The irony about this is that most of these protesters hold up signs announcing that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.<\/p>\n
I can remember on my mission coming across many evangelical Christians who condemned me to hell unless I was willing to accept Jesus into my life. Invariably, I would use the opportunity to, then and there, accept Jesus into my life. I would say whatever little prayer they had printed on their cards or flyers and then look them in the eye and say I agreed with every word in it. It still wasn\u2019t enough. I remember talking to one family at their doorstep, who said I needed to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.<\/p>\n \u201cFair enough,\u201d I said. \u201cI cheerfully accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I recognize that I am helpless without Him, and that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. I invite him into my life, and I know He is the only way to heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n They stood there, flummoxed.<\/p>\n \u201cIs that it?\u201d I said. \u201cDo I have to do anything else?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, you do,\u201d the mother said. \u201cYou need to repent of your Mormon faith.\u201d<\/p>\n Yeah, okay.<\/p>\n See, that\u2019s the problem. These guys insist that all you have to do is accept Jesus, and, presto, you\u2019re saved. But if you say you accept Jesus and still want to hang with the Mormons, you didn\u2019t do it right. If you press people hard enough on this, they\u2019ll tell you haven\u2019t really accepted Jesus, you\u2019ve accepted some other Jesus. The movie The God Makers, which was quite a popular Mormon-bashing film back in the \u201880s, constantly refers to Jesus as being separate from the guy the Mormons worship, who is repeatedly identified as the \u201cMormon Jesus.\u201d The problem is that the Mormon Jesus is pretty much identical to the other Jesus \u2013 he was the Son of God, born to a virgin in Bethlehem; he grew up in Nazareth; he called twelve apostles and taught the Gospel, and then was betrayed and crucified on Calvary. Three days later, He rose from the dead, and He commissioned His apostles to teach his Gospel to all the world. Now, unless the Mormon Jesus did all this same stuff down the street or something, it\u2019s pretty hard to distinguish between the two.<\/p>\n The problem is that Mormons believe Jesus did more than this. The Book of Mormon tells of His visit to the Lost Tribes of Israel, and Joseph Smith and other modern prophets talk of seeing Jesus on several occasions. So what these Christians are saying is that Jesus only did what is chronicled in the New Testament, and only the Mormon Jesus did all this extra, weird stuff.<\/p>\n So, when you get right down to it, the way to hell isn\u2019t a lack of belief in Jesus. Apparently, the danger lies in believing too much about Jesus.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not quite sure what to do about this. I can go into almost any Christian church in the country, and they\u2019ll tell me things about Jesus that I will heartily agree with. I believe He did everything the Bible says He did. But I also believe Jesus is more than just words on a page. I don\u2019t worship the Bible; I worship Jesus, who is not bound like the pages of a book.<\/p>\n I can recall quite vividly one of the first experiences I had that built my own personal witness of Jesus Christ. I was in a pageant at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles called III Nephi, which dramatized Christ\u2019s visit to the New World after His resurrection. I was nine or ten years old, I think. I played one of the children who greets the Savior, and we were taught two songs to sing on that occasion \u2013 one was \u201cI Feel My Savior\u2019s Love,\u201d and the other was \u201cThe Love of God.\u201d I can recall feeling a very powerful witness that Jesus was real; that He loved me, and that He knew me by name. I can remember a testimony meeting right after the dress rehearsal, where one of the men stood up and said \u201cThat which you feel right now is the love of God.\u201d He was right. I knew he was telling the truth, just as surely and plainly as I knew I existed.<\/p>\n The song \u201cI Feel My Savior\u2019s Love\u201d was written for that pageant, and it has since become something of a staple among Mormon children. I\u2019ve heard it a billion times. But I hadn\u2019t heard the song \u201cThe Love of God\u201d since the day I last sang it on the stage of the Shrine. That is, until yesterday, when a local choir sang it as a counterpoint to \u201cI Know that My Redeemer Lives.\u201d And instantly, I felt that same sweet assurance, the power of the Spirit reminding me of the certainty I learned so long ago.<\/p>\n That which I felt was the love of God.<\/p>\n Maybe that means I\u2019m damned for all eternity. Maybe the Mormon Jesus has deceived me. Maybe, maybe, maybe \u2013 but I really don\u2019t think so. There are some things that sink too deeply into your soul to deny them. So when people yell at me and tell me that I need to believe less than I do in order to be saved, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t accommodate them.<\/p>\n Since when does God damn people for believing too much?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lastweek was nuts. When real life intervenes, keeping up with a blog is pretty rough going. I apologize. Rest assured, I have not abandoned this blog, only neglected it. Although if it were a child, that would be enough to sic CPS on me. The past couple of weeks have been very hectic, indeed, yet ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4789,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/4789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.stallioncornell.com\/uploaded_images\/mormonjesus-773463.jpg\")
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I don\u2019t think these people realize that there is not a single Mormon who would disagree with that. I posted this picture on Facebook, and a Mormon friend of mine likened this to a guy going to a polling place on Election Day and screaming to everyone in line, \u201cYOU SHOULD VOTE!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n