Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around the world are occasionally invited to share a message with other members in their congregation during weekly worship services—called “sacrament meetings.”
Keith Thompson is a member of a Latter-day Saint congregation in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. By day he is a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia. In his spare time he writes books on subjects such as religious liberty, priest-penitent privilege, and The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.
His biography states that “Keith practiced commercial and property law in Auckland for 12 years. He was then International Legal Counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through the Pacific (18 years) and the African continent (two years) before returning to Australia to teach law. He retains a practising certificate and does consulting work for a boutique law firm in Sydney and in a regional law firm with offices in the NSW Riverina and in northern Victoria.”
Recently Keith was invited to be one of the speakers in his congregation’s weekly sacrament meeting.
Here is a transcript of his sermon:
Professor Keith Thompson.
Professor Keith Thompson.© 2022 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.In his October General Conference talk, Elder Quentin Cook spoke of his great-great-grandfather, Heber C. Kimball. He spoke of his missionary service in England in the 1840s and of his work with Brigham Young to relocate church members from Missouri to Illinois because Governor Boggs had ordered the state militia to exterminate the Mormons and Joseph Smith had been imprisoned on false charges of treason. This is his quote from his great-great-grandfather:
Let me say to you, that many of you will see the time when you will have all the trouble, trial and persecution that you can stand, and plenty of opportunities to show that you are true to God and His work.
To meet the difficulties that are coming, it will be necessary for you to have a knowledge of the truth of this work for yourselves. The difficulties will be of such a character that the man or woman who does not possess this personal knowledge or witness will fall. If you have not got the testimony, live right and call upon the Lord and cease not [until] you [attain] it. If you do not you will not stand. … The time will come when no man nor woman will be able to endure on borrowed light. Each will have to be guided by the light within himself. … If you don’t have it you will not stand; therefore seek for the testimony of Jesus and cleave to it, that when the trying time comes you may not stumble and fall.
Elder Cook then spoke of testimony and referred to the 76th section of the Doctrine and Covenants where we were given more detail about what Jesus meant when He said there were many mansions in Heavenly Father’s kingdom and what Paul meant when he added that meant there were three grand divisions there – a kingdom in likened to the sun, a kingdom he likened to the moon, and then a kingdom with glories differing as much as the stars of heaven.
Elder Cook noted that the moon is visible because of ‘reflected light or borrowed light’. And verse 79 says that those who inherit that second kingdom are ‘those who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus’. We cannot inherit the first or celestial heaven if we only have borrowed testimony. ‘We need our own testimony of Jesus Christ and His gospel’.
I would like to talk about how I received my testimony. I pray every day that I will be true to it until my time on this earth is complete. I share these thoughts with the hope and prayer that as I speak, the Holy Ghost might confirm the truth of my words in your souls so that you might know how to gain a testimony or how to strengthen yours.
When I speak of testimony, I am using the word slightly differently than when I teach my students the Law of Evidence at law school. But it is not that much different. With the exception of expert witnesses, those called to give evidence in court may not express their opinions. They can only tell what they know with their five physical senses. Mostly they speak of things they have seen with their eyes. As a general rule, second-hand or hearsay evidence will not be accepted in a court of law. The words “objection, Your Honour” are familiar from television drama.
When I speak of a testimony of spiritual things, I differentiate between the things I know and the things I believe. I do not testify that I know of anything spiritual unless I know that I have received a revelation from God on that point. I believe many more things than I know. Most of those follow logically because of things I have had revealed to me.
My parents became members of this church when I was six and a half years old in 1963. I attended their baptism and remember some things that happened on that day. I was baptized myself on my 8th birthday. I believed what my parents taught; I know I had felt some truth because I remember the songs I chose for that service and they tell a story about my young soul. But I don’t think I knew anything by personal revelation yet. I got baptized because I trusted my parents and believed what they had taught me.
I did well in school. I started at University when I was 16 years old. Everyone in my ward expected me to serve a mission and they would ask me when I planned to do that. My answer to those regular and then annoying questions at 16, was always, when I have finished my degree which then meant in 4 years time.
But something happened in Sunday School when I was 17 that changed that. I was not playing the organ that day. I think I had blessed the sacrament and when that was over, I had gone and sat on the back row by myself. There were two, 2 and a half minute speakers. During one of those talks the speaker quoted the following words from Alma chapter 32:
Now, we will compare the word unto a aseed. Now, if ye give place, that a bseed may be planted in your cheart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your dunbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to eenlighten my funderstanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.
At the very moment when the words – “swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions” – were spoken, I felt a physical swelling within my breast. And I stopped concentrating on the talk. I thought I had indigestion and I asked myself, “What did I have for breakfast this morning? Did I have too much? Did I eat too quickly?”
No sooner had I thought that, than my breast swelled again, I felt an overwhelming warmth in my heart and my head at the same time and I heard a “still, small voice” that said quietly – “this is not indigestion. This is the swelling motions referred to in that verse of scripture. I am showing you what the witness of the Holy Ghost feels like and you now know what it means to have a revelation of truth”.
I said nothing about that revelation to anyone for some time. But I was changed. I knew that God expected good things of me. Someone asked shortly afterwards again when I was going on a mission and my answer was different. I now answered “as soon as I can”. I saved fiendishly because I knew my parents could not afford to pay for me, and with my Stake President, I completed my papers just before I was 18 and a half and I left on 2 January 1976, 3 months before my 19th birthday. I had read the Book of Mormon mechanically twice before I received that revelation by assignment in my seminary class and in a crazy gimmicky reading marathon. But now that I knew the truth of that one verse, I read the Book of Mormon twice more before I left and the Holy Ghost drip fed me quite a lot more knowledge of its truthfulness. More than enough I thought to enable me to teach people and tell them I knew it was true when I did go out to serve that mission.
However, I had not been out very long before I felt that knowing that little bit was not enough. People interested to learn about the Church would ask me questions about Joseph Smith and I was pretty faithful to what I told you earlier about testimony. I would say “I know the Book of Mormon is true” but I could only say honestly that I believed that Joseph Smith was called as a prophet of God and that he did indeed see the Father and the Son in the Sacred Grove because I knew the Holy Ghost had not told me that. While it made logical sense that he was a prophet or we could not have the Book of Mormon in the first place, I knew there was a difference between what I knew about the Book of Mormon and what I knew about Joseph Smith. I knew the facts of Joseph Smith’s life, but I did not know by revelation that he was a prophet of God – and I wanted to know that in the same way.
So I went to work. In the final chapter of the Book of Mormon there are three verses that teach you how to get spiritual knowledge. While this teaching is essentially the same as Jesus’ formula in the Sermon on the Mount – “ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you”, in that final Book of Mormon chapter there is more detail:
4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would aask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not btrue; and if ye shall ask with a csincere heart, with dreal intent, having efaith in Christ, he will fmanifest the gtruth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may aknow the btruth of all things.
This passage also says you have to ask, but the extra things are:
- You have to ask with a sincere heart
- You have to ask with real intent, and
- You have to ask having faith that the truth can be manifested to you by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Now I already knew that God could reveal truth to me by the power of the Holy Ghost because that had happened to me two years previously in Sunday School. And at that time I thought that merely asking proved that I had a sincere heart and real intent. But for some reason, God chose to stretch me out on this. I am not sure why, but it was as if He said, prove to me that you really want to know. You say you have faith – will you keep praying if I don’t answer you straight away? And I said OK. I will prove that I really want to know. I asked every day at least twice for more than a year….and then this:
It was March 1977. I had been appointed as the Zone Leader of the missionaries serving in Dunedin and the province of Otago. At the end of the 1976, the Church had produced a film depicting surrounding events and Joseph Smith’s First Vision. I was vaguely aware of it but one of the District Leaders in the Zone had been pro-active and arranged for our Zone to be the first to borrow the Mission’s only copy. He had arranged a cottage meeting at the home of Bill and Judy Stone. Would I be the final speaker? He knew I had studied Joseph Smith’s life intimately. I felt unqualified to give that talk but he insisted. The film was shown first. It began with credits that show Stewart Peterson played the part of the young Joseph Smith. But behind those opening credits was an image of that 14 year old boy running across fields from the Sacred Grove towards his home. The Holy Ghost poured into my heart. I was told a lot of things in just a few moments. Not only had the events depicted happened, but this film had been filmed on location. I basked. When I bore my testimony at the end of my brief concluding talk that evening, for the first time I testified that I knew that Joseph Smith was indeed a prophet of God and that all he said about those events were true.
That testimony which I had so earnestly sought has been sustaining to me. For example, in 1993 when some friends suggested that God had rejected Joseph as a prophet because of events that happened in Kirtland, Ohio in 1837, I said quietly “But why would God tell me that he was a prophet in 1977 if he had been rejected in 1837?” There is clearly more to those 1837 events than you or I know….and that has subsequently been proven to be the case.
I have had many subsequent revelations of truth from God through the Holy Ghost. For example, I know that the Law of Tithing is a law ordained by God and that he blesses those who keep it. I know that God lives. I know that Jesus Christ is the Promised Messiah and that His atonement is infinite and has cured all the effects of sin, illness, disease and misfortune that can happen to anyone on this earth – for every soul who will repent. And I also know Russell M. Nelson and I know that he is a modern prophet of God.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.