Ep. 297: Ministry Among The Mormons

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the indoubt podcast where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week, we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Daniel Markin:

Hey, this is Daniel Markin with indoubt. Today I’m joined once again by my friend, Bryan Hurlbutt, he’s a pastor who lives in Salt Lake City. And so naturally, we’re going to be talking about his ministry among the Mormons as a large percentage of people in his area who are Mormon, and so, his ministry looks different and he has a lot of knowledge on this. He has studied this as well. So, hope you find this episode helpful. I know it’s helpful to me, and it’ll help you begin to think through how different Christianity is from Mormonism and how you can begin to have gospel conversations with Mormons. Hey, welcome to indoubt, this is Daniel Markin, and I’m joined again by my friend, Bryan Hurlbutt. Bryan, how are you doing?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

I’m doing fantastic, man.

Daniel Markin:

You know, the last time that we talked, we talked about discipleship, we talked about your new book, and the program that you’ve been curriculum and all these things you’ve been doing around the work for discipleship. And then, at the very end of that episode, I was basically saying, “Hey, we should do a little bit of discussion about your ministry among the Mormons.” So, give a little bit of an intro to who you are, where you came from, and then obviously I’ve given it away, but you’re in Salt Lake City.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

And you do a lot of ministry around a lot of Mormons. I want to dive a little bit into what is Mormonism and what are some of the differences as a way for us to actually know the real Jesus better, because Mormons, as we’ll begin to discuss, they will claim the name of Jesus. They will say they are Christians. There’s a lot of similarities there. So Bryan, please introduce yourself to our audience.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah. My name’s Bryan Hurlbutt, and I am originally from Upstate New York, which actually is interesting in the Mormon story, and maybe we can talk about that. I didn’t have any connection to Mormonism at all, or really much of a knowledge at all of Mormonism there. I went to undergraduate a little Bible college in Upstate New York, got married, moved to Texas, went to Dallas Theological Seminary, studied historical theology, pastored there for a little while, and felt that the Lord wanted me to get out of the Bible belt, was really the big thing. It wasn’t, go to the land of the Mormons, it was, just go till some virgin soil, get out of the Bible Belt.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, began to look around in an opportunity emerged in Salt Lake City. And I don’t know that I knew what I was getting into, but I came here and my wife Jennifer and I, at the time with two kids, now we have three, three daughters, and we moved here 18 and a half years ago, planted lifeline community in a suburb of Salt Lake City. In Utah, if our listeners aren’t familiar maybe with the demography and geography of Utah, but Utah’s a very, very beautiful state, and almost all, not all, but almost all the population is within about an hour and a half north, south drive along the I-15 Corridor. So it’s a populous area going from just South of Provo, Utah, to North Ogden, Utah, with Salt Lake sitting right in the middle.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

But most of the population in Utah is in the suburb. Salt Lake is not huge. Salt Lake has like 200,000 people, it’s not a huge city. But our church is, I guess, the third largest city in the state right now. And that is West Jordan, Utah. And that is a suburb of Salt Lake. And then I went on and I did a doctorate while I was here, focused in worldview culture, philosophy and how they played in and out of the life of the church. And this has been a good place for me having done that because there’s a lot of cultural like Jesus that has to happen in a place like this, where theology is on everybody’s brain, because what listeners might be surprised at, maybe not, is that anytime you have a really, really strong culture, you always have a strong counter culture.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, here in Utah, everybody thinks about Mormonism and that is a large elephant in the room. Our valley has 1.2 million people, about 50% of our valley are Mormons, 50% are not. So what’s the other makeup? Well, a lot of, not all of, but a lot of the other makeup are disenfranchised people who are agnostic or atheist as well. So, because you have a strong religious culture, you tend to get a strong counterculture that comes with that. So I always, when I consult, I’ll sometimes consult with people who are coming in to plant churches. I just had lunch with a pastor who’s only been here a year to just talk a little bit about ministry here and what it’s like.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

As we talked, I always try to hit the highlight that you got to really be prepared to deal with agnosticism and atheism in Utah. Because when you approach the cookie of Mormonism, you’re going to eat the cookie from the outside in, meaning your focus is going to be a lot of people who have been burned over by the legalistic rigor of Mormonism, the works based, the social pressure of Mormonism, and that really comes pretty heavy.

Daniel Markin:

So, to begin, I was mentioning this, J. Warner Wallace is an apologist out of, I think, Los Angeles. And when he was pastoring, he was a youth pastor at one point, and he would always take his youth ministry, he would take him on a missions trip and they would go to Salt Lake City. You got all these excited high school students ready to go and minister, and they’d get trained up in evangelism, various doctrine, and here’s what to say, here’s what we believe as Christians. Right? If someone, you could try and convert them. And so, all these high school students would show up and the first task of the first day was, “Okay, go out in the streets, evangelize, talk to people, and tell them about Jesus.”

Daniel Markin:

And so, he’d send them off. And the students would all come back on that first day and they’d come back so frustrated and angry, and he would, of course, knowing that he’d ask them, “Well, why are you so angry?” And they’d say, “Well, they’re all Christians.” And he’d say, “What do you mean?” “All of them, they all believe in Jesus.” And what the students didn’t know was that, they were right there, Salt Lake city, right in the hotbed of Mormonism who claim the name of Jesus to some degree. Right? They claim God, and use a lot of the same language. So, what he began the first night, he would then say, “Now ask them clarifying questions about the Jesus they follow, because as they clarified the various questions about who Jesus is, then they began to realize, oh, that’s a completely different religion as to what they believe in.”

Daniel Markin:

So, with that, I want to launch from there and talk a little bit, just tell us a little bit of the story of what’s the background of Mormonism. You mentioned Upstate New York, but what is Mormonism? And then what are some of the key distinctive pieces that we as listeners can consider when we see Elder James and Elder Mike come by on their bicycles? Right? I had lots of discussions with Mormons over the years, and I spent a lot of time talking with them because once I realized, oh, they believe in something different? Now we’re talking, and some of the pressure points, what are some of those, as you begin to think about life as believers in the true Jesus?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot there, and we’ll try to give a big picture. But in short, Mormonism started from a young teenage boy named Joseph Smith, who was born in Sharon, Vermont and his family moved to Upstate New York, but particular Western New York, at a particular time in history that was after the first Great Awakening. So we’re looking in the early 1800s. And at that time in Upstate New York, it became known as what was called the burned-over district, that area, and it was called the burned-over district because there was all kinds of individuated religious fervor that started to happen. So people began to gain followings, and little groups rose up all over the place.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So you had a group called the Oneida Community. They had polyamory going on in it. You had versions of the shakers that were involved in New York. You had witchcraft oriented movements and things like this. And Joseph Smith as a young man and his family became disenfranchised with the churches around them, and didn’t settle in them. And Joseph Smith alleged that the father and son appeared to him, and that subsequent to that appearance, that he had the angel Morona appeared to him and gave him a book. And that book was the book of Mormon. And that was a New Testament. And the New Testament entailed the content of Jesus’ appearance after his resurrection here in the Americas to indigenous peoples.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And that those appearances then gave new revelation, if you will, that mapped onto and became another Testament of Jesus Christ. And that became the central revelatory rallying point for Mormonism. It was published in 1830, and subsequent to that, he had additional revelations. He ended up gaining a following that following moved and made their way out to Kirtland, Ohio. Then from Kirtland, Ohio to Independence, Missouri, and then ended up settling in Nauvoo around 1840, in Nauvoo, Illinois. They were there for about four years, and Smith was killed. He had been involved in nefarious activity himself. He had begun expanding his teaching out into polygamy, and he was taking wives even of other men.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And he had the counselor in the low thirties for the number of wives that he had. He ended up being killed in a jail in Carthage, Missouri, right across the river from Nauvoo, Illinois. And then the Mormons at that time, splintered, a group of them followed his son and his first wife, Emma. They ended up in Missouri. Now today they’re known as the Community of Christ. They were for a long time known as the RLDS, the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, smaller group. The larger group were led by a very entrepreneurial charismatic leader named Brigham Young. And they made their way out West to Utah.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Why’d they come to Utah? Well, they came to Utah because at the time, Utah was outside of the United States, and it was a westerly territory where they could practice polygamy without violating US law. So they got outside and they settled here in Utah, set up camp and began to develop their own civilization, basically out here. Then when Utah as a territory wanted to become a state, they could only become a state if polygamy went away because it was against US law. So one of the primary tenants of Mormon theology is what’s known as progressive revelation.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

The prophet is the authority, and the prophet who has two vice counselors and 12 apostles under him, so it’s 15 total, they lead the church. The prophet had a revelation at time, and that prophet said, “Okay, polygamy is no longer a viable thing.” Well, why did he have that revelation in the early 1890s? Because Utah needed to become a state. And so, it was a prophecy of convenience, if you will. That’s not the only one that’s come along.

Daniel Markin:

A lot of their doctrines have changed over the years, correct?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah. So you have doctrines like that. You have doctrines of African Americans being able to hold the priesthood, really, and it’s not even accurate to say African American, in that sense, it’s accurate to say Blacks holding the priesthood. And I say that because even if you go internationally in the history of Mormon doctrine, it had to do with the pigmentation of your skin color, that was what withheld you from laying hold of the priesthood. So in 1978, they had a revelation that that no longer held, but there actually was a deep seated, theological, embedded dissmormonism that when you even converted, you could become white and delightsome was the original phrase.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

There was a whole kind of a racist ideology and racist anthropology that was embedded in that. So here’s a quick data point. Where did that come from? Well, that came from a doctrine that had to do with the preexistence. It was the idea that, see Mormon theology, heavenly father, and Heavenly Mother through a celestial sexual act, sire the spirit children, the spirit children then come and take on bodies. So, if you were a Mormon, Daniel, the thought would be that you were a spirit child who preexisted, you came and took on this mortal body as Daniel Markin.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And as Daniel Markin, you take, and you live this life and you go through an eternal progression and you have to obey certain laws of celestial exaltation to then arrive at the highest of heavenly states that you could arrive at. And so you could arrive really at six different levels. You could go to outer darkness, that would be reserved for the worst of the worst, and people who became Mormons, but then left, apostate Mormons. You could also then go to the, it’d be the telestial level, that would be like this level that is probably akin to something like life on earth.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

You could go to the terrestrial level that might be life on earth, but on a little bit of heavenly induced steroids, it’s a little bit better. And then you could go to the celestial level, and the celestial level has three compartments within it. This is how you get the six, that’s got three compartments. The highest of which is the highest form of exaltation, where if you’re a male, not a female, but a male, you could become a God over your own world and you could start and redo so to speak what Heavenly Father did here, which was create a world, have spirit children, foster a civilization.

Daniel Markin:

So, I mean …

Bryan Hurlbutt:

The missionaries aren’t going to tell you that on visit one.

Daniel Markin:

No. And that’s the thing too, and I’ve heard you put it like this, you sit down with them in your home and they talk a lot about family, but they’re not talking about the fact that the end goal is to become a polygamous sex God, like you’re going to live with your many wives, populating the universe with spirit children and stuff like that. But that’s kind of the, I guess, the progression as things begin to evolve.

Daniel Markin:

But some of the things that I’ve always found really interesting for clarifying pieces when talking with Mormons, when they sit down is, like you mentioned, the Heavenly Father is a person. Jesus is his son. Right? Correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t Lucifer his brother, like Satan was his brother in the story? And then the Holy Spirit is a separate person. It’s not actually like, they don’t hold the doctrine to the Trinity. But “the Holy Ghost”, typically they call it, is a separate person. And if you ask about the Trinity, they’ll say, “Well, they’re united envision, but not as one God.”

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah. So, a way to think about it, you have to understand Mormon theology, you have to upend your complete understanding of ontology. And here’s what I mean. That is meaning just what a being is. So, in Christian ontology, we typically, if we leave aside animals, we kind of think in terms of three distinct ontologies. Right? We think of God, we think of angelic beings, which we would include demonic beings in that as fallen angels. And then we think of humans. Right? So we have these three and we go, “Okay, well I’m made in the image of God and there’s a likeness there, but we recognize that God and I are ontologically distinct. I’m not, and never will I be omnipotent, no, omnipresent, omniscient. Right? That’s just not available to me because there’s an antic difference between us. Right?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, in Mormonism, there’s not, in Mormonism there is not this type of God, man distinction. So, you are a potential God in Mormonism. Heavenly Father was you at one time. Not literally you, but he was a human. He just did everything perfectly. Right? So, what does that mean then for Jesus? So let’s think about it this way. If Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother sire spirit children for our world, for our world, Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother sired Jesus and Lucifer. They came and presented plans, so to speak for redemption, plans for how this whole thing should operate. Heavenly Father chose Jesus, rejected Lucifer, and Lucifer became angry and fell. Therefore, the fall of Satan.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Jesus then becomes a kind of progenitor. He’s primarily our elder brother. He is a progenitor of what you could be. He just did everything perfectly. I’ll never forget, I came to Utah. It was my first visit before my wife and kids ever moved here. I flew up with two. In fact, our friend Kyle was on that trip. And Kyle, myself, and another guy sat with a BYU law student, was a female law student, and we were all the four of us at dinner.

Daniel Markin:

Brigham Young University?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Brigham Young University. And we’re sitting there and she started describing who Jesus is. And I’ll never forget, Kyle, our friend looked at her and said, “You know, based on what you’ve said, it doesn’t sound like Jesus is that different from me.” And she looked back, she’s very smart, very bright, she looked back and she said, “You know, I’m not sure he really is. He just did everything perfectly.” That’s deeply insightful, because in Christian theology, I’m not a God man, in Christian theology, I’m not a God, in Christian theology, I’m not a potential God.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

In Mormon theology, you have a conflation of ontologies. So, the famous Lorenzo Snow, it’s called the Lorenzo Snow couplet, man is as God once was. Right? As God is, so man may be. Man might become what God is, because God was once what you are. And he progressed, he’s our model to follow in that way. And so we’ve got to obey the laws of exaltation, but here’s the challenge, and this is what J. Warner Wallace’s students, I’m sure, found out. When they talked to people, people talked about the savior, they talked about the gospel. They talked about the importance of the gospel in their life and embracing the gospel.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

But again, let’s ask the clarifying question. What’s the gospel? Oh, and you find out that the gospel includes a set of laws laying on of hands to receive the Holy Spirit, baptism, going to the temple. It’s a host of things now that are gospel ordinances that need to be accomplished. It’s not this gift of eternal life that transforms me from the inside out that we receive by faith in Christ.

Daniel Markin:

One of the things though that maybe some of our listeners have experienced is the prayer and the asking of a testimony. Right? And Mormonism is built largely on that testimony, on that religious experience, which if you trace that back, maybe to some of the roots of near in and around the great awakening, maybe that thing has trickled down. But I have a quote here from Bruce R. McConkie, which basically, he says, “Who can argue with the testimony? Unbelievers may contend about our doctrine. They may rest the scriptures to their destruction. They may explain this or that from a purely intellectual standpoint, but they cannot overpower a testimony.”

Daniel Markin:

And when he says testimony there, he’s talking about that moment, that burning you felt when you prayed, and maybe you’ve sat down with Mormons and they say, “Well, would you pray with me?” And they’ll pray that the prayer and then they’ll say, “Did you feel anything?” Because they’re trying to say, “Well, if you felt something that was the moment that you awoken to this new truth, right, this testimony and that now confirms everything. Everything else follows from that one subjective experience, which to me, as a Christian, I have subjective experiences. I’ve experienced the presence of God. I have seen the Holy Spirit move. Yet I also am a Christian because historically it lines up.

Daniel Markin:

I’m a Christian because philosophically it lines up, it provides satisfying answers. And it has been my experience that a lot of the historical things with Mormonism are very questionable. So, love to hear a little bit about that idea of the testimony.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah. I call it the Trump card of Mormon experience. You’re playing poker and you’ve got Trump and you’ve dropped down the Trump card in the games, you’ve won the hand. So what happens is, you get into a discussion with a Latter Day Saint, and you’re talking about definitions, you’re talking about Christ, you’re talking about Trinity, maybe you’re talking about gospel salvation, and maybe you in the conversation, get that conversation to a point where you go, “Okay, I’m pretty sure I got this. I’ve won the evidence war.” Right?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Beware, because the next line is going to be, you don’t understand, you don’t get it, I have a testimony. And you’re going to go, “Well, testimony, like when I share my testimony, it’s the story of how I came to Christ.” That’s not what that means for them as you said, it is a moment. I asked one Mormon in my living room once, what is it? Tell me, I mean, I want to know what do you say, testimony? What are you talking about? And they said, it’s like a divine aha moment. It’s what this individual said, it’s like the light goes on.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, for them, it’s almost Gnosticism, it’s a way of having a superior knowledge. So they’ll say something like, “If you knew like I know, then you’d really know.” I asked this individual. I said, “Now tell me, how would you delineate your experience from, let’s say there was a Buddhist who was seated right next to you, and that Buddhist,” I said, “How do you know that Buddhism is true?” And they said, “You know what? I push away desire. I find myself through a meditative process at one with all things in this monistic world. And I actualize myself in that moment, and it’s just wonderful.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

How would you invalidate that claim?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

You have a subjective witness, a testimony. You’ve had a spiritual experience. They’ve had a spiritual experience. So how do you delineate that yours is right and theirs is wrong? What is it that makes them in any way, one qualitatively different than the other. And they said, “You have to understand they said to me, it’s like chocolate milk.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, I have more chocolate in my milk. It’s just more real.” In other words, the simplistic nature of the response was functionally, “Mine’s more real than theirs is.” And I said, “The problem is, they’re going to tell me theirs is more real. You haven’t answered the question.” Right?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, this is such an enormous issue, and it makes some people when they share the gospel with Mormon, feel like, “Well, I don’t have anywhere to go with them.” And I think you do have places to go, and I think that’s … What I tell people is, you need to burn the Citadel of testimony upfront in the conversation. So you begin in the conversation early saying something like, “I need you to know. I have and have had a real experience of the spirit in my life. Here’s what happened.” And share, share an existential component of your faith. It’s important. And it matters. And he shared that. And the reason you need to do that is because immediately you are beginning to neutralize the issue of experience.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

The second thing you can do is begin to talk to people about how you validate experience. Ask them a question, could God give you good feelings? Yes. Can God give you bad feelings? Sure. Conviction of sin is no fun. Can the devil give you good feelings? Yeah. Can he give you bad feelings? Sure. Well then, how do you know where your feelings come from? How can you know, for certain? The answer is you can’t. So you have to find something outside of the feeling that validates the authenticity of that which you’re feeling. Then you can press to something that’s a little bit more substantive in terms of that.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So, I’ll give you a quick illustration of how you can go down this road in conversation, maybe two quick data points. I was speaking at a high school graduation years ago in Pennsylvania. I was on flight on my way back, got seated next to a guy who is one of the leading youth speakers in all of Mormonism. He’s published all over the place out here, writes all kinds of books. And he and I got talking, and I asked him, his name was John. And I said, “Hey, John.” I said, “Can you do something for me?” He said, “Sure.” I said, “I want you to share with me what hard historical or scientific data is in favor of Mormon claims. And here’s the rules of our discussion. You can’t use testimony. You’re not allowed to.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

So give me something outside of that.” So I just let him sit for a while. Five minutes went by and I looked him and I said, “Well, John, what do you have?” Now this is the key youth speaker for the Mormon church. And he said, he shared like one obscure data point, I can’t even remember what it was. And then he looked at me and he said, “But I got to be honest with you.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “About 95% of it is my testimony.” Wow. 95% of it. So I began to challenge him. Well, if you lived in our area and you went to Deseret Book or Seagull Books, these Mormon bookstores, you could go and you could pull a talk off the shelf that says, “Jesus knows that I’m a Christian.” And it’s by this guy, John, by the way.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

On the back jacket, he talks about a conversation he had with an evangelical minister on an airplane that led him to begin searching for whether or not Mormonism actually taught grace or not. And that was born out of our conversation, because he was unsettled by the conversation. Second point, on another flight, I sat by a BYU professor coming back. I was coming back from a theology conference and I ended up sitting by a guy who taught finance, and he was leading a field trip back from Wall Street. Well, him, myself and another pastor friend of mine were all seated in the road together. I thought, “I want to get in a conversation with him.” So I found out what he did, and I said, “Man, that is really cool that you’re doing this kind of thing.” I said, “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “I know a little bit about Mormonism, studied some.”

Bryan Hurlbutt:

I said, “as a professor of finance out here in Wall Street, taking your kids out here and taking them back, would you counsel your students to invest in markets that they didn’t have hard data for, or invest in stocks and bonds that they didn’t have hard data for?” He’s like, “No, I’d never do that.” I said, “Well, here’s my question then, I think you’d agree me that our souls are worth quite a bit more than our dollars. So why would you encourage people as a Mormon to invest their soul in something based upon a gut feeling when you wouldn’t encourage people to invest their finances based on a gut feeling?”

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And that launched us into a discussion because what I was doing was trying to give an epistemological hook about how you know what you know, and how you arrive at knowledge when you shouldn’t separate spiritual knowledge in that way as a distinct kind of thing from other kinds of knowledge. But that’s what Mormonism does.

Daniel Markin:

It’s super fascinating as you begin to dig deeper and deeper into it. Let me ask you this. Just as we think about Christianity and as we think about Mormonism, maybe compare, contrast quickly here. This idea of repentance.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

We as Christians use the word repentance, and we mean turning away from sin, coming back to Jesus, believing upon the Lord Jesus again, we are going to do our best to not commit that sin again, we’re going to walk in the way of Christ. We’re transformed. We want to be transformed and fight against it. Mormons use a different definition of repentance, don’t they?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Oh yeah.

Daniel Markin:

And what is that?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Well, I’ll read you a quote. How about that? The prophet of the church in the mid 20th century, a key prophet for a number of years was a guy named Spencer Kimball. He wrote a book called The Miracle of Forgiveness. It’s a very important book in Mormonism. Here’s a section from The Miracle of Forgiveness. This is from page 203. It’s also cited in what’s called the doctrines of the gospel student manual that Mormons use. Okay?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Repentance must involve an all out total surrender to the program of the Lord. That transgressor is not fully repentant who neglects his tithing, misses his meetings, breaks the Sabbath, fails in his family prayers, does not sustain the authorities of the church, breaks the word of wisdom, does not love the Lord nor his fellow man. A reforming adulterer who drinks or curses is not repentant. The repenting burglar who has sex play is not ready for forgiveness. God cannot forgive … Listen carefully. God cannot forgive unless the transgressor shows a true repentance, which spreads to all areas of his life.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

If you read more in The Miracle of Forgiveness, what you learn is that Mormon repentance is about a few things. One is, have I seen sin according to Kimball in all areas of my life? If I haven’t, then I’m not repentant in one area of my life. Secondly, he has another section where he actually points out that when you repent of something and then you do it again. So let’s take our young adults listening. You lust, you seek God’s forgiveness, and then you lust again. Mormonism teaches and Kimball taught that you now became doubly guilty because you showed you weren’t really repented before. So now you repent again, but you’ve got two in the queue now, so you repent again, but then you do it again.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Oh, you’re triple guilty, quadruple. You just stack it up. Right? So he has another line in another quote where he says, “You’re not really repented unless you root out even the desire for sin.” So I will ask young strapping, LDS, missionaries, have you completely licked lust in your life? Is it completely gone from your life? Are y’all done with it now, over? The answer is, of course you’re not. Of course, you’re still fighting it. Of course, you still fail in it. Right.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

But then you’re not really repented, which means you really can’t go to the celestial kingdom, but really do you know anybody that’s done that? Anybody that’s completely licked sin in a particular area of their life and is done with it? No, you don’t. So actually it’s an impossible gospel. You actually can’t live it out because you’ll never be able to meet the imperialistic threshold of repentance.

Daniel Markin:

It sounds hard.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

It is.

Daniel Markin:

It sounds like a lot of weight and it sounds like that would burn you out quick.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And it does.

Daniel Markin:

And so what’s the good news, Bryan, then? What do you tell them?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Yeah, right. Yeah. So the good news is that you can enter the rest to quote Hebrews three and four, that you can walk into the finished work of Christ who has completely forgiven you. And is all available in terms of your past sin, your present sin, and your future sin. And then, and they might think, “I guess that just means Paul begins to object quote in Roman six, I guess then grace can abound. We can just sin and sin and sin.” No, no, no, because then you’ll be transformed from the inside out and you’ll be so grateful that you’ll just long to serve your Lord without the tyranny of the law.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Right now, you’re living under the tyranny of the law of celestial exaltation, and it’ll be joyless and you’ll never measure up and it’ll be impossible, and you’ll end up finding out that the church has sold you a bill of goods.

Daniel Markin:

That they cannot even deliver on.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

That’s right. Just a bill of goods.

Daniel Markin:

You’ll just fail. You’ll fail, fail, fail.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

That’s right. So you can come rest.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. If only there was someone who did live that perfect life and did uphold all of that. Right?

Bryan Hurlbutt:

And that’s the beauty of it. Yep. And so you can talk about the obedience of Christ. And so you take them to second Corinthians 5:21. Right? He who knew no sin was made sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ and what a beautiful, great transaction.

Daniel Markin:

So good. Bryan, thank you, we should just close there. This was so good. It was so good to talk through this and connect again and have you back on the program. So, thank you my friend, it’s been a pleasure.

Bryan Hurlbutt:

Thank you Daniel, take care.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more subscribe on iTunes or Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Daniel Markin:

In doubt is a ministry that exists to engage young people with biblical truth and provide answers for many of today’s questions of life, faith, and culture. Through audio programs, articles, and blogs, indoubt reaches out to encourage, strengthen and disciple young adults. To check out all the resources of indoubt, visit indoubt.ca in Canada, or indoubt.com in the US. Or if you’re in a position or share a passion for the ministry of young people, you can support the ongoing mission of engaging a new generation with the truth of the Bible.

Daniel Markin:

First, you can pray for this ministry, and second, and if you are able, please consider a financial gift by visiting indoubt.ca in Canada or indoubt.com in the US. Your gift of any amount is such a blessing and an answer to prayer. Thanks.