Archive for the 'LDS' Category

From a YouTube comment on a Christmas Video I posted there:

I think that the confusion lies in the view of the Trinity, drug taught from the very beginning of the Church. There is One God, co-eternal with the Son and Spirit. God was never like man nor will man ever become like God. Hear O Israel, the LORD is One. No other diety. Lucifer was not the brother of Jesus.

Because of the limit on post-length at YouTube I am responding here.

You are correct that those are some of the doctrines that cause some Christians to label the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) as a non-Christian religion. Most members of the LDS Church have a different and more inclusive definition of Christian. The LDS definition of Christian simply means anyone who believes in Jesus Christ and who worships Him. This definition probably has its roots in the Book of Mormon passage from Alma 46:13-15.

13 And he fastened on his head-plate, and his breastplate, and his shields, and girded on his armor about his loins; and he took the pole, which had on the end thereof his rent coat, (and he called it the title of liberty) and he bowed himself to the earth, and he prayed mightily unto his God for the blessings of liberty to rest upon his brethren, so long as there should a band of Christians remain to possess the land—
14 For thus were all the true believers of Christ, who belonged to the church of God, called by those who did not belong to the church.
15 And those who did belong to the church were faithful; yea, all those who were true believers in Christ took upon them, gladly, the name of Christ, or Christians as they were called, because of their belief in Christ who should come.

This is why most any Mormon you meet will be incensed when someone even insinuates that Mormons are not Christians. I am a Mormon and I think I understand both sides of this issue. When a Mormon calls himself or herself a Christian, they mean that they are a follower of Jesus Christ. Whether most Evangelical Christians believe that or not is another question entirely.

I do not believe the same creeds that Evangelical Christians believe, but I call myself a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior and I strive to follow, praise, and honor him. I hope that this video helps me do those things, if only in some very small and insignificant way.

I don’t know who has to approve decisions for scheduled maintenance on the LDS Church Website, but it just went down for scheduled maintenance according to the error page that the site is currently serving. My wife and I are speaking in Church tomorrow, and we are still working on our talks. We know that we should have finished preparing our talks sooner, but this is seriously not a good time for the site to go down for maintenance. I’m thinking maybe a Tuesday morning might be a good time. I would pick Monday, but then you have all the people scrambling to get something together for family home evening lessons that would be out of luck.

I guess it’s time to do our research for our talks the old-fashioned way — use Google.

The first time I ever about this was when my sister-in-law, Sandy, showed this to the family two or three years ago. Amy Grant wrote and sings a song called “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” talking about the feelings that Mary had while carrying the Savior of the World. It turns out that a short film put out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called “The Nativity,” and “Breath of Heaven” are almost exactly the same length. Many of the scene changes match the changes in the music and many of the images match the lyrics. When I first saw this it was difficult to get going because it was a VHS tape with the video and a seperate CD player that had to be started together at just the right moment for the effect to be really noticeable. I took the video from the DVD and combined it with the audio from the CD, and this is the result. The Amy Grant music has a much greater impact than the original audio in my opinion. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: MPEG2 Nativity with Breath of Heaven 314MB

UPDATE: A few Evangelical Christians have decided that this video doesn’t make any sense since Mormons aren’t Christians.”

I first saw this at ldswebguy.com. I tested this myslef and was quite surprized. The #1 spot on a google search for “church” returns lds.org, the official homepage of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Result #7 is a link to mormon.org, a site geared toward people who are not memebers of the Church who want to know more about it. This isn’t meaningful in the long term because these things can fluctuate. But it does indicate trends on the web and what people are linking to when they talk about church.

The LDS community online is huge and growing every day. Digg.com is a social news website where the users decide which stories are the most interesting and decide what news stories and links make it to the front page. Sustaine’d applies this same thinking to track stories submitted by Latter-day Saints. When you like a story you can sustain it, if you don’t like it then you can oppose it. When the story gets enough sustaining votes it shows up on the home page. It looks like I have yet another site to check every day.