Two hundred years ago on a beautiful spring morning in 1820,

young Joseph Smith, seeking to know which church to join, went into the woods to pray near his home in upstate New York.

Here we are in what today we call the Sacred Grove.

But back in 1820, it was just a part of the Joseph Smith family farm.

I love knowing that this is ordinary to them, but to members of the Church throughout the world, this is sacred. Basically, the Restoration started here.

And the reason that we call it sacred today, the reason that it ceased to be ordinary, is that, here’s where Joseph Smith began his journey.

He had questions about his sins, as a teenage boy. He wanted forgiveness for those sins, and so he went into the grove to pray, to know which church to join, so he would know how he could get rid of those sins.

And here's where he built his relationship with our Heavenly Father through prayer and with the Savior Jesus Christ through that personal appearance. He came from a very large family.

The family was packed tightly into a small log home.

He wanted some privacy, a place where he could pray vocally for the first time in his life and pour out the feelings of his heart to God.

He couldn't do that in the house.

He really wanted to find a place on the farm where it would be private. So when he was chopping wood one day, he thought, I don't see anybody around. I'll come back here. And he left his ax there, and that's where he came back to the next day, knelt, and prayed to our Father in Heaven, a place where he thought he could have privacy.

When I first read the Joseph Smith Experience, or the First Vision, where, you know, and “He called me by name” and called him by his name, you know, “Joseph,” it was one of those where, that’s it, I was sold, like of all people, to know my name. He’ll know my name, you know, He’ll say it correctly, He’ll know the right way to say it. And you strip it of all of its majesty for whatever it is. It was a really intimate moment because He called him by his name.

So this is where Joseph began his journey. But it's not where he finished it.

This is the Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith log home.

This is where the family moved in around 1819, after they had acquired enough money through working in Palmyra to try to buy this 100 acres that they were going to try to turn into a farm.

This is where Joseph Smith Jr. and his family lived at the time that he went out to have the First Vision, and also the place where the angel Moroni would appear to him. But in this room, I think we get a real sense of family.

Well, I remember during the virtual tour, as we were watching this, the first thing that came to my mind was the song “Love at Home”—“in the cottage, there is joy.” There’s just that feeling of smallness and intimacy with that. And I thought of that instantly when they were showing us this room.

Joseph Smith, throughout his life, thought very, very deeply about families,

his meditations that led to his revelations regarding the afterlife and eternal families really grew out of his experience in places like this.

It’s small here. So this is the room where Joseph Smith and his brother slept.

And therefore, this is the room where Joseph Smith was when the angel Moroni appeared to him. So even though this home is a reconstruction, the airspace in which we’re standing is the airspace where Moroni appeared. So they were all in this room? Yes. So Joseph had five brothers, and so the six of them probably would have slept in three beds in this room, maybe a couple per bed. Oliver Cowdery, in his account, taken from what Joseph Smith told him, explained that Joseph waited until his brothers, one by one, fell asleep around him. The noise of the home had pretty much settled down to nothing, and so he thought it was around midnight that the angel finally appeared to him.

And of course, what he wanted, again, is he wanted redemption. He wanted forgiveness for his sins. Between the time of the First Vision, that was three and a half years earlier, until the present, he hadn’t had any special communication from the Lord. And if you think about it from a teenager's perspective,

when you tell a teenager, I'll get back with you, which is what the Lord said to him in the First Vision, you think in terms of hours, days, maybe weeks, but not in terms of years. And it had been years for Joseph.

Yeah. And again, another extraordinary experience happening to an ordinary 14-year-old boy. In the most ordinary of places, the attic of a log home.

With his brothers and sisters around him. Yes.

This is the Joseph Smith frame home. This is the house where Joseph was living when he got the gold plates.

He brought them from the Hill Cumorah the day after he received them into this home. And then he hid them under the hearth of the fireplace,

the chimney of which you can see right there. And then over time he needed to change the location for various reasons. And one of the places that he put the plates was here in this cooper shop.

His father was a cooper, or barrel maker.

And so Joseph took the plates and he kept them at that time in a box that was made for holding window glass.

The glass was removed and he put the plates in there, and he brought them over here.

And there were two places in which they could be hidden.

One was under the floorboards, which was sort of a natural place to put them.

But then he thought, well, if somebody comes over here

and looks for the plates, they might dig up the floorboards looking for them.

So he put them in a frock and he hid them up in the rafters, thinking they wouldn't look there. And they sure enough did come in.

They tore up the floor. They found the box and the plates weren't in the box. But to me, this is a very symbolic kind of building because of its ordinariness. I mean, this does not look like anything particularly fancy. Well, I remember during the virtual tour, the thing that came to me was this ordinary little shop and how it stored something as precious as those plates, initially reminded me of the manger and Christ being born there. And that, you know, through small and simple things shall great things come to pass, that something as mundane as the shop could hold those plates, and something as ordinary as a manger could be the birthplace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I think it's important for all of us to remember that in God's eyes, none of us are ordinary. He knows our names. We’re special to Him, and therefore He can work great works in our lives, just as He did in the lives of Joseph Smith. I agree.

In humility, we declare that in answer to his prayer, God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ

appeared to Joseph and inaugurated the restitution of all things

as foretold in the Bible.