I do like to ask and answer the hard questions, don’t I? Well, this one is definitely a hotbed of debate. One of the concerns that people of other religions have about the LDS Church is that we seem to think we’re the only true church. Let me shed just a little more light on this.
When Jesus Christ was on the earth, He set up His church the way He wanted it to be run. He had apostles, prophets, ordinances, the sacrament, priesthood authority, and He showed His disciples how to use all of them. When He died, and as the apostles died, many of them martyrs, some of the things Christ instituted went by the wayside. For many years, the world went without a living prophet. Bits and pieces were taken out of the Bible as it went through its different translations. The LDS Church does believe that some plain and precious things were misplaced through the years.
When the Prophet Joseph Smith has his first vision in the Sacred Grove, we believe that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ restored those missing pieces and they are now available to us. We have prophets and apostles on the earth once more. We refer to Joseph Smith’s time as “The Restoration of the Gospel” because of those things that were brought back to the earth.
To make a rather complex answer more simple, we believe that every religion contains a great deal of truth. All truth comes through God, and any religion that follows God contains a measure of truth. It is not our belief that we are the only church that has truth. But we do believe that we have the fullness of the Gospel, meaning, because Joseph Smith restored the Gospel as it was practiced in Jesus Christ’s day, we have a more complete doctrine than we would have without Joseph Smith.
Related Blogs:
Why Are We Members of the Only True Church?
The First Vision – the Father and the Son Appear to Joseph Smith