He Has Felt the Joy of Forgiveness, So He Knows the Resurrection Is Real. (with Craig Ostler)

Craig Ostler has spent more than 40 years teaching the Restoration. He taught seminary and institute for 15 years, then 28 years at Brigham Young University, and co-wrote a 1,200-page commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants with Joseph Fielding McConkie. He has photographed and walked nearly every sacred site in early Church history, and he lived in Jerusalem with his family twice. With all of that study behind him, he will still tell you a testimony is not built from books. It is felt. He felt it at seven years old, kneeling on a porch when his dog had gone missing. He felt it on his mission, the night God told him in every fiber of his being that he was His son.

In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Craig to trace the moments his faith stopped being inherited and became his own. Craig describes the gentle change of heart he felt in the mountains before his mission, when he knew he had been forgiven. He shares the promise he had to make to a man facing prison and ruin, and the night he walked away and fell apart because the cost of belief had become real. He remembers watching his young children kneel to pray in the Sacred Grove, and standing in the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem contemplating the resurrection. Craig has never seen a resurrection. But he has felt the joy of forgiveness, and so he trusts that the rest is true.

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