I learn best by reading. When I first heard Denver’s Retrospective this morning, I immediately looked online for a transcription. Finding none, I made one myself. This is for my own edification only. I gained so much by hearing the Retrospective multiple times as I proofed it. Yes, I used a free transcription site, but as most folks know who use these sites, they are about 95% accurate, at best.
Most podcasts at RestorationArchives.org have a transcription made available soon after the Podcast is released. I simply couldn’t wait. I feel to rejoice with Denver as he looks back and reviews the events and accomplishments of the Lord’s work over the last ten years. I have been involved in studying and participating, albeit remotely, for about the last twelve years. This is a wonderful review.
Update: Here is the link to the official transcription.
Begin Transcription
We’re reaching the end of another year and with New Year’s resolutions coming up that are generally looking out to the future, it occurs to me that we ought to take a moment to think about what has happened over the course of the last ten years, since the completion of the Ten Talks that were given, beginning in Boise and ending in the Phoenix area, which has now been a decade.
It was in connection with those talks that the declaration was made that the heavens were open and that the Lord had set His hand again, a second time, to recover his people, Israel. We tend to look at that in a very narrow lens, as if everything that the Lord has been doing to further his work has occurred within our eyesight or within our area of responsibility.
But there are many things that the Lord has done that made possible His work but wasn’t done by us. It was made available to us by the work of other people. For example, in the last ten years, we have been the beneficiaries of collaborative technological tools that make it possible for people located in very different geographic locations to work together in order to complete projects.
Most notably the Restoration Scripture Project was only possible because we have collaborative tools that have been made available that didn’t exist just a short while ago. We have new digital technology that has been made available, including instant communications and multiple ways to collect and transcribe and preserve, publish, engrave, share, search and learn from the material that we have that’s sacred and important for us to be able to dispense and disperse.
The Testimony of Saint John
We have live video conferencing and webinar capabilities that we’ve been able to use to bring people together in ways never before possible and have enabled conversations to take place about and in the study of the gospel to be achieved in a way that didn’t exist before. We have live video and audio streaming technology that’s made it possible for covenants to be administered worldwide at the same time in fulfillment of prophecy, we’ve been publishing a great deal of material, including restoration of The Testimony of Saint John.
We’ve got many revelations from the Lord that have been added to the Teachings and Commandments, including some very important replacements for corrupted Doctrine and Covenants sections, as well as further teachings and commandments that are addressed specifically to our generation. We have had canonized by a vote of acceptance, the Restoration Edition of the scriptures, including the Book of Mormon and the fullness of the scriptures.
The Book of Mormon in the form that it got published by the LDS church was really taken from a version that got published in the British Isles that contained many errors and omissions and problems, and the restoration project attempted to recover, correct, and finish up the Book of Mormon in the most correct way that it had ever been printed before. Joseph Smith also referred to the fullness of the scriptures as being both the Book of Mormon and the Bible as he had corrected it.
We found out in the Scripture Project that the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible had never been accurately published, and so the Restoration Edition of the scriptures includes the fullness of the scriptures, as Joseph Smith described it, with the most complete and accurate Joseph Smith translation of the Bible that has ever been in print. We have been able to publish the Restoration Edition of the scriptures worldwide, including print on demand versions, leather, high quality form.
There are apps that have been prepared that make the scriptures available for your handheld or your computer. There are online access to the scriptures in searchable formats. There are audio and podcast versions. We have greater access to the restoration edition of the scriptures available to us than perhaps any other people have had scriptures made available to them as quickly as they have come out and become available for us.
Glossary of Gospel Terms – Second Edition
There’s been a compilation of the Glossary, which has the most extensive foundational primer on understanding the gospel available anywhere. If a person were to take and read the Glossary, just cover to cover, what they would find is that they know more about the restoration and the gospel than most people ever achieve in a lifetime of membership in any of the other restoration churches, from the LDS to the Community of Christ.
We have adopted a Statement of Principles that took some doing but managed to reach a form in which there was no opposition to it. The Covenant of Christ has been not only finalized as a plain English version of the Book of Mormon, but it’s been accepted by a body of believers and is now available to help anyone understand the content of that book directed to this generation.
First Nations Edition
It’s now in existence in three different formats: the Restoration Edition, which includes extensive background description in preface and in the in the material that’s forward. But there’s a First Nations Edition that has been printed that has none of that material. It has the original text, and it has a brief introduction to the First Nations people.
Covenant of Christ Reader’s Edition
And then there’s a Reader’s Edition that’s intended to be given to other people who are willing to accept the Book of Mormon, but don’t need to read anything about the restoration movement. It’s already having a great effect on children and teens, and it provides greater clarity and power in our own current language than most people are able to achieve by reading the Book of Mormon alone. We were given an inspired prayer along with an answer to that prayer and a covenant.
It’s the first grafting back into the mother tree that has happened since the restoration began, and it includes specific promises to those who keep the covenant. I don’t think it possible to overstate the importance of the covenant. In addition, there have been a series of lectures that have been given that that really do shed a great deal more light about the understanding of the gospel.
Lecture Series Given
Talks titled Religion of the Fathers, Our Divine Parents, Civilization, The Holy Order, [parts] one and two. All of those are in addition to the Ten Talks that were given previously. We also have a great deal of new information about Joseph Smith and his battle against the sin and corruption that was going on in the city of Nauvoo that he was opposed to, including adultery in the form of polygamy.
We’ve received instructions on the priesthood, clarification on authority and performance of public ordinances, including baptism and sacrament, and we’ve been given direction about how to authorize people to perform ordinances outside of their own family and women’s participation in the disciplinary process. We’ve had eighteen general conferences. We’ve had over fifty regional conferences and events, including seven Sawtooth camp outs.
We’ve seen women in adult retreats, youth conferences and multi fellowship gatherings. Thousands of fellowship meetings have taken place, including in person and online, fellowships that meet regularly, where people collect and administer their own tithing and uplift each other in faith. There have been countless opportunities for people in need to receive tithes dispensed to them. Unlike an institution that collects and keeps it for themselves, our tithes go to help one another.
The Testimony of Jesus
Outreach efforts have included eight talks given to the Christians, a five-hundred-year reformation commemoration website including biographies of inspired reformers and recognition of the continuing effect that movement has had on us today. There’s a book, The Testimony of Jesus: Past, Present and Promise that deals with much of how we benefited from all that.
There have been interfaith conferences and multiple Joseph Smith conferences have been held, conferences in various parts of the world, including Europe, the Far East, and of course, throughout the United States. There’s a book Rescuing the Restoration that has been put out.
Websites are now available to request baptism, to locate fellowships, to hear the Ten Talks, to receive the covenant and to connect with believers worldwide. There have been preservation efforts that have taken place recording and transcriptions of millions of words of audio and video conference and talks, publication of numerous works, including books, compilations of talks, podcasts, scriptures, website, blogs, video streams and audio books.
Major works have been etched into stainless steel plates for long term preservation and websites have been developed to preserve the word of the Lord, including a library of material from Joseph Smith, a library of material from myself, and soon a library will come on board from material published by Hugh Nibley.
We have established a physical book vault for preservation of important works until the Temple Library can take custody of them. There’s Digital Archives of important works preserved in air gapped hard drives and computers located around the world. Archived works are saved in Cloud Storage located in redundant data centers worldwide, so that we don’t lose the material.
In addition to everything else, the Joseph Smith Papers Project has been rolling out during this same time period. It’s preserved and made available hundreds of important documents, even if the LDS church chose to include footnotes written by them and their historians and head notes written by them and historical introductions, many of which are inaccurate and contradict the very papers that they are publishing.
Still, the Joseph Smith papers project has been a gold mine of material that has helped us understand Joseph and what went on in the beginning of the restoration, several works are underway, or have already been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, French and ancient Hebrew, among other languages.
There has been preparation for a temple, including a temple fund that has been established, and funds have been gathered. The Recorder’s Clearing House has recorded baptisms for inclusion in the temple records. And there are other preparations and efforts underway that aren’t currently public, but they’re nevertheless underway.
There had literally been testimonies in the heavens and in the earth. They include blood moons and solar eclipses, the great sign in the heavens that was given that corresponded with some things that occurred on Earth, numerous testimonies related to constellations and planetary alignments, fires, earthquakes, tempests, whirlwinds, floods.
There have been multiple LDS temples with the angel Moroni struck by lightning, or the trumpet being thrown down, heralding the LDS version of the restoration from the Salt Lake Temple. The Stick of Joseph publication corresponded with significant date and sign alignments.
Collectively, all of these events and more that aren’t necessarily public yet but will roll out into public view when the work has been completed testify that when the Lord said that the heavens were open and that He was reaching out a second time, that He meant it, and it has, in fact, proven to be a time of miraculous development, miraculous possibility and proof that the Lord is vindicating His word and serious about accomplishing all that He had in mind.
Lastly, let me assure all of those who have participated in this and held on to their faith that the time being taken to prepare ourselves, rather than attempting to immediately gather together, is time very well spent. There are people who have chosen to depart from us or chosen to create conflict within us, who have exposed themselves as the kind of people that would have readily been invited to gather with us at an earlier point, but who now, at this point, appear to be unlikely candidates because we don’t need to be disrupted by conflict.
We should all be rejoicing at the remarkable progress that has been and is being made. There’s so much left to be accomplished. There’s so little that we currently understand, and so much more that will roll out into view that we ought to take seriously and study everything that we’ve been given to prepare our minds and our hearts as the Lord chooses, to give more.
This has been a decade of historic achievement, a decade of unbelievable progress from where we began a decade ago to where we are now. It is as if we have climbed a mountain, but as it turns out, that mountain we’ve climbed to this point is a foothill to the mountain left yet to be climbed.
I am grateful for all of those who have and do participate. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who, behind the scenes, have been doing work that don’t get credit or recognition. But this work is impossible without their continued support, their continued labor, their continued effort.
I hope the time will come also when those families in which there’s a believing husband and a non-believing wife or a believing wife and a non-believing husband might all become reconciled to the truth and decide that they will jointly go forward in hope, progressing toward that day when the fullness of the gospel is shouted from every rooftop and no one needs to say, Know ye the LORD, because we all know him.
I hope for that. I long for that, and I encourage you also to pray for that. I close this brief message in the name of Jesus Christ and thank you all for participating.
Standard Trailer at end of most every Podcast
The foregoing was recorded by Denver on December 26, 2024. A complete collection of Denver’s papers and lectures are available free of charge at RestorationArchives.com you can learn more about what God is doing to restore the gospel today at LearnOfChrist.org.
Baptism, or rebaptism is available for free at BornOfWater.org to everyone who asks with no obligation to join or attend any church or organization. The new Restoration Edition of the scriptures was canonized in 2017. All three volumes are available online for free at scriptures.info.
The book Covenant of Christ discussed in this podcast was accepted by vote of the Body of Believers assembled at a General Conference on October 27, 2024. It is available online for free at CovenantOfChrist.org. The Covenant mentioned in this podcast is available to review at ReceiveTheCovenant.com
If you have questions or ideas for topics that you would like to have covered in this podcast, please submit them for consideration to questions@DenverSnufferPodcast.com.
This podcast is a volunteer effort produced under the direction of Denver Snuffer, we hope you’ll share it with everyone interested in learning more about Christ, the coming Zion and the restoration of authentic Christianity now underway in our time.
