The Price of Laziness and Rebellion

"I had known that when my parents told me to wear shoes, they did not mean flip-flops; I was old enough to know that flip-flops did not provide the same protection as a pair of shoes. But that morning in the desert, I disregarded what I knew to be right. I ignored what my parents had repeatedly taught me. I had been both lazy and a little rebellious, and I paid a price for it."
(“Come unto Me with Full Purpose of Heart, and I Shall Heal You”,
Patrick Kearon, GC Oct 2010, emphasis added)


https://youtu.be/XZCQHPGT78o

Keep All the Commandments

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"Keep All the Commandments", LDS Media Library

Teach of faith to keep all the commandments of God, knowing that they are given to bless His children and bring them joy.4 Warn them that they will encounter people who pick which commandments they will keep and ignore others that they choose to break. I call this the cafeteria approach to obedience. This practice of picking and choosing will not work. It will lead to misery. To prepare to meet God, one keeps all of His commandments. It takes faith to obey them, and keeping His commandments will strengthen that faith. ("Face the Future with Faith", Russell M. Nelson, Apr 2011 General Conference)

Most Typically, Revelations are Conclusions and not Explanations

From a FB Post by David A. Bednar

We should remember that most typically revelations are “conclusions” and not “explanations.” When we receive revelation for ourselves, we discover what God would have us do. He rarely provides a reason for why we should do what was revealed. Rather, He trusts us to be obedient to the revelation He has given us.

I also like this from Henry B. Eyring

You can pray to know His will, and with the honest desire to do whatever He asks you to do, you will receive an answer. ("You Are Not Alone in the Work", Henry B. Eyring, Oct 2015) 

Achieving Your Full Potential

This morning, I listened to a great talk by Donald L. Staheli that he gave a few years ago in a CES fireside, "Achieving Your Full Potential". I have paraphrased and quoted some parts of it below. It inspired me.

A favorite two-word statement Joseph B. Wirthlin used frequently to motivate us: “Always improving.”

Spencer W. Kimball encouraged us to “lengthen our stride” and to “enlarge our vision”

Neal A. Maxwell said it this way, 'The Lord loves each of us too much to merely let us go on being what we now are, for he knows what we have the possibility to become!'

Faith - Quoting Gordon B. Hinckley, "the kind of faith that moves one to get on his knees and plead with the Lord and then get on his feet and go to work"

Prayer - "Nothing you will do during any day of your life will be more important to your temporal success or your eternal progress than consistent, humble, sincere prayers offered at least morning and night of every day."

Scripture Study

One of my fellow quorum members confided to me that he had not missed a day in reading or pondering the scriptures since he entered the Missionary Training Center in preparation for his mission. That was approximately 40 years ago. What a commitment! What dedication to the Lord! What a great example for each of us to follow!

Those who demonstrate the greatest consistency in their scripture study do so because they follow daily a set time to read. They do not speed-read so many pages a day. Rather, they read and then ponder about the application in their lives of what they have read. But they do it daily, and they do it as a serious part of their personal plan for spiritual growth.

My challenge to you tonight is to reflect carefully on how you evaluate your personal progress in the practice of your faith, prayers, and scripture study daily. Are you providing daily spiritual sustenance to your testimony? Are your actions in these areas providing the willpower against all that the adversary is showing you every day? If not, please think carefully about the changes you will make.

Obedience to the Commandments - "President Ezra Taft Benson simplified the principle of obedience for me when he said: 'When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power' "

"conformity the day the Red Sea opened"

Our bishop chose the message from A Prayer for the Children by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland for our fifth Sunday lesson in August.

Parents simply cannot flirt with skepticism or cynicism, then be surprised when their children expand that flirtation into full-blown romance. If in matters of faith and belief children are at risk of being swept downstream by this intellectual current or that cultural rapid, we as their parents must be more certain than ever to hold to anchored, unmistakable moorings clearly recognizable to those of our own household. It won’t help anyone if we go over the edge with them, explaining through the roar of the falls all the way down that we really did know the Church was true and that the keys of the priesthood really were lodged there but we just didn’t want to stifle anyone’s freedom to think otherwise. No, we can hardly expect the children to get to shore safely if the parents don’t seem to know where to anchor their own boat. Isaiah once used a variation on such imagery when he said of unbelievers, “[Their] tacklings are loosed; they could not . . . strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail.” Isaiah 33:23

Also

Nephi-like, might we ask ourselves what our children know? From us? Personally? Do our children know that we love the scriptures? Do they see us reading them and marking them and clinging to them in daily life? Have our children ever unexpectedly opened a closed door and found us on our knees in prayer? Have they heard us not only pray with them but also pray for them out of nothing more than sheer parental love? Do our children know we believe in fasting as something more than an obligatory first-Sunday-of-the-month hardship? Do they know that we have fasted for them and for their future on days about which they knew nothing? Do they know we love being in the temple, not least because it provides a bond to them that neither death nor the legions of hell can break? Do they know we love and sustain local and general leaders, imperfect as they are, for their willingness to accept callings they did not seek in order to preserve a standard of righteousness they did not create? Do those children know that we love God with all our heart and that we long to see the face—and fall at the feet—of His Only Begotten Son? I pray that they know this.

This talk reminds me of a story my dad often told me. His grandma lived next door to him as a teenager. One day as he was visiting with her she asked him if he had a testimony. He responded in a somewhat affirmative. She said to him that until he had a testimony of his very own. She wanted him to know that she knew.

I am beginning to carry this tradition on to my children. There are many things I do not know. At the root of it all, I know my parents love me. They have been good examples of what a disciple of Jesus is. Because of their model, I wanted to know for myself. I know that as I have practiced the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I have overflowed with happiness. My mind is clear. I am confident in all my doings. In short I have come to know as I know day from night that God lives (Mor 7:15). Jesus is His Son and my personal Savior. Joseph Smith was his prophet. Thomas S. Monson is his prophet today.

My knowledge comes from doing His will (John 7:17). Trying the word He has given me. The fruits of exercising my faith have been the proof. I hope to live my testimony by being increasingly constant in following the promptings I seek from Him.

Elder Holland related, "Elder Neal Maxwell once said to me in a hallway conversation, 'There didn’t seem to be any problem with conformity the day the Red Sea opened.' " I hope to by humble and reduce my need to be humbled as Israel was. To lead my children to the source so they need not look elsewhere for their thirst.

The Inexhaustible Gospel - behaving and knowing are inseparably linked

I just listened to "The Inexhaustible Gospel" a talk given by Neal A. Maxwell as a BYU devotional 18 Aug 1992 (text, media). It has been sitting on my iPod for months now. I woke up in the middle of the night so I decided to take a walk and listen to it.

Elder Maxwell has such a way with words. There is enough inspiration in this talk for many many blog entries. Inexhaustible.

For the last several months, I have been trying to keep in my mind what the word gospel means. In Mormon culture, gospel is sometimes loosely used to refer to the Mormon way of life, or any number of many teachings of the LDS church. It is helpful to me to remember that it means the good news from God. The central teaching of the LDS church. That Jesus is my Savior if I will have Him to be so. If I will enter into the agreement He offers. The phrase, Inexhaustible Gospel means more to me in this light. I am energized when I think about being saved.

Neal Maxwell describes how behaving and knowing play in the process of being saved.

gaining knowledge and becoming more Christlike "are two aspects of a single process" (Warner, Encyclopedia of Mormonism, vol. 4, p. 1490). This process is part of being "valiant" in our testimony of Jesus. Thus, while we are saved no faster than we gain a certain type of knowledge, it is also the case, as Richard Bushman has observed, that we will gain knowledge no faster than we are saved (Teachings, p. 217). So we have a fundamentally different understanding of knowledge and truth--behaving and knowing are inseparably linked. (emphasis added by me)

This truth that particularly interests me. My wife likes to tell the story of one night when I was falling to sleep as we prayed together. I said, "let us take in information as the air flows". I love information. I love learning all sorts of things. I often let this distract me from the weightier matters. Weightier matters sounds more interesting than it often is. The weightier matters sometimes is to change a diaper, to focus my energy to finishing a project for work. To be happy as I make lunch for my children 10 minutes before I want to leave for church. (Because I had not planned well for lunch.) As I do what I know is right in the moment I am in, I gain access to knowing. More, I become as that Savior is, step by step. I gain access to the help and joy and happiness He has.

Neal Maxwell states this principle again in relation to wisdom:

In gospel wisdom, knowing and behaving are irrevocably linked!

One basic limitation of worldly wisdom is its lack of longitudinality and of precious perspective. Worldly wisdom cannot "see afar off," and, without a spiritual memory, past mistakes are repeated; folly is resumed! Winston Churchill chose, by the way, as the motto for his last volume of World War II history these words:

"How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life." [Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953), p. ix]

Maxwell further describes this kind of discipleship as orthodoxy, "Ultimate orthodoxy--and orthodoxy isn't a popular word nowadays--is expressed in the Christlike life that involves both mind and behavior." Later he continues,

How intellectually amazing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is! The gospel is truly inexhaustible! It is marvelous! It is a wonder!

Yet orthodoxy is required to keep all these truths in essential balance. In orthodoxy lies real safety and real felicity! Flowing from orthodoxy is not only correctness but happiness.

It is in the doing that I become safely and permanently saved. By persisting in doing good, I gain integrity. It becomes part of my character. If I persist in learning His law, I come to understand how inadequate I am in doing it. I call upon His name as Alma did and He saves me. I am only required to do my best. I continue to call upon Him. I work hard. I rest and study and do all things in balance and order. I continue to cry unto Him and he saves me. When I stumble, He is there for me.

Minute after minute, hour, day, month and decade, I call upon His name. I renew my promises to Him each week. He fulfills His part of our bargain. As I continue to repent, my life fills with more joy and meaning. Intellectually, physically, emotionally and in all ways, he makes my life more enriched and satisfying. Bit by bit, He and I whittle away all that is not holy. All that prevents fullness of laughing and smiling.

That is enough for now. It is getting light outside and there are other things I am to be doing. I will list below more quotes from Neal Maxwell's talk. Perhaps I will write more about them later.

Brilliance, by itself, is not wholeness, nor happiness. Knowledge, if possessed for its own sake and unapplied, leaves one's life unadorned. A Church member, for instance, might describe the Lord's doctrines but not qualify to enter the Lord's house. One could produce much brilliant commentary without being exemplary. One might be intellectually brilliant but Bohemian in behavior. One might use his knowledge to seek preeminence or dominion.

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Truth includes, but is not limited to, knowledge that corresponds to reality--things as they were, things as they are, and things as they will be (Jacob 4:13; D&C 93:24). Gospel truth is "morally richer," therefore, than the world's definition of truth, as Terry Warner has written (Encyclopedia of Mormonism, vol. 4 [New York: Macmillan Co., 1992], p. 1490).

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you and I should be fully qualified and certified in traditional education and its processes for yet another very good reason: bilinguality. The men and women of Christ should be truly educated and articulate as to secular knowledge but should also be educated and articulate in the things of the Spirit!

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What does it mean to despise the shame of the world? (2 Nephi 9:18)
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"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (T. S. Eliot, The Rock [1934], I).
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I have always had a special appreciation for my friends who, though resolutely irreligious themselves, were not scoffers. Instead, though doubtless puzzled by me and their other religious friends, they were nevertheless respectful. I admire the day-to-day decency of such men and women. Though detached from theology, their decency is commendable.

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"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule." [Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), p. 190]

He closes, "by speaking further of Jesus, our Perfect Shepherd".