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Handling Objections

President Ezra Taft Benson taught,

All objections, whether they be on abortion, plural marriage, seventh-day worship, etc., basically hinge on whether Joseph Smith and his successors were and are prophets of God receiving divine revelation. Here, then, is a procedure to handle most objections through the use of the Book of Mormon.

First, understand the objection.

Second, give the answer from revelation.

Third, show how the correctness of the answer really depends on whether or not we have modern revelation through modern prophets.

Fourth, explain that whether or not we have modern prophets and revelation really depends on whether the Book of Mormon is true.

Therefore, the only problem the objector has to resolve for himself is whether the Book of Mormon is true. For if the Book of Mormon is true, then Jesus is the Christ, Joseph Smith was His prophet, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and it is being led today by a prophet receiving revelation.

“The Book of Mormon is the Word of God,” First Presidency Message, January 1988

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Omnipotence of God

Joseph Smith taught,

“God is the only supreme governor and independent being in whom all fulness and perfection dwell; who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; without beginning of days or end of life; and that in him every good gift and every good principle dwell.” *

“Without the knowledge of all things God would not be able to save any portion of his creatures; for it is by reason of the knowledge which he has of all things, from the beginning to the end, that enables him to give that understanding to his creatures by which they are made partakers of eternal life; and if it were not for the idea existing in the minds of men that God had all knowledge it would be impossible for them to exercise faith in him.” **

 

*Lectures on Faith, lec. 5, paragraph 2

**Lectures on Faith, lec. 2, paragraph 2

Quoted by Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation Vol. I, p. 6

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God Has All Power and Wisdom

Hyrum Smith, Conference of the Church, April 1844:

“Our Savior is competent to save all from death and hell. I can prove it out of the revelations. I would not serve a God that had not all wisdom and all power.”

(Quoted by Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation Vol. I, p.5)

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Gospel and Priesthood Needed to See God

Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation Vol. 1, p.4

“The Father and the Son appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith before the Church was organized and the priesthood restored to the earth. Under those conditions the Lord could appear to one who sought for light as he did in the case of Joseph Smith.

“Now that the Church is organized, and the power of the priesthood is here, no one can see the face of God, even the Father, without the blessings of the gospel and the authority of the priesthood.”

 

Building My Own Study Journal with WordPress

I am using WordPress to build my own online study journal, complete with tags and categories, multimedia and more. It will be my own online database of quotes, talk prep material and more.

Process
With my hosting service, BlueHost, I set up a subdomain to my valentinejames.net, something like study.valentinejames.net. In the root folder for that domain I install a fresh WordPress installation. Some day I might configure multisite option, but I haven’t had luck in the past getting it to work and it doesn’t really bother me to log in separately.

From here, I will choose and customize a theme and start posting my study notes. I can customize what’s visible to somebody who stumbles upon that site.

For example, using IFTTT, I might say anytime I tag a study post with a certain tag, it pushes to my main blog.

Lots of options and customizing to give me a gospel study tool that helps get me excited to both study and share what I learn.

Customized Appearance

I found this free theme called Sampsonite Lite with the floating sticky-note feel. I then added some custom CSS to update the colors to something I like and then found a plug-in that automatically loads my images from Instagram as the featured image of the post. I then went into the theme template and tweaked the code to get the images to display on the template home page.