Latter-day Saints Believe in Jesus Christ

For some reason, many people believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a Christian church. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike many churches, the Savior’s name is part of the name of our church. Our beliefs are centered on His teachings. We study and read the Holy Bible and believe it to be the word of God.

We believe that Jesus Christ is the only begotten son of God, our Heavenly Father. We believe that God, the Father; the Son, Jesus Christ; and the Holy Ghost are three separate individuals, each with His own assignment, but are one in purpose, namely, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of mankind. God is the Father, the Supreme ruler of all that exists. Jesus Christ is His son, who, under the direction of the Father, has created everything that has been created. The work of the Holy Ghost is to bear witness of the Father and the Son.

We believe that Jesus Christ condescended to leave His heavenly throne on the right hand of the Father, to be born of Mary, to take upon Himself a physical body so that He could experience everything that we, Heavenly Father’s spirit children, experience, and so that He could offer Himself as a sacrifice to be ransomed for our sins.

We believe that on the final night of His mortal existence, the Savior, Jesus Christ, met with the twelve whom He had called to be His special witnesses. To teach them humility, the Savior washed the feet of each one. He gave them bread and wine as tokens of His body and blood and instructed them that this was now established as the means by which they should remember Him.

After that, the Savior took the twelve to Gethsemane. While they waited outside the gate, Jesus went alone into the garden. There He knelt down on the ground, and in a way that no mortal can understand, He took upon Himself the sins of all the world. Somehow, He experienced the horror and terror and guilt and shame of all the murders, adultery, tortures, and cruelty, all the evil and depravity that had or ever would take place from the time of Adam until the end of the world.

He suffered as no man had suffered before or will ever suffer again. How great was His suffering? Luke tells us: “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: andhis sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

Later, after His ordeal in Gethsemane, He was taken before the chief priests, where he was spit on, mocked, and buffeted. He was then taken to the Romans where He was beaten and made to wear a crown of thorns. He was presented to the people He had come to save, and they rejected Him and demanded His life.

He was made to carry His own cross to Calvary, where His feet and His hands were nailed to the cross, and He was crucified. While on the cross, He asked Heavenly Father to forgive those who had done this to Him. And then, because those who had placed Him on the cross had not the power to take His life (but He had power to lay down His life and to take it back up again), He allowed His spirit to leave His body, in other words, He gave up the ghost. His body was placed in a tomb, but on the third day, His spirit reunited with His body, never to be separated again.

Jesus Christ went through all that for two reasons. The first is because it was an assignment He accepted voluntarily from Heavenly Father. The second reason is because He loves us.

Christ’s resurrection brought about the resurrection of all mankind. The atonement makes it possible for our sins to be forgiven and for us to become worthy to someday return to the presence of our Father. The first of these two gifts, resurrection, is unconditional—every individual that has ever lived will rise from the dead with an immortal body (see 1 Corinthians 15:20-22). The atonement is conditional, however, so far as each person’s individual sins are concerned, and touches every one to the degree that he has faith in Jesus Christ, repents of his sins, and obeys the gospel.
Every sin that has ever been committed or ever will be committed has been paid for. No matter what evil any of us have done or are going to do, the Savior has already suffered for it. But His pain and suffering, His atonement is of no effect to us unless we accept Him as our personal Savior.

No matter what you might have been told by your uninformed friends, this is what we, the Latter-day Saints believe and teach about Jesus Christ. I submit to you that this surely qualifies us to be considered a Christian people.