Born again and again!

I picked up A 20-year-old young man at his house. He wasn’t coming out and I was trying to text and call him so that I could get going but he wasn’t coming out. Finally with about one minute left before cancellation he showed up and he started apologizing profusely for making me wait.

I said it’s no problem and thanked him for riding with me. We started off and he said, I feel like I need to ask you a question. I said OK. He asked,who is God? I told him God was my father and that god loved us. I said he knows us and he cares about us. Then I said, his son Jesus Christ is also a God. I said that Jesus Christ paid for our sins but not only paid for sin but he paid for the anguish, injustice, infirmity and every negative thing that we can pass through so that he can give us relief.

I was very impressed by his boldness. I could tell he was a born again Christian by the way he talked so I decided to start asking him questions.

I asked him what he knew about the Book of Mormon and he said he knew it was an evil book written by an evil man.

I asked him about God, prophets and how the Bible was written. I asked him if God loved everyone. He said yes. I told him our perspective on each one of those things. I told him that Joseph Smith saw the God the father and Jesus Christ. I told him the Joseph Smith story.

The spirit was strong after the Joseph Smith testimony. I then talked to him about Joseph Smith and how the Book of Mormon was translated.

He said that his grandparents believed this. He told me that they had insisted that he be baptized when he was eight but he hadn’t been back to church since. He said that last year he had been baptized again into another religion.

He said the many churches are corrupt and I agreed with him and told him that this is why Joseph Smith couldn’t find Gods true church and why God had to call him to be the prophet to restore the true church to the earth.

The spirit was really strong and I said do you feel the spirit in the car? He said absolutely! I said how does it make you feel? He said it makes me feel like praying. He said we need to pray. I asked him, when you feel this way, is God with us or not? He said yes he’s with us! I said if God is with us what does that mean about the things that I have been saying? He paused for a minute and said I guess it means they’re true.

I told him that the spirit of God always testifies of truth and if the thing is not true the Spirit of God will not accompany the statement. He said that’s right! I asked him if the Spirit of God had born witness to him of the things I’d said and he said yes. I said that means you know they’re true and he said yes.

I talked to him about Ezekiel and the sticks and he said why would we need two witnesses. I talked about a legal court and the power of multiple witnesses to establishing truth. I talked about the board with a nail analogy. This analogy says that if you have a board and drive a nail into it, you can still move it around. If you drive a second nail into it, it makes the board firm and it will not move. I told him that the Book of Mormon was that second witness that firmly established the divinity of Christ. I identified the spirit again in the car and he was clearly feeling it.

I talked about when Christ came to America. I described the serene laid out in third Nephi of his ancestors touching the prints of the nails in his hands. This was impactful because his mother was from Mexico.

I talked to him about the other places where Jesus might have gone. I talk to him about other sheep that he still needed to visit at that point. I asked him questions about the resurrection and the atonement. To help make the point of the need for Christ to visit in person, I asked him if there were airplanes or ships that could make it to America or telephones when Jesus was on the earth that he could use, he said no.

I asked him again if God loved all of his children he said yes. I asked him if he loved them no matter where they were and he said yes. I asked him if an all powerful God who was all loving would ignore 80% of his children and he said no. I told him that this is why God sent Jesus to America and then to “still other sheep”.

He told me about the ride we were on and asked me do you know why I came here tonight? I said no. He said I came here to sin with the girl that lives in that house. Now I think that I’m going to talk about Jesus with her. Talk about a big change of plans! Again he asked if we could pray and I said yes and he prayed and then I prayed.

When I prayed the spirit was really strong and I said some things that the spirit whispered to me in the prayer about him. In the prayer there were three things in particular that I said and I felt a powerful surge of the spirit when I said those things and I knew that he felt them too. They were how he feels lost right now, how he feels like he’s being treated unjustly and needs to rely on God and the atonement of Jesus Christ. The spirit prompted me to say that his life had been hard but that if he would do God‘s will, God would never abandon him and would walk by his side.

When we got done with the prayer ask him how he felt, he said I feel like I want to be out teaching about Jesus, I said that’s what our missionaries do! He said that’s right! That’s what I need to do. I know that now I need to be a missionary. I promised him that I would look up his bishop and give him his ward and times for meetings. Then I said I would have his bishop call him.

I told him that I needed to have the bishop call him so he could talk to him about getting ready to go on a mission. Then he said, well I need to think about getting ready to do this. I told him that he had had a revelation from God to go on a mission and he shouldn’t doubt that revelation. I told him not to back down from that prompting he had felt. He said ok, call the bishop.

He asked me if it was possible. I said yes every young man that’s a member of the church is commanded to prepare to be worthy so they can go on a mission. He said, is it possible that I could go to Russia? I said it’s absolutely possible that you could go to Russia or South America. He smiled and said that he would never forget that night that ended in prayer. I pray that the Spirit of God will walk with him and I believe that he will prepare to be the servant that his father wants him to be.

The very next day I looked up the information for the bishop and called him. He was very excited as we discussed this young man. The bishop made the phone right after he talked to me so that he could help him start his progress, and get ready to be the missionary that he already wanted to be.