Of a Christmas Tree and Everything Good

 

We are now into the third week of our Christmas tree, braving the low humidity of indoors in the wintry season.  It is still drinking, though about half as much as in the first days, when a gallon or so of water had to be added between morning and late evening. 

We could celebrate Christmas without a tree, but our tree is a focus of Christmas and its meaning.  Our evergreen has ever been a symbol of Jesus Christ.  The tree itself, with its conical greenery pointing upward, emphasizes life when most of the trees around are leafless. 

Those other trees are not dead, but rather filled with life.  Scripture speaks of life in deciduous trees metaphorically.  Loved ones and friends who have passed on from this life may appear to be gone.  A tree may be bare for the season.  Yet, it springs to life at a time whose chief holiday is Easter, the reminder of the resurrection of Christ, extending resurrection and newness of life to each of us when our own season of spring comes.

Upon our Christmas tree we place ornaments of many kinds.  While in great variety, the ornaments to us are all unified.  They display the reality taught in scripture:

. . . in Christ there should come every good thing . . . and all things which are good cometh of Christ” (Moroni 10:22, 24).

If you have a Christmas tree, perhaps upon yours as upon ours there will be found memories of family.  Families are divine gifts, and Christ gave us the way that our families may be united forever.

We have ornaments of fruit, whose beauty, goodness, and plethora are gifts from the Creator.  That is also true of ornaments reminiscent of wondrous places that we have been and seen.

There are charming images in other ornaments retelling stories and tales from inspired authors, among recreations in beauty of form and color.  Mixed in are images of snowflakes, of stars, of beaches, of flowers.  Jumbled about the tree are decorations testifying of birds and animals and other displays of nature well beyond human design.

Were you to gaze upon our tree, and perhaps on yours as well, you might ask, “Then what is the purpose of the ornaments of the Congress and the Senate and the White House?”  Based upon some personal experience, I would reply, they remind us of the Constitution that God inspired the Founders to give us.  From that gift we have enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a nation under God for many generations, with hopes for more generations to come.

Looking to the top of the tree, as with nearly all Christmas trees, there is a special ornament given prime position.  I helped make ours from things that someone else made, depicting an angel flying above the world with a book of scripture on one arm and with the other holding a trumpet to his lips.  It is an effort to resound Christ’s prophecy through the Apostle John to us in these latter days:

And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.

(Revelation 14:6,7)

With that glory represented on our Christmas tree, it is easy to look about us and see uncountable examples of good things that Jesus Christ, the Creator, has given and still gives to us.  It is His wish that we “may lay hold upon every good thing” (Moroni 7:25), and that forever.

Of Vanity and Measureless Worth

 

Photo by Jean Wimmerlin on Unsplash

Millions who were recently fully employed today choose to remain off the market.  The unemployment rate, measured by the number seeking work who have not landed a job, is therefore approaching record lows.  Available jobs outnumber those looking for them.  The total of all employed remains fewer than it was two years ago.  Too many have stopped looking.  With generous government benefits for doing nothing, more than a few have concluded, what is the point?

That is bad for the economy, but it is worse for those who have taken a pass at gainful employment.  It is the ancient attitude of personal desuetude.  Solomon, the King of Israel of antiquity, wrote, “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 1:14)  Has the spiritual wind that brings value to life gone out of people’s sails?  Or have many stopped unfurling their sails?  Giving up on work, are they giving up on living?

Having seen it all, and explored and pondered life, Solomon, the richest and wisest of kings, ruled Israel at its peak in wealth and sway.  Observing “all things that are done under heaven,” he concluded, “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.  What profit hath a man of all his labour . . .?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 3)  Solomon presented a powerful case.  He described the profound emptiness of the ephemeral existence he perceived.  Generations of people come and go, forgotten.  People’s eyes are not satisfied with seeing nor their ears with hearing.  There is little remembrance of what was done in the past, and what will come will be little recalled by those who come after.  Man’s search for wisdom finds grief and his increase in knowledge increases his sorrow.  “There is no new thing under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9ff.)

A cursory reading of Solomon’s Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, has led some to regard Solomon’s wisdom as having soured on existence.  A more careful reading reveals an inspired wisdom that reaches beyond the world.  Solomon recognized, and hoped to cause others to recognize, that lasting value is not to be found in the perishable things of mortality.  He declared, “I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness.” (Ecclesiastes 2:13)  He taught that wisdom was not to be found in a focus on things under heaven, but in the things from heaven, the eternal things.  God gave us the world as the school for us to prepare for heaven.  A focus on the world itself is folly, nothing but dust in the end.  A focus on the eternal, however, can enrich life now and to come.

What are the eternal things?  The scriptures resonate with counsel to make our life bountiful.  In modern times, Jesus Christ offered an exemplary list of things that give us joy and meaning today and endow us for heaven.  “Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence.” (Doctrine and Covenants 4:6) 

The temporary and transient are provided to be harnessed by us as we secure now and take with us what can be never ending.  What is that?  It is all that can go with us beyond the temporary grave, such as our family relations and the virtues that are developed in a family better than anywhere else.  I recently heard my daughter say that being a mother is the hardest work she has ever done, and she loves it.

Solomon urged a rearrangement of our priorities from an attraction to what would become inevitable vanity under heaven, to the use of what the Creator has given us to prepare for living in heaven.  “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.”  This is what Solomon called, “the conclusion of the whole matter . . .” (Ecclesiastes 12:1, 13)

The gift from Jesus Christ is to guide, preserve, magnify, and hold to every good thing which, if we will accept His gift, “without compulsory means . . . shall flow unto thee forever and ever.” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:46)

Of Sincerity and Talking with God

 

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

In the 1700s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, referring to times of personal stress, wrote, “I turned with my request to my Invisible Friend.  I was received so kindly, that I gladly came again.”  Speaking with God is simple.  It may not always be easy.  A basic requisite is sincerity.  When we share with our Heavenly Father a sincere message from the heart, He is eager to listen. 

That is also a basic criterion for us to hear God.  Our Heavenly Father is eager to speak with us when we are sincerely listening.  That means sincerely wanting to know what our Father wants us to know, and being sincerely willing to do what He asks us to do. 

This is prayer and revelation.  Such prayers are answered, and our lives can be made happier.

Can that happen now?  Can I speak with God and get a personal answer?  Yes.  The Lord has given us a prophet today, Russell M. Nelson, who reminded us, as prophets have often taught, that the “privilege of receiving revelation is one of the greatest gifts of God to His children.” 

The Lord has never desired that His prophet be the only one to receive revelation.  When Moses led the children of Israel through the desert, he replied to a complaint about someone in the camp receiving revelation, “would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Numbers 11:29).  Our Father does not want us to wander in the dark, not knowing how to cope with life’s problems.

We are all in the process of dying.  That is why this existence is called “mortality.”  But until we reach the end of that process, we are also in the process of living.  Our Father likes to help us to live well, so that when we die we will be able to live with Him eternally.  He will show us how if we sincerely want to know.

When I was a child, I wondered what it would be like to live in the day when Apostles of Jesus Christ walked the earth.  Some years later I came to know that I was living in those days, that once again Jesus Christ has called Apostles, from ordinary professions, to follow Him in teaching the Father’s children how to live with joy. 

One of these Apostles of Christ is David Bednar.  He recently spoke with a young man whose wife, just a few months before, died from cancer.  The man asked, “What can we do to understand God’s will for us in our personal life?”  With great tenderness Apostle Bednar addressed the question.  He said that he knew that the man’s departed wife was “a righteous woman, and no righteous man, no righteous woman passes before his or her time.”  

Turning to the question of God’s will for this young widower, he recounted a similar conversation with a young girl at a funeral for an older brother.  She had asked, why would God let this happen?  This Apostle of Christ candidly said to her, “I don’t know, but I know God knows, and because I know God knows, I’m O.K. not knowing right now.”  So, he invited this son of God to listen to the revelations from the Lord and, while yet in this life, press on to do what his loving Father inspires him do.  

The gift of personal revelation continues available to this young man.  It is available to each of us, too, as we sincerely seek it.

Of Jesus Christ and Life

Life.  Jesus said, “I am the life” (Doctrine & Covenants 11:28).

Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:32)

Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God:  and they that hear shall live.  For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:25, 26).

I will tell you the story of a German woman, whom for this relation I will name Hertha Lux Bullerman.  Hertha was the mother of 5 children, three boys and two girls.  She lived in far eastern Germany.

Her first child was a daughter, Ursula.  Her second was her first son.  He was named Fritz.  Ursula and Fritz were close, as first and second born children can be.

 

Next was born another son, named Hubertus.  Hubertus died a day short of four weeks after he was born.  Hertha’s next child was a third son, to whom was given a name similar to his brother’s, perhaps in memory of his brother who lived such a short time.  This third son was named Hubert.  Hubert died from typhus, a few days short of his third birthday.  Last born of the children was Hertha’s second daughter, named Christa.

Hertha Lux Bullerman outlived all of her children except her oldest, Ursula.  She also outlived her husband, Alfred, who died in 1938 of an incurable disease, just a few short years before that disease, tuberculosis, became very curable.

The family was religious.  Alfred was a Lutheran minister, and they all lived in the parsonage, along with Hertha’s father for a time, who was an organist for the church.  It was Ursula’s job to work the pump that gave the air that gave the sound to the pipes of the organ.  For Ursula, as a child, that was hard work.  You could get tired long before the music was through.

 

Ursula’s grandfather, Theodor Bruno Waldemar, was proud of her.  They would often walk in the town, old grandfather and young granddaughter.  When other children saw them walking together, they would sometimes call out, “There comes the old musician, with his daughter, the clarinet.”  Grandfather would beam with pride, while Ursula thought altogether differently about the peer recognition.

I speak of these things and these people, because this is life, and they lived it.  And they are all children of God, the God of the living.

Yet so much of it happened before my mortal life, before I arrived on earth and my mortal reality began.  Did it really happen?  How could it be real?  Are the people of the past, of long ago and not so long ago, real?  I am quite sure that it was and that they are.

One year and a month after the death of Hertha’s husband, Alfred, Germany was at war with nearly all of its neighbors.

Hertha’s remaining son, Fritz, was 16 when the war began.  Before the war was over he would serve in a tank on the Russian front.  Fritz never returned home.  He died, in late autumn of 1943, in Ukraine, not far from where there is war again today.

A year later, in November 1944, the old musician, Hertha’s father, died.  Of Hertha’s family, she and her two daughters remained.  In not many weeks all three would flee for their lives from the Red Army.

The three women, barely fitting on the overcrowded refugee train, could take very little with them.  Why did Hertha bring with her the folder containing her family history?  With her world crashing down around her, with so many of her family and friends gone, with her homeland behind her and a merciless enemy at her back, why would those records of the dead have any value?  Were these people who had gone, children, husband, father, family, real anymore?

Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Jesus said, “I am the life”.

Hertha and her daughters, Ursula and Christa, found refuge in southern Germany.  Though her new home would soon be occupied by another enemy, it was a more merciful one than the communists.

Hertha and both daughters survived the war.  The younger one, Christa, married and had children of her own, though she died from an illness in the mid-1960s.  The older sister, Ursula, married an American soldier and came to the United States.  She brought with her that treasured folder of family history, preserved by Hertha through fire and flame, through tragedy and chaos.

Ursula herself died just 10 years ago, from Alzheimer’s disease.  She had forgotten much of what I have remembered for you today.  While my mother’s memory of these people faded away the people did not.  She regained them and her memory of them all just as she joined them in the world of spirits.

We all have such stories.  I am glad for those that I have saved.  I wish that I had saved more.  That folder of family history mattered very much.  Why did my grandmother entrust that folder to my mother?  My grandmother rescued more than her daughters in the cold winter of 1945.

Because the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ extend life to all, I have confidence in the day when we shall be united.  

Of What We Know and What We Are

Recently, while reading in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I thought back to when my two oldest daughters attended nursery during Sunday School hours at church.  We were then members of a congregation with many young families.  There were so many children that they divided the nursery into Senior Nursery and Junior Nursery.  The dividing line was between those who had turned two by the start of the year and those who had not yet reached that august age.  My older daughter—who is a real sweetheart and has since become the mother of daughters herself—was very proud that she was in Senior Nursery, while her sister was in Junior Nursery.

The mysterious relationship between my reading of the Romans and those events of not so long ago is that both emphasize how brief and transitory this life is.  Whether our mortal life is allocated more than 70 years or fewer than 7, the time all told is rather short, and I dare say mercifully so. 

This life is filled with the rich, the beautiful, as well as what is poor and ugly, and mostly what is very much temporary and does not matter.  The emperors of Rome came and went so quickly, few living to die of natural causes.  They scraped and fought and intrigued and connived to possess what they could not hold for long and which at the end left them nothing.  The royal purple for the emperors at last was little more important than whether my daughters were in Senior or Junior Nursery.  It all mattered about the same.

Some things do matter, greatly.  While they can involve tangible things, all that in this life of lasting value is intangible and survives the universal tomb.  Now I am watching my children cope with the mighty challenges that life concentrates into the years of transition from adolescence to adulthood.  Life’s calling, personal dedication, education, careers, marriage, family, truly life-changing decisions come at these young people inexorably in relentless and rapid succession.  They have tangible elements of mortality to employ as tools to aid and markers to help measure the evaluating and making of these important decisions.  They wade into deep problems when these material tools are mistaken for the real things.

As parents we watch, support, counsel, encourage, but the decisions are no longer ours.  With no small amount of concern, and with generous measures of satisfaction, we can witness these whom we love the most exercise their own free will to lay out the remaining course of their mortality.  For Mom and Dad, this period of life has been rich, sometimes painful, and frequently joyful.  It is for us a harvesting time, even while for our children it is mostly a time of planting.  

I am reminded that, with each graduation, one proceeds from the top of a staircase onto the bottom step of a new one.  When my daughter left Senior Nursery, she was at the bottom of the classes of Primary.  The seniors in high school become the freshmen in college.  The college graduate becomes the “newbie” at work.  In my employment I frequently am called upon to consider candidates for jobs.  Shall I tell you how little impressed I would be to learn that a particular applicant had been student council president or editor of the yearbook?

I believe that so it goes in the heavens.  We eternally progress from stage to stage, with Jesus Christ as our Guide, Leader, and Teacher, each stage well done qualifying us to begin the next, bringing us ever closer to become more like our Father in Heaven.  The value is in this very real becoming.  Our greatest worldly achievements of rank and fame bring with them into heaven as little weight as our grade school awards convey into adulthood.  With much concern God watches how we make our decisions, how we develop our character, with satisfaction and joy as we choose what is good and act well.  Like wise parents, God cannot and will not choose for us, our choices at planting being part of His joy in the harvest.

Again, as I recall my children in nursery, and my grandchildren there today, I reflect that there is so much that I would tell them but which they would not begin to understand.  There is a treasury of what I have learned in over 5 decades that I would share but that would be completely incomprehensible to a granddaughter or grandson in primary school. 

Then I reflect that compared to my Heavenly Father, my treasury is the knowledge of an infant, that I even today am such a little child in terms of what I know.  Indeed, were I to know all that there is available to know in this life, it would still be so very little compared with what our Father in the eternal worlds knows and has for us to learn when we once again live with Him.  A modern Apostle, Dallin H. Oaks (a former university president), once remarked that an omniscient God is not all that impressed with our Ph.Ds.  

But if I do well with what He has given and taught me, I have received the living hope from His Son that I may come step by step in the presence of the Father to know all that He would share, which is everything.  That is humbling and exhilarating.  I am glad that I have not really very long to wait, and that I can learn my first lessons even now.

Of Vanity and Christmas Gifts

The prophets, ancient and modern, are clear that this life is a very artificial thing.  The earth and this mortality did not just happen.  They were carefully planned in the sphere of the eternities, for very specific—and lasting—purposes.

Abraham reported this, from a vision wherein he saw God speaking of us, His spirit children, before He created the earth:

We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; . . . and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever. (Abraham 3:24-26)

Some centuries later Moses had a related vision, in which the Lord told him,

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. (Moses 1:39)

Our glory appears to be the Lord’s glory.  It is the Lord’s work and glory that we grow and progress forever.  The mortal mission and sacrifice of Jesus Christ were all part of His work for our immortality and eternal life.  I am not sure that the Lord cares anything at all about anything we do other than what we do that affects His work and His glory.  I do not find any evidence in the scriptures that anything else that we do matters to Him.  Of course, in an eternal context, nothing else we do really matters to us, either.   All of that other stuff is what the author of Ecclesiastes refers to as “vanity of vanities” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

That vanity, the key theme of the Book of Ecclesiastes, is what many people seem to think that this life is all about.  Many people live this life as if this life really mattered much, when in truth, all that matters about this life is how it affects the true reality, which resides in the eternal worlds, beyond this world and life.  Lasting value and meaning are found in what we take with us when we leave this world. 

That is a good filter, if we wish to discern what in this life is imperishable and real and what is temporary and vain.  If you take it with you past the grave, it matters.  If it does not, fuhgeddaboudit.  Or, at least, do not set your heart on it or waste much time with it.

That might be a good guide for Christmas gifts.  By that I mean, consider the purpose behind the giving of the gift.  Is its purpose to transfer possession of vanity, that has no reach beyond the grave?  Or is it instead intended to communicate and strengthen ties of love, friendship, to show kindness, to build relationships, to facilitate personal growth and progress, to memorialize pleasant shared experiences, to express and transmit value?  Consider how it may be tied to this list of eternal verities that stay with us?

Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence. (Doctrine and Covenants 4:6)

There is a lot of Christmas Spirit in that list.  Such solemnized gifts are not likely to break and never grow old.  They are very real.  To the extent they embrace such virtues, I think we remember them.

Of Free Agency and the Game of Life

This past week my wife and I were drawn to an interesting and insightful headline from the Sports section of the newspaper:  “Free agency can be useful tool if used correctly”.  Very true.  This may be true in the games of sports.  It certainly is true in life.

In professional sports, free agency means having some choice as to which team a player may join and on what terms, depending on talent and performance, interest, and the advocacy skill of his representative, among other factors.  Used well, the player may go on to a successful and happy career, profitable for him and for his team, opening up even greater opportunities, including perhaps championship achievements and continuing successes beyond.  Used unwisely, free agency can lead to a career that is a frustrating struggle inhibiting growth, achievement, and limiting follow on opportunities.

In life, free agency means that you and I can choose our manner of living in mortality and, in the process, the terms of living and opportunities available in the immortal worlds, depending again on talent (as expressed in performance), interest (again demonstrated by performance), and the effectiveness of our representative.  If you will agree to His terms, you can have the very best Advocate as your representative, who only emphasizes your triumphs and takes upon Himself the blame for all of your failures.

A popular board game I knew as a child was “The Game of LIFE.”  In this game several players compete by moving along the board on a marked path, buffeted by the vicissitudes and aggrandized by the rewards of life as determined by the cast of the die.  Its virtue is that it presents to children how life is a steadily moving journey filled with a variety of experiences building to some degree on the ones before.  The game was not a favorite of mine, because it asks for little skill from the players, the events of the game subject almost entirely to chance.  In that sense, it teaches the false lesson that how you fare in life has almost nothing to do with your skill and the exercise of your free agency and everything to do with fate, beyond your control. Success or failure happens.  Perhaps the game does little harm as a diversion, but I have not played it in a long while.

Life is not a game of chance.  Neither, is it a sport, least of all a spectator sport.  Each of us is the key and central player involved in making and applying decisions.  The period of life called mortality is a testing ground, where decisions are free only because results are meaningful.  The results derive their meaning from their reach into the worlds of immortality, following our death and resurrection.  Because life has meaning then, it has meaning now. 

That meaning is a gift from Jesus Christ, purchased by His free gift of voluntarily suffering for our sins, including surrendering His life in an unjust execution, one that He could have prevented should He have exercised His free agency not to bear our burdens.  Because of the injustice of that suffering, He came back from the dead and conquered death, to die no more.  Death was thus converted into a temporary interlude for all of us, allowing the choices of this life to extend beyond the grave.

If, on the contrary, each one of us were to end in death, if our being were then to cease to exist, then nothing we did would really matter in that end.  Whatever we did, whatever we achieved, whatever we learned, so what?  It would all be gone, never to be reclaimed. 

Nothing we do makes any difference in the end, if in the end we are nothing, literally nothing.  As far as we are concerned, it all vanishes with us, and any memory of us ends with the end of any who remembered.  With nothing now mattering later, then all loses any present meaning.  Any meaning we attach to anything now is a mirage, or even a charade.  Like a child’s game, things seem to matter until the game is over, when nothing matters.

If nothing that we do matters, then the choices and decisions that we make do not matter, they have no lasting result, they make no real difference in the end.  Whether we put too much salt or pepper in the soup, it makes no difference if no one eats it.  With death as the end of it all, of all existence of any kind for each of us, then we really have no freedom, because we cannot and do not change anything for ourselves or for others.  In any and all cases, whatever choices we make, it all ends the same way, in complete nothingness, annihilation of being.  Choice itself becomes meaningless, a mirage, a charade.

But it is not like that in reality.  It does not feel like that, and very few of us, even the atheists among us, believe or act like nothingness is our destiny, as if what we do is lost in the void, as if our choices do not matter.  Christ’s redemption of us and of the world has changed everything for everyone.  It gives lasting value to our choices, our actions, our decisions, making them all very real, preserving their consequences, their reach into the continuing life beyond our very temporary death.  Our decisions can and do affect ourselves and others, in lingering ways.  Christ’s redemption from death makes our freedom possible, then and now, because what we do matters, and how it matters is preserved.

With that freedom, Christ has given us a tool, which certainly can be useful, if used correctly.  Fortunately, He also has given us guidance and still gives us guidance so that we may get and save the best results from the use of our free agency.  And that is a big part of why we celebrate Easter, why Christ's atonement and resurrection are the central event in Earth's history.

Of Belief and Choice

Belief in God is a choice, and with all choices worthy of the name, there are results directly related to that choice.  If you choose to believe, you receive the fruits of belief, and with belief strong enough to result in action you receive the fruits of faith.  If you choose not to believe in God, you receive the results and consequences of that choice, also.

It is important to understand that belief or disbelief in God does not change the reality of God’s existence or change Him in any way.  All it does is change your relationship to God.  A major purpose of this life, for each person who lives it, is to develop and test faith in God, so your choice of belief matters a lot to you and how you live and succeed in this very brief and temporary existence we call mortality.

The principles of belief and faith in general are recognized for being so closely tied to action that the maxim is oft repeated that whether you believe that you will fail or that you will succeed in something you are likely to be right, since your belief will govern your effort.  There is a similarity—but only a similarity—with regard to belief in God.  Whether you believe in God or not in this life, the events of life are likely to seem to confirm you in your belief.  Those who believe in God will, if they choose to persist in their belief, increasingly see His hand in everything.  Those who choose not to believe in God will find many ways to convince themselves of their choice.

Those with faith in God see evidence of Him in all things and are increasingly able to draw upon the powers of heaven.  The ancient American prophet Alma declared, “I have all things as a testimony” of God (Alma 30:41).  Jesus Christ, after His resurrection, declared to His disciples that “signs shall follow them that believe” (Mark 16:17).  In modern times the Savior declared again that “signs follow those that believe”, but He warned and added that signs come “not by the will of men, nor as they please, but by the will of God.” (Doctrine and Covenants 63:9, 10)  God is not a machine, responding to direction and command, but rather a loving parent who bestows His blessings on His children for our benefit as plentifully as we will receive.  Our belief enhances our ability to receive.

On the other hand, those who choose not to believe in God in this life can usually conjure up reasons not to believe and even to explain away what believers would consider strong evidences of the reality of God.  These words spoken nearly a hundred years before the birth of Christ, by one who chose not to believe, sound very fresh in the twenty-first century:

Behold, these things which ye call prophecies, which ye say are handed down by holy prophets, behold, they are foolish traditions of your fathers.

How do ye know of their surety?  Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ.

Ye look forward and say that ye see a remission of your sins.  But behold, it is the effect of a frenzied mind; and this derangement of your minds comes because of the traditions of your fathers, which lead you away into a belief of things which are not so.  (Alma 30:14-16)

It has been my observation that God usually leaves for those who choose not to believe plenty of room to apply their choice, to find an explanation that excludes God and His power.  He rarely provides knowledge founded on hard, convincing evidence until after a person has made his choice to believe and exercised faith.  Then the evidences come and with increasing clarity. 

The Lord wants the virtues that are associated with belief—humility, patience, perseverance, trust, courage, obedience, and many others including broadness of mind and soul—to be developed in us, which would be scarcely possible if He provided the evidence of conviction before the development and trial of our faith in Him.  As we grow in our faith, we grow in these other virtues.

Not only does the person who chooses not to believe fail to recognize the evidences of God before Him, but God intentionally withholds from him the greater evidences.  In effect, the Lord rewards believer and unbeliever with what they choose, confirmation of belief or the withholding of what the unbeliever would consider verification.  The unbeliever, as with the believer, has to come to the knowledge of God through faith. 

Part of the grace of God, available in this life, is that the choice of unbelief is not final while mortality lasts, and those who believe are commanded by God to employ their faith to help stir belief and faith in others.  “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17)  Believers are commanded to tell, to share their belief.  God is ready to begin to lead to faith and from faith to knowledge those who will begin to hear.  “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Matthew 11:15)

Of Mountains and Forever

They say that the mountains of the East are far older than the mountains of the West and at one time were just as lofty.  Over ages and ages the Appalachian Mountains have been worn down by wind and rain and the other engines of change, their substance contributing to much of the land on which many of the people of the southeastern United States today live and where generations before them cleared the land, built their homes, and at length departed. 

The sugary white beach sands of Florida’s Emerald Coast are said to be uncountable grains of quartz eroded from the mountains far to the north.  The cities of Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Macon, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; and numerous others are outposts along the “Fall Line” of the eastern seaboard, marking where the ocean once met the land and where eons later waterfalls and rapids set the limit that colonial ships could travel up the rivers.  All of the land between these cities and today’s coast was created from the rocks of the timelessly ancient Appalachians.

And yet these mountains are still majestic for all of that wear and tear.  The clouds ever cling to the Smoky Mountains, while in Virginia, as the Blue Ridge, the mountains rise as the rocky fence that for the early colonists divided the new land between what they called east and west. 

I recently spent a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on the western side of the Smokies.  In the morning the view of Mt. LeConte and other towering peaks greeted me, and at night they fed evening reverie. 

Each evening of the week the family gathered for a devotional on a wide porch with that marvelous view as our backdrop.  Each adult family member, often helped by a younger participant, took a turn leading us in song, prayer, scripture study, and a spiritual message.  Spiritual thoughts came easy in that setting.  On one evening in full twilight I called upon the setting for my visual aid.

The mountains of the East are distinguished by being blanketed in forest framing the occasional meadow, with very infrequent exposed rock.  I drew attention to the forest covering, noting that among the woodland growth there were a fair number of trees shorn of every leaf—long dead.  I remarked that all of the living trees that we saw would die in turn, and that the mountains themselves were steadily disappearing, imperceptibly wearing away.  We live in a world that of itself is a world of steady decay, with no earthly exceptions.

And then the point of the message (with little ones in attendance you have to reach the point soon enough):  each one of us is older than the mountains before us.  Our Heavenly Father told us long before time all about this world and His plan for us here while we lived in His presence in His eternal home that preexisted the earth.  From that eternal world we were sent to a world where all was change and where decay prevailed.  This temporary world is our learning, growing, and testing ground, where we have full freedom to choose who and what we want to become.      

Into this world of death and decay Jesus Christ was sent by His Father and our Father to redeem every good thing, including (most of all) those who would choose to rely upon His power and grace to become good and be brought back into the eternal worlds of the Father’s presence.  All good, all beauty, all loveliness of this world would be saved by Christ and amplified where moth and rust do not corrupt.  That was the power that Christ the Redeemer won by His atoning sacrifice.  As beautiful and great as the view before us, Christ came that we might rise above and lay claim forever to it all, losing nothing worth keeping.  Most of all, that included especially all of us gathered on that porch and our eternal relationship as family.

And that was the lesson of the mountains and the forests before us, presented in fewer words.  But the truth of the message lingers and will not wear away.

Of Farewells and Forever

My son considers the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings evidence that Tolkien did not know when and how to end a book.  On the other hand, I have always loved those chapters.  I find the passages deeply moving each time I read them.  In a book rich in art and story they speak to my heart while tying important threads of the work together, completing the grand pattern woven of many tales, valuable to the telling of the greater story.

Part of the attraction for me, as with other great books with which I have enjoyed many a memorable experience, is that I am reluctant to close the cover and say goodbye.  These final chapters of The Lord of the Rings are a prolonged goodbye in a trilogy that is at its core a farewell to a whole world that Tolkien spent his life elaborating and never finished.

Like other great books of art, the work brings into bold relief important themes of reality.  In this life we experience a continuing series of goodbyes.  They fill our hearts with a tenderness, with a longing for lingering. 

For those who consider this life all that there is, goodbyes have a dreadful finality without remedy.  The dear one is gone, the experience has ended, something cherished is lost.  These are finalities that are hard to face.  People avoid them or refuse to recognize them when they cannot be avoided. 

Notice even in our language of parting that our words have a lingering quality about them, as if there were no break, as if there were an enduring connection, another day. We do not seem to have a parting phrase that means, “so it ends,” or, “it is over, done.”  Instead, we use words like, “goodbye,” a contraction of “God be with ye,” as if to connect us by our wishes and thoughts to the one leaving.  Similarly, “farewell” carries with it our interest in the future success of our family member or friend.  And, “until we meet again,” expresses the expectation, however forlorn, of another day in each other’s presence.  Those words, however, cannot mend the finality of it all if there is nothing beyond this life. 

If this life is all that there is, there comes a time when there will be no other day of meeting.  This life is then full of endings that are absolute and unalterable, the greatest of which is our own ending, when with our departure all existence ceases for all that it concerns us.  The awesomeness of that leaves a longing for something more, something to convey meaning that otherwise would not exist.  If when we die all is done, if there is no more, then how does anything matter?  We intuit, “there must be something more.”

Indeed there is.  Rather than finality governing mortality, the defining characteristic of this life is that so much around us is so very temporary.  As it should be.  This life was designed as a temporary existence, a brief exception to the order of the universe, ever changing with the movement of time.  Mortality was not designed to be the end of anything, the only finality being when mortality itself comes to its conclusion and this world is brought back into the realm of the eternities, where real, unending life prevails.

Jesus Christ descended from the eternal worlds into the world of mortality in order to preserve all good things forever.  An angel, a messenger from the eternal worlds, explained it to the ancient prophet Nephi as “the condescension of God,” whereby Jesus, the Savior, experienced all things mortal, and suffered for all things mortal, including death itself, gaining power to preserve all of this world worth preserving and worthy of being brought into the eternities (see 1 Nephi 11:26-33).  With His resurrection, Christ left mortality, creating the avenue for all of us to leave it as well and bring with us all that we had gained from our mortal experience.

Most important of these gains are our relationships with each other.  Most important among these relationships are those of the family, of parent and child and, highest of all, of husband and wife.  All that matters, and these relationships matter most, is preserved through Christ.

Without Christ, as everything perished it would be lost.  People would die and would be eventually forgotten, their works decayed and vanished.  Memories would fade.  Relationships would end.  All would end, constantly, until the end of the earth itself, a pointless and meaningless existence.  Without Christ and His atonement, there would be a dreadful finality to every parting, every last touch, every last glance, every last memory clothed with a hopeless END that nothing could cure.  With Christ, every good thing is saved.

By receiving Christ, since entering into His eternal order through the ordinances that He prescribed and authorized, I have the promise that the farewells have become temporary.  The goodbyes and the partings have an end.  Even death itself is swallowed up as a transient phase of life.  I have no fears of losing any good thing but rather peaceful confidence of inheriting all good things forever.

Of Physical Temptation and Exaltation

Many passages of scripture make plain that through the appetites of the flesh, especially when turned to lusts, Satan finds his readiest avenue for temptation. Here are just a few examples:

For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.  For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. . . . So then they that are after the flesh cannot please God. . . . For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die:  but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.  (Romans 8:5, 6, 8, 13, JST)

Besides writing that to the Romans, Paul similarly warned the saints at Galatia:

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh:  and these are contrary the one to the other . . . Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like. . . (Galatians 5:17, 19-21)

John, the Apostle, made a similar point:

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (1 John 2:16)

One more out of many, from the Epistle of James:

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.  Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin:  and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.  (James 1:13, 14)

Such passages have led unenlightened readers to embrace ancient Greek and Indian philosophies that consider all things material to be evil, seeing life as a continuing process to overcome the physical and leave the material world behind.  The philosophies that envision the struggle between good and evil to be the struggle between spirit and matter are at odds with other central principles of Christianity, particularly the Creation and the Resurrection.

If matter is evil, then why would God create a very material world in a vast, material universe, and call it “good”?

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.  (Genesis 1:31; see also verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25, in which the various phases of the creation are described as “good”).

In modern revelation, Jesus Christ explained further how God delights in providing the blessings of a very physical world to His children:

Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; yea for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul.  And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man; for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.  (Doctrine and Covenants 59:18-20)

The beauties of the earth are not accidental.  Neither is it a sin to recognize and appreciate their goodness.  Man was not born into a body into a material world as a punishment, as if placed in a straightjacket in a prison, both to be escaped.  Possession of a physical body was the next major step in a process of progression that embraces all good things, among them the very elements of the universe.

Again in modern revelation Jesus Christ explained,

The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy.  (Doctrine and Covenants 93:33, 34)

The power of physical bodies and the control of the physical world are so great that God provided a time of learning and testing through which man could learn to control the elements before receiving full, immortal control of them.  Mortality is designed as a brief time for each of God’s children to learn and understand the challenges and joys of a material world, eternal spirits clothed in temporary, physical bodies. 

The metaphor God uses to remind His children how important bodies are is the Temple (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 3:16, 17; Doctrine and Covenants 93:35).  God refers to bodies as Temples, sacred, to be used and cherished for eternal purposes as houses for the immortal spirits of men.  Since the beginning, God has given men laws and commandments as guides to use their bodies safely.  Just like all great instruments of power, physical bodies can enliven or enslave.  God’s commandments unfailingly show man the path to empowerment and away from captivity.  Sin is not in the use and enjoyment of the physical but rather in the misuse and abuse of the physical, whereby the spirit, rather than controlling matter, is overcome by it.  Nearly all sin can be traced to allowing appetites to govern action rather than letting the spirit in man—guided by the Spirit of God—rule.

As in all things, Jesus Christ is the great example.  Already as God in the spirit before His birth, He entered into mortality to take upon Himself all of the challenges and opportunities of physical existence.  The Savior’s miraculous control of the elements is well known and recorded by legions of witnesses.  He also experienced the full depths of the challenges and pains of mortal, physical existence.

An ancient American prophet-king, named Benjamin, foresaw Christ’s mortal experience, and witnessed that He would not spare Himself from its full trials:

And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and abominations of his people.  (Mosiah 3:7)

To a modern American prophet, Joseph Smith, who was undergoing great physical trial and anguish, Jesus related how deep His own experience had been, and summed it all up with the declaration, “The Son of Man hath descended below them all” (Doctrine and Covenants 122:8).

What did Jesus mean?  He meant that after experiencing the full breadth and depth of what the physical world could do and offer, He let the will of the flesh be swallowed up in the will of the Spirit.  Doing the Father’s will, Jesus Christ physically and mentally suffered for the physical sins of all mankind of all time, meriting no portion at all of the suffering.  The Spirit of Christ conquered, in spite of all that the physical appetites or wants of the flesh in a physical world could demand, and He controlled His physical body to submit to what the physical would refuse if it could.  Remember, there was no point, in Gethsemane, in the kangaroo court of the Sanhedrin, under the lash of the Roman tormenters, or on the cross itself, where Jesus could not have said, “enough,” and stopped the suffering.  Surely His body called out for it, but His Spirit always remained in control of the flesh as he drank the dregs of the atoning cup of suffering to the very last.

Having conquered all of the demands of a physical world, Christ gained it all. On the third day, He did not pass into a nirvana of spiritual nothingness, but rather He took up again a very physical body, a permanent and immortal body, forever gaining all power and all joy that only comes from spirit and element, inseparably connected, with the will of the spirit always in command.  Christ gave up the physical body in death on the cross, subjecting the demands of the flesh to the demands of the spirit.  With His Spirit fully and forever in control, Jesus Christ took up His body again in perfection on resurrection Sunday.

In so doing, Christ made available to all of us every good thing, including all of the good things of God’s glorious—and very material—creation.

Of Freedom and Despair

Every man and woman who walks the earth is a union of three natures:  intelligence, spirit, and physical body.  The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that only in this union can there be found a fullness of joy.  Our intelligence is eternal; our spirit an inheritance from God, the Father of spirits; our bodies, mortal vehicles of trial and testing to be placed in the grave and then raised in the resurrection to immortality through the redeeming power of Jesus Christ.

Before we were born and earth’s history began we all lived as spirits in the presence of God, where the whole plan for this earth and its purpose were presented to us.  In a great act of courage, greater than I believe that we can imagine, we each agreed with that plan and volunteered to be born into this world of trial and sorrow, but also of potential achievement and triumph.  The exercise of our free will centered on voluntary obedience to Jesus Christ would make all of the ultimate difference.  As the scriptures  relate, many there were who shied away from the risk and in rebellion sought another way where freedom would be denied us while all of our needs and comforts would be provided for without any exercise of our will or moral effort.

Those who rejected the plan of the Father and rebelled against Him before His face were cast from His presence directly to earth, without birth, without any future or hope.  The plan of moral trial in physical bodies being rejected by them, they could not participate in it.  For those there would be no bodies, no progression, no returning to the presence of God.  Having lost all hope, damned, or stopped in their eternal progression these became devils seeking forever the sorrow of those who chose a better way.  As if to reach for a blistering balm in other’s suffering, they tempt us to rebel against God here on earth and misuse all that a loving Father has provided to His children.

One day near Hallowe’en, more than thirty years ago, I thought to capture in verse something of the attitude of these unembodied spirits towards us, who chose before our birth to follow the plan of the Father as fulfilled by Jesus Christ, His Son.  These devils wish us no good thing, but evil and destruction continually, envying every good thing with which God has blessed us, not the least of which are all of the sensations and experiences that a physical existence in a physical world can provide.  They can see, but they cannot touch.  But they can speak to our spirits, and they each day encourage us to follow them, which is what sin is.

Dance of the Damned

’Round and ’round and sing around,

Swirl the spinning sky with sound.

Twirling, grinning, spinning down

Franticly upon them.

Fill the earth and spread around,

Make the awful beauty frown,

Rip it down, infest the ground,

Though you cannot touch it.

Curse the bodies never known

’Till they’re thrown into a mound.

Bring them blind and blinder still,

Swing the chain ’til you fill

All the world with sorrow;

For if we end tomorrow

They must die tonight.

Twist their sweet virginity.

Drain their new infinity.

Waste their pure divinity.

’Round and ’round, let song abound,

Swirl the human soup around.

Stir them floating, bloating, drowned,

Crowned with our iniquity.

Of Early Results and Final Scores

When I was recently in San Diego, local football fans were vocally wild with excitement when their NFL team, the San Diego Chargers, was winning its Monday night game 24-0 at half time.  It was all over for the visiting Denver Broncos.  But they played the second half anyway.  When the game was really over by the clock and the rules the final score was 24-35, and the Denver Broncos were the winners.  

In 2004, the arch rivals New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox played each other for the American League baseball championship and the right to go to the World Series.  The New York Yankees won the first 3 games of the best of 7 series.  With 4 games left and the Yankees needing to win only 1 of the 4, the series was all over.  Unfortunately for the Yankees (and their fans in my household), the New York team would not win another game that year and Boston would not lose another game that year, winning the American League championship and then sweeping the World Series in 4 games.  (For the benefit of Boston Red Sox fans I will mention that this was the team’s first World Series championship in almost a century.)

As they say in sports, that’s why they play the games.

As in sports, so often in life, there is virtue in playing to the end of the game and not leaving the field before it is really over.  Like all virtues, that virtue is often challenged in this life.  Many wars are won or lost in the hearts of the participants even before the first battle.  Many are the voices who try to call the election before the first real vote is cast and long before the last one is counted.  Many are the men and women, boys and girls, whose careers are ended before they have begun, or at least after the first setback.  In real life, often it is so, but far too often it is so because people believed it to be so, not because the end was really inevitable.

We are and should be inspired by those who have won through determined perseverance.  The persevering struggles of such technological pioneers as Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers gave them triumphs that changed the world.  How tempting it must have been to them at many points and after many failures to give up and say that “it” could not be done.  How poorer the world would be if they had called the game early and accepted failure.

Perhaps no less inspiring are those who struggled to the end in apparent defeat, only to make a greater victory possible for their friends and allies or sometimes for themselves.  The most famous battle of the Texas Revolution was the apparent defeat at the Alamo.  The Greek defeat by the Persians at Thermopylae is as famous as the Greek victory at Salamis that it helped make possible.  Abraham Lincoln’s loss in his Senate contest with Stephen A. Douglas sowed the seeds for Lincoln’s win against Douglas two years later for President.  Moses fell from royal glory among the Egyptians to become a nomadic shepherd before being chosen by God to be His prophet to deliver Israel from Egypt and restore to them the laws and ordinances to guide them for thousands of years. 

In our own personal lives, it is only those who persevere who win.  There is no easy triumph in the battle of life.  It is intended to be hard.  But the end is also intended to be known and can be known.   The Father and the Son discussed life and its purpose before the world was created.  They revealed to us that purpose and the end to give us direction and hope: 

We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them. . .  and they . . . shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.   (Abraham 3:24-26)

The ancient American prophet Nephi explained the proving process this way:

Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life. (2 Nephi 31:20)

There are numerous contrary voices, who would either say that salvation is easy or impossible.  Neither is right.  The pressing forward with a focus on Christ is how each of us can be transformed, how the goodness is refined from a decidedly alloyed ore, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

None of us knows how long will be his or her mortality, but we each must play it to the end.  We cannot call the game early.  If we travel and reach the end in company with Christ, then success is certain even as seeing the game throughout all of its stages is worth the playing.  After all, that is why we play.

Of Coming to Heaven and the Lord’s Supper

The lyrics to a Spanish song that I enjoy listening to include this line:

Para entrar en el cielo, no es preciso morir.

That translates into, “In order to enter heaven it is not necessary to die.”  Of course, that is true.  I have often said and know from some experience that eternal life can begin even in mortality, since the core element of eternal life is to possess the spiritual gift of charity, meaning the pure love of Christ (see Moroni 7:47), the one spiritual gift that never ends.

While it is not necessary to die to receive eternal life, we do need to come unto Christ.  Eternal life means living with God the Father, in His presence, and inheriting all that He has.  To qualify for that existence where perfect love and goodness prevail from this world of imperfection, corruption, and sin, it is necessary to come unto Christ, who has overcome all and who offers to help us to overcome all.

We come unto Christ only on His terms.  We cannot command that He come to us on our terms.  He is the perfect being, and we are very much short of that.  We are the ones with distance to cover.  Christ condescended to come as mortal man into our presence and our world of evil, but He did not condescend to partake of the evil.  We have.  He left our world through death, as we all will, but then was resurrected, which none were before Him, but because of whose resurrection all will follow.

Following resurrection, we will all be judged by the Father to determine whether we may remain in the Father’s presence and continue to grow and develop under His care.  At that judgment, Christ will identify for the Father those who have come to the Son and thereby qualified to remain in heaven.

How do we come unto Christ?  What are His terms?  Just these, that we solemnly promise by covenant with Him and the Father that we will accept Him and keep His commandments.  That is, we promise that we will follow Christ and stay with Him.  How can coming unto the Savior mean anything less?  Either we come unto Him or we do not.

The Savior has declared that this solemn promise and covenant is to be made in such a way as to be unmistakably imprinted on our minds, rich with the symbolism of washing away sin, burying the unrighteous way of life, and then rising to newness of life in accordance with the laws and ways of heaven.  This covenant and symbolism are present in the ordinance of baptism.  We place ourselves in the Savior’s hands via those whom He has personally chosen to represent Him.  We are buried in water, washed and cleansed from sin, and arise out of the water in the image of the resurrection into a Christian life.

The person who approaches baptism truly repentant of all of his sins, genuinely committed to a complete turning away from all evil, will feel the powers and joys of heaven filling his heart.  He will enter into the presence of God through the power of the Holy Ghost.  In fact, shortly after baptism, the next step in coming unto Christ is to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands of Christ’s representatives, just as the Samaritans anciently, who were baptized by Philip and soon thereafter were given the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands of the Apostles Peter and John (see Acts 8:12-17).

I have experienced those steps personally and testify that it works just that way.   Through faith, repentance, and baptism, sins are washed away, and through the gift of the Holy Ghost the heart is changed and filled with the gift of charity, the pure love of Christ.

Sad to say, and I would not excuse myself by noting that it happens to us all, not long after the covenant is made the covenant is broken, and it is not broken by God.  He perfectly fulfills His part.  On our part, sins are once again indulged in, old or new ones, or both.  The Spirit is grieved and withdraws, the gift of charity is also withdrawn, the man is left back on his own.  With the covenant broken what are we to do?

With a graciousness that far surpasses the patience of any mortal man, God allows us to remake the covenant and come unto Christ again.  We need not be rebaptized.  God has provided another ordinance that allows us to reaffirm the baptismal covenant and reclaim its powers and blessings.  As with baptism, it is a physical action that embodies a spiritual commitment.  Also, like baptism, it is designed and prescribed by God in a symbolic form that reminds us of Jesus Christ through whom our redemption is possible.

I refer to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  As with baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper comes in two parts.  In the first, we partake of broken bread, reminding us of the Savior’s body broken for us and soon after resurrected.  In the second we partake of water or wine to remind us of the blood shed by Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross.

As we partake of the sacrament with the same intent and spirit with which we were baptized, the whole baptismal covenant is reaffirmed and renewed, and we resume our Christian life.  We return to Christ.  We need this sacrament or our baptism would be nullified by our later sins.  We need it to retain the effects of our baptism.

It is astonishing, really.  It is a marvelous manifestation of the grace of God that He offers us this opportunity, weekly, to renew our solemn baptismal promises that we not so solemnly break.  While we renege, the Lord does not.  In fact, He offers us the second, third, and hundredth chance, which by all rights and justice He need not do.  Which of us would have such patience with those who broke their promises to us?

Because of the Lord’s patience, to enter into heaven, the presence of God, again and again, it is not necessary to die.  It is necessary to live, and to do that we must come unto Christ, and He beckons to us, all the time.  Why wait to answer His call?