A God Who is Engaged and Speaks

We believe in a God who is engaged in our lives, who is not silent, not absent, nor, as Elijah said of the god of the priests of Baal, is He "on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awakened." In this church, even our young Primary children recite, "We believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

In a sense Joseph Smith and his prophetic successors in this Church answer the challenge Ralph Waldo Emerson put to the students of the Harvard Divinity School 170 years ago this coming summer. To that group of the Protestant best and brightest, the great sage of Concord pled that they teach "that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake."

I testify that the heaven are opened. I testify that Joseph Smith was and is a prophet of God, that the Book of Mormon is truly another testament of Jesus Christ. I testify that Thomas S. Monson is God's prophet, a modern apostle with the keys of the kingdom in his hands, a man upon whom I personally have seen the mantle fall. I testify that the presence of such authorized ministry of Christ has been on the earth. I testify that such a ministry is on the earth again, and it is found in this, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jeffrey R. Holland, Ensign May 2008