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Our Third Meeting With The LDS Missionaries
Our third meeting was much more fruitful. Both LDS missionaries seemed more energetic and ready to get into stuff. They provided us with a pamphlet for our third discussion and said, “Today we’re going to go over the gospel. There shouldn’t be anything different here. I’m sure we will agree on this because it’s just the gospel.”
Becky and I have been careful with which questions we raise because we do not want to chase so many rabbit trails that we do not get to hear the lesson that they have prepared for us. It has been awhile since we have been through the discussions with the LDS Missionaries. The LDS church has a new missionary manual and have changed the way they present the information to those who are interested in their religion. We are raising some questions, but our objective at this point is to get through the material and hold our major objections until after we have been through the new material. The differences between the gospels of Mormonism and Christianity are quite glaring once you know where to look.
After Elder J. made his comment, I was wondering how difficult it was going to be to remain on topic because the gospel is our favorite thing to talk about with LDS Missionaries. We remained silent and let the guys guide us through their material. Once we got to page four of the pamphlet, Elder T. asked us a question about repentance. I explained that a lot of the things we had been discussing sounded the same, but that they were different because our words have different definitions. I asked him to explain what he meant by repentance so they both touched on it a bit and then moved on to other things in the pamphlet.
As we were going through the lesson material, I was praying and asking God how to proceed. I didn’t want to get off track, but I didn’t want to waste a perfect opportunity either. Neither one of these guys are as well-versed as other LDS missionaries we have spoken with so I was wondering how we were going to be able to direct them to the verses that we want them to go to without us bringing up the verses ourselves. At this point, they do not know that both of us have read the Book of Mormon and are familiar with it so to start quoting BoM verses would be out of place.
As we were finishing up with the material, I was praying and got an immediate answer to my prayer. I saw a green light in my mind and heard the promptings of the Holy Spirit telling me, “Go for it!” I then asked a question about repentance and referred back to page four of the pamphlet. Under repentance, one part say, “Stop doing what is wrong, and strive never to do it again.” I asked, “What if you do it again? Is it still considered repentance?” Both guys answered “No” in unison. They also made the point very clear that one cannot be forgiven until they have completed their repentance.
Becky was explaining that if she needed to stop sinning before she could be forgiven, then there is no way she can be forgiven. I started praying again, “Lord, I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but this would be a great place to bring up First Nephi 3:7.” Right then, Elder T. said, “A verse just jumped right into my mind. I know this one will help.” He started thumbing through his BoM and I knew he was going to the verse I had just prayed for. Elder T. said, “This verse is found in First Nephi chapter three.” I smiled and started nodding my head thanking God for that awesome display of sovereignty.
Our 2nd Meeting with the LDS Missionaries
On Wednesday, July 18th, I wrote about a meeting that we had with two LDS Missionaries. Since then, they have come back twice. The second meeting wasn’t very fruitful, but we did manage to get them to think about one very important thing.
They were trying to prove to us the necessity of having a prophet on earth today when elder J. said something to the effect of, “The Bible was written so long ago. We need to hear from God now because there is so much that goes on in our lives now that the Bible doesn’t speak about.”
I stated, “Yes, but doesn’t the Bible give us principles that we can use that will still apply to us today?” They agreed with us that the Bible is still applicable, but still insisted that someone needs to get current messages from God so that we will know how to live better lives.
I asked, “OK, then can you give us some examples of one of your prophets giving us current information that we need that isn’t already found in the Bible?” Elder J. was stunned into silence and looked at Elder T. They both looked at each other and really didn’t know what to say. Finally Elder J. brought up the Word of Wisdom and said that Joseph Smith had a new revelation about a health code.
I didn’t want to reveal what I knew about the Word of Wisdom, but that “revelation” was given in 1833. Hmm… 174 years is not exactly what I would call, “current.” I just said, “Joseph Smith? That was a long time ago. I’d like to hear some examples of one of your prophets giving some important information that you have heard personally and needed to know, something within your life-time. Is there anything recently that isn’t already found in the Bible?”
Elder T. spoke up. “One of the things that I have really benefited from is something President Hinckley said not long ago. He talked about debt and how wrong it is to get into it. That has really meant a lot to me and has helped me to be better with my money.”
I smiled. “Your prophet must have been reading from the book of Proverbs recently.”
I’ll write about our third meeting later.
15th Wedding Anniversary!
Becky and I were married 15 years ago today. Tonight at dinner we were talking about what we were doing 15 years ago and Becky said, “At this time of the night, we were still picking birdseed out of our hair.”
I remember that. As we were coming out of the church, people started throwing birdseed at us. It would not have been so bad if Becky and I had not decided to stop, pick up bird seed from off the ground and throw it back. Sure, we managed to get a lot of people with our seed, but that kept us in the line of fire way too long. As a result, we had LOTS of birdseed stuck in our hair.
Good memories. God has really blessed us for the last 15 years. Our marriage isn’t perfect and we’ve got a lot of work to do, but there is no one else on this planet that I would rather be married to. I love you Becky. Happy 15th anniversary.
I’m A Fundy?
Check out this neat little quiz I just took. Who is the dude in the picture?
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You scored as Fundamentalist, You are a fundamentalist. You take the Bible as the foundation of your faith and read it very literally, and it shapes your worldview. Non-fundamentalist Christians have watered-down the Gospel in your view, and academic study of the Bible stops us from ‘taking God at his word.’ Science is opposed to faith, as it contradicts basic biblical truths.
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What’s your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com
New Cool Tool- Enter The Tag Cloud!
Check out the new Cool Tool on the right sidebar. It is a tag cloud designed by Zoom Clouds. I saw one of these on a blog I read often and wondered what one would look like on our blog. The way they work is to figure out what words keep appearing on your blog and then create a tag that links you to the posts that use that term. It is going to take some time for it to “learn” which terms to use so it will probably look different next month than it does now.
It will keep changing based on which words it picks up so I am interested to see how that develops. I’m not so sure I’m going to keep it, but I’ll use it for a month or so and see what I think. Feel free to share your thoughts.
Jehovah’s Witness Convention 2007- Follow The Christ- Part II
Part II
The building was not completely packed, but I have never been in the company of so many JWs. Every one was dressed up, men, women and children and no child care was offered. Above the stage was a huge banner that read, “Follow The Christ 2007 District Convention 2008.” The program started a bit late, but the speakers usually ended their time slot a few minutes early. There were no breaks from when to convention began at 9:30 until 12:10 for lunch.
As soon as the lunch break began, S.R. came over to me and asked if I had any questions. We got to talking about whether or not God needed an organization when he tried to prove through Acts 15 that all of the churches reported back to a governing body in Jerusalem. I pointed out that because this was the only time in scripture where a letter was sent forth from the apostles in Jerusalem, it wasn’t as clear cut as the Watchtower says it is about a governing body. I told him that after churches were set up and established, they were autonomous and followed no pattern of reporting back to Jerusalem. We agreed to disagree and decided it was lunch time.
S.R.’s family invited me to stay with them and eat. Practically no one left the building for lunch because they all brought their own food in small coolers. Out of the few people who did leave the building, the majority of them sat in the parking lot and ate lunch in their cars. Very few people left the premises to go eat at a restaurant. I thanked S.R., but declined their offer because I had a small cooler in my car and I wanted to call Becky and talk with her about how the day was going.
One of the things I told Becky about on the phone was that the parts I disliked most about the convention were the testimonies. The first three people to give their testimonies all had these stories about how they persevered through extreme circumstances in order to give more time to the organization. The first lady said that she entered into the pioneer service (full-time door to door ministry) in spite of the fact that she has type one diabetes, her daughter has some sort of disability and her grandmother, has Parkinson’s disease.
The second lady told of giving up her four year degree. She was very close to graduating, yet decided that she didn’t want to “waste any more time.” She thought it best to pioneer instead of following Satan’s world.
The third lady was a bit younger than the other two and said that prior to pioneering, she was seeking “wrong entertainment” in the form of video games and movies. Next, she said something very interesting. I don’t have it word for word, but it was something to the effect of, “If you stay busy in the works of Jehovah, you don’t have time for the world.” The message that the Watchtower was trying to send was extremely obvious.
“There are no excuses for not doing more. Do you think you have it
tough? These people have difficult circumstance and are still able to
pioneer full-time for Jehovah’s Organization. Why can’t you?”
What a guilt trip! That, my friends, is a classic mark of a cult. We should stay so busy that we do not have time for anything else. That includes no time for investigation or critical thinking.
One way that the organization accomplishes this was being played out right before my eyes in this very convention. Each speaker brought up numerous Bible verses to substantiate certain points of their subject, but gave almost no time to look up the verses and zero time to consider the context. I was writing as fast as I could and was looking up as many of the verse as I could. When I couldn’t keep up, I would just write down the passage and turn to the verse the speaker had already jumped to. I could see the JWs in front of me who were doing little more than just writing down the verses. It was very difficult to write down the verse, look it up, check the context and take notes before the speaker had already moved on to another verse. After a few hours of this, we all needed a break. Lunch time sounds good right about now.
Blog Down For Awhile
I’m not quite sure what happened the other day, but I received a notice from Blogger informing me that this blog was being investigated for being a “spam-blog.” They needed me to confirm that the blog was genuine and then they would review the blog to make sure. I did what I was asked to do and then all of a sudden, my blog was down.
I received an e-mail from Blogger telling me that all was fine, but it wasn’t fine. My blog was still down. I had to do a little bit of research to get it back up, so here we are. No thanks to Blogger by the way. I responded to their e-mail and have yet to hear from them.
A Surprising Visit From The Mormon Missionaries
Wow, we are surprised! While we were in Salt Lake City visiting temple square, we were asked to fill out a visitor’s cards if we wanted more information or to receive a free video. Since we have not yet seen the video they offered, Becky filled out a card and requested the video.
We have requested information before, but have not always received it. Our house has been on the “black list” for quite some time so we really did not expect to hear from anyone. We were surprised to hear that someone had called our home even before we returned home from Manti. Becky has returned a few phone calls and we finally managed to set up a time for the LDS missionaries to come by and drop off the video.
They arrived this afternoon with the video we requested and asked if we had any questions. Becky got out the ice cream and we sat down in the living room and just got to know each other a little bit. We realized that they did not know who we were when one of the guys asked me what I do. I replied that I was a missionary and was very surprised that they did not ask about that at all. It was almost like they didn’t hear me. Have I mentioned at all that we were very surprised?
The LDS missionaries talked with us and were very cordial, but did not seem like they were going to get started at all. Becky kept prompting them almost as if she were teaching them how to begin the discussions. When they asked if we had any questions about their religion, I looked at the clock and jokingly asked how much time they had. They both were very serious when they said that they had a lot of time. Becky prompted them once again to begin their regular approach and off we went. The lead LDS missionary talked almost non-stop for about 20 minutes.
They gave us one of the pamphlets pictured above and started talking about the great apostasy. I could not help but think of all the times that a Mormon has said to me, “Why do you have to bash our religion? Why can’t you just tell me what is good about your religion without bashing mine? Elder J. was about to move on to his next point when I asked if I could ask a question about what we had just read. I pointed out that the paragraph we had just read was to be applied to our church. The paragraph read in part, “Jesus told Joseph not to join any of the churches, for “they were all wrong” and “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me…”
I asked how they would feel if this condemnation was to be applied to them. Elder J. said that it would not bother him because he hears things like that all the time. That was not the point I was trying to make so I rephrased my question.
Have you ever thought about how other people feel once they realize that this condemnation is to be applied to their church? Becky added that she thought it was a pretty harsh statement. Both LDS missionaries looked at each other and elder J. said that he had never thought about that before. We made sure that they knew that this information is offensive to those not of their faith. Both guys completely understood our point. They did not pull any punches when it came to the LDS doctrine that no church, other than theirs, had God’s authority.
What was really cool about this part of the discussion was that Elder J. said that out of all of the 13 months that he had been on his mission, he had never read that part of the pamphlet to an investigator before and he didn’t know why he read it this time. I chuckled to myself because I knew why God had him read that part. I used this as an opportunity to do some preventative maintenance and told him that when I preach the gospel, I have bad news and good news, but the good news does not make any sense without the bad news. I told them that I have had numerous people tell me that they only want to me to tell them the positive things about my religion without finding fault in theirs. Both LDS missionaries agreed with us that it is necessary and proper to tell people the bad news first. This will come in handy for when they learn about our ministry.
Although we spoke about many other things, there was another important issue that I want to discuss here. Elder J. paraphrased numerous verses in both the Bible and Book of Mormon. One of them was Matthew 7:20– Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. The context is speaking of how to identify false prophets, but rarely does a Mormon know that. Elder J. said that we could determine the truth of things by examining it’s fruit. In this case he said that we could examine Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.
He then transitioned into telling us to pray about the Book of Mormon to find out if it is true. Prior to this discussion, I never had thought about these two ideas as a contrast. I asked, “If we are to test the truthfulness of a religion or person by examining their fruit, why are we told to pray about the Book of Mormon?” Elder J. said that God wanted us to try for ourselves but once we get to a place where we need help, we can ask God. He gave an illustration of our daughter asking for help with a math problem. As a good father I want our daughter to try and figure it out for herself, but once she gets stuck, she can ask me for help.
I started talking about how I like the idea of examining fruit, but that I also thought that praying about the truthfulness of Mormonism is a misuse of prayer. For instance, if Elder J. didn’t study for his math exam and just asked God for the answers, God is not obligated to give him the answers. Both LDS missionaries agreed with me on this point. I took it a step farther and gave him a scenario.
“If one of the sister missionaries from temple square told you that God told her to have a physical relationship with you before marriage, and that to know the truthfulness of her revelation, all you need to do is pray about it, would you pray about it?” He admitted that he would not pray about it because God has already spoken about this and he knows that it would be wrong. I give this illustration to Mormons often and it helps them to see that prayer can be misused.
We told them that we would be more than happy to examine Mormonism and Becky even jokingly warned them that she is a “studier.” Both LDS missionaries understood our thoughts and feelings about this and are looking forward to our next meeting. Please join us in prayer for the salvation of these two guys. We also want to tell them about our ministry and pray that they do not find out about it until we tell them.
Jehovah’s Witness Convention 2007- Follow The Christ- Part I
In this blog I will be reporting on my attendance at the 2007 District Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Since the story is a bit longer than I initially intended, I will break it up into more readable pieces over the next few days. I have never attended one of their conventions so I guess I had more to write about than I originally thought.
Part I
Every year the Jehovah’s Witness have District Conventions all over the globe. The JWs locally meet at the Bell County Expo Center in Belton, Texas. Weeks before the actual event, JWs will canvass neighborhoods and pass out invitations to this three day event. Last year Becky attended the convention for a few hours one day. This year we decided it was my turn.
I attended last Friday, July 13th and was able to stay the whole day. I wanted to attend the convention without bringing any attention to myself or cause any kind of trouble. When I arrived, I parked on the North side of the building and wanted to figure out the traffic flow. I didn’t want to get caught on the wrong side of the building and forced to go in a direction that I did not want to go. I decided to walk over to one of the parking attendants on the other side of the building and ask about the traffic flow.
As I was there talking to him, someone came up behind us in a golf cart. I turned around to see what was going on and the passenger in the cart said, “Hey, Keith! How are you doing?” I could not believe my eyes. What are the chances that I would get spotted by someone who knows me and I haven’t even been inside the building yet? The passenger was a JW I studied with a number of years ago. S.R. knows about our ministry and drops by the house from time to time to see how we are doing. He is a very like-able guy and were it not for the fact that the Watchtower discourages JWs from making friends of Christians who critique the organization, I think we could be very good friends.
He was genuinely happy to see me and probably a bit puzzled as well. He made sure I was OK and that I got my questions answered and then asked if I was “still doing [my] thing,” referring to our ministry. I said I was and he asked if I had any questions for him about their beliefs;
S.R. You know I’ve always got lots of questions.
That is true, you always come up with some pretty
good ones! So is there anything in particular you would like to
ask?
I was hesitant to get into anything right in the parking lot because I really wanted to just observe the convention and didn’t want to take any chance of getting kicked out. Not that I think S.R. would do that, but I have no doubt that someone with more authority and who does not know me would not think twice about asking me to leave. To his credit, S.R. recognized my hesitancy and said that he would stop by my house and we could talk then. I agreed to that and then started to make my way to the building.
As I was walking to the building, S.R. invited me to sit with his family and then jumped out of the golf cart to escort me to where they were sitting. This really was not turning out the way I had planned. I was hoping to be able to come and go unnoticed, take a few pictures and just observe the convention. Now, all of a sudden, I am going to be sitting next to someone who is very familiar with our ministry- an elder and his family. I politely accepted his offer and followed him into the center.
ClustrMaps Updates
Where’d my dots go? That was the question that came to mind when I logged onto my blog just now. You know that map on the right side bar that shows the geographical location of where people are who are viewing this blog? When you click on the map, it says there are 5,432 visitors, but only six dots on the map. I went to the ClustrMaps FAQ to find out what happened. Here is some of what they had to say.
Maps get archived at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, or yearly), as described in our explanatory timeline. The interval is specified by you on your Admin page see the ‘Admin‘ link at the top of any ClustrMaps page). By default, archives happens yearly, but are sometimes delayed until a suitable current update has occurred, which is probably what has just taken place in the case of your own maps.
Naturally, people always like to have ever-more-dots, but the regular archive is the only way we can avoid having the maps turn into a ‘giant red smear’, and continue delivering the scalable service that everyone has come to expect.
That explains it. Here is a thumbnail of last year’s map, 7/11/06 through 7/11/07.
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