Gospel Story Finder

The Prophet Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery received the revelation on Church organization and government in 1830, soon after the Church was organized. What is now section 20 was read by the Prophet Joseph at the first Church conference and was the first revelation approved by common consent.
The content of this revelation is truly remarkable. It teaches us the significance and role of the Savior and how to access His power and blessings through His atoning grace. The Prophet Joseph was 24 years old and had already received numerous revelations and completed the translation of the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of God. Both Joseph and Oliver are identified as ordained Apostles, thus having authority to preside over the Church.

The building of this structure has been a bold undertaking. We worried about it. We prayed about it. We listened for the whisperings of the Spirit concerning it. And only when we felt the confirming voice of the Lord did we determine to go forward.

At the general conference of April 1996, I said: “I regret that many who wish to meet with us in the Tabernacle this morning are unable to get in. There are very many out on the grounds. This unique and remarkable hall, built by our pioneer forebears and dedicated to the worship of the Lord, comfortably seats about 6,000. Some of you seated on those hard benches for two hours may question the word comfortably.

“My heart reaches out to those who wish to get in and could not be accommodated. About a year ago I suggested to the Brethren that perhaps the time has come when we should study the feasibility of constructing another dedicated house of worship on a much larger scale that would accommodate three or four times the number who can be seated in this building” (in Conference Report, Apr. 1996, 88–89; or Ensign, May 1996, 65).

The vision of a new hall was clearly in mind. Various architectural schemes were studied. One was finally selected. It included a massive structure to seat 21,000 with a theater accommodating another thousand. There would be no interior pillars to obstruct the view of the speaker. There would be trees and running water on the roof.

Ground was broken July 24, 1997, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first pioneers in this valley. That was an historic event.

One morning as I walked to the temple, I saw a group of young women who, early that morning, had participated in baptisms for those who had passed beyond. Their hair was wet. Their smiles were radiant. Their hearts were filled with joy. One girl turned back to face the temple and expressed her feelings. “This has been the happiest day of my life,” she said.

After receiving a request from his ward in Nevada, Eric gratefully accepted the challenge to create a visual aid to help the Primary children in his ward learn to follow the prophet.
It took talent, but mostly a lot of preparation and hard work, to complete this project for the Primary. Eric closely studied his subjects, and once he started his pastel drawing, it took him 10 days to complete it.
“I enjoyed working on this drawing,” Eric says. “It felt good to use the talents I’ve been blessed with for our Primary.” And the Primary children really appreciate the picture of the prophets done especially for them. It helps them learn to follow and love the prophets more.

The following is a true story. For my eighth birthday I wanted to have a party. My parents agreed, and so a week before my birthday, I took the invitations to school.
On the school bus, I kept thinking about Alice.* I was hoping that she wouldn’t be there that day. Then my parents couldn’t blame me for not inviting her. You see, Alice was different from the other girls, and she was very quiet. She always played by herself at recess, and as far as I could see, she had no friends. In other words, I didn’t see why I needed to invite her to my party.
When I got to school, much to my dismay, Alice was there. I handed out the invitations, and everyone was very excited.
The morning of my birthday party, my parents asked, “Will Alice be coming?” I was surprised! I didn’t think they even knew Alice.
“I don’t know if she’s coming,” I answered. My father suggested that we take a ride over to her house to see. My father is a very kind man, but he is also very firm. If he suggests that we do something, we do it.
Alice’s mother answered the door, and my father told her why we were there. “She won’t be coming,” Alice’s mother said. “She doesn’t have a present for your daughter. You see, my husband lost his job and …”
My father gestured that he understood, then said, “We would still like Alice to come. It doesn’t matter if she has a present or not.”
No present? I thought. What kind of a birthday party is that? But, of course, I just stood there and smiled.
When we were in the car again, my father told me that after he took me home he was coming back to take Alice to buy a present for her to give me.
This isn’t turning out so bad after all! I thought.
I can’t remember what presents I got that day, but I do remember that Alice seemed to laugh a lot and was actually quite fun to be with. When it was time to take her home, I got in the front seat and she got in the backseat. I turned around to tell her something, and next to her was the prettiest doll I had ever seen. In my eight-year-old mind, I realized my father had bought that doll for Alice. I felt as though my heart grew two sizes that day.
My father is not a great scientist. He has never invented anything or found a cure for a disease. But that day he did something just as important—he showed charity to a little girl. And to another little girl, he showed what it means to be Christlike.

I know of a couple who lived thousands of miles from the nearest temple. Although they earned little, they faithfully paid their tithing and saved all that they could to journey to the house of the Lord. After a year, the husband’s brother—not a member of the Church—unexpectedly came forward and offered them two airplane tickets. This temporal blessing made possible the spiritual blessings of their temple endowments and sealing. An additional spiritual blessing came later as the brother, touched by the couple’s humble faithfulness, joined the Church.

That was the way he looked when I reached the summit of Snowdon for the first time. As the highest mountain in England or Wales, Snowdon, for a six-year-old, seemed as inconquerable as Everest does to me now. The old miner’s track was surfaced with rough shingle that shifted unnervingly as we walked. The craggy gray rocks and scattered boulders were a stark contrast to the sailor-blue sky and white scudding clouds above. Occasionally, we would pass a stray sheep searching for an area to graze. These hardy animals were so used to human invaders that they barely noticed us passing.
It wasn’t long before my short legs were failing, and with them my spirits. The gray path seemed endless. “Come on, Sian. You can do it,” Dad coaxed as he heaved me onto his back. It made the climb more difficult for him but helped revive me. We trudged past crumbling stonewalls that had been built by a now forgotten shepherd long before the era of cement. From a distance they looked like huge scars on the face of the mountain.
At last we reached the final scree. Dad held my hand tightly as we scrambled up. When we reached the plateau on the top, we sat down breathlessly. I looked around. Far below I could see moving people like multicolored ants. As far as the eye could see there were mountain ridges, deep valleys, and in the distance the glint of blue from the North Sea. I gazed around in wonder, then laughed excitedly. “We made it, Dad. We reached the very top!” I looked up to see that the expression in my father’s eyes at that moment was a reflection of my own. It said, I love you, I have faith in you, and I know that you can do what you set your mind to do.

Another memory taught me more about the value and importance of fulfilling a mission.

A few years ago, while serving as president of the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, I had a delightful visit with one of the missionaries who came into my office. He was obviously older than the average young elder. He was about twenty-five years of age. He told me of his conversion.

When he was sixteen, he was baptized into the Church in Europe along with his mother. His father did not object to his wife’s and son’s joining the Church, even though he was not interested. He was a banker and wanted his son to prepare himself for a profession in the same area.

The young man loved studying the scriptures, but occasionally had some difficulty when his father would interrupt him when he was studying his seminary course and say, “Don’t waste your time studying those things. Study your regular school courses so that you can be accepted at the university.”

The elder said, “One night later on, when I was about eighteen, I had a dream. I dreamed that I had been called on a mission to Japan. I felt so good about it. I really wanted to go. The next day, when I told my parents about my dream, my dad strongly objected. He said, “Oh, no! Don’t waste two years of your life on a mission. You need to get on with your university studies.”

Since he was too young to leave for a mission at that time anyway, he did go on with his university studies. He chose to come to Brigham Young University. He majored in finance and banking for his undergraduate degree and stayed to complete a master’s degree in business administration.

He was hired by an international banking firm in Germany and was doing very well as a promising junior executive, but the idea of filling a mission would not leave his mind, and so he went to visit with his bishop and stake president. When he told his stake president of the vivid dream he had years before about going on a mission to Japan, his stake president chuckled and said, “Well, I don’t think you will be going to Japan. Missionaries from here generally are called to some other country on the continent, and a few go over to the British Isles.”

When he received his call and his father heard of it, he came and tried to change his son’s mind because he thought that a two-year interruption would be a disaster for his son’s professional career. One of the bank executives came down from Frankfurt and tried to discourage him from leaving, saying something like, “My boy, do you know how much this will cost you in salary and opportunity loss? You ought to sit down and figure it out.”

The elder said that he did that, and he had determined that the mission would cost him a very large amount of money—more than 150,000 dollars. Then tears came to his eyes, and he said, “But President, if it were to cost several times that amount, I would still be here, because I know that serving a mission is what the Lord wants me to do.”

That elder was one of the few I remember who left the Missionary Training Center speaking what Japanese he had learned with a German accent. He was called to Japan. He served a successful mission, and I am confident that when he finished he found many international businesses that would like to hire a junior executive who can speak English, German, and Japanese—the major languages of the economic free world. Even if he didn’t earn an extra cent, he still knew that he had done what the Lord wanted him to do.

This has been the most difficult period of my life. I remember that two years after Ethel’s passing, I could say, for the first time, that I felt ‘light and happy.’ That feeling didn’t last a day, but it was evidence of possibilities to come. Sometimes these small mercies carry us through.

Fiddler on the Roof was presented by a cast of young Mormons. Their insightful performance, enhanced perhaps by the similarities between the Mormon and Jewish cultures, brought overflow crowds.

Jared and Joshua take turns giving water and food to their bunnies, Fluffernutter and Velvet, and their cat, Foxey. Foxey was a stray cat that Jared’s family decided to take care of. They joke that Foxey “adopted” their family.

Marilin from the Dominican Republic said, “Last year when I came to FSY I was inactive, but it was such a wonderful experience that I became active and now I have a calling in my ward . . . my responsibility is to testify of Christ and invite others to come unto Christ.”

A few years ago Sister Packer and I were returning from New Zealand. We left Auckland at midnight and landed in Papeete in Tahiti. We waited there for a connecting flight. Just before dawn, a plane landed. It was not the one we were to board. We did not know its route; it was just an airliner landing on that small island in the South Pacific in the wee hours of a Monday morning.
I told my wife, “I will know someone on that plane.” I stood near the gate and as the passengers disembarked, four people, none of whom I had met before, approached me. “Are you Brother Packer?” And near the end of the line was one man I knew.
The point is this. It is manifestly impossible, in Huacuyo, Bolivia, or Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, in Kemi, Finland, or Vava’U in Tonga or anywhere else on earth, for an imposter to present himself as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and not be detected by the members as one who has not been regularly ordained by the leaders of the Church.

But finally, in the providences of Him whose witness the Prophet was and in the wisdom of Him who had said aforetime to Joseph Smith, “Thy days are known, and thy years shall not be numbered less” (D&C 122:9)—all according to the divine plan—Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and Hyrum Smith, the Patriarch, were called upon to die the death of martyrs.
The last words of the martyred seer were “O Lord, my God” (Essentials, p. 383), which he spoke as his spirit entered that sphere where the righteous are free from the persecutions of the ungodly, and where, mingling with just men made perfect through the blood of Him whose witnesses they were, they find perfect joy and peace at last.

Gottfried Richter, now 79, looks back over nearly a lifetime of service in the Church that began for him when times were extremely difficult for Latter-day Saints in his country. After four and one-half years in Russian prison camps, he returned to Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), in the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Through a friend who would later become his wife, he found the Church and was baptized in 1951. In 1952 he and Gertraude had their first child. The following year he was called on a full-time mission. These were times when being a Latter-day Saint automatically brought one under the suspicion of the secret police. So it was for many years afterward while he served as a district president and then in the presidency of the Dresden mission. Now the former prisoner of war finds himself serving the Lord in a reunified Germany as a sealer in the Freiberg Germany Temple.
“After the war there were many older members but not very many young people, but that has changed greatly. Today there are many young members. And this is something really special,” Brother Richter says with a wide smile. “They are marrying each other within the Church and bringing up strong children in the gospel. The day after tomorrow I will seal a young couple in the Freiberg temple. Both are fifth-generation members of the Church.”

Another visit was to a man long absent from the Church. My bishop invited him back to be with the Saints. I felt my bishop’s love for someone who seemed to me an unlovable and rebellious enemy.

“When I was 18, as I was preparing to serve a mission, my bishop called me to teach the Sunbeams. I had never before learned to love others more than myself until I had served those children in such a simple assignment. …

“One day I invited Mike to come to church and sit in my class. Mike was my age but had stopped attending church completely by the time he was 12. … Once in a while Mike would accept my invitations to come to an activity. It always surprised me when he did, so I kept inviting him.

“At that time, Mike had long, black hair and a beard. His complexion was dark and pleasant. I don’t remember when I invited him to my Primary class, but one day he showed up.

“Class, I would like to introduce you to my friend Mike,” is how I began my lesson. “He is visiting us today.”
Read the rest of “The Visitor,” by Ken Merrell, in the May 2000 New Era.

43. Feb. 1831 A self-proclaimed prophetess named Mrs. Hubble deceived some Saints with her revelations. The Prophet Joseph inquired of the Lord concerning the matter.

I was recently in a Church meeting in West Africa when a priesthood leader invited the brethren to come forward and occupy the first three rows of the chapel. Every man immediately stood and moved his seat according to instruction. A small thing? Yes. But it reflected a willingness to obey. That is not a small thing.

In 1827 Joseph Smith obtained those records and by 1829 had finished translating them into English by the gift and power of God. The book, published in 1830, was a powerful missionary tool for convincing readers of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. With an initial print run of 5,000 copies, however, sending the Book of Mormon to “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” may have seemed a long way off.
Still, the Lord reaffirmed this prophecy to Joseph Smith in 1833, foretelling a day when “every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language” (D&C 90:11). The Book of Mormon, which “contains … the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (D&C 20:9), is playing a key role in the fulfillment of this prophecy.