Stand as Witnesses

To my son,

                In our Come, Follow Me reading this week we learned about Alma and his people who were in bondage to the Lamanites. As they struggled under their afflictions, the Lord comforted Alma in these words: “Lift up your heads and be of good comfort, for I know of the covenant which ye have made unto me; and I will covenant with my people and deliver them out of bondage. And I will also ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs, even while you are in bondage; and this will I do that ye may stand as witnesses for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions” (Mosiah 24:13-14). That contains both a promise from the Lord and a call to action for us. He promises those who keep covenants with Him to ease our burdens and visit us in our afflictions. In return, we must stand as witnesses of Him. That means that we are willing to bear our testimony of Him and how He has blessed us in our lives. Today in Sacrament Meeting I told a story about a modern-day pioneer in Africa who was indeed a powerful witness of the Savior. He has helped bring countless people into the Church. Since I put together his story from a couple different sources, I wanted to record it here so that you can have it. When you are a missionary someday, I hope that his example will be an inspiration to you as strive to be the best witness of the Savior you can be. I learned about him mainly from this podcast by Scott and Maurine Proctor and this article in the Church Global Histories. I also have a friend who met him personally in a visit to Ghana and spoke with awe of this faithful man.  

                In February 1964, Joseph William Billy Johnson of Ghana was given copies of Church literature from a friend who had received a Book of Mormon while in England. After reading he said, “I was convinced. I believed. I felt the spirit when I read the story of Joseph Smith, especially how the Father and the Son revealed themselves to him.  That moved me a great deal.” He continued, “One early morning of March 1964 while I was about to get up to prepare for my daily chores, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon me.  I heard a voice from heaven speaking to me saying, ‘Johnson, if you will take up my word as I will command you to your people, I will bless you and bless your land.’  Trembling in fear, I replied in tears, saying ‘Lord by thy own help, I will do whatsoever thou would command me.’ From that day on, the Spirit of the Lord constrained me to propagate the restored gospel to my people.  I started door to door and performed open missionary work preaching the new message we read from the Book of Mormon.”

The Church, though, was not yet established in Ghana, and could not be because the priesthood was not available at that time to blacks of African descent. And yet Brother Johnson and others organized and gathered people and did the best they could. They set up signs where they met announcing that they were The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They wrote letters to the leaders of the Church, asking for help. They received literature and hymns and instructions and encouragement from the Church, but no missionaries were sent. Despite this, Brother Johnson continued his own missionary labors under only the direction of the Spirit of the Lord. It was not easy. He related, “We were ridiculed and heckled by mobs who did not believe the Book of Mormon and the testimonies of Joseph Smith. They believed only the Bible and they would not accept any other book of scripture as the word of God.  A lot of Churches took notice of us and started calling us names. They branded our group as an anti-Christ organization.”

At one point as he suffered through the persecution, he fasted for three days and then had a dream in which he saw two enormous books ahead of him. He was told in the dream, “Johnson, go carry them. Go carry them.” That seemed impossible to him because they looked so heavy, but he attempted to pick them up in his dream and found that they were light. He said, “They were light because they supported each other.  Once I saw it in a vision, I didn’t doubt any more.” He had a witness that the Bible and Book of Mormon indeed were both from the same God and supported each other. It was still very difficult. He said, “Persecution became bitter, so much that we nearly gave up from the very onset, but through much prayer and fasting, we waxed strong in faith and continued to preach the gospel without flinching.”  They continued waiting for the Church to send missionaries. One of their favorite hymns to sing in their meetings was Come, O Thou King of Kings and they would shed tears as they sang the words, “We’ve waited long for thee.”    

Sometimes he became discouraged, and while “in anxious prayer one of those days, Johnson heard an unidentifiable voice…saying to him, ‘I will come and help you.  Do not be discouraged. Be patient. The Church in America will help you.’” By the mid-1970s there were ten congregations in Ghana and over 1000 converts to the gospel who as of yet could not be baptized. Brother Johnson started a primary school called the Brigham Young Educational Institute and even named his own son Brigham. The other converts called him the Reverend Minister Johnson and they hung on with faith that the Lord would answer their prayers for the Church to be established among them. On one difficult night he wondered, “Will our brothers from the West ever come for us?”  That night he had a dream where his brother who had passed away before Brother Johnson had found the Church came to him. He said in the dream, “Do not weep. I have found your Church in this place, and I want to be baptized, but I cannot without your help.” In one letter to President Kimball, Brother Johnson said this, “We therefore solemnly declare in the name of Jesus Christ that God has prepared the groups in Ghana for you, and we have nowhere else to go but forward, looking for your missionaries to help us understand the Church better. It is our burning desire to live by that faith and attain its standards.”

Then on June 9th, 1978, Brother Johnson had a hard time sleeping, and so he listened to the BBC on the radio. During the midnight broadcast he learned that the Church was going to extend the priesthood to all worthy males. The blessings that Brother Johnson and so many others had sought for during fourteen years would finally come. He “sat there and cried.” Missionaries arrived later that year and hundreds, including Joseph William Billy Johnson, were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Brother Johnson was immediately made the branch president and he continued his work to bring the gospel to the Saints in Ghana.

In 2004, the Accra Ghana Temple was dedicated. Scot and Maurine Proctor, from whom much of the account I just told came, recounted how they met Brother Johnson at that time and spoke with him at length. She said, “I had the immense blessing of standing in line with Joseph William ‘Billy’ Johnson as we went into the temple dedication.  He said he had spent the entire night before prostrate upon the floor in fervent prayers of thanksgiving to the Lord for giving his people this temple. I talked to him again when we came out of the Temple—and he told me that during the Hosanna shout and the singing of The Spirit of God he had seen an open vision of the hosts of the Ghanaian dead who were all in their tribal garb and awaiting their work to be done.” Brother Johson also said, “Temple work is the sweetest part of the Church to which my heart and soul have always clung.  I want to meet my mother and father in the resurrection prepared to enter the kingdom of God. We will always remember what the missionaries have done for us.  My heart is burning with love and appreciation. When I started preaching with the Book of Mormon, everyone said, they won’t come. Leave the Church. I said, ‘I know they will come because the Lord has told me.’”

What an incredible story of faith and devotion to the Lord! I am inspired by his example of missionary work and dedication to the kingdom of God. One day you too will have the opportunity to receive the priesthood of God, and I hope that you will remember his story. It is a great privilege to serve God’s children through the power of the priesthood, and that was the promise that the Lord made to Abraham thousands of years ago. Abraham was told this from the Lord: “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee above measure, and make thy name great among all nations, and thou shalt be a blessing unto thy seed after thee, that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations; And I will bless them through thy name; for as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed, and shall rise up and bless thee, as their father…. And in thee (that is, in thy Priesthood) and in thy seed (that is, thy Priesthood)… shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal” (Abraham 2:9-11). You will have the opportunity to be part of the fulfillment of that promise from the Lord. You are of the seed of Abraham, and through sharing the gospel and serving others you will bless the families of the earth by encouraging them to receive the ordinances of the priesthood including baptism, the temple endowment, and the sealing of families. I hope that you are looking forward to this great privilege that you will have! Jehovah gave you and me this injunction: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he” (Isaiah 43:10). We must learn to be faithful witnesses of Him, and we can help do our small part in blessing all the families of the earth with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Love,

Dad