Welcome to the classic speeches podcast presented by BYU Speeches, bringing you treasured talks from 70 years of BYU Devotionals.

Be sure to check out our other podcasts by searching BYU speeches wherever you get your podcasts, or by visitingspeches.BYU.edu slash podcasts.

This devotional address entitled Study, Faith, and the Book of Mormon, was given on May 10th of

1988 by John W. Welch, then a professor of law at BYU.

President Holland, fellow members and friends of the Brigham Young University community,

I have been very humbled by the invitation to speak to you this morning, and I pray as we

pause for these few devotional minutes that our minds and spirits will be blessed, as the Lord

has blessed us so many times before, in devotionals on this

great campus. As I speak to you today, I consider my two principal credentials to be my testimony

of the divine origins of the Book of Mormon, together with an unrelenting desire to know more

about this wonderful and wondrous book.

Over the last 20 years, I have made the Book of Mormon a matter of continual study,

and the book has rewarded me far beyond what I could ever have deserved or far beyond anything I ever could have imagined.

That's the way I've always found it with the Lord.

We can never anticipate or fully deserve his ways or his blessings.

My desire this morning is to present a few ideas about current Book of Mormon research,

and I hope and pray that you will find them interesting and enlightening.

We've heard much in recent years about the Book of Mormon.

A person would need to be both deaf and blind not to have noticed that President Benson

has made this a paramount theme of great importance. The significance of the Book

of Mormon to us as a people, both individually and collectively, can hardly be overstated.

Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion, he has asked?

...