Hank: Jesus Saves by hankjonesproject
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on September 9, 2010 |
On my mission, serving in Tennessee and Kentucky, I learned to respect and not to criticize other faiths. As you know, that’s the location of the highest concentration of Protestant Christians in the United States, so I was completely exposed to it. In the early part of my mission, I didn’t always speak too highly of other faiths, as we ran into hardcore Bible-thumpers on a daily basis that loved to try and argue and bash with us. As the months went on though, I developed a love for the people, despite the fact we were often seen as a threat to various Christian congregations. One of the reasons I developed this love is because I truly came to understand how MUCH all the people loved the Lord Jesus Christ, and how much they trusted in Him and His Atonement, probably a lot more than many members of the LDS church. When we hear the phrase “I’m saved,” we usually think of Baptist preachers, or ministers from some sort of Protestant religion, and it almost has a negative connotation to us, who know that there is more to being saved than just saying “I’m saved.” The fact of the matter is, Jesus DOES save. He IS the Savior. His blood IS what cleanses us from our sins, and HE is the only way back to the Father. The people I met, day after day, believed this. Some may have been more sincere than others, but they still trusted in Him to get them back to heaven. That is the simplest and purest kind of faith, I believe. My view of the doctrine of grace greatly matured on my mission, as a result of meeting tons of wonderful people of different faiths. While we differed on what is is that WE need to do to get back to Heavenly Father, the one thing we could agree on was certainly the most crucial and most important: Jesus Christ is the Savior and Redeemer of ALL mankind. He loved us enough to descend below all things, suffer, beyond human comprehension, for our sins and every infirmity we’ve ever experienced, and then to die on the cross. He WAS resurrected, and He lives today. As Joseph Smith said, this is the fundamental principle of our religion, and everything else in the Church is simply appendages to it.
