BYU (Brigham Young University) is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often mistakenly called the “Mormon Church.” BYU students take nearly a semester of spiritually uplifting, stimulating religion classes.
In this series (see below), students enrolled in scripture study classes have shared their thoughts, insights, and reflections on the Book of Mormon in the form of letters to someone they know. We invite you to take a look at their epiphanies and discoveries as they delve into the scriptures.
In publishing these, we fulfill their desire to speak to all of us of the relevance, power and beauty of the Book of Mormon, a second witness of Jesus Christ and complement to the Bible. The Book of Mormon includes the religious history of a group of Israelites who settled in ancient America. (The names they use are those of prophets who taught the Book of Mormon peoples to look forward to the coming of Christ—Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Helaman, and other unfamiliar names. We hope those names will become more familiar to you as you read their inspiring words and feel the relevance and divinity of their messages through these letters.)
Let us know if you’d like to receive your own digital copy of the Book of Mormon, and/or if these messages encourage and assist you spiritually as well.
Letter to a very close friend
This week in my New Testament class we were discussing the story of Peter getting out of prison. While in prison, all the people were praying to Heavenly Father that Peter would be able to get out. While they were praying, a young child saw Peter (which meant he was out of prison) and tried to tell the praying adults that he was looking right at Peter. The adults just pushed the child away, angry that he was disturbing their prayers. They did not listen to a word he said, even though he was telling them their prayers had been answered. There are two big lessons that we can learn from this story. First, sometimes we need to give little children the chance to teach us. They tend to know more than what we give them credit for. We have been commanded to become as little children. Little children are very receptive to the Spirit and are able to have very powerful spiritual experiences due to their innocence. We need to give them a chance to share those experiences and make sure we listen to them. The second lesson we can learn from this story is that we need to pray with faith. These people were just praying because they knew that they were supposed to pray. They weren’t believing that their prayers would be answered. When we pray, we need to make sure that we have faith that our prayer will be answered. This will make our prayers more meaningful and bring us closer to our Father in Heaven.
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