CC #19 (Praise to the Man)

The transcription is discussing the importance of having a living prophet and the gratitude for Joseph Smith and the restoration of the gospel. It also mentions Elder M. Russell Ballard's last talk before his death and the account of Joseph Smith's First Vision. The speaker reflects on their own gratitude and testimony of the restoration and the importance of personal revelation. Surely, the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets. How blessed we are to have a living prophet today. Brothers and sisters, the Savior declared, whether by my own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same. Welcome to Conference Chronicles, where we systematically take one conference talk per week from the previous conference and dissect it and learn from it. I'm your host, Taylor Lithgow, and I firmly believe that as we listen to and apply the Lord's teachings through His living prophets, we will fulfill the full measure of our creation and we will be prepared for the Lord at His second coming. So please join with me each week as we take this quest called Conference Chronicles. Hello brothers and sisters. Welcome on in to another episode of Conference Chronicles. I am feeling definitely under the weather, so hopefully that doesn't come across too much in the episode. I've got a bad headache and my nose is really runny, so we will see how this comes out. This week's talk is by Elder M. Russell Ballard, entitled Praise to the Man. It is the last talk that he delivered in mortality. He died just a few months later, and I always wonder how good of an idea these men have on when they might die. I wonder, did he know that this was his last talk? Of course you think of Bruce R. McConkie's talk where he said, in coming days I will feel the prints of the nails in his hands and feet, but I will not know better then than I know now that He is the Christ and He is my Savior. So essentially he predicted that he would be dying soon. So I wonder, did Elder Ballard know that he would be dying soon? I guess it doesn't really make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but you wonder why he chose to speak on this specific topic. It was clearly very near and dear to his heart. He even mentions that he couldn't see the teleprompter. He said, I went in to see the doctor and I said, hey, I can't see the teleprompter and his doctor said, well your eyes are old and they're not getting any better, so good luck. So essentially he was just speaking from his heart and speaking from memory. One thing that stood out to me in his message was just his deep sense of gratitude. He mentioned multiple times how grateful he was for Joseph Smith, for his mission and for the things that we know because of him. I'll read this little excerpt. I think how grateful we are as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that Joseph Smith, a boy who desired to know what he needed to do to have his sins forgiven, found the courage to go into a grove of trees near his home in Palmyra, New York, and there kneel in prayer and by his own statement pray out loud for the first time. On that occasion, as Joseph got on his knees in what we call the sacred grove, the heavens opened. Two personages, brighter than the noonday sun, appeared before him. One spoke to him and said, Joseph, this is my beloved son. This began the restoration of the fullness of the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus, our Savior and our Redeemer, spoke to the boy Joseph and opened up this dispensation of time that we now live in, we sing praise to the man who communed with Jehovah. We thank the Lord for Joseph Smith and his courage to go into that grove of trees in 1820 near his home in Palmyra, New York. I've been thinking about all the marvelous things that we know and all the things that we have. My beloved brothers and sisters, my testimony to you this morning is how abundantly blessed we are to know all that we know because we have Joseph Smith, the prophet of this last dispensation of time. Elder Ballard's caused me to reflect on my gratitude for all that I have and all that I know because the gospel has been restored. And it made me reflect on the many testimony-building experiences I've had to grow my knowledge of the restoration and of Joseph's unique mission. I thought of the experiences I had in the six months leading up to my mission. After I received my mission call, I started taking my personal study very seriously and I felt the need to deepen my testimony in the restored gospel because I would be teaching about it for two years. I had studied the Book of Mormon a couple of times through up to this point and I definitely had a strong testimony. It was simple but it was strong. But I felt a sense of responsibility for the people that I would soon be teaching. I knew that I needed to be strong and that there were people in Arizona that were depending on my testimony being strong. So I would pray and ask Heavenly Father to help me in this endeavor and I felt prompted to study from Joseph Smith's history explaining his account of the First Vision and the other events surrounding that experience. So I actually studied this account at least once a week leading up to my mission. I remember just feeling the most overwhelming sense of power and truth every time I studied it. It was like the Spirit was just entering into the room and into my heart every time I read this out loud. So let me go ahead and read some of it from Joseph Smith's history. The backdrop of this account is that Joseph's family members had all joined different churches. There was certainly religious freedom and there was a great religious upheaval and many of the different denominations were fighting against each other trying to get new members to join their congregation and so they were trying to persuade all the individuals why the other churches were wrong and why theirs was right and this really confused the boy Joseph and I'll pick up right there in verse 10. He says, In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself, What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it? While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which 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. Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did, for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know, for the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible. At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. So in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of 1820. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally. After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction. But exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction, not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being, just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. When the light rested upon me, I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other, This is my beloved son, hear him. I would like to add my simple testimony that I know that Joseph saw what he said he saw, that God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ appeared to him and spoke to him by name. I also wanted to pause there and go back to Elder Ballard's message of gratitude, saying how grateful he was that we know what we know and have what we have because of the restoration of the gospel and Joseph Smith's role in that. So what do we know? What did we learn from this one account that we call the first vision in the sacred grove? What did we learn from this account? Well, we learned that God will always lead honest seekers of truth to the answers they need. Joseph was confused. He wanted and needed to know what church to join. So Heavenly Father spoke to him through the holy scriptures in James and prompted him to go deliver his first vocal prayer. And Heavenly Father will do the same for you and I as we are honestly seeking truth in our lives. We also learned that revelation is not dead. We can all receive personal revelation in our own lives, and we learned that when the teachers of religion in that day would say things like, Miracles ceased with the apostles and there will never be any more of them, that that was wrong. It was false. God is not silent, and he called another prophet, and he called 12 apostles, and he still calls prophets and apostles to this day. So we learned that revelation is not dead. We also learned that there is a need for more scriptures to be revealed. At this time, at this moment that we had read this after Joseph had received the first vision, we did not know that the Book of Mormon would be revealed to him. We did not know that. But what we do realize is that there was a need for more scriptures to be revealed. He said that there was all of these different churches, right, and they all had the Bible. They all studied from the Bible. They had the exact same words in front of them, but yet they understood the passages so differently. They interpreted the verses so differently. So it was impossible to come to any sort of clear conclusion by simply looking at the Bible. It was clear that there needed to be a second witness, another testament of Jesus Christ, if you will, to provide clarity and to provide context to the verses that we already had in the Holy Bible. What else did we learn? We learned that the adversary tries to thwart God's work, always. Also, the greater importance of the work, the greater his efforts will be. Like for instance, with our Savior himself, as he was fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, the account of Satan coming to him and tempting him time after time after time. And then as Joseph knelt in prayer and was about to be visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ, Satan knew the implications of this. And he does all he can to stop and thwart and distort the work of God, then and now. He will never win, but oh how he tries. On that note, we also learned that sometimes God allows us to go through darkness or hard times before we see the light. God the Father, in his loving omniscience, allowed Joseph to be almost completely overtaken by Satan and his darkness. And it forced Joseph, in his own words, to say that he needed to exert all his power to call upon God to deliver him out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon him. And it was at that moment that he saw a pillar of light. It reminds me of Lehi's vision of the Tree of Life, when he wandered in darkness for a long time and then finally called out to God for help and was led out of that darkness. Sometimes our Father in Heaven will lovingly allow us to experience darkness so that we can better understand the light, to taste the bitter so we know the sweet, to feel pain so we know pleasure and comfort and satisfaction. What else did we learn? We learned that God the Father and his beloved Son, Jesus Christ, are distinct beings with bodies of flesh and bone. We learned that they know us by name and that we are created in their image and likeness. We learned that God is not some abstract force that is so big and vast that it can cover the whole universe, yet so small it can fit into your heart. God is our literal Father and Jesus is his beloved Son and our Savior. We learned that God almost always allows the Savior to speak on his behalf. As recorded in Scripture and in this experience with Joseph Smith, he calls him by name, Joseph, and then immediately turns to the Son and says, this is my beloved Son, hear him, hear what he has to say, he will speak on my behalf, I trust him implicitly to share exactly what I would also share if I were speaking. And then moving forward from that, we ended up learning that none of the churches on the earth at that time had the fullness of the gospel and that Joseph would be called to be the prophet of the restoration to restore Christ's original church that he established when he was living on the earth. What else did we learn? And I also, if there's anything that I haven't mentioned, please mention them in the comments. I'm interested to hear from your perspective what you glean from this First Vision experience and what you've learned from it. Moving forward, there are so many other things that we are so grateful for because of the fruits of Joseph Smith's life and the work of Jesus Christ through him. So what are they? We know who we are and our purpose on this earth. We know about the pre-earth life. We know about our purpose on this earth and we know what happens to us after we die. We know about the spirit world. We know that if humans weren't able to receive sacred ordinances like baptism on this earth, they are not lost forever. They're not cast off just like Joseph saw his brother Alvin in a vision and realized that he would also be saved even though he wasn't baptized on this earth. We have more context and clarity about the kingdoms of glory as mentioned in the New Testament in Corinthians. We have more context and clarity on those kingdoms of glory. We know that family relationships can be perpetuated beyond the grave. When we're married in our courthouses, it says, tell death do you part. But in the holy temples, the wording is for time and all eternity. With that being said, we have holy temples to make sacred covenants in and to experience the crowning ordinance in the gospel and that is the sealing ordinance. We have a deeper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ and what that is, right? Faith in Jesus Christ and his atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end and all that that encompasses. And then lastly, the last thing I'll mention is we have the Book of Mormon which is the keystone of our religion and should be the keystone of our testimonies. It's a fruit of Joseph Smith's life and mission, the Book of Mormon. I'm going to come back to the Book of Mormon and talk more about it a little bit later, but I wanted to pause and acknowledge that there are many people facing doubts and fears. I have talked to plenty of family members and friends that have expressed doubts or fears in some capacity surrounding Joseph Smith, the restoration of the gospel and the restoration of the church on the earth today. So let's pause and acknowledge those individuals and maybe offer a bit of encouragement and advice. I did want to point out that fear is not real. Danger is real, but fear isn't. Fear is an emotion that our brains have come up with and fear can be very, very powerful. It can trap us, imprison us in our own mind, but it is fake. So please try your best to not give in to the lie that is fear. The next thing I'll say, and this is something we've all heard many times probably, is to doubt our doubts before we doubt our faith. If we have a doubt that comes up, doubt that first. Don't let that one doubt compromise all of the truths that you do know and love. Allow the doubt to have its place, set it aside, and trust that you will receive an answer to that. You have most likely put in a lot of hard work and effort to gain the testimony that you do have. So don't let something small totally uproot all of that work that you have put in. I would also say to remember the fruits of the gospel in your life. Do you really want to give up those sweet fruits? I mean, where else can you go for those same rich blessings? On that note, I wanted to read an excerpt from a CES devotional given by Elder Tad Callister. This was in January of 2014. It's entitled, What is the Blueprint of Christ's Church? And here's what he says. If one rejects this church after studying the blueprint, then it will likely ruin him for any other church because he knows too much. He will be like Peter, who was asked by the Savior, Will ye also go away? Peter responded with an answer that should be engraved in every heart and enshrined in every home. To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. If someone turns from the church, where will they go to learn about the restored truths concerning the nature of God as revealed in the sacred grove, the preaching of the gospel to the dead, the three degrees of glory, and eternal families? Where will they go to get the ordinances that can save and exalt them? Where will they go to have their families sealed to them for eternity? Where will they go when they want a priesthood blessing of comfort or healing for a family member? Where will they go to find a prophet of God? They will look in vain for those doctrines and those ordinances and those powers and those prophets as they are unique to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One cannot have the doctrines and ordinances as restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith without accepting Joseph Smith and the underlying history that is the basis for such. They are inseparable. They go hand in hand. You cannot call the fruit good and then call the tree bad. The Savior taught that truth long ago. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Accordingly, if the doctrinal fruit we have discussed tonight is good, then the tree from which it sprang, Joseph Smith and the accompanying underlying history of those revealed truths, is likewise good. You cannot have one without the other. So again, I'll add, the fruits of the restored gospel are so sweet to me. And from what tree do they spring? Who was the instrument, who was the prophet that our Father in Heaven and our Savior used to restore these truths? The Prophet Joseph Smith. You cannot separate the fruit from the tree, as Elder Callister said. So now, my last invitation to those who might be struggling with doubts and fears is this. Study the Book of Mormon. Study the Book of Mormon diligently and ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if the Book is true. It is called the keystone of our religion for a reason. And again, I'm going to read another excerpt from Elder Callister. It's in a different talk altogether. It's entitled, God's Compelling Witness, the Book of Mormon. It was given in October of 2007. Here's what he says. The Book of Mormon is not only the keystone of our religion, but it can also become the keystone of our testimonies, so that when trials or unanswered questions confront us, it can hold our testimonies securely in place. This book is the one weight on the scales of truth that exceeds the combined weight of all the critics' arguments. Why? Because if it is true, then Joseph Smith was a prophet and this is the restored Church of Jesus Christ, regardless of any historical or other arguments to the contrary. For this reason, the critics are intent on disproving the Book of Mormon, but the obstacles they face are insurmountable because this book is true. While someone might choose to believe the critics' line of reasoning, it is for me an intellectual and spiritual dead end. To believe such, I would have to accept one unproven assumption after another. In addition, I would have to disregard the testimony of every one of the eleven witnesses, even though each remain true to his testimony to the very end. I would have to reject the divine doctrine that fills page after page of this sacred book with its supernal truths. I would have to ignore the fact that multitudes, including myself, have come closer to God by reading this book than any other. And above all, I would have to deny the confirming whisperings of the Holy Spirit. This would be contrary to everything I know to be true. I'll add my simple testimony that I also have come nearer to God by studying the Book of Mormon than by any other book. And I would also have to deny so many spiritual witnesses and the spiritual witnesses of millions of others, as Elder Callister said. Elder Callister does an amazing job of breaking things down in a logical and intellectual way. So, I would really recommend you go and study both of these addresses that I referenced, God's Compelling Witness in October of 2017, and then What is the Blueprint of Christ's Church in January of 2014. They are quite good and powerful. But again, with all of that being said, we cannot gain a testimony of spiritual things solely by using logic or intellect. It is impossible. And so I'm going to close with a quote from Elder Anderson in his General Conference talk in October of 2014. The talk is entitled, Joseph Smith. He says, These explanations are convincing, but the sincere inquirer should not rely on them exclusively to settle his or her search for truth. Each believer needs a spiritual confirmation of the divine mission and character of the prophet Joseph Smith. This is true for every generation. Spiritual questions deserve spiritual answers from God. So I will extend the same invitation that Elder Anderson extends and the same invitation given to us in the Book of Mormon itself. Please study the Book of Mormon. Everything hinges on it. If it is true, which I testify that it is, then everything else is true. As we sincerely study the Book of Mormon, our lives will be changed. We will be ingesting spiritual food in a world that is desperately craving spiritual food. And to go back to the beginning point of Elder Ballard, I am so grateful for all that I know and all that we have because Joseph Smith was courageous enough to offer his first vocal prayer and then to act on every answer that he received from God the Father and Jesus Christ. I testify that this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is at the helm. And I say that in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Thank you very much for tuning in. This has been such a fun process, in my opinion, every week to study these talks and deliver these messages. I hope you enjoy them. Next Sunday is General Conference. We will have a lot more material to work with after next weekend. So I will not be releasing an episode next weekend. I hope that everyone enjoys General Conference. And then the following Sunday, I'll start recording episodes for the April 2024 General Conference. I really look forward to it. I'll talk with you all soon. Bye-bye.