A new joy and light began to flood my thinking and heart. I marveled at God and the fact that I could know Him. I started reading the Bible regularly (a KJV I had from growing up) and I started praying. I found that I suddenly enjoyed singing worship songs and I experienced a sweetness of drawing near to Him that filled my heart with gladness and wonder. I even started telling others about Christ-something which would have been utterly foreign before. I started writing songs about knowing God. (You can find some of the songs I wrote later on here).
I also experienced a conviction of sin and an awareness that I was a sinner. What I had done in high school in relationships with girls, who were clearly not my wife, was wrong and evil. Trying to live for music or friends or being custo de uma esposa mexicana in a relationship with a girl instead of God was wrong and evil. God is God and deserves our love and worship; to forsake God and put other loves before Him is a form of spiritual adultery (see the book of Hosea). In an act of repentance, I called up one of my ex-girlfriends and apologized. In addition to this, I sensed a conviction of sin over other areas of my life: God was showing me how absolutely clouded my life was with sin, but also how deep and amazing was His grace, love, and mercy toward me in Christ.
Through all this, God was comforting my heart and filling me up with the knowledge of Him. I began to know experientially that God really is the “God of all comfort” (2 Cor 1:3). He comforted me in my pain and confusion, He comforted me with the truths of the gospel and His love for me. This was a love truly better than any other love I had known, one that was better than life (Ps 63:3).
I loved and treasured God!
Along with experiencing God’s comfort, I began to delight in Him and His ways. Learning about God was thrilling and sweet and walking in His ways were freeing and good. God was shaping me to be more like Christ; He was helping me to say no to temptations and walk away from spiritual darkness. I was now living a life of “walking” with God and living for Christ (Col 2:6-7). Of course, my walk with Christ was not without its faults and failures-as it is still not without them today-but I saw God growing me to be more like Jesus and keep my close to Him.
REVISITING MORMON THEOLOGY
In the newness of the life I experienced in Christ, I also revisited the stark differences between a historic biblical Christianity and that of Mormonism. I spoke with Mormon friends at college and Mormon missionaries on campus. I studied and studied and studied. I read the Bible and I read parts of the Mormon Scriptures, and I read books about on the topic.
I found out that the more I studied, the more I realized how utterly different Mormonism is compared to Christianity. Though the two religions use the same words, they often have completely different meanings for these words. I began to become even more convinced that if the Bible is true, then Mormon theology is not and Joseph Smith could not be a true prophet.
One of the most fundamental differences is found in the doctrine of God. Mormonism teaches that God the Father is a created being (along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as created beings), and that God the Father was once only a man who became a god after a prolonged obedience. Thus, in Mormon thought, God the Father had a god before He was god. And, so did that god before Him, and the cycle continues-in Mormonism this is called “the doctrine of eternal progression.” This means that in all of reality there are countless gods in the universe-even if Mormons say that “for them there is only one” they worship. This is a FAR cry from the Bible, which teaches that there is only one God in all of existence and reality (Isaiah , 44:6), a God who eternally exists in three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). A biblical view of God is monotheistic, while Mormonism holds to a form of polytheism (though they claim to worship only one god, they are polytheistic in claiming there is more than one true God in all of existence). A biblical view of God holds to the view that God is eternal and uncreated in his nature (Psalm 90:2), while Mormonism teaches that there was once a time when Heavenly Father was not or did not exist.
