Joseph Smith: Lover of the Cause of Christ | Heidi S. Swinton | 2004

Where do you stand? Do you love the cause of Christ, and will you stand firm, no matter what difficulty you face . . . ?

This speech was given on November 2, 2004.

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The day was June 27, 1844. The place, Carthage, Illinois. In the early evening Willard Richards, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, dispatched sobering news to the Saints in Nauvoo: “Joseph and Hyrum are dead. Taylor wounded, not very badly. I am well. . . . The job was done in an instant” (HC 6:621–22).

A cortege left the hostile county seat of Carthage early the next morning and arrived in Nauvoo just after three in the afternoon. The mourners were waiting in the streets for the return of their prophet-leader.

“My soul sickened and I wept before the Lord,” William Hyde observed. “It seemed that the very heavens were clad in mourning” (William Hyde Journal, LDS Church Archives).

James Madison Fisher described the melancholy: “To see stout men and women standing around in group[s] crying and mourning . . . was enough to break the heart of a stone ” (Aroet Hale, Reminiscences, LDS Church Archives).

“The love the saints had for him was inexpressible,” Mary Alice Cannon Lambert lamented. “Oh, the mourning in the land!” (Mary Alice Cannon Lambert in “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” Young Woman’s Journal 16, no. 12 (December 1905), 554).

These people had left homes, farms, and even families to gather for the Word’s sake. They saw themselves as saints; they saw Joseph as a prophet called of God. For 14 years he had raised up this religion on American soil. It was a religious movement that had attracted the attention of the nation. Wrote Boston notable Josiah Quincy after an 1842 visit to the Mississippi river town of Nauvoo:

It is by no means improbable that some future textbook, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. And the reply, absurd as it doubtless seems to most men now living, may be an obvious commonplace to their descendants. [Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1926), 317; emphasis in original]

We are those descendants. Our lives, our very salvation, hinge on our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His gospel restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith.

It isn’t the life and history of this New Englander that spurs a testimony. It is his words: “I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me” (JS—H 1:25). For years he stood all alone before the world and testified of his vision in the Sacred Grove. He spoke with God the Father and Jesus Christ face-to-face and shared what he had learned with us. Joseph’s testimony of the Savior, “that he lives!” is as direct as it gets (D&C 76:22). Jesus Christ lives. Ponder on the significance of those words. Of his first vision of the Savior in the company of our Father in Heaven, Joseph wrote, “I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it” (JS—H 1:25).

Years later, in Hiram, Ohio, he no longer stood alone. At his side was Sydney Rigdon as they “beheld the glory of the Son, on the right hand of the Father, and received of his fulness.” Ponder on their words:

And now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, this is the testimony, last of all, which we give of him: That he lives!

For we saw him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father—

That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God. [D&C 76:20, 22–24]

We are those sons and daughters.

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