or commands proxy baptism, and Hebrews states the opposite pattern plainly: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Jesus tells the same thing to the rich man in the account of Lazarus: a "great gulf fixed" separates the righteous and unrighteous dead: "so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence" (Luke 16:26). One obscure verse describing a practice, weighed against a direct doctrinal statement and a parable Jesus told for exactly this purpose, is not close. On the Initiatory: Scripture does use washing and anointing as real symbols, most clearly in baptism itself and in James's instruction that elders should pray for the sick, "anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord" (James 5:14). But Scripture describes the cleansing that actually matters as already finished, applied by faith, not administered in stages behind a temple door. "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God" (Hebrews 9:14). Paul tells Titus that this washing comes by mercy, not by any rite performed on us: "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost" (Titus 3:5). And John says the cleansing is present tense and ongoing for anyone walking in the light, not something reserved for those who make it past the temple door: "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin" (1 John 1:7). That is a completed cleansing, offered openly, not a private ritual a person must pass through behind closed doors, gated by a temple recommend, before being permitted to proceed toward ordinances the church teaches are required for exaltation. On the Endowment: I don't think the Masonic connection alone settles the question, and I want to be fair about that. But I think it's a fair question to ask directly: if the endowment restores an ordinance practiced by ancient patriarchs, what explains its close proximity in form to a nineteenth century fraternal ritual Joseph Smith had personally joined seven weeks before introducing it, and what explains its own later revision in 1990? An ordinance said to restore an eternal pattern shouldn't need penalty language quietly removed a century and a half later. More than the historical question, though, is the theological one. The whole book of Hebrews is built around a single argument: that Christ's sacrifice was offered once and is sufficient, requiring no further ceremony to access God's presence. "Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us" (Hebrews 9:12), and "For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). When Jesus died, that access was already opened: "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51), and Hebrews says that gives every believer "boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus... through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Hebrews 10:19-20). A ceremony built around secret words and signs, required to progress toward exaltation, sits uneasily next to a temple veil God Himself already tore open. On the Sealing Ordinance: I want to be fair here too, because the hope behind eternal families is a beautiful one, and I don't think wanting to stay connected to the people you love is something Scripture mocks. But Jesus was asked directly about exactly this question, a woman married seven times over, and whose husband she would belong to in the resurrection, and His answer doesn't qualify marriage as continuing only for the exalted. He states it plainly: "For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven" (Matthew 22:30). Some will say Jesus was only ruling out ordinary earthly marriage, and that temple sealings, performed under priesthood authority, are a different category not addressed by His answer. But that distinction isn't in the text. Jesus gives no such qualifier. His statement is blanket, no carve-out for marriages entered under a different kind of authority. And the scenario the Sadducees raised wasn't a casual marriage to begin with. It was levirate marriage, the practice set out in Deuteronomy 25:5-6: when brothers lived together and one died childless, the surviving brother was to marry the widow so her firstborn would carry on the dead brother's name. The statute even provided a formal, if shaming, procedure for refusing (vv. 7-10). That is about as close to a God-commanded, covenant marriage as the Old Testament has, and Jesus still says it does not carry into the resurrection. If even a marriage entered under a direct command from God does not continue, reading a priesthood-authority exception into His words is adding something He simply did not say. Paul teaches the same thing from a different angle: the marriage bond itself is described as lasting only as long as both spouses live, not as an institution extending into eternity. "For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband" (Romans 7:2), and again, "The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:39). If marriage continued into eternity as its own institution, freedom to remarry after a spouse's death would be a strange thing for Paul to describe so plainly and so often. And when Paul does connect marriage to something eternal, it isn't marriage itself he calls eternal, it's what marriage pictures: "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:31-32). Marriage points forward to Christ and His church. It was never meant to be the destination in itself. On The Second Anointing: This is the one most members never even hear about, and I think that fact alone is worth sitting with. Peter's actual words are, "give diligence to make your calling and election sure" (2 Peter 1:10), addressed to ordinary believers as something to pursue through faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, patience, godliness, and love, the list he gives just two verses earlier, not through a private ceremony reserved for a nominated few. Assurance in the New Testament is never gated behind a second, rarer ordinance available only to some. It's available the moment someone trusts Christ: "These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). On the Garment: Scripture does use physical reminders, the bread and the cup of the Sacrament, for one. But there's a real difference between a shared meal every believer eats together in memory of Christ's finished work, and a private undergarment worn as protection, its symbols historically tied to Masonic ritual, available only to those who have completed a secret ceremony. The temple system as a whole, baptism for the dead, the endowment, the garment, all built around physical buildings and restricted access, moves in the opposite direction from where the New Testament actually goes. The temple in Jerusalem gave way to something greater. Jesus called his own body the true temple: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). And after that, the New Testament relocates the language of temple onto believers themselves: "for ye are the temple of the living God" (2 Corinthians 6:16), and onto the church corporately, "an holy temple in the Lord" (Ephesians 2:21). Jesus told the woman at the well that true worship would no longer be tied to a location at all: "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him" (John 4:23). The whole trajectory of Scripture runs from a building, to Christ's own body, to God's gathered people. Reintroducing a network of restricted, secret-ritual buildings as the necessary site of saving ordinances runs against that trajectory rather than fulfilling it, and it stands against Paul's own plain statement that access to God now runs through one place only: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). NOTES ON SOURCES The history and dating of baptism for the dead, the endowment, and the second anointing above, including Joseph Smith's March 1842 Masonic initiation seven weeks before introducing the endowment, the 1990 removal of penalty oaths, and the second anointing's origin with Joseph and Emma Smith on September 28, 1843, are documented in David John Buerger's "The Fulness of the Priesthood: The Second Anointing in Latter-day Saint Theology and Practice," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16, no. 1 (1983), and in the Church's own Church History Topics essay on Masonry. The garment's original four marks and their later modification from cut to embroidered symbols are documented in independent scholarship drawing on early Latter-day Saint sources, including early leaders' descriptions. The 1995 agreement on Holocaust victim baptisms is a matter of public record widely reported at the time. The initiatory's 2005 simplification is documented in the published timeline of temple ceremony changes and in John Charles Duffy's account of the initiatory revisions ("Concealing the Body, Concealing the Sacred," Journal of Ritual Studies 21, no. 2, 2007); the later phasing-out of the shield rests on less authoritative reports. This post also draws directly on my own book, Grace, Legalism, and the Gospel, sections 7.5.1 through 7.5.2 on baptism for the dead and the endowment specifically, and Part 11, sections 11.1 and 11.2, on the biblical temple's trajectory from building to body compared with the LDS temple system. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, since it's the version I grew up using as a member, and am most familiar with. MY OWN PART IN THIS I remember my endowment session vividly, the reverence in the room, the sense that I was being trusted with something ancient and sacred. I wore the garment every single day for years without a second thought, the way you don't think twice about breathing. When I finally read the actual history, the Masonic timeline, the 1990 changes, how recent and how quietly revised so much of it really was, it didn't feel like discovering someone had lied to me maliciously. It felt like discovering the sacred weight I'd carried for decades had been built on a much newer and much more human foundation than I'd ever been told. What steadied me in the end wasn't anger at the temple. It was reading Hebrews and realizing Christ already tore the veil Himself, that I already had the boldest possible access to God, and that I had spent 38 years looking for a door that had been standing wide open the whole time. "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him." (John 4:23) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry Find this and more at FromMormonToChrist.com Subscribe for more at FromMormonToChrist.Substack.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDSChurch #LDSTemple #Endowment #BaptismForTheDead #SecondAnointing #TempleGarments #Mormonism #ChurchHistory #ChristianApologetics #LatterDaySaints #Christianity #FaithJourney #LeavingMormonism #Scripture #JesusSaves #TruthMatters #GraceNotLegalism

THE SEER STONE AND TREASURE-SEEKING YEARS I've covered this topic a bit before but I thought it worth revisiting. I'm currently writing a book about Joseph Smith's early years and found some additional information I think makes this topic worth revisiting. That being said, let's get into it. If you grew up in the church the way I did, the story usually starts at the Sacred Grove and moves straight to Moroni and the plates. What most members never hear is what Joseph Smith was doing with his time in the years between: hiring himself out with a seer stone to search for buried treasure, and later using a personal seer stone, placed in the bottom of a hat, to dictate the Book of Mormon. The church has confirmed all of this itself. Let's look at what it actually says. STEELMAN: the LDS position, stated fairly A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you seer stones were an accepted and unremarkable part of the folk culture Joseph Smith grew up in, and that using one to search for lost objects or buried treasure was common practice in early 19th century rural New York, not something uniquely suspicious about Joseph. They would point to biblical precedent for God using physical objects to reveal truth, the Urim and Thummim given to Israel's high priest to seek God's will (Exodus 28:30), and argue that a stone is no different in principle. They would say the March 1826 proceeding in South Bainbridge was an examination, not a trial, and that no source describes a charge of fraud or a fraud conviction. They would point to Josiah Stowell, the employer at the center of the whole episode, who is recorded in the surviving examination account testifying that Joseph "never deceived him" and that he had "the most implicit faith in Prisoners skill," and who was still calling Joseph a seer and a prophet and affirming the Book of Mormon seventeen years later, in a letter his son wrote at his dictation in February 1843. That is a remarkable degree of consistency from the one man who knew the treasure-seeking years best, and it deserves real weight. They would say Joseph eventually stepped back from treasure-seeking, and that what mattered was not the method but the source, that God can use unconventional means, including a stone, to reveal His will to a true prophet, just as He used the Urim and Thummim, dreams, and even a donkey speaking through Balaam. That is a real argument, rooted in the idea that God is not limited to the methods we expect Him to use, and it deserves to be heard on those terms. QUICK REFERENCE - Joseph Smith obtained his first seer stone around 1821 to 1822, reportedly discovered while helping neighbor Willard Chase dig a well. He later acquired at least one more, a brown, egg-shaped stone, and church sources do not settle with certainty which of his stones was used at which stage of what followed. What is established is that by the mid-1820s he owned and used a personal seer stone for treasure-seeking, and a personal seer stone is also what witnesses describe him using in translation. - Beginning around 1825, Joseph was hired by Josiah Stowell of Bainbridge, New York, to help search for a supposed lost Spanish silver mine, using his reputation for locating buried treasure and lost objects with the stone. - On March 20, 1826 (the date given by the docket entry; contemporaneous fee bills independently corroborate that a proceeding occurred that month), Joseph appeared before Justice of the Peace Albert Neely in South Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, examined on a complaint under New York's disorderly-persons statute after being identified in that same surviving bill of costs as "the Glass Looker." No source, hostile or friendly, describes a charge or conviction for fraud. The fullest surviving narrative of the testimony comes from a single account, a docket entry attributed to Justice Neely, which survives only through a disputed nineteenth-century chain of custody (a family member's copy, a British magazine, a bishop, an 1886 Utah newspaper) and not in any original that can be checked today. That account has Joseph himself, under examination, describing his own practice in his own words: that he had a stone "to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were," and that he had been "in the habit of looking through this stone to find lost property for 3 years." The same account has Josiah Stowell testifying that Joseph "never deceived him" and that Stowell "had the most implicit faith in Prisoners skill." Historians, including the Church's own Joseph Smith Papers project, describe this proceeding's exact procedural outcome as unresolved by any independently verifiable record, since the docket entry claims a guilty finding while the surviving bill of costs contains no record of any conviction being entered. - Separately, according to his future father-in-law Isaac Hale, Joseph told Hale directly, after his 1827 marriage, that he "had given up what he called 'glass-looking.'" - In its own Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Mormon's translation, published in 2013, and in its own official magazine article "Joseph the Seer" in 2015, the church confirmed that Joseph used at least one of his personal seer stones, not only the Urim and Thummim that reportedly came with the plates, to dictate significant portions of the Book of Mormon. The church's own account states he placed the stone in a hat and put his face in the hat to block out light, then dictated what he said he could see. - The church itself photographed and published images of the actual brown seer stone in 2015, which it had kept in its possession since passing from Joseph Smith through Oliver Cowdery, Brigham Young, and later church leaders. THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE I want to give the Urim and Thummim argument its full weight, because it is the strongest point in the steelman above. God did instruct Israel's high priest to carry the Urim and Thummim in his breastplate (Exodus 28:30), and Scripture shows it used to seek God's will on real occasions. When David's camp at Ziklag was raided, "David said to Abiathar the priest, Ahimelech's son, I pray thee, bring me hither the ephod. And Abiathar brought thither the ephod to David. And David enquired at the Lord, saying, Shall I pursue after this troop? shall I overtake them? And he answered him, Pursue: for thou shalt surely overtake them, and without fail recover all" (1 Samuel 30:7-8). So the claim that God never uses a physical object as part of revelation is not quite right, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the Urim and Thummim were given by God, through Moses, to a priesthood God Himself established, under instructions God Himself specified in detail (Exodus 28:1-30). That is a completely different origin from a stone a boy found for himself while digging a well and had already been using for years to hunt for buried treasure and lost objects for paying customers, before he ever connected it to anything he called a call from God. Scripture draws a sharp line, not around physical objects as a category, but around where the power is claimed to come from and how it is used. Divination, using hidden means to reveal what is otherwise unknown, apart from God's own established priesthood and God's own stated instruction, is named directly and condemned: "There shall not be found among you any one... that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord" (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Locating hidden treasure and lost objects for hire by looking into a stone is exactly the kind of practice this passage has in view. It was condemned in Israel not because objects are inherently evil, but because the practice operated entirely outside anything God had authorized, on the seeker's own claimed gift. It's worth noting that the church's own canonized account of the plates' recovery, Joseph Smith-History 1:34-35, describes Moroni delivering "two stones in silver bows... fastened to a breastplate," names them the Urim and Thummim, and says the possession and use of these stones is "what constituted 'seers' in ancient or former times." That official, scriptural telling does not mention a stone in a hat at all. The hat-and-stone method comes to us only through the later accounts of Emma Smith, David Whitmer, and others, and through the church's own 2013 and 2015 acknowledgments. That gap, between what the canonized history describes and what the witnesses closest to the work actually reported, is itself worth sitting with. That is the real question this topic raises for me, and I think it is fair rather than harsh: does the record show God establishing this method and calling Joseph to it from the start, the way He established the Urim and Thummim through Moses, or does it show a young man already known locally for a folk-magic gift, already being paid to use it for treasure hunting, who later folded that same practice and the same physical stone into what became a new religious movement? The record itself, published now by the church's own historians, shows the second. The stone did not begin as an instrument of revelation and later get used for treasure hunting. It began as a treasure-hunting stone, and a personal seer stone, the same method, hat and all, was carried forward into the translation. Isaac Hale, Joseph's own father-in-law, watched both periods firsthand from inside his own house, and he said so in exactly those terms in a sworn 1834 statement: "The manner in which he pretended to read and interpret, was the same as when he looked for the money-diggers, with the stone in his hat, and his hat over his face, while the Book of Plates were at the same time hid in the woods." Hale was hostile, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend a hostile witness is a neutral one. But the physical detail he describes, the stone, the hat, the face buried to block the light, is the same detail Joseph's own believing witnesses, Emma Smith and David Whitmer among them, later described from the inside with approval rather than contempt. A critic has no reason to invent a detail his opponents would go on to confirm. When a hostile witness and the church's own faithful witnesses agree on exactly what physically happened, that is not a point left in genuine dispute. What is in dispute is only what to make of it, and that is the question Deuteronomy 18 answers directly. NOTES ON SOURCES Some of the sourcing below was originally gathered for a different project, a full-length book I'm currently researching and writing on Joseph Smith's formation years, 1805 to 1831, treating the founding-era record with the same primary-source discipline you see here. More on that when it's further along. The 1826 examination testimony quoted above, Joseph's own words and Josiah Stowell's, comes from a single source: the docket entry attributed to Justice Albert Neely, published by the Joseph Smith Papers project as "Appendix: Docket Entry, 20 March 1826," which the project itself flags as carrying disputed nineteenth-century provenance. It is not drawn from A. W. Benton's 1831 account or William D. Purple's 1877 reminiscence, two separate secondhand accounts of the same proceeding that this post does not quote. The docket entry dates the proceeding March 20, 1826; contemporaneous fee bills independently corroborate that a proceeding occurred that month. Josiah Stowell's 1843 letter affirming Joseph as "Seer" and "Phrophet" (spelling original) is a separate document from Stowell's testimony in 1826, dictated to his son and sent to John S. Fullmer in February 1843. Isaac Hale's sworn March 20, 1834 statement, printed in E. D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed, is the source of both the "glass-looking" quotation and the direct comparison between the treasure-seeking method and the translation method quoted above. The Church's own confirmation that a personal seer stone, not only the Urim and Thummim, was used in translating the Book of Mormon, placed in a hat, is drawn directly from its December 2013 Gospel Topics essay on Book of Mormon translation and its October 2015 Ensign article "Joseph the Seer," along with the church's 2015 release of official photographs of the stone itself. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, verified directly against the text, with references given. MY OWN PART IN THIS I was in the church for 38 years before I ever learned any of this. Not one lesson, not one manual, not one Sunday School class ever mentioned a stone in a hat. When I finally read it, in the church's own published sources, it didn't anger me so much as it grieved me, because I realized how much of my testimony had been built on a version of the story with the hard parts quietly left out. I don't think every person who ever consulted a seer stone in that era was beyond God's reach. I do think the practice itself, judged by God's own standard in Deuteronomy, was never something He authorized, and building a religious movement's founding text on a method He named an abomination is not a small footnote to work around. What actually changed me wasn't rejecting Joseph Smith out of anger. It was realizing that the God of the Bible does not need a stone in a hat, a folk-magic reputation, or hidden means to reveal Himself. He speaks plainly, through His Word and through His Son, to anyone willing to actually read what He already gave us. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry FromMormonToChrist.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDSChurch #JosephSmith #SeerStone #TreasureSeeking #Mormonism #ChurchHistory #ChristianApologetics #BookOfMormon #LatterDaySaints #Christianity #FaithJourney #LeavingMormonism #Scripture #JesusSaves #TruthMatters #GraceNotLegalism #NewCreature

FOUR TELLINGS OF ONE VISION. LET'S LOOK AT ALL OF THEM. Many of you have noticed my posts have been fewer and further between. Allow me just to say I've been navigating some health and personal issues, but God is with me, and God is good. The extra time has also allowed me more time to prepare many posts, so that when given the chance, I could finally upload them. So let's get right into it. Every Latter-day Saint knows the First Vision the way I knew it for 38 years, as one clean story: 14-year-old Joseph Smith, a grove of trees in the spring of 1820, two glorious personages, and the Father introducing the Son with "This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" What most members never sit down and read is that Joseph himself left four different written accounts of that vision, and they don't all say the same thing. STEELMAN: the LDS position, stated fairly A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you having four accounts is a strength, not a weakness. They would point out that Joseph told the story at different times, to different audiences, for different purposes, and every honest witness does that. They would compare it to the four Gospels, which record the life of Jesus with real differences in detail and emphasis, and to Paul's own conversion account, told three separate times in the book of Acts (chapters 9, 22, and 26) with details that shift each time. They would say the core of the story, a boy praying for guidance and receiving a heavenly manifestation, never changes across any of the four accounts, and that the church itself has published all four accounts openly rather than hiding them. They would say expecting a fourteen-year-old's story, retold as an adult writing to different audiences over twenty years, to read identically every time is not how real memory or real testimony works. That is a fair point, and it deserves to be weighed honestly rather than waved away. QUICK REFERENCE - The 1832 account is the earliest, written partly in Joseph Smith's own hand. In it, Joseph places the vision "in the 16th year of my age," describes seeking forgiveness for his own sins rather than asking which church was true, and describes an encounter with 'the Lord' without the explicit two-personage language present in every later account, saying "the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph thy sins are forgiven thee." No second personage is mentioned in this account. - The 1835 account, recorded in Joseph Smith's journal after he described the vision to a visitor, places his age at "about 14," and states he saw one personage, then a second, along with "many angels." The "many angels" detail appears in no other account. - The 1838 account, later canonized in the Pearl of Great Price as Joseph Smith-History, is the best known. It places Joseph's age at 14, describes his motive as wanting to know which church to join amid religious revival in his area, and describes two personages, one introducing the other by saying, "This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" - The 1842 account, known as the Wentworth Letter and published in the church's own newspaper, is brief but consistent with the 1838 account: two personages, age about 14, the question of which church to join. - The Church's own published position, in its 2016 Gospel Topics essay "First Vision Accounts," states plainly that the age discrepancy in the 1832 account "was most likely the result of a scribal mistake," and that the shift from seeking forgiveness to asking which church was true reflects two closely related concerns in young Joseph's mind rather than a contradiction. - On the question of the 1820 religious revival Joseph described in his area, church-published historical research points to a Methodist camp meeting near Palmyra in 1820 and traveling preachers reporting "religious excitement" that year, though the most extensively documented regional revivals are dated to 1824, four years after the vision. THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE I want to be fair here before I say anything else. Multiple accounts of the same event differing in detail is not, by itself, evidence of fabrication. Scripture itself shows us this. Paul's Damascus road conversion is told three times in Acts, and the details of what his companions heard and saw shift between the tellings. If differing detail across retellings disqualified a testimony, it would disqualify Paul's. So the mere existence of four differing accounts is not where I'd plant a flag. Where I would plant a flag is on what the vision is claimed to have delivered, because that is something Scripture gives us a direct standard for testing. The 1838 and 1842 accounts explicitly record the instruction not to join any church; the 1832 account speaks of the world's apostasy without a join/not-join instruction, and the 1835 account raises the church question without the explicit rejection language. That is not a minor detail in the accounts that contain it. And that claim can be tested against Scripture directly, apart from any question of memory or scribal error. Paul told the Galatian church, "though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). He did not say test the messenger's sincerity. He said test the message, even against an angel, because the message is what stands or falls. John told believers the same thing in different words: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). A heavenly appearance is not itself proof of divine origin. It is the beginning of a test, not the end of one. And Jesus made a promise about His church specifically that the First Vision's core claim runs directly against. He said, "upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). If every church and creed on earth in 1820 was, in the vision's own words, entirely wrong, that means Christ's promise that His church would never be fully overcome had already failed for roughly 1,700 years before Joseph Smith was born. I don't think that promise failed. I think Christ kept it, through a real, visible, believing church that never disappeared, long before 1820 and long after. NOTES ON SOURCES The text of all four firsthand accounts, including the 1832 account's exact wording ("in the 16th year of my age," "I saw the Lord"), the 1835 "many angels" detail, and the 1838 "This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" quotation, are drawn directly from the Joseph Smith Papers project, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which hosts transcriptions and images of all four original documents. The Church's own explanation for the age discrepancy and the relationship between the "forgiveness" and "which church" questions is drawn from its 2016 Gospel Topics essay "First Vision Accounts" and its related "Multiple Accounts of the First Vision" study page. The historical detail on regional revivals in 1818 through 1824 is also drawn from the Church's own published material on the topic, which acknowledges 1824 as the year of the most extensively documented revivals while pointing to smaller 1819-1820 camp meetings as support for Joseph's description. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, verified directly against the text, with references given. MY OWN PART IN THIS I taught the First Vision for years the way I was taught it, as a single unbroken story, because that is the only version most members ever encounter. I never once heard the 1832 account mentioned over a pulpit. When I finally read it in Joseph's own handwriting, the 1832 account describes an encounter with 'the Lord' without the explicit two-personage language present in every later account. It emphasizes forgiveness instead of "which church" and places Joseph at sixteen instead of fourteen. It didn't shake me because the details changed. People's memories genuinely do shift with time and audience, and I don't fault anyone for that alone. What shook me was going back and actually testing the vision's central claim, that every church on earth was wrong and an abomination, against what Christ Himself promised about His church in Matthew 16. I had spent 38 years assuming a heavenly appearance settled the question on its own. Scripture never asks us to do that. It asks us to test the message. When I finally did, I found a vision whose central claim contradicts Christ's own promise, and a Savior who never stopped keeping His word. To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. (Isaiah 8:20) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry FromMormonToChrist.com #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDSChurch #FirstVision #JosephSmith #Mormonism #ChurchHistory #ChristianApologetics #PearlOfGreatPrice #LatterDaySaints #Christianity #FaithJourney #LeavingMormonism #Scripture #JesusSaves #TruthMatters #TestTheSpirits #GraceNotLegalism #BibleTruth

THE MOST CONFRONTING DOCTRINE. LET'S TALK ABOUT IT HONESTLY. I spent 38 years as a Latter-day Saint. I served as elders quorum president. I was sealed in the temple. And for most of those years, if you had asked me about polygamy, I would have told you it was a difficult, complicated chapter of church history that God allowed for a season, then closed. That answer got me through a lot of conversations without ever really sitting with the doctrine itself. So let's sit with it. STEELMAN: the LDS position, stated fairly A believing Latter-day Saint would tell you plural marriage was a commandment from God, not a scheme of Joseph Smith's own making. They would point to Doctrine and Covenants 132, given through Joseph Smith and dated to July 12, 1843, as a revelation on "the new and everlasting covenant, including the eternity of the marriage covenant," which also addresses plural marriage. They would tell you Old Testament figures like Abraham, Jacob, and David practiced it under God's sanction, and that D&C 132 explicitly invokes that precedent, so the principle itself is not foreign to Scripture. They would say the practice was introduced quietly and carefully because it was unlawful under Illinois civil law and deeply unpopular even among the Saints, not because it was shameful. They would tell you the church did not abandon the doctrine because it was wrong, but because the Lord, through President Wilford Woodruff, directed the church to stop the practice to save the church's temples and its legal existence under mounting federal pressure. And they would tell you the underlying doctrine, that marriage can be sealed for eternity and that exaltation involves family relationships continuing forever, still stands. That is the fairest version of the case, and it deserves to be heard as such before any response is given. QUICK REFERENCE Church history sources indicate Joseph Smith may have first taught the principle privately in the early 1830s, though no revelation laying out the doctrine from that period has been located. By the summer of 1843, historical research places Joseph Smith in approximately twenty five plural sealings, entered into confidentially over the preceding years. The revelation now known as Doctrine and Covenants 132 was dictated on July 12, 1843, in Nauvoo, Illinois. Joseph Smith's brother Hyrum reportedly urged him to write it down specifically to persuade Joseph's wife Emma, who showed real and repeated resistance to the practice, that it came from God. The practice was kept confidential from the general church membership through Joseph Smith's lifetime. He was killed in June 1844. After the Saints moved west, the church publicly acknowledged the doctrine in 1852, and plural marriage became openly practiced in Utah under Brigham Young's leadership. Federal legislation, including the Edmunds Act (1882) and the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887), criminalized the practice and moved to seize church property and disincorporate the church itself. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act in May 1890. On September 25, 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued what is now called the Manifesto, publicly declaring his advice to the Saints "to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land." It was sustained by the general church membership on October 6, 1890, and is canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 1. The Manifesto did not require existing plural families to separate, and some new plural marriages continued quietly for a time afterward before the practice fully ended within the mainstream church. THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE Scripture does record polygamy among God's people. It never once records God commanding it or blessing it without cost. Every polygamous household in the Old Testament, Abraham's, Jacob's, David's, Solomon's, is shown in the text itself producing rivalry, favoritism, grief, and division. The Bible describes the practice honestly. It does not prescribe it. The pattern God actually establishes goes back to the beginning. Genesis records the first marriage as one man and one woman becoming a single new thing. Jesus himself, when asked about marriage, did not point back to Abraham or Jacob. He pointed back to Eden: "And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). Twain. Not three, not four. Jesus treats Eden, not the patriarchs, as the standard. God gave Israel's future kings a direct warning against exactly this practice: "Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away" (Deuteronomy 17:17). Solomon is the case study in what that warning was protecting against. Multiplying wives did not multiply blessing. It turned his heart. By the time the New Testament sets qualifications for church leadership, the standard is unambiguous. An overseer must be "blameless, the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2), and the same qualification is given for deacons (1 Timothy 3:12). Paul elsewhere teaches "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband" (1 Corinthians 7:2), stated as a one-to-one relationship, not a pool. None of this means God abandoned people who lived under polygamy in the Old Testament, or that every polygamous marriage recorded in Scripture was itself a sin in the moment it happened under an earlier covenant. It means the Bible does not hold polygamy up as the created design or the standard for God's people going forward. It holds up one man and one woman, for life, as the pattern from Eden onward, and that is the pattern the New Testament church is built on. There is also a question worth sitting with honestly, and I want to be careful to state it as a question of reasoning, not as settled fact. Wilford Woodruff did say he received a vision before issuing the Manifesto, telling the Saints, "The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice." I want to represent that fairly rather than skip past it. But look at what the vision is actually described as being about. It is about consequences: the temples would be lost, the church's legal existence would collapse. It is not described as new revelation declaring the original 1843 doctrine fulfilled, completed, or reversed on its own doctrinal terms. The formal text of the Manifesto itself carries no revelation language at all. It is worded as submission to federal law, issued after the Edmunds-Tucker Act had already disincorporated the church and after the Supreme Court had upheld it. So even granting Woodruff's vision at full strength, the reason given for stopping was that continuing would cost the church its temples and its legal standing, not that the commandment itself had been satisfied. If plural marriage truly belonged to what D&C 132 calls "the new and everlasting covenant," and if God's purposes cannot be frustrated by the laws of men, it is fair to ask why the path forward was for the church's practice to bend to federal law rather than for God to make a way for the commandment to stand as originally given. I should be fair to the other side of this too. Jesus himself, in that same passage in Matthew 19, tells the Pharisees that Moses permitted divorce "because of the hardness of your hearts," not because God's original design ever included it (Matthew 19:8). So Scripture does show God accommodating a practice to human circumstance without that meaning the practice was His design from the start. A believing Latter-day Saint could reach for that same logic here. The difference I would point to is that Moses' accommodation was framed in the text itself as a concession to hard hearts from the beginning, while plural marriage was framed in D&C 132 as an eternal, binding commandment tied to exaltation, not a temporary concession. Ending an eternal commandment under outside legal pressure is a harder fit for that argument than ending a concession always understood as temporary. That is my read. I hold it as an argument, not a proof, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend the tension resolves itself easily either way. NOTES ON SOURCES Historical claims above on the number and timing of Joseph Smith's plural marriages, and the drafting of D&C 132, are drawn from the Joseph Smith Papers project's own historical introduction to the July 12, 1843 revelation, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Manifesto's text, date, and the events leading to it (including the Edmunds-Tucker Act and the May 1890 Supreme Court ruling) are drawn from the Church's own Gospel Topics essay "The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage," and the original Manifesto text as published in 1890. Wilford Woodruff's quotation about receiving a vision showing what would take place if the practice continued is also drawn directly from that same Gospel Topics essay, which sources it to Woodruff's own recorded remarks. All Scripture quotations above are King James Version, verified against the text directly, with references given. Where church sources describe internal disagreement or private teaching with no located written revelation before 1843, that uncertainty is stated plainly above rather than resolved one way or the other, because the historical record itself does not resolve it. MY OWN PART IN THIS I never lived polygamy. It ended in the church long before I was born. But I lived inside a framework that asked me to hold two things at once: that plural marriage was a commandment from God serious enough to cost families everything, and that it was also something the church quietly stopped defending in daily teaching and mostly hoped members wouldn't ask about. I did the same thing with it that I did with a lot of hard doctrine in those 38 years. I filed it under "sacred and complicated" and moved on, because sitting with it honestly would have meant asking whether a command from God can also be something He tells the prophet to stop doing under legal pressure, and still be treated as unchanged in its divine source. I never had a good answer to that. I still don't think the LDS Church does either. What changed for me wasn't finding a clever argument. It was reading Jesus point back to Eden, one man, one woman, one flesh, and realizing that's the standard I should have been measuring everything else against all along. Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. (Hebrews 13:4) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDSChurch #Polygamy #DoctrineAndCovenants #JosephSmith #PluralMarriage #Mormonism #ChristianApologetics #BiblicalMarriage #GraceNotLegalism #LatterDaySaints #Christianity #FaithJourney #LeavingMormonism #ChurchHistory #Scripture #JesusSaves #TruthMatters

I write a lot about doctrine. Scripture, sources, the actual textual and historical case for why I believe what I believe now instead of what I was raised to believe. That work matters, and I'll keep doing it. The claims of the Restoration, the nature of God, the sufficiency of Christ's finished work, the difference between a gospel of grace and a system of worthiness checklists. These are not side issues. They are the ground under my feet. But there is a cost to leaving the LDS Church that never shows up in any of that careful argumentation, and I have not talked about it enough. The family cost. This week forced me to sit with it more honestly than I have before. My earliest memory of church at all is not a lesson, not a scripture mastery verse, not a Primary song practiced in a classroom. It is a childhood visit to a temple. I was maybe seven. I remember the inside being bright and white, almost glowing, as if light itself had been designed into the architecture. Afterward we went outside to the gardens. I remember the smell of the flowers up there more clearly than almost anything else from that age, sharp and sweet and alive in the open air after the hushed, polished stillness inside. That memory has stayed vivid for nearly forty years. It is the doorway into everything that came after it, the callings, the temple sealing, the decades of trying to be faithful the way I was taught faithful looked. It is also, I've realized this week, the doorway into this week's particular grief. That part of my family is now part of the loss. There was a death, someone whose life ran alongside my own church story from the very beginning of it, and I did not hear about it in time. I do not fully know why. People have their reasons, and I am not going to pretend to know all of them or assign blame I cannot back up. What I can name is the ache of learning that someone you once shared so much of life with has left this life, and you were not there to grieve with the rest of the family. It helps to understand this wasn't a shallow thing I was leaving. By the time I was baptized at ten, both sides of my family were already generations deep into the church. I hold my grandparents' patriarchal blessings alongside my own. My own conversion history on my parents' side is murky, my parents have always been elusive about the details, which tells me even that isn't simple. But the point stands either way. What I walked away from wasn't just a set of beliefs I'd personally picked up. It was a family identity that had been built and passed down before I was ever born into it. Leaving that isn't like changing your mind about a hobby. It reads, to the people still inside it, like stepping outside the family's whole reason for existing together in the first place. And I want to be fair here, because the system that produced this rupture also produced real good, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Family life inside the LDS Church, at least the version I grew up in, ran on structure. There was a dry erase board in our living room tracking who had done personal scripture study, who had prayed, whose turn it was to lead Family Home Evening. You did not get to go to a friend's house after school without checking the box first. Looking back at it honestly, in my own words from another writing project, it was a gatekeeping strategy that had a backwards effect. We did it because we had to, not because anyone was teaching us to actually pursue a living relationship with Christ. The system measured compliance more readily than it measured the heart. The Primary songs that shaped a child's whole emotional sense of what church meant were not primarily about doctrine either. One of them, one most Latter-day Saint kids grow up singing, is called "Families Can Be Together Forever." That is not a small idea to a child. That is the entire architecture eternity gets built on. So when someone leaves the church, it does not register to the family left behind as a change of Sunday plans or a shift in theological conviction. In that framework it can feel like a threat to whether the family stays together at all, forever, not just in this life. The sealing ordinances, the temple recommends, the language of eternal families, all of it reinforces the same underlying logic. Belonging to the covenant community and belonging to the family are tightly braided together. Untie one and the other feels endangered. That is not a fair fear to carry, but it is a real one, and understanding it has helped me stop being surprised by the silence I have received from some corners of my own family. Jesus told us this would happen. Not as a threat, as an honest warning. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matthew 10:34-36). Following Him sometimes costs exactly this. Not because we went looking for a fight, but because truth divides what used to be held together by something else, even when that something else was sincere and well meaning. The cost is not abstract. It is the quiet phone that does not ring. It is the funeral announcement that arrives too late. It is the sense that you have become a stranger to people who once shared the same pew and the same family photo. If you are reading this and you are where I am, still loving people who have gone quiet on you, still grieving relationships that did not end so much as fade, I want you to know two things. First, it is allowed to hurt. Do not let anyone, including yourself, tell you it should not. The silence is real. The news that came too late is real. The loss of shared history that once felt sacred is real. Second, you are not alone in it, even when it feels that way. The family God actually offers in the gospel is not built on checklists, dry erase boards, or gatekeeping. It is built on grace freely given. That grace is the whole reason any of this was worth the cost in the first place. Psalm 34:18 (KJV) still stands: "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." He does not wait for the checklists to be completed or the relationships to be restored on our terms. He draws near to the brokenhearted. That nearness is not a consolation prize. It is the deeper belonging that no earthly structure, however well intentioned, can finally secure or finally take away. Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDS #Mormonism #FamilyEstrangement #CountingTheCost #ExLDS #GraceLegalismAndTheGospel #ChristianApologetics #BrokenHearted #FaithOverFamily #MatthewTenThirtySix #PsalmThirtyFourEighteen #GriefAndFaith #ComeToJesus #BiblicalTruth #ChristCenteredTruth #NobleBereans #ApologeticsMinistry

I want to tell you something I don't say enough, given how much of my writing lives in the doctrine and the debates. The grace of God is the single thing that changed everything for me. Not a rule I finally kept. Not a threshold I finally crossed. Grace, freely given, is what cracked me open after thirty eight years of not truly understanding it. So before anything else in this post, I need you to hear that part first, because everything after it only makes sense standing on that ground. Here's a question I had to ask myself honestly, and I'm asking you the same one now, brothers and sisters. How much time is actually in a day? And of that time, how much of it do we hand over to the God who gave us all of it in the first place? I remember a season of my life, near the very end of my time in Mormonism, when I was in real limbo. I knew deep down something wasn't right, but it was all I had, all I'd ever known, and I had no map for how to get from where I was to somewhere true. In that season I would spend half a dozen hours some days on a video game and somehow never find ten minutes for Scripture, never find sixty seconds to actually kneel and pray. Not because I didn't believe in God. Because I hadn't let it sink in yet what He'd actually done, and what that was worth to Him, and what it should have been worth to me. That's not a confession I'm making to shame myself in front of you. It's the plainest, most honest way I know to say this: all of us have more time for God than we're giving Him. Plain and simple. Not because He needs it. Because we do. This isn't a call to earn anything, hear me clearly on that. "For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world" (Titus 2:11-12). Grace doesn't sit and wait for us to prove ourselves worthy of God's time before He gives us His. It appeared first. It taught us second. "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Every bit of devotion I'm asking you to consider giving is a response to something already given, not a payment toward something still owed. And still, Solomon's honesty about how fast a life disappears stands: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after" (Ecclesiastes 1:11). In a hundred years, everyone reading this will be in the ground, and in two hundred, most of our names will have thinned down to a line in a record somebody happens to check. Jesus told us plainly which part of us that actually threatens, and which part it can't touch: "fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). The body runs out of time. The soul does not. So Moses' prayer becomes the only sane response to that math: "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). Wisdom, once it actually lands, changes where the hours go. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:19-21). And Jesus gives us the actual order of operations, not as a burden but as an invitation: "seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you" (Matthew 6:33). Seek first. Not seek only, not seek instead of everything else in your life. First. So here's my plea, and I say it prayerfully, as someone who wasted real years not knowing any better. Whatever margin you have today, the ten minutes scrolling before bed, the drive to work, the show you'll half remember by Friday, give some real piece of it to God on purpose. Not to earn His love. You already have that, fully, freely, before you ever did anything to deserve it. Give Him the time because of what He's already given you. "Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you" (James 4:8). He is not far off and He is not waiting on your performance. He is waiting on you to simply come close. We will not be remembered the way we hope, most of us, not for long. But we will still exist, forever, held entirely by grace we didn't earn and can't lose by falling short. Let's actually give that God some of the hours we've been giving to everything that was always going to fade. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matthew 16:26) Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #GraceOfGod #Grace #Faith #Eternity #Soul #Gospel #Christianity #FromMormonToChrist #Scripture #KJV #SeekGodFirst #TreasureInHeaven #DrawNighToGod #JesusChrist #Bible #Prayer #WhatMatters #NumberOurDays #EternalLife

Here's what most members are never told, and what should matter to anyone who genuinely cares whether their faith is true and not just familiar. Those original papyri were believed destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. Then in 1966, several fragments turned up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and were handed over to the LDS Church the following year. For the first time, actual Egyptologists, not just Joseph Smith, could read what was actually on them. This isn't a critic's claim. It's in the Church's own Gospel Topics essay: Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the Book of Abraham. What the papyri turned out to be was a standard Egyptian funerary text called the Book of Breathings, written for a man named Hor, roughly two thousand years after Abraham would have lived. It's a burial document, not a patriarchal record. I spent 38 years inside that church. I know what it's like to build a testimony on something you were told was unshakeable. But faith that can't survive contact with evidence isn't faith, it's denial wearing faith's clothes. This is exactly why I wrote about it, carefully and with sources, in Grace, Legalism, and the Gospel. Not to mock anyone still in the LDS Church, some of the people I love most in this world are. But because truth matters enough to actually test, the way scripture itself tells us to. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). A friend I've made online since starting the Ministry, picked up the book recently and left a review that captured exactly what I was hoping it would do. He called it "an absolutely incredible resource," and said what stood out most to him wasn't just the doctrinal contrast, it was the book's ability to help him understand how LDS people read certain scriptures in the first place, so he could actually relate to them "in a loving and understanding way" instead of just arguing past them. That's the actual goal. Not winning an argument. Helping people test what they've been taught, and giving the rest of us the tools to talk about it the way Christ would. Test it. Look at the actual papyri. Read the Church's own essay on it. See if it holds up. It's available on Amazon should you be interested. God bless you all. Acts 17:11 (KJV): "These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #LDS #Mormonism #BookOfAbraham #JosephSmithPapyri #TestAllThings #ProveAllThings #ActsSeventeenEleven #NobleBereans #ChristianApologetics #GraceLegalismAndTheGospel #ExLDS #ChristianBooks #ApologeticsMinistry #BiblicalTruth #GraceNotWorks #ComeToJesus #ChristCenteredTruth

Charles Stanley's preaching has meant more to me than almost any other voice outside Scripture itself. His sermon "Grace and Continuing Sin," built on Romans 5-6, was one of two things that cracked grace open for me during a thirteen hour day I spent in Scripture, the day I couldn't unsee it anymore. So when I sat down with his sermon "The Supreme Moment in Human History," I wasn't expecting anything less than I got. Ask a historian, a philosopher, or a scientist what the single most important moment in human history was, and you'll get a dozen answers. The printing press. Electricity. The moon landing. The end of a war. Ask God the same question, and the answer doesn't move. From His perspective, the supreme moment in all of human history was the day His Son was crucified. Stanley opens with two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, men who had seen Jesus die, heard the reports of the empty tomb, and still walked away confused. "We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel," one of them says (Luke 24:21). Past tense. They had the facts and missed the meaning entirely. Stanley's point landed on me hard, because I spent thirty-eight years knowing the story of the cross without grasping the actual weight of what happened there. Knowing the facts and grasping the meaning are not the same thing, and I'm proof of that. Three things happened at that cross that changed everything for every person who has ever lived. God judged sin. Because God is holy, sin cannot simply be overlooked, the penalty has been death since the Garden. At the cross, God placed the sin of every person, past, present, future, on His sinless Son. "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus didn't just pay a debt on the ledger. He became the thing being judged so we wouldn't have to. Jesus defeated Satan. Just before the cross, Jesus said the ruler of this world was about to be cast out. Paul describes what actually happened there: Christ "having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15). The debt Satan held over us was cancelled in public, not quietly. The war was won at the cross, even though skirmishes keep coming. God reconciled us to Himself. The wall between a holy God and sinful people came down. "All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ... to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). Not counting it against us. That's the same Jesus who cried out from the cross that it was finished, now inviting anyone who'll come into a relationship with the Father, forgiven, accepted, secure. Stanley's whole point is that the cross isn't a historical event we pull out once a year at Easter and set back down. It's the pivotal moment of everything, still carrying its full weight and its full power right now, for you specifically, whoever you are reading this. Everything a person actually needs, forgiveness, freedom, victory over the enemy, a restored relationship with God, was purchased there, once, in full. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost (John 19:30). If you liked this post, it moved you or touched you, please hit like and share it so others can read it. And If you haven't done so already, hit that follow button ! So glad to have you here. Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #Grace #Gospel #Cross #JesusChrist #Christianity #FromMormonToChrist #CharlesStanley #ItIsFinished #Salvation #Reconciliation #Redemption #Bible #KJV #GoodFriday #Calvary #Faith #Scripture #Atonement #TheGospel

Acts 17:11, The Bereans Searched Daily Anyone who has spent real time in or around Mormonism has heard of "the shelf," even if that exact word was never used out loud. It is the place in the back of the mind where every hard question, every historical difficulty, every doctrinal contradiction gets set instead of resolved. Nobody works through all of it in real time, so it goes up on a shelf and stays there. For some people that shelf eventually breaks. For most, it does not, because without quite realizing it, they spend years reinforcing it instead of examining what is actually sitting on it. STEELMAN: THE LDS POSITION Latter-day Saint theology gives a faithful member a genuine, coherent reason not to treat every unresolved question as urgent. The basis of testimony is not primarily historical or evidentiary, it is a personal witness from the Holy Ghost, and that witness is treated as sufficient on its own terms. Scripture within the tradition itself cautions against over-relying on human learning at the expense of the Spirit's confirmation. On this framework, an unanswered question is not a crisis. It is simply something held in tension while a person continues to trust the spiritual confirmation they have already received. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf named this directly in October 2013, telling members to "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith," and openly acknowledged that "there have been times when members or leaders in the church have simply made mistakes." That is a serious, pastoral answer to a real problem, not an evasion, and I do not want to treat it as one. QUICK REFERENCE (canonized LDS sources only): Moroni 10:4-5, a witness of truth given "by the power of the Holy Ghost" as the basis of knowing 2 Nephi 9:28-29, "when they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God," a caution against relying on one's own learning Doctrine and Covenants 6:22-23, "What greater witness can you have than from God?" THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE (KJV) Scripture does not describe examination of the truth as an act of faithlessness. In Acts 17, the Bereans are held up as the model response to a new teaching, better than the Thessalonians who simply received it: "these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). Paul does not scold the Bereans for testing his own preaching against the text. He commends them for it. Jesus draws the same line in John 3, and this is the verse that names what a shelf actually is: "For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God" (John 3:20-21). A shelf is, by definition, a place kept out of the light on purpose. Not examined, not resolved, just set where it will not be looked at too closely. 1st John makes the same claim about God's own character: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all... if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another" (1 John 1:5, 7). Fellowship with God is tied directly to walking in the light, not around it. None of this says doubt itself is sin. It says the response to doubt matters. Reinforcing a shelf so it will hold more weight is a different posture than bringing what is on it into the light to actually be examined, and Scripture consistently commends the second over the first. NOTES ON SOURCES "The shelf" is not a term I coined. It is widely used within both the current and former Latter-day Saint community to describe this exact accumulation of unresolved difficulties, and its prevalence is itself evidence that many members recognize the pattern in their own experience even when they do not act on it the same way. Uchtdorf's 2013 address is worth reading in full rather than just the one popular line; it is a genuinely compassionate talk, and its candor about past leadership mistakes is part of what makes it significant, not incidental to it. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #FormerLDS #Christianity #Jesus #Grace #Gospel #Bible #KJV #Apologetics #ChristianApologetics #LDS #Mormonism #TrueChristianity #BibleStudy #Faith #Scripture #Doubt #Truth

2 Timothy 1:7-8, Not a Spirit of Fear One year ago today, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking on a college campus in Utah. I remember exactly where I was when I heard. In the months since, I've watched a real debate unfold, not just among pundits but among Christians, about what his death actually did to the wave of faith that followed it. Some say the revival that broke out in the weeks after he died has already cooled, that believers have gone quiet again, more careful, more reserved, less willing to say what they actually believe out loud. I don't buy that. What I've actually watched happen this past year isn't faith fading, it's evil getting bolder and less willing to hide what it is. A man was murdered for saying things about God and country in public, and some people's honest reaction to that was to celebrate it out loud. That's not a sign the light went out. That's what happens when light gets bright enough that what was already there stops bothering to hide. Whatever else people argue about Charlie Kirk, and there was plenty to argue about, his faith wasn't a talking point he reached for when it was useful. Months before he died, someone asked him how he wanted to be remembered if everything else, the platform, the arguments, the influence, just went away. He didn't hesitate. "I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing." Four days before he was killed, he wrote, "Jesus defeated death so you can live." He wasn't performing that for an audience he knew was coming. He had no idea what was four days away. And then there's Erika Kirk, standing in front of a packed stadium days after burying her husband, choosing to forgive the man who killed him. I can't imagine carrying that kind of grief and choosing grace inside of it, in public, with cameras on her. That's not a talking point either. That's the actual gospel, worked out in real time, in front of everyone. Here's what I keep coming back to. Paul wrote to Timothy from a prison cell, to a young pastor who by every account was afraid, tempted to go quiet, tempted to distance himself from a movement that was getting people killed. Paul didn't tell him the fear was irrational or that it would pass on its own. He told him where it came from and where it didn't: "God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord" (2 Timothy 1:7-8). Fear is a real thing. It's just not the thing God handed you. Paul makes almost the same point in Ephesians: "all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light" (Ephesians 5:13). Bring light into a room and you don't create the mess that was sitting in the corner. You just finally see it. I think that's closer to what's happened this past year than any story about faith quietly losing steam. The light didn't get weaker. Some of what was already there got harder to miss. So no, I don't buy the idea that the revival died with him. My own responsibility to speak plainly about Christ certainly didn't expire when the news cycle moved on. Neither did yours. I don't get everything right. I say things too sharply sometimes, I go days without posting when I should have shown up, I've had to walk back arguments I got wrong. That's not a reason to go quiet. It's the actual material discipleship is made of, get it wrong, get corrected, get back up, keep going. A revival that depends on one man staying alive was never going to hold up on its own anyway. What holds up is a lot of ordinary people deciding, one more day than they want to, not to be ashamed of the gospel. So today, of all days, I'm not going quiet. If you've been quiet too, this is me telling you it's alright to stop being so. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth (Romans 1:16). Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #CharlieKirk #Faith #Courage #Gospel #Christianity #FromMormonToChrist #JesusChrist #Bible #KJV #NotAshamed #2Timothy #Boldness #Discipleship #Grace #Scripture #OneYearLater #Remembering #TruthAndGrace #StandFirm

I spent 38 years as a Latter-day Saint. Temple sealed. Once was an Elders quorum president and Branch Mission Leader. Fully convinced I knew the truth. Then the shelf finally broke… and what met me on the other side wasn’t loss. It was the staggering, finished, unearned grace of Jesus Christ. That discovery is why I wrote Grace, Legalism, and the Gospel. This book is for three kinds of people: 🔹 Those who have already left Mormonism and are still trying to untangle what was true from what they were taught 🔹 Those still inside whose shelf is growing heavier by the year and who are quietly terrified of what happens if it breaks 🔹 Christians who love Mormon friends and family and desperately want to understand them, and speak the gospel clearly to them I didn’t write this as an outsider throwing stones. I wrote it as a man who lived the system, taught the system, and then spent thirteen straight hours in the Bible trying to prove the pastor wrong… only to discover that Ephesians 2:8-9 was right all along: we are saved by grace through faith, and that not of ourselves: it is the gift of God. Romans 11:6 still wrecks me: “If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace.” My deepest desire is simple: I want other people to find the same Christ I found. The One whose work is finished. The One who justifies the ungodly. The One who offers rest instead of endless striving. If you’ve ever felt the quiet exhaustion of “after all we can do”… If you’ve ever wondered whether grace is the foundation or just the final safety net… If you long for the kind of assurance that lets a person sleep at night… This book was written for you. Give it a real chance. I’m convinced the gospel is better than we were told, and I want you to know that freedom too. (Link in the comments / DM me) Still grateful. Still in awe. Jesus really is enough.

Before I respond to anything, I want to state the Latter-day Saint position on grace as fairly and accurately as I can, in its own words, from its own sources. Representing a view accurately before answering it is not the same as agreeing with it, and I don't want anyone reading the next section to think it reflects where I stand. I was a member of the LDS Church for nearly four decades, some of that time in leadership, before leaving this past October. I know this doctrine from the inside, not secondhand. What follows after the steelman is where I actually stand now, and why. STEELMAN Latter-day Saints do not believe salvation is earned outright through works. The standard LDS position, following 2 Nephi 25:23, is that "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." The official LDS Bible Dictionary defines grace as "divine means of help or strength, given through the bounteous mercy and love of Jesus Christ," further explaining that "individuals, through faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ and repentance of their sins, receive strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain if left to their own means. This grace is an enabling power that allows men and women to lay hold on eternal life and exaltation after they have expended their own best efforts." On this framing, grace isn't a wage for good behavior, it's the power that makes ongoing obedience and repentance possible in the first place, extended as a person continues to strive. Helaman 12:24 reflects the same idea: the repentant "shall be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works." LDS scholars themselves have debated how far to press "after all we can do." Some caution strongly against reading it as a righteousness quota that must be hit before grace kicks in, insisting instead that "all we can do" simply means whatever measure of faith a person currently has, however small. That is a fair and serious reading, and it deserves to be represented honestly rather than caricatured. QUICK REFERENCE (Canonized LDS Sources) 2 Nephi 25:23 - "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" Bible Dictionary, "Grace" - grace as "enabling power" that operates "after they have expended their own best efforts" Helaman 12:24 - "restored unto grace for grace, according to their works" THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE (KJV) Genesis 15:6 says simply: "And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness." What makes this verse so decisive is its timing. This happens roughly fourteen years before Isaac is born, decades before Abram is circumcised (Genesis 17), and centuries before the Law of Moses exists at all. Abram has no ordinances to point to, no law to keep, no "all he can do" yet performed. He simply believes God's promise, and God counts that faith itself as righteousness. Paul makes this exact chronological argument in Romans 4:9-10, asking whether righteousness was credited to Abraham before or after his circumcision, and answering, "before." He drives the point home in verses 4-5: "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." Grace, by definition, cannot be something owed after sufficient effort. The moment it is owed, Paul says, it stops being grace. Paul makes the same case in Galatians 3:6-9, calling the gospel preached to Abraham "before" the law existed. Ephesians 2:8-9 states it as plainly as Scripture ever does: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Even James, the writer most often quoted to argue works matter for salvation, cites this same verse (James 2:23) to make a different point than "works contribute to justification." James's argument is that real faith always produces works as fruit and evidence. He never claims works are the precondition for God crediting righteousness in the first place, Genesis 15:6 already settled that, years before Abram had anything to show for it. The contrast is not "does faith matter to Mormons" versus "does faith matter to Christians." Both traditions affirm faith matters enormously. The contrast is sequence: does God credit righteousness to faith alone, with a transformed life following as fruit, or does grace complete and reward a life of effort already underway? Genesis 15:6, and Paul's entire argument built on it, says the crediting happens first, before any obedience is in view. WHY I KEEP COMING BACK TO THIS People who follow this page have probably noticed I return to grace more than almost any other subject. Two reasons. The first is personal. There was a day I spent thirteen hours straight in Scripture, and that day is when grace finally cracked open for me, not from one insight but two arriving together. The first was understanding Genesis 15:6 correctly, that Abram was declared righteous before he had anything to show for it, no law kept, no ordinance performed, no threshold of effort crossed. The second was Charles Stanley's sermon "Grace and Continuing Sin," built on Romans 5:20-21 and Romans 6, where Paul writes that "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" and that believers are, in Stanley's words drawn from Romans 6:18, "slaves of righteousness" rather than people perpetually re-earning their standing. Stanley's core point that day was blunt: you cannot out-sin the grace of God. Put those two things together, an unconditional declaration of righteousness in Genesis and an inexhaustible supply of grace in Romans, and the entire "enabling power after all you can do" framework I'd been taught my whole life stopped sounding like good news to me. It just relocated the finish line. It didn't remove it. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. The second reason is broader, and it isn't really about Mormonism at all. I've noticed that plenty of Christians who already affirm salvation by grace on paper don't seem particularly astonished by it in practice. It gets treated like a box checked at conversion rather than the actual scandal it is, that God credited righteousness to a man's faith alone, in advance, with nothing earned and nothing owed. I don't think we love grace enough, any of us, until we've stood close enough to a system that promised it and delivered a ledger instead. I'm currently working through The Essence of the Old Testament by Ed Hindson and Gary Yates in my Old Testament coursework at Liberty University, where Hindson served for over thirty-five years as Distinguished Professor of Religion and Biblical Studies and Dean of the School of Divinity before his passing in 2022. In his companion devotional on Abraham's life, Hindson makes almost this exact point himself, describing the covenant God made with Abram in Genesis 15 as entirely unilateral: "It was not a conditional covenant. It was not an agreement that depended on both sides keeping their half of the bargain in order for it to work. God promised He would do it, and He did it, by Himself." He goes on to note that Genesis 15:6 is significant enough that Scripture repeats it three more times in the New Testament, at Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:6, and James 2:23. That's not a fringe reading. That's a Liberty University Distinguished Professor and the author of my own assigned coursework, landing in the same place I did that day. NOTES ON SOURCES The Bible Dictionary "Grace" entry is quoted directly from churchofjesuschrist. org/study/scriptures/bd/grace, official reference material bound with LDS scriptures. 2 Nephi 25:23 and Helaman 12:24 are quoted directly from the Book of Mormon. The internal LDS debate over "after all we can do" is real and ongoing among LDS scholars and General Authorities alike; this post represents the more common devotional reading found in official Church materials, not the only reading available within LDS thought. Charles Stanley's sermon "Grace and Continuing Sin" is drawn from In Touch Ministries' published teaching on Romans 5-6. Ed Hindson's quotations are from Courageous Faith: Life Lessons from Old Testament Heroes (Chattanooga, TN: AMG, 2011). 1 Corinthians 3:11 (KJV): "For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #Grace #Faith #Mormonism #FromMormonToChrist #Genesis #Romans #Galatians #Ephesians #Justification #Righteousness #ByFaithAlone #Christianity #BibleStudy #OldTestament #Salvation #Atonement #JesusChrist #Gospel #Scripture

A CHRONOLOGY MISTAKE TAUGHT ME SOMETHING ABOUT GRACE I just closed out a New Testament course, and the assignment I'll remember longest wasn't the one I got perfect on the first try. It was the one where I got something wrong. I was studying Acts 10, Peter and Cornelius, the moment the gospel crosses over to the Gentiles. I wrote that Peter showed up "the day after" Cornelius had his vision. My professor caught it. Cornelius actually says it happened four days earlier (Acts 10:30). Four days. A whole sequence I had flattened into one, the vision, the messengers traveling to Joppa, Peter's own vision, the trip back to Caesarea, collapsed into a sentence that wasn't true to the text. It was such a small thing. A word choice. And it bothered me more than it should have, because I have spent years now trying to get things right, trying to make sure that when I speak for God I am not putting words in his mouth or shortcuts in his timeline. Getting caught on something that small was humbling in a way I didn't expect it to be. ───────────────────────── THE PART I DIDN'T EXPECT ───────────────────────── I fixed the sentence. That part was easy. What I didn't expect was what happened when I got to Part 2 of the assignment, where I actually had to teach the passage to someone, not just write about it. I taught it to my family in the car. There's a quiet that shows up on a drive, in between the conversation, and sometimes the truest things get said right there in it. And somewhere in the middle of that drive, teaching a passage about a man who had to leave everything familiar to go somewhere God was sending him, my family landed on something I never steered them toward. They said my pastor's sermon was my own "Cornelius moment." The sermon that first cracked open thirty-eight years of ground I had built my entire identity on top of. I sat with that the rest of the drive. I didn't bring it up, they did, on their own, in a car. When I sat down to write the reflection afterward, I couldn't leave it out. My professor's comment on it was the one that stuck with me longer than any grade has: "The principle you closed with, God working through imperfect messengers, is not an observation in this paper. It is an autobiography." I have read that sentence more times than I probably should admit. ───────────────────────── WHY THIS MATTERS ───────────────────────── Here's what I keep coming back to. God didn't send an angel to explain the gospel to Cornelius directly, even though an angel was standing right there and could have. He sent for Peter instead, a man who had to have his own vision, wrestle with it, and physically walk into a house he had no business entering by his own upbringing. God still works that way. Not through shortcuts. Through people willing to cross a line they weren't raised to cross, even when it costs them the comfort of staying inside the room they already understood. That's the whole reason From Mormon to Christ exists. Not because I have it all figured out, clearly I still get chronology wrong, but because someone had to be willing to have a conversation I didn't want to have, in a moment I would have rather avoided, and I don't get to withhold that same willingness from someone else now. Not after what it cost to give it to me. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9, KJV). (Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry.) #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #FormerLDS #Acts10 #Grace #GraceAlone #GodShowsNoPartiality #Cornelius #Ephesians28 #ItIsFinished #Testimony #FaithJourney #MormonToChristian #BiblicalChristianity #JesusChrist #TruthMatters #Evangelism #FaithCrisis #FromMormonToChristMinistry

Can We Talk About Faith Without Fighting? I've been sitting with an idea for a while now, and I want to run it by you all before I commit to it. I keep noticing that most faith conversations online turn into fights. Someone states what they believe, someone else jumps in to correct them, and within a few comments it's not a conversation anymore, it's two people trying to win. I don't think that's what Christ modeled, and I don't think it's what actually reaches anyone. I spent 38 years in the LDS Church before coming to faith in the biblical gospel of grace, and if there's one thing that journey taught me, it's that people don't get argued into the truth. They get walked there, patiently, by people who respect them enough to tell them the truth without contempt. So I'm considering starting a Facebook group built around one idea: Christians from different traditions, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, all of it, sharing what they believe and why, disagreeing honestly when they disagree, but never with insults, name-calling, or the kind of contempt that shuts a conversation down instead of opening it up. Real biblical discussion. Real disagreement, even. Just none of the ugliness that usually comes with it. A few things I'm thinking through, and where I'd genuinely love your input: Rules with teeth. I want zero tolerance for insults, profanity, and mockery, not as a slogan, but an actual one-warning policy. Say something cruel once, you get a warning. Do it again, you're out. My thinking is that people engage more honestly when they know the room is actually safe, not just theoretically safe. Nobody does their best thinking, or their most honest searching, while bracing for an attack. Moderators from different Christian traditions. I don't want this to be a group where every ruling looks like it favors one denomination. I'm hoping to find moderators from a Catholic background, an Orthodox background, and a few different Protestant streams, Reformed, evangelical, Pentecostal, so that no one ever wonders if a decision was about fairness or about theology. If you've got that kind of background and this sounds like something you'd want to help build, I'd love to hear from you directly. Substance over slogans. You can make a strong claim here, even a hard one, but you have to back it up with real reasoning, not just drop a one-liner and walk away. I'd rather someone say something true and difficult than something safe and empty. Faith deserves better than both cowardice and cruelty. I don't have all of this figured out yet, that's actually why I'm posting. Does this sound like something you'd want to be part of, either as a member or as someone helping moderate it? And if you've been part of a group that tried something like this and it worked, or didn't, I'd genuinely love to hear what you saw. Please let me know! Im hoping to put this together, create a discord for the moderators, and then roll it out and try to get people who are actually interested in Apologetics into it. "A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." Proverbs 15:1 © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FaithWithoutFighting #GentleAnswers #BiblicalTruth #ChristianUnity #GraceNotContention #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormonChristian #ChristianDialogue #TruthInLove #NoInsultsAllowed #FaithConversations #ChristianCommunity #GospelOfGrace #ProverbsWisdom #RespectfulDisagreement #ChristianModeration #FaithAndTruth #KingdomUnity #SharingTheGospel

Doctrine and Covenants 1:38, "My Word... Shall All Be Fulfilled" Recently a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Instagram and Facebook post about a New York fashion designer set off a firestorm among members, some praising the Church for reaching men who feel out of place, others calling it tone-deaf given the designer's background. I'm not going to pretend to know what was going on in the Church's communications department when that post went up. What I do know is that this is not the first time the ground has moved under members' feet, and it will not be the last, because the pattern goes back to the foundation of the institution itself. STEELMAN: THE LDS POSITION Latter-day Saint theology has a coherent answer for why teaching and practice can legitimately change over time: the canon is open, and God continues to speak through a living prophet. Article of Faith 9 states the position as a standing commitment: "We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." Amos 3:7 is read as establishing that God always works through a prophetic office, and Doctrine and Covenants 1:38 extends that principle into the present, promising that whether by the Lord's own voice or the voice of his servants, "it is the same." On this framework, a reversal is not evidence of error. It is evidence that revelation is still active. QUICK REFERENCE (canonized LDS sources only): Doctrine and Covenants 1:38, "whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same," a word once given, "it shall all be fulfilled" Jacob 2:23-35 (Book of Mormon), plural marriage condemned in strong terms Doctrine and Covenants 132, plural marriage later commanded Official Declaration 1 (1890), plural marriage discontinued Official Declaration 2 (1978), priesthood ordination extended to all worthy male members regardless of race THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE (KJV) Malachi 3:6 states God's own claim about himself: "For I am the LORD, I change not." Hebrews 13:8 says the same of the Son: "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." James 1:17 adds that in God there is "no variableness, neither shadow of turning." Numbers 23:19 puts the same claim in its starkest form: "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent." Set beside that standard, the documented record is worth sitting with plainly rather than arguing around. Plural marriage was condemned in the Book of Mormon's own text, then commanded in Doctrine and Covenants 132, then discontinued by Official Declaration 1 in 1890, a sequence of reversal inside the space of a single lifetime. The priesthood and temple restriction based on race was taught for over a century as, in the words of a 1949 First Presidency statement, "not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord," before being reversed by Official Declaration 2 in 1978. Brigham Young's Adam-God teaching was taught from the pulpit and later disavowed outright. None of these were minor administrative adjustments. Each was taught, in its time, with the same claimed prophetic authority as the position that later replaced it. That is the honest problem this story sits inside. It is not that one Instagram post proves a conspiracy. It is that a system built to allow, and even require, this kind of correction over time cannot simultaneously claim the fixed, unchanging status Scripture reserves for God alone. Numbers 23:19 does not describe an institution capable of revising its own settled doctrine twice within 150 years. It describes someone who never had to. NOTES ON SOURCES The Church's own 2013 Gospel Topics essay, "Race and the Priesthood," states plainly that "Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice," an admission that no recorded revelation actually established the restriction the 1949 First Presidency statement had called a direct commandment. The same essay disavows the theories once taught to explain it. Reporting on this story, including coverage from the Salt Lake Tribune and LGBTQ outlets Queerty and PinkNews, indicates the interview was filmed over a year before it was published and that the designer's brand did not exist at the time of filming, which is worth noting as context rather than treating the timing itself as proof of anyone's intent. This is the argument at the center of my book, Grace, Legalism, and the Gospel. A system that has to keep adjusting its own settled positions is not describing the same kind of authority Scripture claims for the God who does not change and the Christ who does not need correcting. Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8). Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #FormerLDS #Christianity #Jesus #Grace #Gospel #Bible #KJV #Apologetics #ChristianApologetics #LDS #Mormonism #TrueChristianity #BibleStudy #Faith #Scripture #PriesthoodBan #PluralMarriage

THE TEXT THROUGH TIME: Post 5 of 11 — The 1849 European Edition By 1848, Orson Pratt, one of the original Twelve Apostles, was running the Church's European mission from Liverpool, England. The 1841 first British edition had taken almost eight years to sell out (see Post 4), and once the stock was finally gone, Pratt oversaw a new printing: 5,000 copies, offered for sale starting May 15, 1849. Mostly it was routine maintenance. He moved the index to the front of the book and relabeled it "Contents," a small formatting choice that stuck around in British printings for the next thirty years. But tucked into this otherwise unremarkable edition is a quieter repeat of the exact same problem from Post 2. Back in 1837, "king Benjamin" had been silently changed to "king Mosiah" in Mosiah 21:28, with no documentation of who made the call or why. Twelve years later, in this 1849 edition, Orson Pratt made the identical correction a second time, in Ether 4:1, which also originally read "Benjamin" in the 1830 print. Same fix, same total absence of a paper trail, just a different apostle making the call more than a decade after the first one. Here's where it gets genuinely interesting. Royal Skousen, the BYU scholar whose manuscript-based critical text is the standard reference for this kind of question, has gone back and checked the narrative timeline in Mosiah 22 against both of these "corrections." His conclusion: Benjamin may plausibly still have been alive at both points in the story. If that's right, then neither the 1837 change nor this 1849 change fixed an actual error. They may have both introduced one, independently, twelve years apart, into a text that was already correct as originally dictated. Two different editors, over a decade apart, quietly "fixing" the same name in two different chapters, and the best manuscript-based scholarship available today suggests they may have both been wrong. 📌 QUICK REFERENCE • 1849 second European edition, Liverpool. 5,000 copies, printed under Orson Pratt's direction • Structural change: index moved to front of the book, relabeled "Contents" • Ether 4:1 changed from "Benjamin" to "Mosiah," the second instance of this exact correction, twelve years after the first (Mosiah 21:28, 1837) • No documentation exists for who made this change or why, matching the pattern from 1837 • Royal Skousen's manuscript analysis suggests Benjamin may still have been alive at both narrative points, meaning both corrections may be mistaken BIBLICAL CONTRAST (KJV) Scripture doesn't describe God's word as something that needs a second undocumented correction twelve years after the first one already missed the mark. "The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times" (Psalm 12:6). Isaiah is even more direct about durability without editorial rescue: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever" (Isaiah 40:8). And God himself is described as consistent in a way this editorial pattern is not: "For I am the LORD, I change not" (Malachi 3:6). A book that needs the same kind of silent, unexplained fix applied twice, a decade apart, by two different men, to two different verses, and that scholarship now suggests may have gotten it wrong both times, doesn't fit the picture of a word that stands purified and unchanging. It fits the picture of an ongoing editorial project, still being adjusted by trial and error, well over a decade after it was first delivered as the "word of God." NOTES ON SOURCES The Ether 4:1 correction, its 1849 date and attribution to Orson Pratt, and Royal Skousen's Mosiah 22 timeline analysis are documented in Skousen's Book of Mormon critical text project (BYU), the same standard scholarly source referenced in Post 2, used by LDS and non-LDS researchers alike. "For I am the LORD, I change not." (Malachi 3:6, KJV) (Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry.) #FromMormonToChrist #BookOfMormon #TextualCriticism #RoyalSkousen #OrsonPratt #Ether4 #Mosiah22 #WordOfGod #Psalm12 #Isaiah40 #Malachi3 #MormonToChrist #ExMormon #ChurchHistory #TruthMatters #SolaScriptura #ScriptureAlone #BiblicalInerrancy #Part5of11

I’ve spent the past year studying the defenses of the Christian faith, examining arguments, history, philosophy, and the coherence of the gospel. But the longer I dig, the clearer one truth becomes: the most powerful apologetic is not a polished argument. It is grace. Paul called it “the gospel of the grace of God.” Not the gospel of human effort. Not the gospel of religious performance or endless progression. The gospel of unearned, undeserved, unrelenting favor poured out on people who could never earn it. I know what it feels like to live under the opposite. For years I was raised and fully believed as a Mormon. I was taught that God’s love was real, but that acceptance, exaltation, and even a secure relationship with Him depended on my worthiness, my ordinances, my continual striving. There was always another level to reach, another standard to meet, another quiet fear that I might not be doing enough. The weight of that system sits heavy on the soul. You learn to measure yourself constantly. You learn to perform. Then I encountered Charles Stanley’s teaching on the grace of God. He spoke simply and repeatedly from passages like Acts 20:24, where Paul says he does not count his life dear to himself so that he may finish the course and testify to the gospel of the grace of God. Stanley made it plain: grace means God’s undeserved forgiveness and acceptance are already yours through faith in Christ alone. You do not serve in order to be accepted. You serve because you already are. That message did not just inform me. It snapped something loose in me. For the first time I began to see that the gospel is not a ladder I climb toward God. It is the announcement that God has already come all the way down to me in the cross of Jesus. The debt is paid. The verdict is already “not guilty.” The door is already open. No temple recommend. No checklist of progression. Just Christ, and Him crucified, and the free gift of righteousness given to the one who believes. Understanding grace did more than free me from a works based system. It began to show me who God actually is. Not a distant Father waiting to see if I measure up. Not a God whose love is conditional on my performance. But a God whose heart is so full of kindness that He would rather die for His enemies than leave them in their inability. A God who gives what we could never achieve. A God whose acceptance is secure because it rests on His Son’s finished work, not on my fluctuating faithfulness. As someone who now studies apologetics, I see even more clearly why this message is so powerful. Every other system, religious or secular, ultimately says some version of “Do enough and you may be accepted.” The gospel of grace alone shatters that framework. It leaves human pride with nowhere to stand and human despair with nowhere to hide. It is intellectually stunning and personally devastating in the best possible way. So today I am still learning to live in the freedom Stanley pointed me toward. I no longer have to serve God out of fear that He might reject me if I fail. I no longer have to perform for His approval. I already have it, completely, securely, forever, because of Jesus. That changes why I live, why I obey, why I love. Not to earn His smile, but because I already live under it. Not to gain His favor, but because His favor has already found me. Grace has already spoken. The rest of my life is simply learning how to live in the echo of that yes. And if you are still carrying the quiet weight of wondering whether you have done enough, I want you to hear what finally set me free: the gospel is not advice about how to climb higher. It is news about what God has already done for those who could never deserve it. “But I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself, so that I may finish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God.” Acts 20:24 #GospelOfGrace #GraceAlone #UndeservedFavor #CharlesStanley #InTouchMinistries #Apologetics #ChristianApologetics #FaithAlone #CrossOfChrist #FinishedWork #FromMormonism #ExMormonJourney #TrueGospel #GodsGrace #SalvationByGrace #FreeGift #AcceptedInChrist #NoMoreStriving #RestInGrace

EMPTY HANDS: WHAT MARK 10 SAYS ABOUT EARNING WHAT CAN ONLY BE RECEIVED My pastor preached on Mark 10:13-31 at church today, and the thesis he opened with has not left me since: the kingdom of God cannot be earned with full hands, it can only be received with empty ones. The more I sat with the passage, the more I realized it is one of the most direct answers Scripture gives to the question I spent many years answering the wrong way, what must I do to be saved. THE PASSAGE ITSELF (KJV) Mark places two scenes back to back on purpose. First, children are brought to Jesus, and the disciples rebuke the people bringing them, as though Jesus has more important business than a child with nothing to offer Him. Mark alone records that "when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased" (Mark 10:14). He says, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10:14-15). A child brings nothing to the table but empty, open hands. That is the posture Jesus commends. Then a man runs to Jesus, kneels, and asks the exact opposite kind of question: "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10:17). He treats eternal life like a checklist. Jesus points him to the commandments, and the man answers, "Master, all these have I observed from my youth" (Mark 10:20). Mark tells us something Matthew and Luke leave out: "Then Jesus beholding him loved him" (Mark 10:21). This was not a hostile confrontation. It was Jesus, in love, showing a sincere, moral, religious man exactly what still owned his heart. "One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor... and come, take up the cross, and follow me" (Mark 10:21). The man's countenance fell, "and he went away grieved: for he had great possessions" (Mark 10:22). Jesus then tells His disciples how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom, harder than a camel passing through a needle's eye, and the disciples, astonished, ask the only question left: "Who then can be saved?" Jesus answers, "With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible" (Mark 10:27). That line is the hinge of the whole passage. Salvation was never a math problem the rich young ruler could have solved by giving away one more possession or keeping one more commandment. It was, and is, impossible for man, full stop, and possible only because God does it. Peter, sensing the shift, points out that he and the others have left everything to follow Jesus. Jesus does not correct him for that observation, but He does redirect it, promising a hundredfold return now, in this time, with persecutions, and eternal life in the world to come (Mark 10:29-31). Following Jesus was never a transaction for status or reward. It cost the rich young ruler his idol, and it costs every one of us ours. STEELMAN: THE LDS POSITION Latter-day Saint theology does not teach that grace is absent. It teaches grace and obedience working together, most explicitly in the phrase "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23). In that framework, faithful obedience, commandment-keeping, ordinances, and worthiness are how a person positions themselves to receive grace, not a replacement for it. Someone raised in that system, as I was, would read the rich young ruler being told to keep the commandments and see confirmation that obedience is part of the path, not a mistake to correct. QUICK REFERENCE (canonized LDS sources only): 2 Nephi 25:23, "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" Articles of Faith 1:3, obedience to "the laws and ordinances of the Gospel" as required for the atonement's benefits D&C 130:20-21, blessings are predicated on obedience to the law upon which they are predicated 3 Nephi 27:19-20, only the clean are permitted to enter God's kingdom, requiring one to be "washed" through obedience WHERE THE PASSAGE ANSWERS THIS DIRECTLY Here is the problem the rich young ruler's own words expose. He does not ask how to cooperate with grace. He asks, "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" That is a checklist question, and Jesus answers it the way a good teacher exposes a wrong premise, by taking the man at his word and following it to its conclusion. The man claims to have kept the whole law from his youth. Jesus does not argue with that claim. He shows him the one place his obedience has not reached, and the man's own reaction, grief, walking away, proves that his "after all I can do" was never actually enough, because there was always one more thing. That is not a coincidence in the story. It is the point. Paul makes the identical argument in Galatians: "the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus fChrffist might be given to them that believe" (Galatians 3:22), and describes the law as "our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith" (Galatians 3:24). The commandments were never given as a ladder to climb into eternal life. They were given to show every one of us, rich young ruler included, that we cannot climb it. Jesus's answer to "who then can be saved" was not "those who finally do enough." It was "with men it is impossible." Paul states the same principle without the parable: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). And again, "not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us" (Titus 3:5). Grace that only finishes what our obedience started is notð gdrace as Scripture defines it. It is wages with a discount, and Paul is explicit that wages and grace cannot occupy the same transaction: "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Romans 4:4-5). ANTICIPATING THE PUSHBACK "Jesus told the man to keep the commandments. Doesn't that prove obedience is part of salvation?" Jesus does tell him to keep the commandments, and then shows him he cannot, not fully, not in the place that matters most. The command functions as a diagnosis, not a doorway. If keeping commandments were sufficient, the story would have ended with the man's confident answer in verse 20. It does not end there. It ends with Jesus revealing what the checklist could never expose on its own. "2 Nephi 25:23 doesn't mean earning salvation, it just means we still have to try." The phrase "after all we can do" places human effort as a precondition that grace supplements, not as a response that flows from grace already given. That ordering is the exact reversal of what Paul, Jesus, and this passage all describe. Biblical grace comes first and produces obedience as fruit. It does not wait at the finish line for obedience to arrive first. "Worthiness interviews aren't about earning salvation, they're about qualifying for temple ordinances." In Latter-day Saint theology those ordinances are taught as necessary for the highest degree of exaltation, which means passing the worthiness checklist functions as a gateway to the fullness of salvation in that system, not a separate, lower-stakes category. That is precisely the "what must I do" posture the rich young ruler brought to Jesus, and precisely the posture Jesus met with grief-inducing honesty rather than approval. "James says faith without works is dead, so works must matter for salvation." They do matter, as evidence, not as currency. James is describing what genuine faith produces, not what earns entry. A child brought to Jesus with empty hands in verse 14 has done no works at all, and Jesus calls that posture the model for the whole kingdom. Works are the fruit of a life already saved by grace, never the fee required to receive it. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11). © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry #FromMormonToChrist #ExMormon #FormerLDS #Christianity #Grace #GraceAlone #Mark10 #Bible #KJV #Apologetics #ChristianApologetics #LDS #Mormonism #SolaGratia #Salvation #Gospel #EmptyHands #JesusChrist #BibleStudy

The Poem Of Only One Set of Footprints 👣 There was a picture that hung in my mom's house growing up, the kind a lot of homes had, showing a set of footprints along a beach, paired with a well-known poem about a man looking back over his life and noticing that during his hardest seasons, there was only one set of footprints in the sand instead of two. He assumed God had left him right when he needed him most. The answer he received was the opposite: those were the moments God was carrying him. I thought about that image recently, looking back over the last year of my own life. For thirty-eight years, I walked a path I believed was leading me somewhere true. I served faithfully, I taught others, I built my whole sense of who I was and where I was headed around it. And when that entire foundation started to come apart, I didn't feel like I was walking through it with steady steps, weighing evidence at a comfortable pace. I felt like the ground itself had disappeared. Here's what I've come to understand about that moment, looking back. I didn't find my way out through my own searching. I wasn't looking for anything new that October Sunday I walked into a small church, angry about a sermon on grace. I think what actually happened to me is closer to Luke 15's picture of a lost sheep, not one that wanders back to the fold under its own strength, but one a shepherd goes out after, finds, and carries home on his own shoulders, rejoicing the whole way. That's what it felt like, once I could see it clearly. I didn't find Jesus that day. He found me, through a wife who wouldn't let me drive away from a conversation I needed to have, a pastor who patiently repeated himself to a stranger trying to prove him wrong, and thirteen hours of Scripture that refused to cooperate with the case I was building against it. Scripture describes God this way more than once, beyond that one parable. Isaiah says of Israel, "even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you" (Isaiah 46:4, KJV). Moses tells Israel that in the wilderness, the Lord "bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went" (Deuteronomy 1:31, KJV). That's not gentle companionship alongside someone walking under their own power. That's someone being lifted and moved because they couldn't have covered that ground themselves. What I know now is that the weight I carried for thirty-eight years, the weight of wondering whether I'd done enough, is gone. Not because I finally did enough. Because someone else carried it, all the way to a cross outside Jerusalem, and put it down there, and hasn't picked it back up since. If you're in the middle of a season like that right now, where the ground feels like it's disappeared and you can't tell if anyone's still with you, I'd just say this: sometimes the absence of a second set of footprints isn't abandonment. Sometimes it's the clearest evidence there was that you were being carried the entire time. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11, KJV). (Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry.) #FromMormonToChrist #GodCarriesUs #Isaiah46 #Deuteronomy1 #Luke15 #FaithJourney #ExMormon #FormerLDS #GraceAlone #ChristAlone #TestimonyTuesday #BiblicalTruth #ChristianLiving #FaithOverFear #TrustGod #MormonToChristian #ScriptureAlone #StillCarried #FaithNotWorks

Why Does Following Christ Feel Harder Than I Expected? 🥊 I used to think that once I got the theology right, once I actually understood grace instead of a system of earning, the hard part would be behind me. I don't think that anymore. If anything, the last several months since my baptism have shown me the opposite. The pull toward sin hasn't disappeared. If anything, I notice it more clearly now than I ever did before, because for the first time I'm not measuring myself against a checklist of ordinances and commandments. I'm measuring myself against the actual holiness of God, and that's a much harder mirror to look into. Paul describes this exact tension in Romans 7, and reading it for the first time as a believer instead of as someone still trying to earn his way, it stopped me cold. "For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I" (Romans 7:15, KJV). A few verses later: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19, KJV). This is the apostle Paul, writing this, a man who planted churches and wrote a large share of the New Testament. If he wrestled with this, I don't think I should have expected to be exempt from it. Here's what struck me most, though. Paul doesn't resolve that struggle by trying harder. He doesn't end the chapter with a five-step plan for better obedience. He cries out, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24, KJV), and then answers his own question: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 7:25, KJV). The deliverance isn't self-improvement. It's Christ, again, still, the same finished work I'm resting on for salvation itself. Here's something I didn't expect grace to do: it's made me more honest about my own failures, not less. Under the old framework, admitting a real shortcoming felt dangerous, like reporting a debt against a balance I was still trying to pay down. So there was always a quiet pull toward minimizing things, explaining them away, comparing myself to someone doing worse. Grace has done the opposite. Because my standing isn't on the line every time I fail, I don't have to protect it anymore. I can actually look at where I'm falling short, honestly, without flinching, because confessing it doesn't put anything at risk that Christ hasn't already secured. 1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (KJV). That verse only works the way it's supposed to if confession is safe. And it's only safe if the forgiveness was never something my confession earned in the first place. I spent thirty-eight years in a framework where spiritual progress was something you could point to and measure, ordinances completed, commandments kept, a ladder you were visibly climbing. Leaving that behind for grace didn't make the internal battle go away. In some ways it made it more honest, because I'm no longer able to hide behind a completed checklist and call the war over. Sanctification, becoming more like Christ, is a real, lifelong, often exhausting process, and Scripture never promises it will feel easy just because the guilt of earning your salvation has been lifted. What it does promise is a direction, and someone worth reaching for. Paul writes near the end of his life, "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14, KJV). Not arrived. Not finished improving. Pressing on. That's where I am too. Not finished. Not without a real, ongoing fight against my own flesh. But not measuring my standing before God by how that fight is going today, either. My standing rests on a work already completed on a cross. My pressing on is just what it looks like to actually love the one who did it. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11, KJV). (Feel free to share with credit. © 2026 Rexford George Beardsley Jr. / From Mormon To Christ Ministry.) #FromMormonToChrist #Romans7 #PressOnTowardChrist #Sanctification #GraceAlone #ChristianLiving #ExMormon #FormerLDS #FaithJourney #ApostlePaul #Philippians3 #SpiritualGrowth #ChristAlone #WrestlingWithSin #GrowingInFaith #BiblicalTruth #TruthInLove #FaithNotWorks #BibleTruth