Monday, June 4, 2018

Are you prepared? My testimony of 2018


God’s Call to His People

Personal testimonies and experiences of April Erwin 4/25/2018


My experience is broad and reaches back several years, but it all started to come into focus in January of 2018. I experienced a deep personal emotional crisis in January and sought counsel from a Patriarch because of it. Through the counsel, the Lord answered my questions and told me that if I would focus on the spiritual things, He would take care of the things I had been so concerned about. I decided to do that and began fasting, studying, and listening to sermons while at work. Immediately I began to see things change in my attitude and in my faith. In fact, so many things started coming together in a close amount of time, it’s hard to put it in order. I’m going to try and hope that I can do it justice.

I was led in two directions about the same time. First I was led to answers I’d been searching for regarding the Book of Mormon and its geographical location. It was the completion to an experience I’d had a couple of years ago and it was important, because through finding the Heartland Theory and the many answers it brought, I also got a deeper understanding of the Mosaic Law and the promises God gave to this land. It also gave me one more reason to know that the Brazil plates were a hoax.  I’ll share more about that experience in a separate testimony.

On March 11th, we went to see my niece baptized and weren’t at Waldo Ave Restoration Branch (our home branch) for Sunday morning services. Monday, at work, I pulled up the sermons for both Oak Grove Restoration and Waldo on Livestream.com to listen. It was amazing. God gave a powerful message to His church - and both congregations received it on the same day at the 11 am service. Excited and curious, I begin looking to see if any other branches had received a similar message. They did.

South Chrysler also received it. I posted my find on Facebook and asked if anyone else had noticed. Several commented they had-branches that didn’t broadcast also received the message. In addition to those from March 11th, several other sermons were recommended to me. I found that the message God had for His church had started being delivered as early as 7/2016 with Karl Anderson, but many others had spoken the message as well. I have found 20 sermons so far (and still counting) that share that message. I wanted as many people as possible to have access to them, so I opened a blog and linked them to my testimony on line. (visit https://wakeupsaints.blogspot.com/2018/03/god-is-issuing-message-to-his-people.html for the links.)

In essence the Lord is telling his people to wake up, to repent and come back to their covenant. That He is coming and we are in the time of the Ten Virgins. We must become one with Him so we can be prepared to enter the wedding feast. 1 A thrilling message!

It was also around early March that I first heard about the Brazil plates. My gut reaction was to believe it was a lie, but I didn’t want to dismiss anything without knowing the whole story. I prayed about it and asked the Lord for discernment and to protect me from being deceived if it was not true. Then I watched all the videos posted on Zarahemla Restoration Branch’s website regarding the Brazil plates. I heard all their testimonies and still I knew with a certainty it was a lie and our men were deceived. Our people too. (I want to make clear that I don’t believe any of the priesthood from here is part of creating that deception. I believe they simply trusted the wrong message.)

The message sent back from Brazil was eerily similar to what I’d already heard preached in so many branches. They only thing the Brazil group asked for, was that the witnesses come back and unify all the different RLDS groups and build the temple so the Lord could return.

Unity is a word that’s been flung about for years, and for many of our members, they didn’t see a problem with the request. But the two messages, so seemingly similar, are vastly different. God, through prophetic ministry of the priesthood, is saying focus on becoming one with the Lord and He will unify us so that we will be ready when Jesus comes. Brazil’s deceivers say you unify yourselves and then Jesus can come. Satan has twisted God’s message. Although neither message is new, they both came into a broad public light at the same time, the beginning of March 2018.

Meanwhile, as I’m still doing the Book of Mormon research, I also started rereading my Bible starting with Genesis. It really was eye-opening. So many things seemed new and clearer to me. Especially the laws that were given through Moses. Both the Book of Mormon geography and the Old Testament reading led me to begin studying the feast days. I saw the interpretation of the spring feasts laid out and then explained, in detail, how Jesus fulfilled everyone as they occurred the year of his ministry. When the Fall Feasts came up (Yom Teruah/Rosh Hashanah/Feast of Trumpets, Yom Kippur/Day of Atonement, and Sukkot/Feast of Booths), I was reminded of a dream I had 3 years ago. I had to hunt for where I had typed it up, but found it and was amazed. This is what I had typed three years ago.

Dream About September 19th on June 8, 2015
I woke at 7:05 am from a dream that was quite unusual. Although I’d had my normal oddball dreams off and on throughout the night, this stuck out because it really had nothing to do with anything else I’d dreamed and it felt important to remember.

It began with a bit of the odd, where I had made something for Mom with her name on it and she said, “If you’re going to spell my name different, I wish you’d tell me.” I laughed at her thinking, how else could I spell Linda? I asked her what she was talking about and she showed me something I’d typed or written and it was like my fingers had been on the wrong keys and her name was all messed up. I laughed about it and we were jokingly trying to pronounce my messed up word.

It’s here that the dream changed, suddenly it was more serious and we were looking at her day planner/calendar, the size of a checkbook, which she uses to schedule appointments. In the first Sunday square is written Day Mon. Worship in handwriting. The Sunday square below it said September 19 with the word savvy written beneath the date.

We were both a little perplexed, so I said, “Flip to that date and see what it says.” She did and September 19 was circled. I think it was a Friday, but I’m not positive that it wasn’t Saturday. Friday is what is impressed the most. On the circled 19th it said 3 Yrs. 

I asked Mom, “3 years since what?” She couldn’t remember and was offering suggestions like, since grandma died, or since we got the kids? And I was dismissing them because I knew those were all longer back. Neither of us knew what the 3 yrs. meant. I said, “I guess we should get Angel and everyone together on that day and worship.”  Then I woke up.

After praying about it I was able to fall back asleep. I knew that the word Savvy was an intentional use. I had been to a writer’s conference over the weekend where we discussed the power of words. It made me think how our vocabularies are so diminished from what they were even 200 years ago. It brought to mind the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and how the character always said “Savvy?” I always wondered if it was being used correctly, but never looked it up. Now I did, here is the definition:

sav·vy informal verb
1.       To know or understand. Adjective. 2. shrewd and knowledgeable in the realities of life.

The next day I searched the internet to see if those dates had any significance for the yr. 2015 or for 3yrs previous and found nothing. We’ll fast and worship and see what happens on September 19, 2015. (Note: nothing of significance occurred on 9/19/15 that I am aware of.)

On March 28, 2018 the following was made clear to me:

While pursuing personal study and change, I was reading through the Old Testament, specifically about the feast days. The dream I had in 2015 was brought to mind, it took a few days, but I found where I had typed up the dream and saved it to my computer. This time, I checked the dates again for this year, 2018 – 3 years from the time of the dream.

September 19th was on a SATURDAY in 2015. But three years later, 9/19/18 is the Day of Atonement/Yom Kippur. The week before on a Monday is Rosh Hashanah/Yom Teruah (the blowing of the Shofar and celebration of receiving the law or Torah at Mt. Sinai). Rosh Hashanah/Yom Teruah 2018 will begin in the evening of Sunday, September 9 and ends in the evening of Tuesday, September 11. Yom Teruah is also known as the Feast of the Watchmen because watchmen stand ready in high places to light signal fires when the new day is announced, ensuring everyone in the area knows immediately that the Holy day is upon them.

The Lord counts days starting at sundown, so by seeing Sunday circled in the dream with the note to worship on Monday, it was showing the Biblical day, sundown Sunday night begins the celebration and Monday would be the first day to worship.

September 19, 2018, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins at sundown. The 10 days between Yom Teruah and Yom Kippur are meant to be spent in repentance because on the Day of Atonement, we are presented before the Lord to see if we are acceptable.

I believe that God has been calling to His church over the last three years, calling us to repent and come back to our covenant. To put our lives in spiritual order so we will be ready for Jesus’s return. On March 11th of this year, that message was culminated by sermons across the Restoration, all preaching the same message, including one at Waldo.

The Lord has promised if we are one with Him, He will be in us. Jesus is the unifier and the only one who can bring us all together as one people. If we are one in Jesus, we naturally draw closer as a people and become unified, but it must be done through Jesus first.

The feast days are not well understood in our church as a whole, but through this dream, the Lord is telling us to become Savvy, to be knowledgeable of His seasons and to worship. I hope by sharing this experience it will strengthen the call God has issued to be one with Him and that others will also seek to know and understand and worship. This is a very important year; I want all of us to be prepared for whatever is coming.

 When thinking of unity, I pictured an Isosceles triangle. Jesus stands at the top point and the church members line the bottom. If we all seek to draw closer and become one with Jesus, moving from our broad base of differences to the single high point where He stands, then we all naturally become closer to one another as well as the angle narrows. However if we attempt to unify ourselves, we may as well be playing tug of war on the bottom as we try to convince one another that our view is the best. It leaves Jesus out of the process all together.
On the night of 04/20/2018 I had another dream.
In the dream I wanted a baby so much, that I went and found a man I didn’t know to sleep with me just to get me pregnant. Afterward I felt very guilty and confessed to my mom and sister what I had done. I knew they were disappointed in me, but we moved forward. In the next scene of the dream, it was a few months later. I had started my cycle and suddenly thought, “Wait, I’m supposed to be pregnant, aren’t I?” I couldn’t remember at first and had to think about it because I knew I’d been having my cycle again. I finally remembered that I definitely had been pregnant. In trying to remember dates, I remembered that I’d gotten pregnant in March and that the baby would have been due in December. However, I knew it was September and I’d lost the baby without recognizing it right away. After this realization and feeling a little stunned, I turned and saw a TV playing the news. A news anchor was talking over a picture of Israeli soldiers being captured. The news anchor was saying that Israel apologized to its Allies, the U.S., for not being able to come to our aid, but they were under attack as well and wouldn’t be a help to us. I knew that war had come to us. Then the dream ended and I woke up at about 4:30 am
At first I played it off as a weird dream, but I prayed and told God if this dream had meaning, to let me remember it so that I could share it with Mom and Angel the next day. If it was nothing, then I just wanted to forget it like I do most of my dreams. I went back to sleep. The next afternoon was a Saturday and Mom, Angel and I had a rare moment when we were alone. I still remembered the dream, so I shared it with them. We all agreed that symbolically in scripture a woman generally represents the church and a baby represents the kingdom. Other than that, no insight was given. I prayed to understand if there was anything to know and left it at that.

Then, during work on 4/24/18, the interpretation came to me. I grabbed a pen and wrote as fast as possible.

I /Church wanted the baby/kingdom so much, we went out and got it illegally by fornication/illegal covenant with someone who would give us what we wanted so badly and were tired of waiting for.  (Pregnancy is the result of consummating the marriage covenant, there was no marriage so the baby was not part of a legal covenant.)

Like Abraham and Sarah, who found their own solution and used Hagar to gain an illegal child, instead of waiting for the one promised son that would bring about the promises God had made in His covenant with Abraham. Isaac was a type and shadow of Jesus, the beloved son that would be sacrificed. By having Ishmael first, they created a great deal of turmoil that still rages today.
Then after starting the Kingdom/baby, aka getting pregnant, I/Church felt guilt for our choice but then forgot about even beginning the process of gaining the baby/kingdom. Only when the due date was close did we remember and realize we didn’t have anything at all. The effort to obtain the baby/kingdom was a wasted effort – a pointless sin; it didn’t come to fruition because it wasn’t legitimate. That’s when it was shown that Israel was under attack and they knew that we were too.
Becoming pregnant in March corresponded with the timing of the 2 messages that came forward – one from the priesthood to become one with God and one from Brazil to become one with each other. I realized in September, the same time from the previous dream that corresponded with the Day of Trumpets (also called Feast of Watchman, a reference to the parable of ten virgins again) and Day of Atonement, which if the baby had gone to term it would have been born in December. Hanukah, the festival of lights, is in December, also called the Feast of Dedication. In my study of the Feast Days, I’d learned that although it isn’t a high holy day, Jesus did celebrate the feast. John 10:22, Jesus said, “I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” John 8:12 Jesus is the light we celebrate.

I feel like the illegal covenant to make the kingdom coincided with the Brazil false plates. Rather than doing it God’s way, the church or a portion of it, chose the wrong path and because of that, failed. So although the fake plates may seem like a big movement, it will ultimately fail for the whole of the church. September is important and I feel something big will happen. If we do it God’s way, we’ll see the kingdom come and the bridegroom will return and bring His light and truth.

I want to be clear that I don’t know what this big thing that’s coming is. I am not claiming Jesus is returning with Zion in September 2018. However, He is calling us to be prepared for something and I don’t dare ignore this final wake up call to trim our lamps and make sure they are filled.

As I discussed all of this with my family, Angel reminded me of a dream she had in 2012 and I’ll share it below. Both of us are witnesses that something big is coming.

My dream as of 06/27/2012. By Angel Erwin

Jesus is Coming SOON!

I had a dream in which I was with a large group of people, mostly friends of mine. We were all studying together concerning the coming end times and how to prepare both physically and spiritually. We were divided up with a partner and asked to study together. My friend Amy and I were paired but since she has a family, chose to spend some time in private study and prayer. I went off to my room at the gathering facility to study and pray. While doing so I looked up and the ceiling disappeared. I saw in the heavens a large rock formation, pink crystal geode looking in nature. I then saw that it had a golden city sitting on top of it. As it descended the city fell off the rock, building by building and immediately disappeared. I then saw the exact same thing, the rock formation and the golden city on top. This time it did not fall apart. Once it had moved out of my line of vision while still looking up, I saw Jesus in the clouds following after the city. The vision ended and I became so excited that I immediately went back to the gathering room and found my friend and study partner. Many other people were standing around talking. As I was telling my friend about the vision I had just had, many walked over to listen. I said, "Amy, Jesus is coming and He's coming SOON!"

The dream ended and I woke up. I began to pray that God would confirm that the dream was of Him. Then the thought came to me "Whether the dream is 'Spiritual' or not the message still stands. Jesus IS coming. Are we prepared?


“And now my beloved brethren, I have said these things unto you, that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him; that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which ye have been received. And now I would that ye should be humble, and be submissive, and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long suffering; being temperate in all things; being diligent in keeping the commandments of God at all times; Asking for whatsoever things ye stand in need, both spiritual and temporal; always returning thanks unto God for whatsoever things ye do receive, And see that ye have faith, hope, and charity, and then ye will always abound in good works; And may the Lord bless you, and keep your garments spotless, that ye may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the holy prophets who have been ever since the world began, having your garments spotless, even as their garments are spotless in the kingdom of heaven, to go no more out.” - Alma 5:38-42



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