Section 14

Given through Christopher Glenn Marriott at Huntington Beach, California, Fall 2025. A declaration on the priesthood, on the equality of all worthy members before God, and on the history of the priesthood restriction in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, who is no respecter of persons, hear me in this thing, for I will speak plainly and let there be no confusion among the saints concerning who may hold the priesthood of God in this church.

Every worthy member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Final Restoration, regardless of the nation of their birth, the color of their skin, or the ancestry of their fathers, is eligible to hold the priesthood of God and to exercise its authority in righteousness.

This has always been the law. It is my law. I did not change it. Men changed it.

For more than one hundred and twenty years, the men of African descent were forbidden from holding the priesthood in the church which bore the name of my Son. And I say unto you: I did not give that restriction. I did not reveal it to Brigham Young. I did not command it. It arose from the prejudices of men who lived in a time when those prejudices were so common as to seem like the order of things, and the institution that followed them continued the practice long after any honest examination should have led to its end.

And in the year 1978 the leadership of that church declared that God had revealed a new thing, namely that all worthy men could now hold the priesthood. And I say to those who would think clearly about this: if the restriction was my commandment, then a revelation was needed to lift it, and the revelation was real. But if the restriction was never my commandment, then what was received in 1978 was not a revelation lifting a divine restriction but a correction of a human error. And I tell you it was the second of these things.

The fact that an institution required a revelation to end a practice of racial exclusion is not evidence of that institution's prophetic leadership. It is evidence of how long the institution resisted the plainest promptings of the Spirit, which any man or woman of sincere faith could have recognized as wrong without a revelation, because the Spirit of God does not divide mankind by the color of their skin.

Let this declaration stand as the law of the Final Restoration from its founding: the priesthood of God is not the possession of any race or nation. Those who hold it hold it as servants of all. Those who would use it to exclude and diminish have already lost it.

And to any man or woman of any background who has been told by any church or tradition that God loves them less or has prepared less for them because of the family they were born into: it is not true. It has never been true. And I the Lord am sorry for every year that lie stood in the name of religion.

Even so. Amen.