Thursday’s Thought: Lessons from LDS

Last night, I went to a family from my church’s house, and they are hosting a couple of students for the week as part of a short-term exchange program. Both of these students are Mormons. While I was visiting, I talked with them for a while about their beliefs (a while being over 2 hours), trying to throw in questions every now and then comparing what the Bible (which they claim as one of their holy books) says to what they were saying. Throughout the conversation, I had a lot of thoughts come through my head, and I am here compiling some of them as this Thursday’s Thought(s):

• The kids knew their stuff. Every morning before school, they go to “seminary” (think: Bible Study on steroids), which is something that all LDS (Mormon) kids their age do. Because of this, they had a level of knowledge concerning the contents of the Bible and their other sacred texts that had a vast amount more depth to it than the level possessed by most (almost all?) of the kids in my youth group. Almost every question I asked throughout the night, they would have the answer right away, or they could look it up online (on the official LDS website, not through Google or Wikipedia) in a matter of seconds because they knew exactly which words to search for.

• It’s amazing the things people accept as truth when they place other things alongside the Bible as having the same level of authority as the Bible. For the Mormon church, this includes (but is not limited to):
o God was once a man, and all of us are the children of God and his wife.
o Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are actually 3 separate gods with 1 unified purpose, which they call “The Godhead” (not to be confused with the Trinity). (I asked them a bunch of questions about this one, such as, “What about when Jesus says, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,’ or, ‘I and the Father are one’?” One of them caught on to and pointed out the fact that our beliefs in this area are irreconcilable before I got a definitive answer to that one.)
o We are saved by Christ’s work PLUS baptism, obedience, and a few other things.

• Clever arguments don’t make converts, only Christ can do that. For all the money I’ve spent on being a Bible major at a Christian school, nothing I said and no amount of cleverness on my part could convince these guys that God is eternal, salvation is in Christ alone, etc. This is one that I have known for a while, but it was a humbling reminder.

• We should always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that lies within us. Yesterday morning when I woke up, the one of the last things on earth I would have expected to be doing last night was spending 2+ hours talking to a couple of Mormon kids about what they believe and what I believe, but it happened very unexpectedly. Encounters like this one are why we must constantly be saturating ourselves with the Word so we can be prepared when we need to be.