You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink.
Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages. Welcome to More Than Ink. Hey, have you ever been so surprised by something you read in the Bible that you literally stood up and shouted? Well, not quite like that, but I was excited a couple times. That happened to our friend Doris Hansen, and we're going to hear her tell that story today.
Yes, on More Than Ink. Well, good morning. I'm Dorothy. And I'm Jim. And we're sitting here at our dining room table about to do what we always do every week. Always.
Open the Word of God, begun to talk about it. Except a little differently this week. Because we're going to talk about it with a friend of ours. Yeah. And her story is such an interesting one. She grew up in a Mormon polygamy group.
Polygamy. And we have known Doris Hansen for, oh, maybe 12 or 13 years. And enjoy very much working alongside her in ministry. And, well, I don't know. Pick it up. Well, she's someone who, since she came to the Lord, has become quite a student of the Bible.
But more than just a student. Because she talks to a lot of people who are still in polygamy, who are misled about what God's desires and intentions for them. So she pulls out the Word of God, and she says, look, this is where the truth is.
This is what it's really about. So she's masterful at handling the Word of God. But more than that, it's fascinating when you ask her what was the role the Word of God took in your life, in your exit from the polygamy Mormon groups and all that kind of stuff.
Because I think what we lose view of as Christians, we read the Bible, and it seems like kind of an optional thing for us to sit down with the Bible. But with people like Doris, and last week you heard from Earl and Carla, the Word is a critical component in every aspect of their lives and in ministry. And we wanted you to see up close and personal the actual effects of the Word of God on people's lives, which we tend to forget about. Well, and Doris is very adept at spotting the twist.
That's very easy for false teachers or deceived people to take words that are familiar from the Bible and just put enough of a spin on them that they mean something other than what God intended them to mean. And so Doris is very quick at spotting those deceptions, and she's very good at untwisting the twist. And so I appreciate that very much about her, and that will come out in our conversation with her today. Well, and in doing so, she's fulfilling what Jesus said about the truth setting you free. So the Word of God, like I said, is living and active. It's powerful. I mean, it really does amazing things in people's lives.
It pierces to the division between heart and soul and bone and marrow. Yeah, so when we talk about looking at this page that has words on it, it is more than ink. There's something incredible going on in the lives of people. And when you stop and ask them, tell us what the Word of God did in your life.
How did God use that? You can usually get amazing stories, and that's part and parcel of what's coming up right here with Doris. So without further ado. Yeah, let's talk to Doris. So we're sitting here with Doris Hansen, a very good and beloved friend of ours who has a fascinating story. And so before we dive into topics Bible-oriented, which is why we're here today, I mean, just give us a brief thumbnail of your past and present and future. Oh, and just do past and present.
Past and present. Well, I don't know the future yet. Yeah, that's good. I do know how the Bible ends, and I know that's my future.
There you go. I was, of course, born and raised in a Mormon polygamy group. And, of course, they do teach, just like Mormonism does, that you can't trust the Bible.
Right, right. You can't believe everything that it says, but you can trust Mormon scriptures and Mormon history. And I rejected Mormonism as well as the polygamy idea of how to get to heaven. That flavor of Mormon back then. That part of it, yeah. And in fact, it's original Mormonism. Yes. It certainly isn't an offshoot from an apostate viewpoint.
It is orthodox Mormonism, and I didn't like it. So I did get out of it. I got away when I turned 18, but I didn't turn to anything.
I just left everything behind. Anything that had to do with religion or the Bible, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. Right, right. So I lived 25 years without any input that I knew of from God or seeking Him in any way.
I didn't want Him, and I didn't want religion in my life. Yeah, yeah. So I was biblically illiterate, except for what I had been told growing up that the Bible, what they said the Bible said. Right, right. And that was the shocker. Most people only know what somebody told them the Bible said. And then when they find out.
They never actually wrote it. Yeah, right. And I did that a lot.
Even in my 25 years of nothingness, we would get philosophical conversations. I'd say, well, the Bible says blah, blah. Well, I was only repeating what somebody had told me. I didn't know if it said it or not.
And a lot of people do that. It was a big book. It must be in there somewhere.
Yeah, somebody said it was in there, so it must be. But you never read the Bible yourself before you left? I mean, did they ever allow you to do that? Oh, yeah, they had a Bible in the house in our Monday home evenings, which we had. My mother would teach, and she'd teach Bible stories.
She would teach Cain and Abel and Jonah and the prodigal son and all of these Bible stories, but they always had the twist that twisted it to make it sound like it undergirded the polygamy of religious beliefs. And that was one of the great things when I was studying the Bible when I finally did become a Christian is reading those stories myself and finding the true meaning of each of those stories that my mother had twisted so badly, actually, very badly. So what made you want to start reading the Bible in the first place? Were you already a Christian at that point?
Oh, no, no, no. So something attracted you to the Bible somewhere along the line. I look back at it now. I didn't know it at the time, but I look back at it now, and I know it's just all of a sudden the Holy Spirit decided to move on my life. And I remember one day I was sitting at a table, and I was just thinking, I wonder what it would be like to read the Bible.
Really? So I picked up the Bible, and I turned to Job. Oh, wow.
What a place to start. I didn't know what I was doing, and I wasn't seeking, and I didn't understand what I was reading, and that was the end of that. But it was right during that same time period that God was drawing me. So He just gave me that odd yearning. He didn't give me a yearning to go to church, but He did give me, you know, what would it be like to start reading the Bible?
So I guess it's true that God's the one who draws us to Himself. Definitely. Definitely. I never would have done that on my own. So when you started open to Job, did you know anything there that struck you? Why would you keep reading if you started with Job?
Yeah, I do not remember right now. I do not remember anything I read. It was a closed book to me. That's because I didn't have the Holy Spirit to explain it yet. But it was Him. I know now that it was Him doing that initial drawing to get me to Him. That's fascinating.
Yeah. That's fascinating. So, then, were there scriptures that led up to you coming to the Lord, or at the time of the Lord?
I mean, this can kind of go back historically. Well, I kind of think what I had to do is understand that Mormonism isn't true before I could believe the Bible is true. Oh, okay. And that's the road that the Lord led me on, because He knew that too. I'd had such a negative experience in the religion of Mormon polygamy, growing up in a polygamy home, that I had to know that the Bible was a positive thing, that God was positive, and that, of course, He loved me. Sure, yeah. So, God took me on the road of discovering how to discover that Mormonism was not true.
Ah, okay. And once I discovered that, once I was sure that Mormonism was not God's religion, that freed me up. It gave me permission. I didn't know it at the time, but it had given me to give myself permission to start looking into what the truth really is.
It was created as something of a vacuum, in a way. Right. And at just the right time, God had somebody leave some reading material in the office I was working in, and it was religious stuff, but it was stuff. Well, you can mention what that is. Is that Floyd's book?
Or something else? That was part of it, yeah. That was part of it. And Mormon is a Mama and Me, by Thelma Gere, was really the biggie. But there was also some of the Tanner's material involved in that, too, along with some audio tapes that Walter Martin had made. And he was a powerful preacher, and he was the first Christian preacher I ever listened to, other than Billy Graham. Oh, that's interesting.
Wow, really? But Walter Martin, he got right to the point. He hit it on the head every single time, and I was fascinated listening to him, just fascinated. And so I discovered, started getting into the Bible, and I came across Isaiah chapter 40, verse 8. Uh-oh. I know where this is going. It's good stuff.
Go ahead. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God stands forever. And I looked at that, and I thought, well, of course, if God said it, He can do it. And miraculously, I knew that anything I read in the Bible from that point, I could trust. And that's when I started understanding what I was reading.
I love it. That's interesting. And I didn't go to, but I found later, Mark 13, 31, where Jesus said that heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. And that just kind of like concreted it in. That was it.
There was just, there's no way the Mormons could say that the Bible wasn't true, because God in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament promised. Hooked together, right. And so I knew. Everything I read, and then I started reading with passion, and everything I read, I automatically compared with what I'd been taught growing up. And nothing matched. Nothing matched.
There were no connecting dots there. And then it became patently visible, right, that what you had been taught was not correct when you encountered the correct thing. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. And again, I still didn't know what was going on with me. I just thought I was on a curious road here. I didn't understand the spiritual implication of what was really going on. I know now that it was the Holy Spirit was just drawing me with those cords. And lifting that word off the page and giving me a meeting. And taking me to the words I needed to see.
That's right. But I remember the day I got saved, and the day I realized how salvation came by, and I was reading the Bible at work. And it was slow, and I was alone in the office, so I could do whatever I wanted. And I had this Bible. And you're reading the Bible? Yeah, I was reading it.
Yeah, great big grand hope. And I came across Romans 10, verses 9 and 10. It says, �If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.� Well, being saved and all that was kind of new stuff to me, but I looked at that and I thought, �I have always believed that Jesus is Lord.� I didn't know it meant God at that time, but I still thought that. And that he was resurrected. I believed that. You were way down this road.
I was on the way. And then I came across Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 8 and 9, and that is what did it for me. �For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one can boast.� And I hit the ceiling. They tried to peel me off the ceiling. I was alone in the office, and I stood up and I yelled, �What?� �Not by works.� There was nobody there to help me. And I'm going, �Not by works?� And then I thought, �I've got to tell my sister. I've got to tell�.
You know, and that's the first thing I want. You don't have to do these things because she's still in the group.� And I was just right then that just threw me up onto cloud nine, and I rode there for the next year or two. Not by works. Not by grace.
Not by works. It was just awesome. Awesome experience. Wow. Did you really grasp what grace was? No. But you knew that it wasn't about accomplishments. Not by works.
Not by works. Yeah. That was the, I was going to say, that kind of rings. Yeah. Well, now, that's interesting to me because, you know, we just talked with our friends Earl and Carla just last week, and Carla cited the same verse.
It's interesting, isn't it? Not by works is what penetrated her. It's big from a religion, like the LDS religion, that demands works. And there's other false religions that demand works, too.
Most do. So that's big for people who come out of that kind of a religious background. Yeah. It's such a release because you're under that burden all your life, and you think, well, this is just what's required.
And then God says, nope. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Not by works. Not important. Yep.
Yeah. It is so free. It's a gift. It's such a shock.
Such a shock. And that's where Calvin's book came in. Oh, okay. And that's where I read what I needed to do to get saved, to ask Jesus into my life.
Yeah. But in reality, you may already have been saved at that point. Well, the Lord was giving me insight into his word, and so there was a point somewhere in there.
Somewhere along there. And I just kind of maybe had to confirm it in myself with the prayer or whatever so that I would get a better understanding of what was going on. And even after I prayed, I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't know any Christians. I didn't know any churches to go to.
I had no idea what to do from this point. I didn't even know I was a Christian. So it was the word of God itself, God's Spirit himself, through his word that brought you to that understanding of salvation, because I think for most people, we have been witnessed to by somebody, and they speak with us or pray with us or somehow lead us along. But in your case, it was God's word itself. It was God all by, of course, it's God in any way all by himself. But I think that if a person in person had come to try to speak to me about religion, I would have laughed him off the planet.
I wouldn't accept it. I was in that mind frame all my life. And so when he did it through a book, I mean, what can you do with a book from across the room?
You stand up and yell. Yeah. What?
Yeah, but that's true. And for the first several weeks, I didn't know any Christians. I knew no one, and I didn't know what was going on. And there was immediate spiritual battle, and things just went from bad to badder, and then from there to worse. And I know now, of course, it was spiritual attacks.
The devil doesn't attack an unlit log, and I'd finally been lit up, and boy, he was after me. And I didn't know what was going on. Yeah. But God had not abandoned you. No.
But again, I didn't know the Holy Spirit was living in me. Right. Right. I didn't know that.
I just knew that I could go to heaven without works. Yay. That's enough. That's enough. But gradually, reading the Word is, of course, what helps you understand and see these things.
But it wasn't until I got under a Christian preacher that the application and the drawing it out. Right. Right. Make the connections for you. It became very powerful in my own life.
Yeah. So since that time, what Scriptures do you keep coming back to? Well, during that time of not understanding what had happened and why I was going through such spiritual battles, I memorized Proverbs 3, verses 5 and 6, where it says, �Trust the Lord with all your heart.
Leave not on your own understanding, but in all of your ways acknowledge him, and he'll make your paths straight or direct your paths.� That sounds pretty good, yeah. And I memorized also Psalm 23, �The Lord is now my shepherd. I need to know this.� Yeah. And those two Scriptures, the first few weeks after I became a Christian, were powerful in me because when I would get these attacks or these negative things that were going on that I didn't understand, I would say them out loud or under my breath.
I would say them. Things were going on. I'd go, �God, I need to trust you.
I don't understand what's going on, but I'll trust you with all my heart.� And that got me through some of the real rough times in the beginning. Right. Those are perfect for someone who's isolated and not, I mean, you're not in a church. You're not, you're just, you feel like you're adrift. Yeah. Like God says, �Nope, I'm your shepherd.� Well, that was a way of retraining your mind. Right. Exactly. To fix on the truth. God is my shepherd. Right.
He is enough. Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.
And my cup runneth over. I had to realize what that meant. Yeah. Somebody turned it around and said, �Is your saucer full?� And I thought, wow, that's amazing. Wow.
That's astonishing. Yeah. So are there sections that you gravitate to today that ring big in your mind, or is it just all? I love it all.
I love it all. Yeah. But the Gospel of John was the first book that I studied in depth, verse by verse, phrase by word by word sometimes.
It was a very big in-depth study. And I did it at home from a tape recorder, a tape recording. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. I didn't do it from my church, but that was where I first really got insight into who Jesus is. No kidding. I mean, I knew He was God before that, but I didn't understand the way John had presented it.
Yeah. And I was so excited to learn who Jesus is, that He is God, and that He is the only Savior, and that believing in Him is all I am required to do, because in believing in Him, truly having faith in Him, I will follow Him and obey Him, and I still go to some of those real tough verses. I love John 10, the whole 10th chapter. But I love all of John. And so I still gravitate to some of those verses, sometimes just out of sweet remembrance of when I first learned these things. I go back to John most often than anything else. Well, we just finished 38 weeks talking about the Gospel of John on this very program. So that also is our kind of go-to. It's the place we go when we need to be reminded, who is this Jesus?
What do you say about Himself? And it's so comforting. It is so comforting. One, it starts out so big, you know, there you have Jesus in John 1, and you go, wow, this is a big claim. I wonder if John's going to approve this. And then he talks about it all the way through, and you go, okay, well, you get to the end, and you go, I agree with you. I think I'm with you, John. And then it says at the end, and I write these things so that you will believe on this Jesus I've just presented to you.
Right. And it works. That's why we recommend John to people all the time, like, where do I start? So do I. Go to John.
Go to John. Because it paints the big picture of Jesus and the intimate picture of Jesus and the love. I mean, just, yeah, it's incredible. Galatians is pretty big to me, too, because there's so much in there of grace versus works and the Jesus's importance of grace as it is relates to his death on the cross for us. Yeah. I think for someone who doesn't know about grace, and there might be people listening, it's such a remarkable, not just a concept, but a core character of who God is, is that He gives, and it has nothing to do with our merit.
And there's almost nothing else we can connect that to in our experience. So when you start to grasp that and you see how many ways, especially Paul says it so many different ways, so you understand, and for him it was central to him, which makes sense because he was a law-abiding Jew, a big works guy. So for him, you can hear in his voice, grace is an extraordinary thing. And it was really hard for me to grasp, okay, now that I'm saved by grace, I remember saying this to myself, now that I've been saved by grace, I have to really be good. So here I am being saved by grace, but then remain saved by works? You keep grace by being good.
By being good, yeah, by works. And that's where Galatians, where Paul's, where it really connected, helped connect me. It took a while for that to happen.
There was a friend of ours, she said, in fact she'd come out of Mormonism too, and she said, I'm trying to do this now, I'm trying to be a good Christian. And we stopped her and said, well, that might be your problem right there. There's an oxymoron there. But it takes a while to learn how to do that. It is, yeah. It doesn't happen automatically, especially someone from a works-oriented background.
Right, right. And I've talked to people and they say, well, but that's natural in our world. You know, you get a job, you get paid back for what you accomplish, it's an accomplished kind of a structure. And I say, yeah, but that's not entirely true, because you don't have that relationship with your parents or someone you love or, I mean, with your children. I mean, you have a lot of relationships that are actually built on grace, not merit.
And so I said, so take that idea and expand that by a thousand times. But my relationship with my parents was merit. Exactly.
I did not get love from them unless I deserved it. And God, too. And that poisons the whole concept. Yeah, it does. Yeah.
It's hard to move from one to the other. Yeah. But through God's word, you can get that, you understand, start to get there. Well, look, we're almost out of time. And I'd like the listeners to hear something about what you do in ministry that's based on your experience coming out of the Kingstons and stuff like that, and how they can find out more about that, like websites and stuff. So tell us some. Well, I have a website. It's shieldedrefuge.org. And I have a ministry that reaches out to people in polygamy groups to show them that they can be saved by grace, not by polygamy.
They read. The big work. Yeah. They've replaced the Savior with polygamy for salvation.
And so my basic premise is to bring biblical truths to polygamist people today. So they can go online and they can check out. There's a lot of shows online, I think, don't there? Hundreds of shows now. Hundreds.
Since 2007. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah.
And every week we produced a show. Yeah. Still do. Yeah. Yep. Still do. Yeah.
Yeah. So we're just, we're delighted to be involved with you that way. And we continue to do this.
And it's just a great blessing. Well, thanks for being with us. Thank you. This has been fun, Doris. Thank you. It's fun to turn the table around once in a while. We have enjoyed this immensely. Thank you.
I love your programs. Well, I sure love Doris's comments. You know, one of the things I love about it so much is that she was persistent over a long period of time, saying, you know, God, she wasn't aware that God was drawing her, but she kept being drawn to the Bible, and even, you know, with that false start in Job and seeing nothing, and yet still wondering, what is, there must be something here for me. There must be something here.
There must be something true here. I love that, because, you know, sometimes we think we should just be able to open the Bible to any page, and boink, God's going to change our lives. Well, maybe.
He certainly could do that, but for most of us, it's a longer, subtler process than that. Right, right. But it's accessible, and that's why we're trying to let you know here, the Bible is accessible, and the Holy Spirit works in conjunction with His Word, and amazing things happen in lives. Well, listen, next week we're going to go a different direction. You want to introduce where we're going? Oh, I'm so excited.
This is going to be really cool. We are going to start into a week-by-week discussion of the letter to the Hebrews, and it's a big book, and a fascinating book, and why are we going to do Hebrews? Well, yeah, and part of my rationale, at least, is the fact that when you read Hebrews in the New Testament, you sort of have to have one foot in the New Testament world and one foot in the Old Testament world, and the two complement each other so well, probably unlike anywhere else in the Bible. So it's going to be sort of our backdoor introduction to the Old Testament as we study the New Testament. Well, and we're going to touch on all kinds of things that are pertinent to where we live.
Things like the high priesthood of Jesus, things like the temple, like God's purpose for speaking His Word, His final complete Word in His Son. So we're excited about this, but it's going to be hard work, and we will take it in tiny chunks. So if it's been daunting to you before, be no more daunted. We're going to take a look at it and march our way into it.
But it's a fascinating study, I mean it really is. So we hope you join us next week as we head off on this adventure. I'm Jim.
And I'm Dorothy. And we'd love to have you back next week on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content.
To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org. Quick. We could do it again.
Does it need to be longer? We could do it. Yeah, we'll just try it again. We're going to do it again next week.
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