I write this because as I am coming out to my Mormon friends about my leaving their faith, they will most certainly want to know my reasons. Already as I have told my parents and a few close friends of my leaving—with a great amount of concern, they have asked me why I left.

    There is predominately one reason I left Mormonism, it is because I realized that Jesus and his love are not the center of their religion. Most Mormons will argue vehemently that Jesus is the center of their faith. I argue that he is in name only, and that their understanding of Jesus is quite limited. To help you understand why I left, I must tell you of how I was converted to Christianity.

    In the summer of 1997 I moved to Provo, Utah to court a young woman and by chance began attending Brigham Young University (BYU). I was raised a Mormon all of my life and never doubted the goodness of that faith.

    In December of 1997 I was married and after six months my wife left me. She told me that she just wasn’t happy. Devastated I went into counseling on the campus. They offered free group and individual counseling to anyone passing through psychological distress in their lives – a service I am today immensely grateful for. I attended group therapy session for about three years. After attending once a week for about two years I felt pretty well recovered, and stopped going. Then after about six months I realized how much I’d learned and wanted further reinforcement of it, so returned to attend for about six more months til I graduated.

    The primary thing I learned in counseling was that if we let people, possessions, money, or situations around us determine our happiness then we are never going to be happy. So, we cannot let these things determine our happiness. For the few days after my divorce all I could do when I was alone was ball. The following year was dreadfully up and down for me emotionally. Whenever I was alone, I seemed to just sporadically breakdown and ball. It was a low time for me. Other people I met in the group counseling I attended were going through everything from suicidal depression to simply difficulties getting along with a roommate, spouse, or parent. Some of the severely depressed people sometimes had difficulty even finding the motivation to get out of bed in the morning. They felt as if life was hopeless. The main counselor would often ask, “So what if you never did get up in the morning? Is that so bad? If you laid in bed and didn’t do your homework or go to class does that make you a bad person?” I learned so much there about unconditional love for, and goodness of, self. I learned that nothing around me, no circumstance or money or anything can really make me happy.

    At the beginning of my last fall semester at BYU, I began to feel somewhat hopeless about myself and my relationship with God. I felt fine about my relations with others, but as much as I tried there were just things I seemed to never be perfect about. I just couldn’t seem to be able to be that perfectly righteous person that the Mormon church had as an idea for me. As well, I kept reading in the scriptures about people that were totally rejoicing in Jesus, and I so much wanted to experience this, for at that time I wasn’t. The people in the church didn’t seem to be rejoicing in Jesus like that either. And when I would ask people in the Mormon church about God’s love, their answers were often “through obedience we will come to know God’s love,” or I would even hear things like, “the atonement of Jesus is just a really difficult thing to understand and that we probably will never really ever grasp it’s full meaning.” But I would read about people totally rejoicing in Jesus, and they seemed to really understand God’s love and atonement—so I knew it was possible for me too also! At that time, at the beginning of the fall semester, I began to pray daily for the next year and a half to truly understand what Jesus really did for me.

    A few months later, about December, one night while working at the custodial job I had at the time, I felt so hopeless in my efforts to be perfect that I said to God, “I guess I can’t be good enough for you and that I‘m just going to go to hell. I guess I can live with that.” I said that I was sorry that I couldn’t be all that he wanted me to be, and so I would just accept my fate of going to hell. A few moments later I thought, how can a God exist who would create me hopelessly imperfect and then just banish me to hell. At that moment I slowly began to understand the love of Jesus.

    I began to think, perhaps works didn’t matter to God, even if people didn’t have the strength to get out of bed in the morning because they were so incredibly depressed, or if someone couldn’t drive out of their homosexual desires (like a close friend of mine) that perhaps what we do really doesn’t matter to God at all. Perhaps all that matters is that we believe in him and in his love and saving grace. Then when we realize this and really believe in Jesus’ totally unconditional love and saving grace, it is so powerful to us that it changes our lives, and soon all we can ever seem to do is love others, as we’ve realized that Jesus loves us – as imperfect as we are.

    These thoughts seemed to run contrary to all I’d been taught in the Mormon church. When I recently moved on to the graduate school I’m at, I came in contact with some Christians who had been “born again.” They reaffirmed to me all that I’d felt concerning the love and grace of Jesus. Even now I continue to pray daily to better understand what Jesus has done for me. I still feel as though my understanding is very limited, but I’d never realized how wonderful the love of Jesus is really is til now.

    As time has gone on, I have realized and come to believe a great many more details about God’s love and grace that Mormons do not believe.

    In Mormonism, God’s love and grace are conditional upon our works. For them, salvation is something you must qualify for. As many Mormons claim, if we are righteous, then God’s love will be upon us. The Bible seems to indicate the opposite—1 John 4:19 says, “We love because he first loved us.”

    Mormons believe that to fully realize the love of Jesus, we must first turn away from our sins and live “worthy” lives. Only then does the atonement can take effect and the grace of Jesus is over us. This is a false belief. So what shall we say to those people who feel so hopeless and depressed that they can’t even leave their room or get out of bed? In the context of Mormonism, these people can never truly understand the love of Jesus on a personal level.

    Grace is free, not “after all we can do.” God’s love and sacrifice are truly that all encompassing. Being imperfectly human, if we are even partially responsible for our personal salvation we will always feel some degree of hopelessness.

    In Mormonism people do good things predominately for 2 reasons, out of a feeling of obligation, and out of selfishness. The church puts them under strict covenants of obligation to obey their leaders and the commandments or else God will curse them immensely. This is particularly evident in their temples. People essentially obey out of guilt and fear—fear that if they do not obey, they will be destined for eternal damnation and many earthly curses. The Mormon church is full of people that carry VERY heavy burdens of guilt, shame, and obligation. The second primary reason for their obedience is out of selfishness. They want to go to heaven and they believe the only way to do so is by obedience. They believe that the sacrifice of Jesus does not cover all their sins as the Bible states, but that they must be obedient to qualify for heaven. And so out of their selfishness desire to get into heaven, they do lots of good things and do everything they are asked to by their church leaders.

These beliefs run contrary to many Biblical teachings.

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified FREELY by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." -- Romans 3:23-24

Salvation is FREE!

"For the wages of sin is death, but the GIFT of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." -- Romans 6:23

When someone gives you a gift at Christmas, do YOU pay for that gift? You do not, you don’t pay for salvation either, Jesus already paid for it.

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this is not from yourselves, it is a GIFT from God -- not by works so that no one can boast." -- Ephesians 2:8-9

Our works do NOTHING for us, only believing in his great gift of grace saves us.

"That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you WILL be saved." -- Romans 10:9

Simply believing and confessing saves us in God's kingdom.

"Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom we have NOW received reconciliation." -- Romans 5:11

Salvation is NOW to those who believe.

"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my voice and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life." -- John 5:24

The qualifications for ETERNAL LIFE are to HEAR and BELIEVE.
I tell you that I have heard and now believe. I cannot say the same for Mormons, they believe that their works save them. Most of them do not know Christ or rejoice in him. When they hear the name of Jesus it doesn’t make them want to just shout for joy. When you think of meeting Jesus when you die, do you feel as though you'd just fall down before him, kiss and bathe his feet with your tears as did the woman in Luke 7:37-50? When I was in Mormonism, I could not sense this rejoicing in anyone. I fear that in Mormonism few if any at all really know God. They do not know him because they look to THEMSELVES for their salvation, and not to Jesus.

"Then they asked him, 'What must we do to do the works God requires?'"
Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: To believe in the one he has sent." -- John 6:28-29

Often the Jews of Jesus' time wanted to know some formula to get into heaven. It isn't very hard at all:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever BELIEVES in him shall not perish but have eternal life." -- John 3:16

    Another verse that had a lot of influence on my leaving Mormonism was, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt 22:37-40)  This verse led me to ask the fundamental question -- so why should I love God in the first place if I’m just going to go to hell anyway because in all my struggles I cannot be all that he wants me to be? This led me to conclude that being a good and “righteous” person will not lead me to understand God’s love—it must be by some other means. Also, these verses seem to suggest that I cannot even love the people around me unless I first loved myself. I wasn’t sure that I even loved myself. I actually kinda hated myself because I couldn’t be the perfect person God wanted me to be.

    The only way I could find to interpret these verses was to conclude that God’s love is something without any conditions, that it is honestly an irrational love, for to love and save someone as awful as I was and still am is completely irrational. And then as we come to realize and understand this love, we won’t be able to help but love ourselves, because you know you are loved and more than accepted by Jesus. Then after understanding God’s love and then accepting and loving ourselves, it just naturally follows that we’d love God back and love others with that same irrational love. Jesus hung out with and befriended everyone who nobody else would hang out with. I came to realize that he loves and will save us all too.

    In Mormonism, I found few who truly rejoice in the love and grace of Jesus. As my understanding changed while I was still in the Mormon church, I felt more and more uncomfortable there. I would sit in church and get so angry about what was being taught, because I felt that what the leaders were preaching was unjust and not right. The injustice made me feel like exploding in meetings. People didn’t know Jesus or his love. They weren’t rejoicing in him constantly. When I tried to speak up, I tried not to seem too rebellious, because I knew if I did, it might lead to excommunication. I was raised a Mormon, I believed it was God’s only true church on the earth. You do not understand how much I prayed to God that he would help lead me to find some common ground with the Mormon faith so I wouldn’t be led to leave it. Please, understand and know that I prayed and pleaded again and again with God to help me find a way to understand Mormon teachings in the light of my own conscience. Eventually, I realized that it could not be done. The road got to the point of me either having my name removed from the church records and leaving the church quietly, or staying and eventually being excommunicated for not agreeing with “the brethren” on basic doctrinal teachings.

    In the Fall of 2001, when I moved off to graduate school in Southern California, someone in my dorm invited me to come to a gathering of Campus Crusade for Christ. I was looking for an escape from the close mindedness of Mormonism and decided to go. And when I went to their meeting and started talking to people there, I realized that suddenly I was surrounded by people that believed the same way I had on my own come to believe. A few months later, after an immense amount of prayer, I decided to leave the church quietly and eventually had my name removed from the church records.

    Now I rely not on myself or on a church, but on Jesus alone. I worship and praise God because of his love alone for me. God loves me so much that he paid the price for me to be with him in heaven forever. And he gave me the promise that whoever believed in him would have eternal life. Jesus, he is my Lord, he is my King, he is my personal Savior. These words Jesus, Lord, King, and Savior have such profound meaning to me now. I praise and I worship him. No one can save themselves, only Jesus can.

    On February 16, 2002, I gave the whole hope of my salvation to Jesus and was “saved.” Since then, I have also found out about many other fallacies in Mormonism, some of which I go into at the following link, but I will refer you to some web sites with a great amount of additional information (most of them are very well documented). Check them out at my Links Page under Ex-mormon sites. I’ve tried to be very complete in my explanation above. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me at otveter@yahoo.com, someone did and I have some of my responses at another link. Please, I hope that this information I reveal to you about why I left Mormonism does not disturb you such that we cannot be friends anymore. Mormonism is something that gets deep inside you, socially and spiritually. Please know it was not an easy decision to leave, but it was the right for me. Thank you for understanding.