Stephanie Ice

My Mormon to Christian Testimony

What is your favorite day of the week? Well, mine is Sunday. I get to rest from the world's agenda and be encouraged by friends and believers. I get to rest physically from having a schedule and a monotony of things to do, and I get to go outside to White Rock Lake. But when I was growing up in the Mormon Church I dreaded Sunday as the worst day of the week. Sunday was all about keeping a whole slew of rules I bet you never thought of! I was taught that Sundays were a day of rest and reverence for the Lord. This meant that we had to wear nice dresses to church (my grandparents would make us stay in church clothes the entire day!), and church was three boring hours of sitting very still! We weren't allowed to nap because that was laziness, and we weren't allowed to go outside because having fun wasn't reverent. Spending money for any reason was out of the question because it made other people work on the Sabbath. So no going out to eat for lunch. We weren't allowed to watch TV or movies or do anything that was unspiritual or irreverent. And going to church to be with people was a burden because they all were scrutinizing each other to feel like better Mormons. I looked forward to Mondays.

I'm only telling you this so that you can get a feel for the burdensome life that most Mormons live, even though they SAY they are just like you in their beliefs. They are not.

The Attraction of Mormonism

Most Mormons seem to be the "best people in the world" and they will also teach attractive doctrines like "families can be together forever." Growing up, the thing I liked the most about Mormonism was having a ready answer for every single difficult question in life. I never had to lose sleep over philosophical questions, and I never really even had to THINK. Every Mormon in the whole world studies from the same books, the same version of the Bible with the exact same footnotes. If I moved to a different town, the Church already had another congregation where we were expected to show up the first Sunday, and the new congregation would be teaching the exact same chapter of Sunday school as the old congregation. Everyone knows exactly who he is and what he is expected to do. Mormonism is safe, easy, moral, and good. So leaving Mormonism seems about as scary as leaving home to go to college in Afghanistan!

The Trap of Mormonism

The trap in Mormonism is that they do not trust Jesus alone to pay for their sins, and they spend a lifetime following rules upon rules so that they will keep from sinning and earn Godhood. They do a lot of good things and try to never sin, but ironically, they are trapped in their own pride and will be sent to hell. I would have been as well, except for the grace of God that saved me. Don't be threatened or angered or callous against Mormons. I encourage you to pray for them and bring them the Good News of Jesus' victory over their sin.

How God Saved Me Out of Mormonism

First of all, I want you to know that God answers prayer, and my best friend in high school and college prayed for me while I was Mormon, then agnostic, and finally Christian. That means he and his family prayed for me and my family for many years, and I believe God honored their prayers for me and my family.

The test for Mormon faith is found in a verse at the end of the Book of Mormon which states that after you have read the Book of Mormon you should ask God with a sincere heart if the book is true, and then the Holy Ghost will tell you that it is true (Moroni 10:4). Mormon epistemology is based on their feelings because of this verse. When they say that the Holy Ghost testifies to them that these things are true, they mean that they get a very strong feeling about Mormonism when they read the Book of Mormon, and that is how they "know" it is true.

When I was a Mormon I never read Jeremiah 17:9, which says that the heart (your feelings, thoughts, will, etc.) is deceitfully wicked. Well, my heart tricked me right out of Mormonism! I thought I knew for certain that Mormonism was true because the Holy Ghost (my feelings) told me so.

Then I innocently picked up a New Age book called "Conversations with God." It’s about a guy who asks God questions and God answers him as he writes in his journal, and in these revelations "God" claims that there is no hell, no sin, and that reincarnation is a gracious chance to "do over" your life. Coming from a guilt-ridden childhood, this book gave me false comfort and I thought the Holy Ghost was telling me, through my feelings, that it was also true!!! As I reasoned my way through these opposing propositions, I realized that they could not both be true. My philosophy class in high school taught me that existentialism says that I don't have the ability to know what is true through my feelings, my reasonings, or otherwise, and I soon sadly realized that my feelings had tricked me. I decided that existentialism was right; I could never know the truth.

So I decided that I would never fall for any religion ever again, and I would be on a quest for the truth for the rest of my life, committing to always search for truth and to never take solace in a false belief. I believed I was mentally stronger than all the weak masses that needed a crutch of faith to make their lives seem purposeful.

My new rule for life was to live for each day, but to never do anything that I would regret later. For instance, I decided that getting drunk was no longer morally wrong, just stupid, so I never got drunk. I never did drugs or had sex or went to wild parties, but I still did whatever seemed right in my own eyes. And even though I didn't believe in guilt anymore, my conscience bothered me; not about what I was doing, but about who I had become. I was selfish, immoral, lying, lazy, even murderous. My mom's new husband had kicked me out of the house while I was still Mormon, and I hated him so much that I wished I could kill him. I used people to get what I wanted. I was impure in my dating relationships, from my motives to my actions. I was angry at anyone who ever hinted that I was wrong about anything, even professors who gave me bad grades! I stayed this way for two years.

So you can understand why I was a difficult person to be friends with; but I met two guys in community college, Daniel and Noah, who decided to be my friends anyway. Daniel and Noah did there best to reach out to everyone in our Calculus class by hosting study groups at Daniel's house and meeting with everyone every morning at the study lab. I had, at this point, decided that I could talk to God because my grandpa told me that I couldn't go my whole life without taking a stand on some propositional truth. But I invited God into my life on my terms.

Daniel and Noah had a plan. They made it known that they were Christians, and while Daniel would use our math lesson as a springboard into philosophical discussions, Noah would ask everyone for their opinion and then let Daniel expound the Christian position. In a friendly, disarming way they would tag-team each other to lead the whole group into hearing the gospel explained and defended! Because of my autonomous attitude, I often got into arguments with them, and I thought it was unfair for Daniel to argue my points down with biblical verses when I didn't accept the Bible as true. When I told him this, he kindly said that the Bible was true and effective, whether I believed it or not. Daniel also challenged me to consider my relationship to God on His terms, found in the Bible, instead of my terms, which I had made up. Daniel never tried to defeat my arguments with his arguments; he always appealed to the Bible, so if I got offended, which I very often did, Daniel could say that my problem was with the Bible, not him.

The Bible claims to have the authoritative exclusive rights to the truth of being in a right relationship with God, and everyone in the world either trusts God's word, or they don't. The Bible tells me I have a sin problem that I can't work out, and that I must trust the one and only way to fellowship with God, which is Jesus Christ. I didn't think I had a sin problem; Jesus paying for my sins didn't seem to be an issue to me because I thought he would only pay for things I did, not change the very nature of who I was. I had stopped using people, stopped lying, even stopped dating because I viewed myself as a toxic person. I knew deep down that I had become a bad person and I had no way to change myself regardless of how "good" I acted. I could act good for the rest of my life and still never be a good person. I dreaded the idea that Daniel or Noah or anyone could ever find out that deep down I was such a hurtful, impure, selfish person.

That is when my family invited me to go with them to the Mormon Church and try out "another way" to be religious, as my mom explained. But once I was there I realized for the first time that Mormon people and the Mormon Gods never really forgave you for being a sinner; they just made you cover up you your sinfulness with rules, like Adam scrambling to find a fig leaf to cover up his shame. (By the way, in the temple ceremony, Mormons are made to put fig leaf aprons on over their clothes and keep them on during the entire ceremony to cover their sin before God).

I sat there in the Mormon Church watching a propaganda video of Jesus visiting Native Americans in 400 AD, and I felt horrible. I thought about the gospel that Daniel had explained to me, and I asked God if there was any way to really be clean of my sins. I asked him if all the things I learned about Jesus wiping my sin away completely, declaring me to be clean and righteous, were really true. And at that moment, in a Mormon church, surrounded by Mormon people and a false-Christ video, God gave me true faith in His Son Jesus and said, "YES!" Tears poured out as I turned to my sister Anne and said, "It's true!  It's true!" I was too excited for all these "reverent" Mormons! Anne tried to hush me up with, "Yes, we all know it's true, shhhh!" I stood up and pulled Anne out of the sanctuary so I could tell her all about it in my state of excitement. I told her I was clean, really clean and forgiven, totally forgiven, and that I wasn't the same person anymore—not a liar, not a murderer—and I was totally pure for the first time!

Let me tell you all that Jesus sent His Holy Spirit as a guarantee of my soul, and it was totally different from the Mormon Holy Ghost! With Mormonism, I had to rely on my feelings to know what to do, and what was true. A story in the Book of Mormon analogizes this as following a path through a thick cloud of darkness with only a rail to hold onto. But with Christianity I could go to the Word of God anytime and be reminded of my right-standing before God, His will for my life, and all I need to know for how our relationship works.

Daniel and Noah were good friends to me through the first few months while I went through a DTR (define the relationship) with God via His word!!! Mormons and many others say that they have a relationship with God, and they will say at the last day, "Lord Lord, didn't we do great things in your name?" But Jesus will say that He never knew them, because they ignored His terms for the relationship found in His word.

So when you talk to Mormons and people of pseudo-Christian beliefs, stand firm behind God's word, because it's the key to helping them discern the truth about their standing before God. Be faithful in prayer for them, even if it takes years and years of prayer.

Thanks for listening to my testimony.

Stephanie Ice
Stephanie.Icee@gmail.com