Sivulkas with Adam's Road
Leftist Platitudes

I wrote a new blog attacking leftist platitudes.

Evangelizing Our Friends

I talked to my buddy who buys chicken eggs from me every month about Jesus and life. We've talked before about these things, but this was the longest we've talked--about an hour. I've been praying for him, and with friendship evangelism, you know that you have to be really patient and wait for God to open the door. My buddy was full of questions. We began talking about how crazy the world is today, particularly with COVID, and I simply mentioned that's why I'm looking forward to Jesus coming back and how I'm trusting him since he rose from the dead. Well, it was off to the races after that. My buddy believes nothing, but he's from a Buddhist background. I had to stop the conversation since I had to get my girls from school. Please pray that God will keep drawing him to himself.

Tara also has had a great opportunity with one of her LDS friends that she's had to be really patient with as well. It's like the long wait for harvest and it's exciting when you get to see some action. Of course I see action almost every day in other areas. Sometimes, though, there are periods of nothing, and in those times we still have to be faithful to our Lord and trust that he's working to bring the increase (1 Cor. 3:6).

Adam’s Road and LDS Missionaries

One night last month, we had dinner with Micah Wilder and Adam's Road band (made up of ex-Mormons now Christians) over at my folks' and Dad bought a box of Micah's fascinating new book, Passport to Heaven: The True Story of a Zealous Mormon Missionary Who Discovers the Jesus He Never Knew). Dad said I could take some, so I took 3. I took them inside my home, but the next morning, on our way to church, I decided to put them back in my car, because I thought I may see my LDS buddy later. We passed the Taylorsville temple under construction and there were 3 LDS missionaries, who usually travel in twos, waiting at a corner to cross the street. I turned around and pulled up behind them in a parking lot. I rolled my window down and told them I just happened to have 3 books for them and told them the story I just told you and a little about Micah serving his mission in FL. I also told them that I believe this meeting is a divine appointment. They gladly took the books.

The light changed and they took off, but then I thought I should have got a picture with them for Micah. So of course I drove after them and got this picture to the right. One missionary said they weren't supposed to promote other books, but the other one with the book didn't think it was a big deal. The one pictured in the back asked if they could give me a book. I asked if it was the Book of Mormon, and he said it was. I replied, "Thanks, but I already have a bunch of them at home!" I told them I appreciated them, but was late for church, so I took off.

Life Chain

My daughters and I participated in a national Life Chain event (affiliated with 40 Days for Life) on the corner of 106000 and State in Sandy, UT to hold up signs for life. People could use their various signs, but we had signs to advertise my AbortionIsMurder.Info. We were not in front of an abortion mill. Just out on a busy intersection with around 50 people. I counted 25 fingers in an hour! That's way more than I get for advertising JosephLied.com. I even got to preach to a woman waiting to turn. She said, "My body my choice." I yelled so she could hear me: "The body inside your body isn't your body. It's got a separate DNA. If it's a boy, it has a penis, but you don't have a penis. You are for murdering babies. You need to repent." Others with windows open, I yelled to check it out and be a little open-minded. Pray that at least some will!

 

 

Update on Doctoral Program

I have submitted the third draft of my research proposal. Also, I was having a problem paying my bill. I thought I paid it when I wired it from my bank back in July. However, in the beginning of September, I received another bill with interest. (For some reason, I never received a bill from my school in August, so I figured everything was paid.) I went to my bank. The teller got on the phone with someone, and that individual apologized that they forgot to email me to let me know that it didn’t go through. The phone number I got for the South African bank online did not work. I went home and 
Right across from us on the south-west corner
continued to email the financial assistant at the school, and she told me that there is no number required on their end. No one around the world uses phone numbers for wire transfers. I relayed this information to my bank, and they said they still required a working number. (This is a new rule for wire transfers.) They told me that we could simply use the number of the financial assistant. It worked! After all the accumulated interest, I was thinking I’d have to pay a lot more and obviously, I wasn’t happy about it. However, the value of the South African Rand went down from July, so I ended up paying $6 less than I tried paying in July! Praise the Lord!

 

We Need Your Partnership!

We not only need your prayers, but we need your financial partnership as well. Keep in mind that your investment is not simply for us, but for the lives of others we reach with the gospel. The standard way to financially invest is by writing a tax-deductible check to Courageous Christians United (CCU). For more information on various ways to invest in this ministry, including online giving, please see our “Invest” page on our sites. Please keep in mind we have no financial guarantees each month. Ministry partners come and go. If you’re not a partner and are blessed by these monthly updates, please consider joining our team and let us know soon. We’d love to be your missionaries here in Utah. Many thanks to those of you who hold us up in prayer and/or in your financial giving!

We expect God to provide for our needs through you. Why? Because the Bible is clear: “the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:14).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be strong and courageous (Joshua 1:6)!

Rob Sivulka
President, Courageous Christians United
P.O. Box 1374
West Jordan, UT 84088
(801) 792-6373 (leave voice message or text)
MormonInfo.org
MeetTheExMormons.org
JWinfo.org
MuhammadLied.Info
AbortionIsMurder.Info

Mailbag

You are a great man, it's a pity that you are not in Poland 🙂
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Thank you for your wonderful ministry!
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Praying for you my brother as you complete your studies:)
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Do you find most Christians are confident enough to connect with muslims people before sharing the gospel with them? I find some of my Christian friends are: 1) afraid to approach someone from another faith,  2) not well enough versed in the Qur'an nor the Bible 3) have misunderstanding about what the other person believes or a combination of the above.

So how do you help Christians take the first step to assuage their fear of "the other"? I think if someone is too afraid of the other they won't even approach them and that seems a basic step- lowering our fear so we're  ready to approach and build rapport with them. Your thoughts?


I hope you and your family had a good Labor Day.

[I replied:] It's hard for me to answer your questions living in UT where we don't have very many Muslims. However, in general, I think Christians are afraid to befriend unbelievers of different faiths, especially in order to evangelize them. I find Christians are lazy and they know that this would require learning another religion/language in order to deconstruct it. They are content to just being nice and available, but rarely take the initiative. When I lecture, part of my talk is to encourage believers to trust the Lord and do what He commands... love, pray, study, evangelize. Our book "Sharing the Good News with Mormons: Practical Strategies for Getting the Conversation Started" deals heavily with interpersonal interactions, but it also includes my specialty, which is stranger evangelism in public venues.
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I am trying to educate some of my Mormon neighbors that JS was a fraud.  I specifically want to educate them about JS and the many wives that he had and how this was not nor ever will be ok with our Heavenly Father.

[I replied:] https://www.gotquestions.org/polygamy.html
http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo?lang=eng (make sure you read the endnotes here too!)
https://www.mormoninfo.org/discussion-35/does-god-condone-polygamy-3833
Also https://www.courageouschristiansunited.org/blog/the-one-true-churchs-history-of-lying-on-polygamy-62759


[He replied:] The youtube video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnZsCYdeN9U&t=3s] of the Manti Pageant where all of Joseph Smith's wives were lined up and interviewed. It was awesome!!
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[LDS:] Ok, so lets take this apart and look at it from an eternal perspecticve.First and foremost we become totally NOTHING, unless the issue of our sins are dealt with through Christ our Savior.Christ has come to redeem and to save us, and the Holy Ghost is the means by which we are transformed.I have a daughter, I did not want her to stay in diapers as an infant, but encoraged her to mature and develop.She is now an adult and our relationship has changed as it should.I will always be her father,and will hold that position and she has respected that role. In the same way, we mature and develop,purchased, redeemed, forgiven and eventually sanctified through Christ ,and we can dwell in God's presence for all eternity and mirror all we see,and will be full of gratitude for such grace extended to us.God will always be our Father and we will forever worship Him , and never be above Him.He invites us to become as He is,that is the only way to peace in this life and a fullness of joy in eternity, through Christ who has made it all possible by His sacrifice for us.

[I replied:] The biblical problem for your assumption is that God is NOT an exalted MAN who had to become a God and become a Father before He could even become God. What you Mormons do is devalue God and exalt man. May God give you eyes to see that God has always been God (Ps. 90:2), that He's not a man in His nature (Hosea 11:9), that He is above all gods (2 Chron. 2:5), that He's not a containable being (2 Chron. 2:6), and He alone is the Creator of all things outside Himself (Gen. 1:1, Ps. 96:4-5, Isa. 44:24), and as a result, He knows of no other God besides Him (Isa. 43:10 and 44:6 & 8). All other gods are false gods (Ps. 96:4-5, 1 Cor. 8:1-6, Gal. 4:8).

[He replied:] Genesis teaches and the First Vision affirms we are literally made in God's image.The Lord Jesus rose from the dead with a perfected body, and our Savior would not possess such a body if His own Father and our Creator did not also have one too.Our Father in Heaven has a Celestial body,He is a male, and totally understands us, since He put us together after His own pattern.I suppose you could recite any number of Protestan creeds that asssume that God has'' neither body, parts or passions'' but that would deny the reality of the empty tomb, and the Savior who conquered death who came forth, to die no more,with a tangible but non corruptible form or body.

[I replied:] You're assuming that the image must be physical, but I know from scripture that can't be the case given God's nature, which isn't an image, btw. Given that God created space and time, He's infinitely bigger than the Mickey Mouse god of Joseph Smith. And since He's all-powerful, it's always His prerogative to take on a physical form or nature (an attachment) in order to show up in the physical world. I know the Bible teaches that God isn't in His nature a man (Hosea 11:9) and is thus not the type of being that can be contained in the whole universe, let alone a house built for Him (2 Chron. 2:6). That's why He's greater than all other gods as 2 Chron. 2:5 says. The LDS god is just as good as all other gods that went before Him.

[He replied:] The prohet Joseph did not worship a small, Mickey Mouse God, and neither do I! We disagree with the creeds and statements regarding the nature of God, formulated by Greek Theologians in the 3rd to the 5th centuries, that reduces the Lord to an inmaterial intelligence that has no real connection to us and is not fully capable of understanding who we are, since they did not believe God had a perfected phsical form, as clearly taught in Genesis.In such a view, the Savior's perfected body that was taken up into heaven poses a real issue! Does the Son have or possess something that His own Father not have, like a perfected physical form? So I have a body, but my father did not? really? And if the Father and Son are one in the sense you teach, the only conclusion you could reach is that our Creator now has a body, where as before He did not? No, Joseph's First Vision laid to rest all of the misunderstanding about the true nature of God,and as the Lord opened his eyes to further understanding upon this subject later on.So when the Lord was designing us as males and females,where did He get the pattern? why not four legs instead of two, or any other variation? Adam and Eve are part of an eternal design that has always existed,we are copied after their likeness and image according to Genesis, if you take the scriptures literally as you should in this case!

[I replied:] Your god is weak since he didn't create matter. He needs it to get along. He also must submit to other gods that went before him in order to become a god himself. There is obviously a greater God than that that we can all imagine at least. That's a God who created matter and time itself. That's the God of the Bible (Gen. 1:1, 2 Chron. 6:18, Ps. 90:2, 96:4-5, Isa. 44:24, Hos. 11:9, Col. 1:13-18). He is infinitely greater than Joseph Smith's god. Mormonism has distorted and weakened the God of the Bible because they are more in love with what Joseph Smith said about how only humans are exalted or gods.

The God of the Bible is accurately reflected in the precise scholarly statements of the creeds. However, my faith isn't based in the creeds. It's based in what God has revealed in the Bible. I haven't begged the question and assumed and argued for God's nature on the basis of what the creeds state.

You are also confusing the 2 natures of Christ. When you don't do that, then you see how all the essential attributes of God are shared between the members of God, and that includes being immaterial and omnipresent. In that nature, the Son is not a containable being as 2 Chron. 6:18 says. However, it's always the Almighty's prerogative to create an attachment to manifest Himself. That's exactly what the Son (one of the members of God) did to die for our sins.

You simply beg the question that the Father must have done that too. But even you know better than that since your own church teaches that the Holy Ghost doesn't have a body of flesh and bones so he could dwell in us (D&C 130:22). So your presumptuous thinking commits a fallacy and is not even consistent with what you already believe. Namely, God doesn't have to have a body in his nature simply because one of his sons has a body. The Father could simply be like his other son who doesn't have a body. In fact, that's what your former scripture contained in the Book of Commandments used to teach. The Lectures on Faith, which was part of the Book of Commandments and was the Doctrine in what latter became the Doctrine & Covenants, clearly taught that the "Father being a personage of spirit" and the "Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, a personage of tabernacle, made, or fashioned like unto man, or being in the form and likeness of man, or, rather, man was formed after his likeness, and in his image" (Section V, 53).

I reject Smith's first vision account, but even if I did allow for that as a possibility, there's no reason to assume that the appearance of the Father in a body is what He is in His nature. Just because something appears a certain way doesn't entail that's the way it is. For example, a stick isn't bent when stuck in water just because it appears that way.

So on the basis of what the Bible teaches about God's nature, I conclude that we aren't in the physical image of God, since God's not physical. We are in the spiritual image of God and that includes spiritual properties: rationality, free agency, the ability to rule over creation, ability to love the Creator, etc. That's why both male and female reflect God. If it was physical, then females aren't as much in the image of God since they have different physical features. Further, if God is a certain color, then those who don't have his color are also not as much in his image. But that's ridiculous!

So this conclusion is based on a literal understanding of the Bible, and by the way, it's one that has been taught by the Christian Church for 2,000 years now. It just doesn't fit your literal understanding based on faulty assumptions and being too fixated on the physical.


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