This is my 3rd installment in a five part series on Mormonism that I am teaching at Light Force.
Free From Bondage, John 11:21-43
Imagine that you had done something really bad and were sent to prison for life. Over the course of a few months you would likely begin to recreate a new life based around y our prison experience. Since you were there for life, you would quickly lose yourself in the politics of prison life, the daily routines, etc. You’d form new friendships and likely forget about the outside world altogether. You aren’t free but you learn to adapt to life in jail.
Well, a few years later you are unexpectedly released from jail. You very quickly remember how cool freedom is. You embrace it, run with it, settle down into freedom-based friendships and jobs. Some more time goes by and you’ve nearly forgotten about your jail experience. You get a decent job, fall in love and get married, and start a family. The old prison life is a distant memory.
Until the knock comes at your door. Instantly, you are taken from your "free life" and thrown back in prison because they have mistakenly set you free. So, you tasted some freedom but head straight back to jail.
– What would that emotion feel like?
o To
be in jail, all alone in the world.
o To
be set free, to experience the ability to do whatever you wanted… to start life
over.
o But
then to be put back in jail.
– My guess is
this would actually be worse than if you were just put
in jail and never tasted freedom at all.
Tie-in: This is exactly the type of thing Mormons
seek to do with women.
Chrisitans believe that we are born into sin, but yet can confess their
sins and turn to Jesus and away from sin and it’s bondage… and He promises to set them free. Christ is their
mediator. In Him they find true release and freedom.
Mormons believe that
there is no freedom for women. Their freedom can only be found through
marriage. Their husband becomes their source of salvation. So even if they are freed from sin’s bondage they are merely rebonded to a sinful man. There is no true release and freedom.
Book:
raised Mormon… these aren’t old, they are brand new stories available at
exmormon.org.
From Kris,
college student: I was a Mormon all my life. I was the all-around Mormon
girl. I attended all four years of seminary, I held many church positions. I
was ready to serve a mission when I became the right age. You name it, and I
did it.
After I graduated, I decided to go to the
University
of
Idaho-
which was quite far away
from my hometown-Pocatello,
Idaho
(which
is very highly Mormon populated). I attended church in
Moscow
at their University Institute- the first one ever established. I was pretty
active in my ward, but they didn’t put me in a group for Family Home Evening (a
meeting that’s held on Monday nights for family-oriented studies and activities).
The girls who lived next door to me had a Christian Bible Study, and they
invited me to come with them- so I went- hoping that I would be able to convert
someone. Well, the exact opposite happened. I started to learn more and more
about God, and I saw something in my Christian friends that I had never seen
before. Then one night when I went out to dinner with my Bible study leader, we
started talking about it, and later that night I invited Jesus Christ into my
life.
To those of you who have left the Mormon
church, and want to give up on God altogether- please don’t. There is more to
God than you think. I had some bitterness toward God for letting me go through
all of that pain and suffering all those years, but He did it for a reason. I
have been able to help out several others who are going through this pain, and
it helps them out because they know that I know what they are going through.
God has a purpose for you, so please don’t give up on Him. He didn’t give up on
you.
From Cindy,
13 years old I love my mother very much and I always will. I know that she
is not going to go to hell because I know that she’s a good person, and that
you don’t have to belong to a church to be a good person. She showed me a lot
of things that she has researched about the church that made me realize that
not only the church was false but that they had lied to me and everybody else.
It hurt me so much!! I mean I prayed about it, I read about it, and I even
listened in church, but still did not find my answeres. I wanted my mom to be
wrong about all of the stuff she had told me, but I knew that she was right.
I felt really really dumb for not seeing before,
but then I also knew that it wasn’t really my fault, that they had manipulated
me into believing what they wanted me to believe. After knowing and actually
thinking and believing for myself I felt really uncomfortable whenever I went
to church. I mean I was sitting with all of these true believers and I felt
like a loner. I hated going to church and being taught false things, but I
couldn’t tell my dad how I felt because I thought that he would disown me or
something.
After weeks of going to, what I called hell,
church, I finally snapped after hearing a lesson in Young Womens. The lesson
was about how a women’s calling in life was to support her husband and to bear
children. NO!!! I do not think so. I plan to have a life, and I do have a nice
future planned ahead of me that I would like to achieve. I am not going to
spend my life sitting at home cooking, cleaning, and popping out babies every
year. Yeah I want to get married, and yeah I want to have children but 3 is
enough for me. I also think that when I get married that my husband will be
mature enough to do things for himself, yeah sure I’ll help him when he needs
it but I am certainly not going to baby him!
Nameless
mother of 3, After several years of study and prayer, I finally came to the
inescapable conclusion that the LDS church was not the one true church at all.
Accepting this brought a certain amount of peace and
relief (I felt relieved of the mental gymnastics I was performing to try to
justify the church’s history and doctrines). However, I also felt great sorrow
and confusion. I had trusted God to lead me, I had built my life on Mormonism,
I had spent my youth in its service, and look where it had gotten me. For some
reason, I did not abandon my basic belief in God (as I once though I would if I
ever discovered that the church wasn’t true), so I kept searching , kept trying
to make sense out of it all. It was at this point I could have benefited most
from your site. I stopped attending the LDS church (my husband had also drifted
into inactivity by this time). I felt drawn towards the same protestant
churches I had once been taught to demean (regardless of what any Mormon
apologist may profess about the church not criticizing other faiths, we
ex-Mormons know that the founding tenet of Mormonism is that all other churches
are false and do not have the power to save, drawing towards God with their
lips only, and may even be, as Elder McConkie taught, the "whore on the
water".)
Having been burnt once by authoritarian religion, I
steered clear of fundamentalist groups which, to me, seemed as dogmatic as
Mormonism. I wanted a church that could help me understand God without seeking
to control my beliefs and thoughts through fear and domination. A friend
suggested a nearby Episcopal church, and although all the attention to Christ
felt strange at first, I quickly warmed to it. My priest constantly spoke of
Christ’s redemption, with the insinuation that His redemption was a gift given
freely, one we could never earn. I began reading the Bible again, trying to
understand it with my own mind, not the mind of Mormonism. I have come to
believe and accept that grace, though nearly scorned in Mormonism, means more
than "everyone resurrecting with a body". It means I can give up
trying to make myself "good enough for God" because that is beyond my
power. That is exactly why I never felt spiritual peace in all my years as a
Mormon. Grace means God will take me as I am, broken and prone to sin, and heal
me from the inside out.
What are these women
describing?
Are they describing a
faith that has set them free?
No, the Mormon faith teaches women that their only
acceptable role in life is to be a servant to their husband. They have no
freedom outside of their home. Ultimately, their doctrine teaches that the only
acceptable things they can do as an adult are.
– Be a missionary (1-2 years in college)
– Get married
– Make babies
– Support your husband
– Work for the church
In the most literal way… a Mormon woman cannot communicate
with God, except through her husband. Her husband is her priest. She serves men
in every capacity of her life.
She can hold no official office of the church. She is
without a voice and without power. But her life is controlled in many ways by
the men of the church. She is expected to give them all authority over her
life.
If a Mormon man would like to take another wife… she’s got
nothing to say in the matter. He doesn’t even have to divorce her. Programs on
MSNBC have well-documented how Mormon men, even today, chose to add women and
create a polygamous marriage. They can chose to marry their wives relative, a
younger girl, or just someone random. So… even though the woman has no power in
the relationship… he can even attack their sense of pride and self-worth in
knowing that they have their husbands exclusive love. Even that sense of
security is destroyed by the men in her life.
They teach their women that if they’d like to be in heaven,
they will need to be with their husband.
If he is a really good husband and together they do
everything on earth that they can… then she gets the ability to…
– Be a goddess with her husband over a new planet
– Have loads of sex with her husband for eternity
– Have loads of babies to populate their new planet
This is a life of
bondage. They are like that prisoner who thought he had been set free… but
instead of freedom Mormon women just find more bondage.
This is the opposite of a life with Christ. Through Christ you can find
total freedom… and it’s free for the taking.
– A fulfilled life as a women is not tied to good stuff
you do for the church.
– It doesn’t require you to give years of your life to a
missionary effort
– It doesn’t require you to get married.
– It doesn’t require you to stay home
– It doesn’t require you to be a mom
– It doesn’t require you to serve your man in this life
and the next.
That is bondage… through Christ we find freedom.
Look:
Two examples of freedom found for women in a life with
Jesus.
- Romans 6:6-14
- In
Christ we find true freedom - Unlike
the prisoner… we can’t be taken back to prison because we are FREE for
life. - If
you come to Christ, you die to your sins… they have no power over you. - You
don’t need anyone to
- In
- John 11:21-43
- Jesus
had great love for Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha
- Jesus
i. He broke every available social rule in his friendship
with these women.
ii. He considered them to be equals with men
iii. Martha called him “teacher.” Most rabbis would not
teach women… but Jesus did.
- This
relationship provided Mary and Martha unprecedented freedoms.
i. They didn’t need a man to act as a priest to talk to
Jesus, and neither do the women here.
ii. As believers in Jesus, they were allowed access to the
King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
In Mormonism, we see a terrible view of womanhood. In every
sense of the word, Mormon women give their lives to be slaves to men. They have
no power. They have no ability to do what they like. They have no choice but to
serve their husbands and their churches.
So why do they stay? Because
walking away would mean walking away from their families, their children, and
everything they know.
Where do they find
hope?
– The same place you do.
– 22But now that you have been set
free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to
holiness, and the result is eternal life.
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