OUR BELIEFS
Spencer has written a lot about what he’s doing, but he hasn’t gone into the substance of the lessons
he teaches every day, so I thought this would be a good place for me to tell you what we believe and
what Spencer is teaching.
We are God’s Children, and He Wants Us to Be Like Him
Spencer is teaching everybody who will listen that we are ALL God’s children, and not in some mystical
or distant way. We don’t know exactly how it came to be, but we take the Bible literally when it says we
are God’s children.
I love Romans 8:16-17 in the New Testament. Paul wrote, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our
spirit, that we are children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs with God and joint heirs with Christ;
if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.” To us, that means that we have
seeds of divinity in our souls. God’s plan for us is that we will develop that divinity through our life on
earth and for eons into the future, but at some point, if we follow God’s plan, we can be “glorified
together.”
Sometimes members of other churches view it as an insult to God that we believe we can become like Him.
But to us it seems perfectly natural that God would want His children to be just like Him someday. And who
are we to limit God’s desire to bring ultimate happiness to his children? In fact, Christ himself taught in John
10:34, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”
What could motivate us better to live a Christ-like life than to believe that we really are God’s children, and that
we are part of His great plan to exalt us? Whenever we have trials and suffer terrible things, it helps to make
sense of it all, knowing that we are traveling a path that includes hard things, because they will help us to
grow and eventually become like our Father.
Christ Is the Only Path to Salvation
The most important thing we believe is that Christ is the only path back to God’s presence and to ultimate happiness.
Before we came to earth, we lived as spirit children of our Heavenly Father in His presence.
He had a perfect, exalted body that allowed him to experience a fullness of joy, and He knew
we would need to gain a body and experience the joys and sorrows of life to be like Him.
God wanted us to progress and prove that we would put off our baser instincts and allow the spiritual, godly
parts of us to control our thoughts and actions. Doing that would allow us, eventually, to enjoy the same blessings
and opportunities that He enjoys. Because it is necessary to have a body to experience a fullness of joy, we
would have to gain spiritual power, not by losing our bodies, but by gaining power over them.
The Book of Mormon teaches, and we believe, that God made this world as a way of giving us a probationary
period, during which we would gain a body, experience the joys and sorrows of life, and prove that we would choose
God’s way, which is the way of charity. We had to prove that we would put others first. God is love, and if we want
to be like God, love must be our motivating goal.
The Lord told Moses, “Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
(Moses 1:39). Helping us to grow is all God cares about. It truly is. I’ve learned that is true for myself, as I have sought
Him in my times of trial and suffering, and everybody who asks in sincerity will also come to know that is true.
So God’s plan involved a probationary period. To accomplish that, God created a world for us to inhabit
temporarily. But two great obstacles would be inherent in this plan.
First, because the plan requires us to prove ourselves, we would have to be free to choose our way. If
God was standing next to us insisting that we make every right choice, or instantly punishing us whenever we made
a wrong choice, our life and the decisions we make would mean nothing. The way God truly made us free was by
drawing what we call the “veil of forgetfulness” over our minds. At birth, we would forget our pre-mortal existence, and we
would have to exercise faith in God’s plan. God sends angels and prophets to teach us His plan, but we have to choose to follow
it.
Sometimes, God knew, we would not follow His plan. We would do things that hurt ourselves and other people.
We would act selfishly. We would give reign to our worldly desires, rather than following God’s way. Those things are sins.
When we sin, we become unlike our Father, and we make ourselves unworthy to be in His presence. If we, in our dirty state, were
to enter into God's presence, then his presence would itself be unclean. Worse, we would be uncomfortable in his presence
and would wish to be separated from him. So our sins necessarily separate us from God, and In that sense, sin is a spiritual death.
There was another kind of death, and that is physical death. At the end of our mortal lives, we would leave this body behind,
and our spirits would go back to the eternal world. But what about the plan that requires us to have a body for a fullness of joy?
We would have to receive our body again.
Jesus Christ made it possible to overcome both of these deaths.
Christ was the firstborn of all of God’s children and his Only Begotten. In the pre-mortal existence, He came forward and offered
his own life as a sacrifice to allow us to overcome both spiritual death and physical death.
We don’t understand exactly how it is, but we do know that Christ had several characteristics that made him uniquely able to overcome
these two deaths. First, he lived a perfect life. He was not subject to spiritual death, or to the demands of justice, because
He never sinned. Second, He was the Only Begotten Son of the Father. He was born of the virgin Mary, who the Bible teaches conceived by the
power of the Holy Ghost. Because of that, Christ was divine in the literal bodily sense, and he had both mortal and immortal qualities.
Because he was mortal, he could suffer and die, paying the terrible price for our sins. Because he was immortal, he could take
his life again, opening for all of us the doors of resurrection and immortality. Because of Him, we can live with God, and
because of Him, we can receive our resurrected bodies again. Our eternal well-being and the entire plan God laid out for us depends on
Christ and His eternal sacrifice for us.
One Book of Mormon prophet saw Christ in vision and then wrote many years before Christ’s birth,
And he shall go forth, suffering pains and
afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be
fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his
people.
And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the
bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their
infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh,
that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to
their infirmities.
Now the Spirit knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son
of God suffereth according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of
his people, that he might blot out their transgressions according to the power
of his deliverance; and now behold this is the testimony which is in me.
When Christ came forward in Heaven and explained how He would overcome the two deaths for us, making the whole plan of happiness possible,
we rejoiced. The Bible (in Job 38:7) teaches that the morning stars sang together and shouted for joy.
That is the central message we offer to the world. We proclaim, with Paul, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive.” And Paul joins dozens of prophets in the Book of Mormon who wrote, “And we talk of Christ, we
rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source
they may look for a remission of their sins.” (1 Nephi 25:26)
When Christ suffered in Gethsemane and on the cross, He paid, by proxy, the price of our sins. He suffered unimaginable pain for us,
so that whenever we make a mistake, sin intentionally, or suffer any pain or trial, that pain can be swallowed up in the suffering
Christ went through for us, if we will just accept his gift. I’ve experienced this in my life as I have sought forgiveness for my
sins, and I’ve felt the joy of forgiveness, knowing that Christ has paid the price for me.
Having paid the price of our sins, Christ now holds the keys to our prison door. He opens the door and waits for us to walk out
of the prison. The way we do that is by accepting his sacrifice. We accept his sacrifice by changing, by putting off the sin that caused
us and others pain, and by living righteously. Sometimes there are difficult steps we have to take to make our change permanent, like
confessing our most serious sins to Christ’s representatives, but those steps all have one purpose—to help us actually change and
become more like Christ. In that way, we can return to live with Him and our Father in Heaven.
Of course, there are many other things the missionaries teach their investigators. They teach people about the role of prophets and how
they give us God’s word for our day. They teach how the Book of Mormon contains the plain and precious truths we need to help
us understand Christ’s atonement, many of which have been lost from the Bible. They teach about the role of God’s temple and how
we can be sealed together as families for eternity. They teach about the priesthood and how God entrusts some of His power to us,
so that we can help accomplish His work without violating God’s promise to respect our freedom. They teach how we make
covenants with God through the ordinances we keep, such as baptism.
All these things have brought me great happiness and peace in my own life. I consider it a great blessing to have been born into
a family where these truths were taught, and I am grateful that Spencer has learned for himself the truth of these principles. I'm especially
grateful that he has chosen to share the joy of his faith with his brothers and sisters in the Kiribati islands. Nothing could be more worthwhile.
Thank you for reading this. For any of Spencer’s friends who want to know more about our beliefs, you can always ask me any
questions you might have (e-mail me at smarksbrothers@hotmail.com), or you can go to www.mormon.org and look up more information
or order a free Book of Mormon. There are also missionaries serving wherever you are who have given two years to teach the gospel,
just like Spencer, and they would love to visit with you and present the same message Spencer is teaching. They will invite you to
read the Book of Mormon, and if you feel their message is true, they will invite you to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by
being baptized.
I wish you the very best!
Doug Marks
he teaches every day, so I thought this would be a good place for me to tell you what we believe and
what Spencer is teaching.
We are God’s Children, and He Wants Us to Be Like Him
Spencer is teaching everybody who will listen that we are ALL God’s children, and not in some mystical
or distant way. We don’t know exactly how it came to be, but we take the Bible literally when it says we
are God’s children.
I love Romans 8:16-17 in the New Testament. Paul wrote, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our
spirit, that we are children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs with God and joint heirs with Christ;
if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.” To us, that means that we have
seeds of divinity in our souls. God’s plan for us is that we will develop that divinity through our life on
earth and for eons into the future, but at some point, if we follow God’s plan, we can be “glorified
together.”
Sometimes members of other churches view it as an insult to God that we believe we can become like Him.
But to us it seems perfectly natural that God would want His children to be just like Him someday. And who
are we to limit God’s desire to bring ultimate happiness to his children? In fact, Christ himself taught in John
10:34, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”
What could motivate us better to live a Christ-like life than to believe that we really are God’s children, and that
we are part of His great plan to exalt us? Whenever we have trials and suffer terrible things, it helps to make
sense of it all, knowing that we are traveling a path that includes hard things, because they will help us to
grow and eventually become like our Father.
Christ Is the Only Path to Salvation
The most important thing we believe is that Christ is the only path back to God’s presence and to ultimate happiness.
Before we came to earth, we lived as spirit children of our Heavenly Father in His presence.
He had a perfect, exalted body that allowed him to experience a fullness of joy, and He knew
we would need to gain a body and experience the joys and sorrows of life to be like Him.
God wanted us to progress and prove that we would put off our baser instincts and allow the spiritual, godly
parts of us to control our thoughts and actions. Doing that would allow us, eventually, to enjoy the same blessings
and opportunities that He enjoys. Because it is necessary to have a body to experience a fullness of joy, we
would have to gain spiritual power, not by losing our bodies, but by gaining power over them.
The Book of Mormon teaches, and we believe, that God made this world as a way of giving us a probationary
period, during which we would gain a body, experience the joys and sorrows of life, and prove that we would choose
God’s way, which is the way of charity. We had to prove that we would put others first. God is love, and if we want
to be like God, love must be our motivating goal.
The Lord told Moses, “Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
(Moses 1:39). Helping us to grow is all God cares about. It truly is. I’ve learned that is true for myself, as I have sought
Him in my times of trial and suffering, and everybody who asks in sincerity will also come to know that is true.
So God’s plan involved a probationary period. To accomplish that, God created a world for us to inhabit
temporarily. But two great obstacles would be inherent in this plan.
First, because the plan requires us to prove ourselves, we would have to be free to choose our way. If
God was standing next to us insisting that we make every right choice, or instantly punishing us whenever we made
a wrong choice, our life and the decisions we make would mean nothing. The way God truly made us free was by
drawing what we call the “veil of forgetfulness” over our minds. At birth, we would forget our pre-mortal existence, and we
would have to exercise faith in God’s plan. God sends angels and prophets to teach us His plan, but we have to choose to follow
it.
Sometimes, God knew, we would not follow His plan. We would do things that hurt ourselves and other people.
We would act selfishly. We would give reign to our worldly desires, rather than following God’s way. Those things are sins.
When we sin, we become unlike our Father, and we make ourselves unworthy to be in His presence. If we, in our dirty state, were
to enter into God's presence, then his presence would itself be unclean. Worse, we would be uncomfortable in his presence
and would wish to be separated from him. So our sins necessarily separate us from God, and In that sense, sin is a spiritual death.
There was another kind of death, and that is physical death. At the end of our mortal lives, we would leave this body behind,
and our spirits would go back to the eternal world. But what about the plan that requires us to have a body for a fullness of joy?
We would have to receive our body again.
Jesus Christ made it possible to overcome both of these deaths.
Christ was the firstborn of all of God’s children and his Only Begotten. In the pre-mortal existence, He came forward and offered
his own life as a sacrifice to allow us to overcome both spiritual death and physical death.
We don’t understand exactly how it is, but we do know that Christ had several characteristics that made him uniquely able to overcome
these two deaths. First, he lived a perfect life. He was not subject to spiritual death, or to the demands of justice, because
He never sinned. Second, He was the Only Begotten Son of the Father. He was born of the virgin Mary, who the Bible teaches conceived by the
power of the Holy Ghost. Because of that, Christ was divine in the literal bodily sense, and he had both mortal and immortal qualities.
Because he was mortal, he could suffer and die, paying the terrible price for our sins. Because he was immortal, he could take
his life again, opening for all of us the doors of resurrection and immortality. Because of Him, we can live with God, and
because of Him, we can receive our resurrected bodies again. Our eternal well-being and the entire plan God laid out for us depends on
Christ and His eternal sacrifice for us.
One Book of Mormon prophet saw Christ in vision and then wrote many years before Christ’s birth,
And he shall go forth, suffering pains and
afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be
fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his
people.
And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the
bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their
infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh,
that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to
their infirmities.
Now the Spirit knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son
of God suffereth according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of
his people, that he might blot out their transgressions according to the power
of his deliverance; and now behold this is the testimony which is in me.
When Christ came forward in Heaven and explained how He would overcome the two deaths for us, making the whole plan of happiness possible,
we rejoiced. The Bible (in Job 38:7) teaches that the morning stars sang together and shouted for joy.
That is the central message we offer to the world. We proclaim, with Paul, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive.” And Paul joins dozens of prophets in the Book of Mormon who wrote, “And we talk of Christ, we
rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source
they may look for a remission of their sins.” (1 Nephi 25:26)
When Christ suffered in Gethsemane and on the cross, He paid, by proxy, the price of our sins. He suffered unimaginable pain for us,
so that whenever we make a mistake, sin intentionally, or suffer any pain or trial, that pain can be swallowed up in the suffering
Christ went through for us, if we will just accept his gift. I’ve experienced this in my life as I have sought forgiveness for my
sins, and I’ve felt the joy of forgiveness, knowing that Christ has paid the price for me.
Having paid the price of our sins, Christ now holds the keys to our prison door. He opens the door and waits for us to walk out
of the prison. The way we do that is by accepting his sacrifice. We accept his sacrifice by changing, by putting off the sin that caused
us and others pain, and by living righteously. Sometimes there are difficult steps we have to take to make our change permanent, like
confessing our most serious sins to Christ’s representatives, but those steps all have one purpose—to help us actually change and
become more like Christ. In that way, we can return to live with Him and our Father in Heaven.
Of course, there are many other things the missionaries teach their investigators. They teach people about the role of prophets and how
they give us God’s word for our day. They teach how the Book of Mormon contains the plain and precious truths we need to help
us understand Christ’s atonement, many of which have been lost from the Bible. They teach about the role of God’s temple and how
we can be sealed together as families for eternity. They teach about the priesthood and how God entrusts some of His power to us,
so that we can help accomplish His work without violating God’s promise to respect our freedom. They teach how we make
covenants with God through the ordinances we keep, such as baptism.
All these things have brought me great happiness and peace in my own life. I consider it a great blessing to have been born into
a family where these truths were taught, and I am grateful that Spencer has learned for himself the truth of these principles. I'm especially
grateful that he has chosen to share the joy of his faith with his brothers and sisters in the Kiribati islands. Nothing could be more worthwhile.
Thank you for reading this. For any of Spencer’s friends who want to know more about our beliefs, you can always ask me any
questions you might have (e-mail me at smarksbrothers@hotmail.com), or you can go to www.mormon.org and look up more information
or order a free Book of Mormon. There are also missionaries serving wherever you are who have given two years to teach the gospel,
just like Spencer, and they would love to visit with you and present the same message Spencer is teaching. They will invite you to
read the Book of Mormon, and if you feel their message is true, they will invite you to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by
being baptized.
I wish you the very best!
Doug Marks