Amazing Questions

AMAZING ANSWERS 

 

(By Joseph Fielding McConkie, from his book, 50 Truths).

 

Can Common Ground Be Sacred Ground?  (page 117)

 

1. The single greatest heresy in missionary work is the idea that we seek common ground with those we teach.  Anytime a missionary tells an investigator that we share common ground he or she has testified against the need for the Restoration.  Joseph and Hyrum Smith did not die in Carthage Jail to assure that we could believe in the same things everyone else already believed….Ours is not common ground, it is sacred ground.  It is where the heavens open and the God of heaven speaks.

 

Can True Religion Ask For Less Than Our Best?  (page 125)

 

2. All churches would like to have their members pay tithing, but they do not do so because their members do not have the faith to pay it.  In like manner, they would like to be able to send out missionaries like ours but they cannot.  They simply do not have the faith among their numbers to get that many young men and young women with the faith to accept a call to serve at their own expense wherever they might be sent to serve for a required time.

 

Other churches would like to introduce our family home evening program and our visiting and home teaching programs, along with a host of other programs, but they do not because they simply do not have the faith to make them work.  The key to salvation is not in believing in Christ but in following him.  It is found in doing, not professing.

 

True worship consists of believing as God believes, thinking as God thinks and doing as God would do.  It consists of countless things we do to bless others and it refines our souls in the process.

 

Why does the cause of truth always attract scoundrels?  (page 128)

 

3. The great matter and the heart of our message does not center in translation but transmission.

Our concern is with the plain and precious things that have been taken from it.  They have been restored to us by the score in the Book of Mormon as well as in the Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants.

 

If the Bible had not been tampered with in significant ways, we would not need the Book of Mormon.  No commentary will ever be written that sustains the Bible with power and prophecy the way the Book of Mormon does.  There are not anti-Book of Mormon arguments that are not at the same time anti-Bible arguments.  There are no anti-Joseph Smith arguments that are not at the same time anti-Jesus Christ arguments.

 

Every gospel doctrine is greeted by the adversary with a counter doctrine.  All gospel principles and practices have their counterfeit.  The only church whose doctrines and practices have remained unchanged from dispensation to dispensation was restored to us by the Prophet Joseph Smith.  Ours is not a new religion but a restoration of the faith of the ancients.

 

Is Tampering With the Bible Alive and Well?   (page 136)

4.  As rendered in the King James Version used by Latter-day Saints today, John 3:16 reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Then the great change came.  In modern translations, such as the New International Version or the Revised Standard Version, you would be hard pressed to find such a rendering of the verse.  The text is translated so it reads, “God so loved the world that he gave his ‘only son’ or his ‘one and only son’ that he should not perish.  The word ‘begotten’ is omitted.

The idea that Christ is the begotten Son of God does not square with the creeds of men.  It clearly implies that God is an actual being, that he is in reality a father and the Jesus of Nazareth is actually his Son.

At the same time that it robs God of his personhood, his fatherhood and Christ of his rightful place as the child born of God to Mary, it destroys the plan of salvation.

No longer do we have a Son who inherited the power of life from his immortal father, or a Son who also had the power to lay down his life and take it up again.  This omission thus destroys the doctrine of the Atonement and the resurrection.

This subtle change in text robs all of us of the claim to being the spirit sons and daughters of God and of the attendant hope of resurrection.  Thus this text captures how the creeds of men have taken so much of life and meaning out of the Bible and have thereby dramatized the reality of a universal apostasy and the need for a restoration of all things.

What is Hell’s favorite doctrine?  (page 151)

5. Given that the principles of the gospel are everlastingly the same, the arguments against those principles remain the same also.  Standing opposite the principle of continuous revelation, for instance, is the doctrine of sufficiency.  The doctrine of sufficiency holds that what has been given in the past is sufficient and thus the heavens are sealed to additional light and knowledge.

One arguing for this doctrine would likely say, “My father plowed fields with the aid of a horse, read by the light of a candle and had no indoor plumbing.  It was good enough for those who lived generations before and it is good enough for us today.”

To deny the need for continuous revelation to give life and meaning to current revelation is to deny the light of the sun to the spring planting.  It is to reduce revelation to black ink on white paper.  When the God of heaven chooses to erase those principles he personally espoused or to invite their re-reading through creeds written by councils of men, you may know of a surety that you no longer have possession of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Hell’s favorite doctrine is that the heavens are sealed and that God has no need to speak to us in our day.