Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Pattern of restoration

 

What I find interesting is that "the Church became corrupted and needed reform" isn't actually the biblical pattern. When Israel went astray, God didn't raise up independent reformers who studied existing scripture and started competing movements. He sent prophets. Moses. Samuel. Elijah. Isaiah. Jeremiah. John the Baptist. The biblical pattern is revelation and divine commission, not self-authorization. In fact, Uzzah was struck down for trying to steady the Ark, even though his intentions were good. Why? Because sincerity is not authority. If the Church had become corrupted, the real question isn't whether reform was needed. The question is: who authorized the reformers to do it?
Quote
Michael E. Perry
@lcbchefperry
Replying to @Primary_Pianist and @edlars53
I’ll answer it. The Reformation happened because the medieval Roman church had accumulated serious corruption, false teachings, abuses of authority,


Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Evangelicals and works and apostasy

 

Evangelical: Mormons believe they’re saved by works. Latter-day Saint: We believe we’re saved by grace through Jesus Christ. Evangelical: What about “after all we can do”? Latter-day Saint: The verse says, “It is by grace that we are saved.” Evangelical: Right. After all you can do. Latter-day Saint: Who is doing the saving in the verse? Evangelical: Grace. Latter-day Saint: And who does grace come from? Evangelical: Jesus. Latter-day Saint: So Jesus saves? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: Then why do you keep saying we believe works save us? Evangelical: Because it says “after all we can do.” Latter-day Saint: Does it say we are saved by all we can do? Evangelical: No. Latter-day Saint: Does it say we are saved by grace? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: Then why are you changing the subject? Evangelical: Because Mormons obey commandments. Latter-day Saint: Did Jesus tell people to obey commandments? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: Did Jesus tell people to repent? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: Did Jesus tell people to love their neighbors, forgive others, feed the poor, and follow Him? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: So obeying Jesus means you’re trying to earn salvation? Evangelical: No. Latter-day Saint: Then why does it only become “works-based salvation” when Mormons do it? awkward silence

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Evangelical: So you’re saying the Great Apostasy means every Christian disappeared for 1,700 years? Latter-day Saint: No. That’s not what we mean. Evangelical: Then you’re saying nobody was saved? Latter-day Saint: Also no. Evangelical: Well then what are you talking about? Latter-day Saint: Let’s start with a question. Did Christ establish a Church with apostles, prophets, ordinances, and authority? Evangelical: Sure. The apostles led the early Church. Latter-day Saint: Did Christ give them authority? Things like the keys of the kingdom, the power to bind on earth and in heaven, ordain leaders, and govern the Church? Evangelical: Yes. Latter-day Saint: What happened when the apostles died? Evangelical: The Church continued. Latter-day Saint: The believers continued. But who inherited the apostolic keys? Evangelical: The Bible. Latter-day Saint: The Bible inherited authority? Evangelical: The Bible preserves the teachings. Latter-day Saint: I agree. But preserving teachings and possessing authority are different things. Evangelical: Authority comes from the Word of God. Latter-day Saint: Then why did Christ ordain apostles at all? Why not just hand everyone a book and say, “Good luck”? Evangelical: Because they were needed for the beginning. Latter-day Saint: Where does the New Testament say their authority would no longer be needed? Evangelical: The gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. Latter-day Saint: Agreed. We don’t believe they did. Evangelical: Then there couldn’t have been an apostasy. Latter-day Saint: Only if you define “apostasy” as “every Christian vanishes.” Evangelical: Isn’t that what it means? Latter-day Saint: No. We believe faithful Christians remained throughout history. We believe many precious truths survived. We believe God continued working with people. Evangelical: Then what was lost? Latter-day Saint: The same thing that was lost repeatedly in the Old Testament: divine authority and the right to administer God’s ordinances. Evangelical: So you’re saying Christians were good people but lacked authority? Latter-day Saint: That’s much closer to what we’re actually saying. Evangelical: But why would a restoration be necessary? Latter-day Saint: For the same reason Christ called apostles in the first place. If authority wasn’t important, there would have been nothing to restore. Evangelical: So when you say “Great Apostasy,” you don’t mean God abandoned humanity? Latter-day Saint: No. We mean humanity lost the apostolic authority Christ originally placed in His Church. That’s a very different claim than what most people think Mormons mean. Most arguments against the Great Apostasy start by arguing against a position Latter-day Saints don’t actually hold.


Saturday, June 20, 2026

Ye are gods

 

Critics call it Mormonism's most outrageous claim: that a man can become like God. But Psalm 82 says it. Jesus quoted it. Irenaeus taught it in 180 AD. 200M Orthodox Christians still do — they call it theosis. This is the oldest teaching in Christianity.


https://x.com/justin_hart/status/2068112135276871785?s=20













Friday, June 19, 2026

rather be exterminated than assimilated

 


Your faith was forged in people who would rather be exterminated than assimilated. A soft version of it, eager to be liked and desperate to fit in, is not the thing they died to hand you. So stop striving to be liked. Stop angling to be loved by a world that drove your fathers into the snow. That world would think no better of the gospel today than it did in 1838. Stop trying to file down every peculiar and glorious edge of the Restoration until the world finally finds you acceptable. It never will. And the wanting of its approval is the slow death of everything your people bled to preserve. I am thinking of the proclamation on the family, and of how many have quietly gone looking for a way around it. Some say it aloud now. Some march under the world's Pride banners and tell themselves it is only love. They have done the quiet arithmetic and concluded that if they give the world this one doctrine, the world will finally stop hating them, finally let them belong, finally call them good. It does not work that way. It has never once worked that way. Understand what the world actually hates, because it is not a single teaching about marriage that it cannot abide. It is the claim. It is the unbearable, scandalous claim that the keys of the priesthood were restored to the earth, that there is a prophet who speaks for God, that this and no other is the authorized house of the Lord. That is the offense. That is what it cannot forgive. You could surrender every doctrine the world finds distasteful, one after another, and you would not buy a single hour of peace, because the thing it objects to is not your position on this or that. It is that you claim to hold the authority of heaven, and it intends to see that claim humbled. The doctrine is only the doorway it is pushing on. The house is what it wants. Embrace the truth. Embrace the battle that has always come with it, because there has always been a battle, and there is one now. It is the oldest war there is, good against evil, light against the dark, and you were born onto its field whether you wished to be or not. You did not inherit a museum. You inherited a war, and a banner, and a people who never once surrendered it. You are a Mormon. The blood of the persecuted is in you, and the truth they died for is in your hands. You are not tourists. You are not spectators. You are the heirs of warriors, and the line they held is now yours to hold. So plant your feet on the ground they bled for. Lift the banner they would not drop.


The Family Proclamation is the hill worth dying on. This is where we make our last stand. Who is with me?


the member below is in good standing with a calling wake up my brother you need to rally and clean house





"We are not a creedal people. We have no Nicaea, no list of clauses you must recite to be counted among us. And yet in 1995 the leadership put the doctrine of the family on a single page, signed their names beneath it, and that one page has become our shibboleth. You know the word. At the fords of the Jordan the men of Gilead caught the fleeing Ephraimites by a single sound. Say shibboleth. The ones who could not shape the sh, who said sibboleth, were known in a heartbeat for what they were. A shibboleth is the syllable you cannot fake, the confession that reveals which bank of the river you are standing on. But here is the strange thing about ours, and it took me years to see it. Every other shibboleth in history was a word. A password. Something you said. Ours cannot be said at all. We have no creed to recite, so the test could never live in the mouth. It had to go somewhere the mouth cannot reach. It had to become a life. You do not pronounce this one. You build it, and the building shows. It is a man and a woman who took the covenant and then kept it, through the years and the dullness and the nights they wanted to leave and stayed, for time and for all eternity, while the whole world assured them the vow was a formality and the exits were always open. It is a house with too many children in it by the world's arithmetic, the family that refused to treat a child as a luxury to be deferred and took it instead as the entire point, the cord carried forward into the next generation, the one most of the world has now decided it cannot afford. It is the clean life. The thousand small refusals the world finds quaint or insane. The body kept. The appetites bridled. The Sabbath honored. The long sobriety of a people who say no to a hundred easy things on a Tuesday when no one is watching. These are not three rules. They are the welding itself, done with a body, in time. And none of it can be faked at the ford. You can sign the Proclamation in an afternoon. You cannot fake a marriage of forty years, or a table that loud, or a life that disciplined. The signature is easy. The life is the shibboleth. And so is the nerve to say it out loud, to stand up in the open and say that family is between a man and a woman, plainly, publicly, and where it costs you to say it, and to refuse to file the edge off the word because you would rather be liked, or because you have weighed the persecution and decided your own comfort is worth more than the truth. Anyone can affirm the parts the world still applauds."

Pattern of restoration

  The Primary Pianist @Primary_Pianist · 19h What I find interesting is that "the Church became corrupted and needed reform" isn...