The Talk

Do We Understand What We Have?Brothers and Sisters, what if you had the best bag of cookies in the world, and went around munching on it in front of people. Occasionally you might offer one, but only to your best friend. The Restoration is so much better than a bag of cookies. I pray for and invite the Holy Ghost to now assist me and you as we consider the remarkable restoration. I ask for your prayers as well.The Atonement of Christ allows humankind to live happy, fulfilling, and productive lives here and into eternity. Old Testament prophets, Christ himself, and his apostles, all taught that the atonement should work for us three different ways. First, unconditional forgiveness from Adam’s sin. This allows us to be “agents unto ourselves.” Second, forgiveness for our personal sins. This depends on us being born again through following the gospel and then giving a continual good faith effort to live like Christ did. And third, grace that comes after our conversion helping us towards exaltation. This includes Christ comforting us in our individual pains, and giving us a capacity, greater than our own, until we can “do all things through Christ.” (Phillip. 4:13)To help us take advantage of the two conditional purposes of the atonement, forgiveness of sin and grace to make us more perfect, Christ brought the priesthood and set up a church. The priesthood made it so the ordinances involved in being born again could be performed, a requirement for forgiveness of personal sin. Christ then gave this priesthood to twelve apostles and organized a church with these apostles as its central leadership. The church provided support to help its members endure to the end, a requirement for the post-conversion grace that can make us better than ourselves. Because the teachings about the atonement were so crucial, the church also helped prevent the followers of Christ from being, “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” (Eph 4:14) Remember that.After Christ went back to heaven, the apostles traveled throughout the Mediterranean teaching anyone who would listen how the atonement could work in their lives and organizing branches of the church to help them live up to the requirements of the atonement . While traveling, Paul, one of the apostles, prophesied, “Grievous wolves will enter in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:29.) That’s exactly what happened. Physical persecution from the Jews and Romans and internal differences in beliefs kept the church weak. For example, Greek philosophers would teach an outlying Christian branch, and the small struggling congregation would try to mix these philosophies with their Christian beliefs, so they could attract as many people as possible to their church, and allow it to survive. As long as the centralized church leadership remained, however they could correct these false teachings. In an example of this, Paul wrote to a branch he had helped form, “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ into another gospel.” (Galatians 1:6) Ultimately, however, persecution raged and within seventy years of Christ’s death all twelve apostles had either died or were translated, no replacements were selected, and the centralized leadership of the church had died. This left every branch to fend for itself. Without the apostles to hold the church together, these congregations were “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” (Eph 4:14) The church was in apostasy. The next two hundred years of doctrinal disaster is hard to follow because each congregation went in a different direction. Then in 320 AD, Constantine declared himself the leader of Christianity. At this time, Constantine wasn’t even Christian. To think that the fullness of Christ’s gospel had survived to that point, under those circumstances, is pretty ridiculous, but what happened next proved an apostasy had occurred, and went on to bury many remaining truths. Constantine brought together the leaders of the many remaining groups that called themselves Christians. They counseled together to define Christian doctrine. They couldn’t agree on what it was. Of course they couldn’t agree, they had had no revelation, no priesthood, no church in over 200 years! So they voted on doctrines that would be militarily enforced. This massacre of Christ’s teachings destroyed the understanding of Christ’s ability to succor us, a personal God, and the plan of salvation, among other things.Within a generation of this meeting, a man named Augustine developed a theory that humanity is depraved, or basically evil, in order to explain his struggle with sexual sin. To justify his new theory with religious teaching, Augustine pointed to Adam’s sin, and said all mankind was guilty for it, dubbing it “the original sin.” This was a drastically new idea, created by Augustine alone. It did not draw on any prior Christian teaching or tradition; however, Constantine, looking for a religious reason to be a tyrant, attached himself to the idea that man was depraved and therefore needed a powerful government, right? It was Constantine’s political power that pushed Augustine’s new idea to the center of Christian doctrine, not its logic or its scriptural evidence. The doctrinal dominoes began to fall, and the results were not pretty. Augustine’s teaching of human depravity, destroyed the doctrine of the atonement. Since man was no longer assumed innocent, they couldn’t be seen as having power over their own destiny. Instead, the church decided man was something to be acted upon by the grace they gave out in ceremonies that, by this time, they had either messed up or made up.The teachings that resulted from Augustine’s theory included that unbaptized babies would go to hell, man could do nothing on his own to work towards the blessings of the atonement, the symbolism of rebirth was taken out of the gospel ordinances, placing an impassable road block on the gospel path and leaving mature commitments to Christ to shrivel with nowhere to go, and the grace the apostles taught was available to help man increase his capacity until he could do all things was hidden behind the belief that man had no capacity to do anything. Eventually, reformers came and recognized the need for change. Martin Luther said, “Christianity has ceased to exist.” John Wesley said, “The Christians…had only a dead form left.” Roger Williams said, “There is no regularly constituted church…nor can there be until new apostles are sent.” While these reformers saw something was wrong, they did not weed out Augustine’s idea of human depravity. Rather they built upon it, and reinforced it. Luther couldn’t find the grace he needed to satisfy his guilt through the church’s ceremonies, rightfully so, but, instead of recognizing that grace comes after a good faith effort, Luther theorized that grace was given directly to unworthy undeserving individuals. This belief became standard through out Protestantism. Certainly, reformers came up with many different teachings on how those individuals were chosen, from Lutheran faith justification to Calvinistic predetermination, but by removing the only step man was required to make, which was participating in church ceremonies, the teachings that came out of the reformation ended up even more negative about the nature of man than Augustine’s teachings had been. These reformers started, literally, hundreds of churches with their own unique ideas, but the essential atonement doctrine was not corrected. Christianity was still lost, not withstanding the fact it now had a thousand different options of how to be lost.Imagine for a moment the practical effect that believing in this version of the atonement would have on your life. Self worth is basically tossed out of the window; every worthwhile thing you ever do is unlike your nature and worthless in your eternal progress. Not only was the priesthood gone to make the atonement effective, and the church gone to help the people live up to its requirements, the basic understanding of how the Savior could save you was gone. Can we begin to see how this apostasy made it impossible to understand, feel or utilize the grandeur of Christ’s atonement? The human progress of the next several centuries seemed to argue against the view that mankind was uncontrollably evil and capable of nothing, but how could Christian teachings acknowledge the power of man without abandoning the necessity of grace? Only by a restoration of the original teachings. Peter had prophesied, “The heavens must receive [Jesus Christ] until…A prophet the Lord your God shall raise up…like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things.” (Acts 3:20-22) Then came the spring of 1820, and oh, how lovely was the morning, because when Joseph Smith prayed he went around the centuries of doctrinal brush and mud, and man was reconnected to God. In clear language, Christ confirmed a complete apostasy had occurred, but with this manifestation the road back to an effective atonement was opened. The Book of Mormon was the tool that restored the understanding of the three ways the atonement can help us, and cleared up to the now confused world how human capacity and the grace of the atonement can and should work together. Mormon taught, “Little children are whole, the curse of Adam is taken from them in [Christ.]” (Mormon 8:8) Man is then neither basically good nor basically evil, but whole, and become good or evil. King Benjamin taught that we either, “Listeth (or lean) to obey the evil spirit.” or “yield to the enticings of the Holy Spirit” these paths, King Benjamin explained, either lead us to, “Become an enemy of all righteousness,” or “become a saint through the atonement,” respectively. As Lehi explains this clean slate allows us to act, rather than be acted upon. (2 Nephi 2:26) Second, living in a world with free choice and sin, inevitably we all sin. King Benjamin makes clear that those who knowingly sin are not innocent, but neither, completely evil and powerless to work on their own salvation. They can, of their own free will and work, utilize the atonement through “repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Mosiah 3:12) Similarly, Alma the Younger reminded the people of their fathers who had once been “encircled about by the chains of hell,” and he asks, “What grounds had they to hope for salvation?” In answering his own question Alma teaches, “A mighty change was wrought in their hearts, and they were faithful unto the end; therefore…” Alma 5:13, “They were,” they did something, “They were faithful unto the end; therefore they were saved.” They didn’t earn salvation by themselves, their earlier sins prevented that, but their work still qualified them for their salvation. Later in the same sermon, in order to clarify this relationship, Alma uses the example of a garment that must be clean to enter into the kingdom of God. While it was man who actually did the physical work of “washing” their garments, “they were cleansed…in the blood of Christ.” Simply scrubbing in the air or on a rock would not clean a dirty shirt, they needed a cleansing agent, a soap, the blood of Christ, but neither can soap clean our clothes without our own scrubbing power, either. Christ himself explained what was involved in this work of washing the garment, or “mighty change of heart” to the Nephites. “Whoso shall have faith in me, repenteth and is baptized in my name shall be filled; and if he endureth to the end, behold him will I hold guiltless before my Father at that day.” This is the process we know as the gospel of Jesus Christ. The third way the atonement can help us was also brought back to light. The understanding of the grace we are given as Nephi taught, “line upon line, precept upon precept,” after we are baptized as we strive to reach our ultimate goal. “What manner of men ought ye to be?” Christ asked the Nephites, “Even as I am.” On our own we are not capable of reaching this goal of becoming like Christ, but Moroni teaches, “If we will have faith in Christ, we shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient, or necessary, in him.” (Moroni 7:33) And ultimately this Christ like persona that we are hoping to attain will be “bestowed upon all who are true followers of …Jesus Christ,” so , “that when he shall appear we shall be like him.” (Moroni 7:48) Ultimately it’s only through Christ we can be like Christ. And to enable us to endure the trials of life and remain faithful, Alma taught, “Christ will take upon him [our] infirmities…that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people.”How many times have we skimmed the sermon of King Benjamin, without appreciating the precious understanding he returned to mankind? How often do we take Alma the younger for granted as just another prophet who taught the Atonement or Mormon as what people call us without cherishing the clarity he brought to our relationship with God? In this single volume, in The Book of Mormon, our Heavenly Father washed away the twisted, crumbling, tower of false, ineffective atonement doctrine, and in its place built a clear, straight and narrow road back to his glory. Once the doctrine of how we could access the blessings of the atonement was restored, then the priesthood necessary for the ordinances of the gospel, and the church to support us were restored.It was through Joseph Smith the world again learned the truth of how the atonement can bless us. It cleared up the confusion; we understood our relationship to Christ, why he died for us, how that can help us, what we’re capable of and responsible for. The centuries of political changes and theological missteps in Christ’s gospel was overshadowed in a few short years. Joseph Smith gave us the doctrine to understand the atonement, the priesthood to make it effective, and the church to help us live it. It is for this reason the restoration is so important, because it was the process to teach the world again of how to come to Christ.This isn’t simply a matter of the world munching on oatmeal raisin cookies, while we eat peanut butter cookies, we have the most delectable macadamia nut white chocolate chip cookie and the world is hungry for them. So proclaim the restoration not in spite of the fact that we are Christian, but because of it. There is no understandable, effective Christianity without the restoration. It is the reason I am here. It has saved me. God be praised for it. In Jesus Christ’s name amen.