William
Shakespeare’s play The Life of King Henry V includes
a nighttime scene in the camp of English soldiers at Agincourt just
before their battle with the French army. In the dim light and
partially disguised, King Henry wanders unrecognized among his
soldiers. He talks with them, trying to gauge the morale of his badly
outnumbered troops, and because they do not realize who he is, they
are candid in their comments. In one exchange they philosophize about
who bears responsibility for what happens to men in battle—the king
or each individual soldier.
At
one point King Henry declares, “Methinks I could not die any where
so contented as in the king’s company; his cause being just.”
His
companion agrees, “Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we
know enough, if we know we are the king’s subjects: if his cause be
wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.”
Not
surprisingly, King Henry disagrees. “Every subject’s duty is the
king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.”1
Shakespeare
does not attempt to resolve this debate in the play, and in one form
or another it is a debate that continues down to our own time—who
bears responsibility for what happens in our lives?
When
things turn bad, there is a tendency to blame others or even God.
Sometimes a sense of entitlement arises, and individuals or groups
try to shift responsibility for their
7:03pm
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Hello
Bruce Randall,
YOU
are awesome. At least God and I think so.! : )
This
talk came from conference. It has brought me great peace this week. I
have listened to it 5-6 times. I was surprised because it comes from
a new apostle and not one I had picked as a favorite.
Anytime
someone starts by quoting Shakespeare I automatically think they are
probably well read. I hate Shakespeare. I am glad he wrote but please
don't make me listen to him or read him or watch him. I was given two
$20 or 30 dollar tickets to go watch about 20 years ago and felt it
quite the good luck, but yuck! What a waste of time! I got to go with
my school 4 or 5 times when we had a charismatic drama teacher at
Desert Hills intermediate school and it was a little better. They
explained for the kids.
I set up the page this way so I can comment along the way, since you
probably did not get my text before dark, and we won't be visiting
you in person this month.
As
Varlo taught this lesson today I posed two questions. What about Alan
Averett who knows he shot people as a soldier? 1) And what about
Casius Clay and
welfare
to other people or to governments. In spiritual matters some suppose
that men and women need not strive for personal righteousness—because
God loves and saves us “just as we are.”
But
God intends that His children should act according to the moral
agency He has given them, “that every man may be accountable for
his own sins in the day of judgment.”2 It
is His plan and His will that we have the principal decision-making
role in our own life’s drama. God will not live our lives for us
nor control us as if we were His puppets, as Lucifer once proposed to
do. Nor will His prophets accept the role of “puppet master” in
God’s place. Brigham Young stated: “I do not wish any Latter Day
Saint in this world, nor in heaven, to be satisfied with anything I
do, unless the Spirit of the Lord Jesus
Christ,—the
spirit of revelation, makes them satisfied. I wish them to know for
themselves and understand for themselves.”3
So
God does not save us “just as we are,” first, because “just as
we are” we are unclean, and “no unclean thing can dwell … in
his presence; for, in the language of Adam, Man of Holiness is his
name, and the name of his Only Begotten is the Son of Man [of
Holiness].”4 And
second, God will not act to make us something we do not choose by our
actions to become. Truly He loves us, and because He loves us, He
neither compels nor abandons us. Rather He helps and guides us.
Indeed, the real manifestation of God’s love is His commandments.
We
should (and we do) rejoice in the God-ordained plan that permits us
to make choices to act for ourselves and experience the consequences,
or as the scriptures express it, to “taste the bitter, that [we]
may know to prize the good.”5 We
are forever grateful that the Savior’s Atonement overcame original
sin so that we can be born
others
who dodged the draft and then had amnesty declared so they were safe
in the US again? 2)
“Shift
responsibility” is a concept you and I feel strongly about!
My
next door non-member neighbor, Bill Young, believes that we need not
strive for personal righteousness-because God loves and saves us
“just as we are.” He is the one who believes baptism is optional.
I
didn't think any apostle would ever quote that statement from Brigham
Young. But he did.
I
have never liked thinking that nothing unclean can enter into God's
presence. I have always wanted to be able to keep just one little sin
or addiction. Don't you get tired of repenting? Man I did. I knew I
had to repent each time I partook of the sacrament or it would be
harmful to my spirit. How many decades could I sin and repent without
feeling helpless and powerless to change? Man when I was finally able
to put that sin/addiction behind me I thought, horray! Yippee! I will
never feel so unworthy taking the sacrament again! To me it was a sin
that overpowered or overshadowed all other sins. I
could abandon for long periods of time but it always came back. I
couldn't change under my power alone.
He
neither compels nor abandons us. Really?
into
this world yet not be punished for Adam’s transgression.6 Having
been thus redeemed from the Fall, we begin life innocent before God
and “become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for
[ourselves] and not to be acted upon.”7 We
can choose to become the kind of person that we will, and with God’s
help, that can be even as He is.8
The
gospel of Jesus Christ opens the path to what we may become. Through
the Atonement of Jesus Christ and His grace, our failures to live the
celestial law perfectly and consistently in mortality can be erased
and we are enabled to develop a Christlike character. Justice
demands, however, that none of this happen without our willing
agreement and participation. It has ever been so. Our very presence
on earth as physical beings is the consequence of a choice each of us
made to participate in our Father’s plan.9 Thus,
salvation is certainly not the result of divine whim, but neither
does it happen by divine will alone.10
Justice
is an essential attribute of God. We can have faith in God because He
is perfectly trustworthy. The scriptures teach us that “God doth
not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor
to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said,
therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal
round”11 and
that “God is no respecter of persons.”12 We
rely on the divine quality of justice for faith, confidence, and
hope.
But
as a consequence of being perfectly just, there are some things God
cannot do. He cannot be arbitrary in saving some and banishing
others. He “cannot look upon sin with the least degree of
allowance.”13 He
cannot allow mercy to rob justice.14
Satan
would have us believe otherwise. Quinn Carter compared Satan to a
character in Charlie Wonka's chocolate factory in my visit with them
this afternoon. “I'm just doing my job.” says the character.
We
can choose to become the kind of person that we will/want! And with
God's help, that can be even as He is. Two things! We have to
want/will, and we can't do it alone!
There
are so few members of the church on the earth right now. One of 500
people! How sad that so many of His children are in the mortal test
without understanding! Their true colors just sort of shine through
without the help, guidance and understanding that you and I have.
I have a favorite scripture I thought he might quote here. I love
this one, It is one one of my original 16 that I would repeat to
myself when I couldn't sleep at night. “And now the plan of mercy
could not be brought about except an atonement should be made.
Therefore God himself atoneth for the sins of the world, that God
might be a perfect, just God and a merciful God also.”
There
are some things God cannot do. That brings to mind some funny
riddles/questions teenagers ask each other as they try to figure out
how powerful God really is.
mercy.
It is because He is just that He devised the means for mercy to play
its indispensable role in our eternal destiny. So now, “justice
exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her
own.”15
We
know that it is “the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in
whom [the Father] wast well pleased; … the blood of [His] Son which
was shed”16 that
satisfies the demands of justice, extends mercy, and redeems
us.17 Even
so, “according
to justice, the
plan of redemption could not be brought about, only
on conditions of repentance.”18 It
is the requirement of and the opportunity for repentance that permits
mercy to perform its labor without trampling justice.
Christ
died not to save indiscriminately but to offer repentance. We rely
“wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save”19in
the process of repentance, but acting to repent is a self-willed
change. So by making repentance a condition for receiving the gift of
grace, God enables us to retain responsibility for ourselves.
Repentance respects and sustains our moral agency: “And thus mercy
can satisfy the demands of justice, and encircles them in the arms of
safety, while he that exercises no faith unto repentance is exposed
to the whole law of the demands of justice; therefore only unto him
that has faith unto repentance is brought about the great and eternal
plan of redemption.”20
Misunderstanding
God’s justice and mercy is one thing; denying God’s existence or
supremacy is another, but either will result in our achieving
less—sometimes far less—than our full, divine potential. A God
who makes no demands is the functional equivalent of a God who does
not exist. A world without God, the living God who establishes moral
laws to govern and perfect His children, is also a world without
A
God that makes no demands. . . Woah! Powerful statement.
Wouldn't
it feel awful if there were no God? Where would be our ultimate
fairness when we finally die and receive our just rewards?
ultimate
truth or justice. It is a world where moral relativism reigns
supreme.
Relativism
means each person is his or her own highest authority. Of course, it
is not just those who deny God that subscribe to this philosophy.
Some who believe in God still believe that they themselves,
individually, decide what is right and wrong. One young adult
expressed it this way: “I don’t think I could say that Hinduism
is wrong or Catholicism is wrong or being Episcopalian is wrong—I
think it just depends on what you believe. … I don’t think that
there’s a right and wrong.”21 Another,
asked about the basis for his religious beliefs, replied, “Myself—it
really comes down to that. I mean, how could there be authority to
what you believe?”22
To
those who believe anything or everything could be true, the
declaration of objective, fixed, and universal truth feels like
coercion—“I shouldn’t be forced to believe something is true
that I don’t like.” But that does not change reality. Resenting
the law of gravity won’t keep a person from falling if he steps off
a cliff. The same is true for eternal law and justice. Freedom comes
not from resisting it but from applying it. That is fundamental to
God’s own power. If it were not for the reality of fixed and
immutable truths, the gift of agency would be meaningless since we
would never be able to foresee and intend the consequences of our
actions. As Lehi expressed it: “If ye shall say there is no law, ye
shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye
shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no
righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness
nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things
are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither
the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither
to act nor to be
Reading/listening
to these rationalizations was Painful for me. They are so real. They
seem so reasonable. Don't you like how he can declare them black. Not
grey. Black. Oh I love having apostles that can do that for us!
What
do you think of Lehi's logic here?
acted
upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.”23
In
matters both temporal and spiritual, the opportunity to assume
personal responsibility is a God-given gift without which we cannot
realize our full potential as daughters and sons of God. Personal
accountability becomes both a right and a duty that we must
constantly defend; it has been under assault since before the
Creation. We must defend accountability against persons and programs
that would (sometimes with the best of intentions) make us dependent.
And we must defend it against our own inclinations to avoid the work
that is required to cultivate talents, abilities, and Christlike
character.
We
must defend it against programs that would make us dependent. No
freebees for us! We need to earn our way and Not “avoid the work
that is required to cultivate our talents.” What work are you
exerting right now to cultivate your talents? I am indexing at the
FHCenter in Italian. And I am as challenged as I want to be. I made a
goal of 3K names this month. I am not going to reach it. I was stuck
on tough, tough handwriting and names I had never seen before and it
took me an hour a batch and sometimes 2 hours or 3! A week ago I
decided I had had enough of the tough stuff and went back to the city
of Cuneo to index. I had one batch this week that I got done in 24
minutes. They are supposed to take about 30 minutes.
The
story is told of a man who simply would not work. He wanted to be
taken care of in every need. To his way of thinking, the Church or
the government, or both, owed him a living because he had paid his
taxes and his tithing.
He had nothing to eat but refused to work to care for himself. Out of
desperation and disgust, those who had tried to help him decided that
since he would not lift a finger to sustain himself, they might as
well just take him to the cemetery and let him pass on. On the way to
the cemetery, one man said, “We can’t do this. I have some corn I
will give him.”
It
is God’s will that we be free men and women enabled to rise to our
full potential both temporally and spiritually, that we be free from
the humiliating limitations of poverty and the bondage of sin, that
we enjoy self-respect and independence, that we be prepared in all
things to join Him in His celestial kingdom.
I
am under no illusion that this can be achieved by our own efforts
alone without His very substantial and constant help. “We know that
it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”24 And
we do not need to achieve some minimum level of capacity or goodness
before God will help—divine aid
can
be ours every hour of every day, no matter where we are in the path
of obedience. But I know that beyond desiring His help, we must exert
ourselves, repent, and choose God for Him to be able to act in our
lives consistent with justice and moral agency. My plea is simply to
take responsibility and go to work so that there is something for God
to help us with.
I
bear witness that God
the Father lives,
that His Son, Jesus Christ, is our Redeemer, and that the Holy Spirit
is present with us. Their desire to help us is undoubted, and Their
capacity to do so is infinite. Let us “awake, and arise from the
dust, … that the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made
unto [us] may be fulfilled.”25 In
the name of Jesus Christ, amen.4. I
am under no illusion that this can be achieved by our own efforts
alone without His very substantial and constant help. 8:08pm
vj
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