Dynamic Truths

WORDS OF NOTE  (Taken the writings of Joseph Fielding McConkie and his book, 50 Truths The Devil Doesn’t Want You to Know)

1. First from the Introduction:  “The need to worship is as essential to the soul of man as the necessity of breath to the mortal body.  The atheist who claims no belief in God has simply chosen to worship at the shrine of his or her own intellect while the believer has chosen to worship that which is greater than himself or herself.”…

2. “By definition God is not and cannot be a tyrant.  He did not create us to serve his every want and need, for he is not a slave to such things.  He created us for the joy of creation: to share that same love that parents do in their own children.”

3. “Four principles must be operative for agency to exist.  First, God, and he alone, must ordain sure and absolute laws by which we can advance and be blessed.  Second, opposites must exist. Third, we must have a knowledge of those laws so that we might conform to them or war against them.  Fourth, we must possess an unfettered freedom to act upon those laws.”

4. …”Satan insults and fights that which he finds most threatening.  If something threatens him, that thing must be an evidence that the Church is true…These are the kind of things that make the devil holler.  The louder he hollers, the more threatened he is.”

5. From page one, “ The First Vision is the foundational story of the personal testimony of every member of the Church…No true Latter-day Saint has claim to a testimony that is valid and binding independent of the witness of the Spirit of truthfulness of this event and a faith in Joseph Smith’s account of it.  There is no middle ground where the telling of this story is concerned.  It will always invoke the spirit of peace, light and truth, which in turn will always be countered by the loud, ugly ranting of the adversary.”

6. From page three, “What spirit, we are left to ask, would fight such a story?  Our response can only be one that feeds upon the spiritual dependency and poverty of others.  All else must say, I too must pray about this, doing so in the hope that it is true.”

7. “The gate of Gethsemane for those of our dispensation is through the Sacred
Grove.  One cannot accept Christ while rejecting those who he commissioned to come in his name with his message.  Any man or woman who does not have the courage to ask God about the truthfulness of the First Vision cannot have the truth.  You cannot expect to drink the water from Jacob’s well if you refuse to lower the bucket into the well.  No man has a right to speak for God who does not believe that God speaks.”

8. From page five, “As the foundational doctrine of the Restored gospel is the First Vision, so the foundational doctrine of the meridian dispensation is the resurrection of Christ.  If Jesus the Christ did indeed lay down his body in death and take it up again in life as an immortal and eternal being, then he must of necessity be the Son of God and the divinely appointed source of salvation for all men.  The Book of Mormon stands as an independent witness of his resurrection, for it was the resurrected Christ that appeared to the nation of the Nephites to declare anew to them the covenant of salvation.”

9. “The Book of Mormon is the perfect witness of the reality of the events attested to in the Old World and the best friend the Bible and the Christian message have.  All professing Bible believers should rejoice in this new and independent witness of Christ.”

10. From page 10…”Revelation is light and light is the source of life.  All true revelation has the power of life within it and thus is intended to perpetuate and give birth to additional revelation.  (D&C 84:45)  No revelation was intended to be complete and final.  Such an idea stands contrary to the very nature and purpose of revelation; it is to argue that life was not intended to produce life.”

11. “Indeed, the greatest revelation of this dispensation was not the First Vision but rather the revelation that led Joseph Smith to the Sacred Grove where that great theophany took place.  How singularly interesting it is that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has become the sole steward of the doctrine of James, that we ask of God.  The challenge to ask of God is given by all Latter-day Saint missionaries to all investigators.  No other church invites its investigators to accept James’s injunction to so ask.  Some demand that we acquiesce to the authority of the church.  Others insist that answers can only come from reading the Bible; meaning reading the Bible as it has been interpreted by religious leaders, which excludes the thought of asking God, which thought they freely ridicule.”