Sunday Selection: Be Perfected

Note: this post was actually initialized on Sunday, January 18, but I am just now posting it. Some of the thoughts may not have been fleshed out as much as I would have liked.

Today in Church, we had Ward Conference, so we got to hear from some of our leaders. The theme for the conference was from a scripture in the book of Mormon – Moroni 10:32-34. It says, in part:

Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in
him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of
all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is
his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in
Christ;

2 Nephi 25:23 supports this:

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our
children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to
God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

We can’t be perfect in this life, but the Lord, by His grace, will “finish up” our perfection AFTER we have done all that we can do to be perfect.

Other supporting scriptures:

Alma 13:6 - We are called to teach others so that they too can be perfected and return to live with God.

Moroni 7:48 - When he appears, we will be like Him, IF we have and pray for the pure love of Christ.

These came from President Voorwahler’s talk in Priesthood.

Glass of water analogy: we fill our glasses with our best effort to a certain level (a certain fraction).

The Lord then fills our glasses with what is missing—what is needed to make it full—AFTER all that we can do.

Other thoughts:

We must strive NOT to be complacent. As we do try to be perfect, we have to remember that there will always be new milestones to achieve. We must endure to the end and not be satisfied with “just” doing what we’ve done. "Enduring to the end" is not JUST accomplishing those initial goals, like getting baptized, going on a mission, going to the temple, etc.

Sunday Selection: Inspired Decisions

I wanted to share some of the thoughts we had as a group during Elder’s Quorum (Priesthood Meeting) at Church today. President Ladd taught the lesson, and it was on inspired decisions. He presented six steps to coming up with an inspired decision:

Six Steps to Coming Up With an Inspired Decision:

1. Identify the Problem
• We all make decisions everyday, sometimes trivial, sometimes life-changing. Sometimes they are spiritual, but sometimes they are more of a temporal nature. Examples of temporal decisions may be to find out which job to accept, whether to accept a job wherein you need to relocate, a question about your garden or your “fields” (Alma 37:37).

2. Pray About It
• I thought this was interesting. I would think prayer would be the last part of the process. Like it says in Doctrine & Covenants—study it out in your mind and in your heart, and THEN pray, and you will feel the answer to what you should do. But no, you should first pray as soon as you identify the problem. In this way, you can receive divine help all along the way, and SOMETIMES, the Lord will answer your prayer right then and there, and you can move right along to step 5. I have had this happen several times (mostly in the last year and a half), and each time, I was very surprised to hear the answer WHILE I was still praying—before I even ended the prayer! Each time, I thought, “Are you sure?! You don’t want me to… ponder it more?” So yes, it is well worth it to pray about your decision before you move on to the next steps in the process.

3. Study the Problem
• Ah yes. This goes to that scripture in D&C about the Lord making it known to you AFTER you study it out “in your mind and in your heart.” Study it out, ask friends and others who may inspire you, and just ponder it.

4. Make a Decision
• Since you are receiving divine help along the way, go ahead and make the decision. Be confident! This will be the choice that you bring to the Lord. Several times during this lesson, I thought of the story of the Brother of Jared at the beginning of the book of Ether in the Book of Mormon. I thought of how he had an important decision to make (how to have light in the 16 underwater barges in which he and his people would be traveling for the next year). He received a divine prompt to make a decision HIMSELF and THEN present it to the Lord for approval/confirmation. I thought of the confidence that he had when he brought his choice to the Lord, and the Lord rewarded him for his faith by helping him to know that the decision was a correct one.

5. Pray for Confirmation
• This is when we receive a “Yeah” or a “Neigh.” As you already know, you may not receive the answer you wanted, and it may not come WHEN you want it. That means not always right away, either.

6. Act—Do It!
• Sometimes we’ll think we made the wrong decision based on the results of the choice we made. Sometimes we won’t see that it was a good decision until much later. A lot of times we will ask, “Why?” “Why is this happening to ME?” If the times get tough, we also need to remember those feelings of confirmation that we did receive when we brought it to the Lord in prayer. Remember that decision-making process that was performed. Those six steps were important—don’t go back on your choose simply because it doesn’t feel right at first. Remember—that was an inspired decision!

We have to remember that things DO happen for a reason! We have to be ready for those tough times.

The other interesting thing that I got from this lesson was that we need to do the work ourselves—God will not take away our free agency by making the decision FOR us. This goes back to the story of the Jaredites—the brother of Jared needed to decide what HE wanted the Lord to do to help him. God wasn’t going to just spoon-feed it to him.

Sunday Selection: Unity

In today’s Priesthood class, we studied from Chapter 23 of the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith manual. The lesson was on the concept of unity, and it inspired me to write about how we can apply this to our lives. I’m not sure how neat and tidy this post will be (how unified, if you will), because it is just a collection of thoughts that I had while participating in the lesson. So maybe I will just present it that way here, and it will be helpful:

• The lesson mentioned the concept of putting forth a “concentrated action.” That was a neat idea to me. I like the word “concentrate.” It can not only mean to focus, but it also reminds me of concentrations of fluids in a compound. I like chemistry, and it is a neat idea that the ideas, actions, and yes, foci of each individual can help complete the mixture and create a genuinely good thing.

• History shows that when groups of people have banded their strengths together and became united, the results were much better than anything their individual efforts might have done.

• During the class today, a few of the class participants mentioned sports teams and how the teams with the high-paid, egotistical stars are usually not victorious. It is those teams that are filled with selfless, no-name, blue-collar players that want to win and perform concentrated actions as a team that may not show up in the box score, but that will help the team be victorious. A good example is an offensive line on a football team. Do they receive any accolade for their work? Although they are starting to get paid like true stars more and more each year, they will never be as famous or popular (at least in the fans’ eyes) as the so-called “skill players.”

• In any war, be it from the archives of the scriptures or in the history of our own country, platoons of soldiers that were unified were proven to be victorious.

• Unity starts in the family and then moves on to other organizations in each of our lives, be it in our Church, Scouts, Quorums, student groups, or even at work. I think it is utterly important that we establish that unity at home—among the people with whom we hope to spend the rest of our eternities. We must help each other out, so that we can then concentrate our actions on serving more of our brothers and sisters here on earth.

• I was also reminded of the Power Team that we have been instructed to have within our businesses, including our real estate endeavors. Having a power team is SO important in business—you’re not expected to be the expert at everything. The best entrepreneurs go out and find those people that can be the best at each individual discipline within the business. For example, if I have a portfolio of rental houses, could I be the property managers? Of course I could, but why not team up with somebody that has taken the time to be the master of fixing toilets, summing up the books, or even collecting rent. It just makes sense that a concentrated effort would be more effective than everything being done by an individual.

There were a few scriptures that were shared during the lesson, and I wanted to share three of them:

• John 17: 21-24; Christ pleaded with the Father that those who followed Him would be one with Him, and that He would be one with the Father.

• 4 Nephi 1: 15-18; this is a follow-up to the scripture in John. After Christ visited the Nephites, the people achieved unity because of their righteousness.

• 1 Corinthians 12:26 (12-27); If one member suffers, so do the rest of them, but one member has cause to rejoice, so do the rest.