“God Had a Work for Me to Do”
The Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith
The Prophet Joseph Smith said:
“On the evening of the . . . twenty-first of September [1823] . . . I betook myself to prayer and supplication to Almighty God. . . .
“While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor. . . .
“He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.
“He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants;
“Also, that there were two stones in silver bows—and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim—deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted ‘seers’ in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.”
President Gordon B. Hinckley said:
“I love to read of the visit of Moroni to the boy Joseph Smith—that night when he was only a youth, when a messenger clothed in white appeared before him in his bedroom. He was a farm boy, with very little in the way of formal education. But he had received a vision three years earlier, the like of which no man in his generation—or in any generation since—has received, when God the Eternal Father and the resurrected Lord had appeared to him.
“Now the angel Moroni came, and according to the Prophet’s testimony, ‘said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people’ [Joseph Smith—History 1:33].”
(“God Has a Work for Us to Do,” Ensign, May 1985, 86.)
