Of Pride and Overpowering Love

 

Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash

God the Father never says that He is proud of His Son, Jesus Christ.  At least we have no record in any scripture of the Father saying so.  At the baptism, the voice of the Father proclaimed Jesus with the words, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)  Similar words are recorded by Mark (1:11) and also by Luke (3:22).  Some time later, at the Mount of Transfiguration, the Father introduced His Son, once more with the same words. 

Following the crucifixion and resurrection, the Father heralded His Son again, as Jesus Christ descended to teach an assemblage of believers in ancient America.  He used these words:

Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him. (3 Nephi 11:7)

There is a pattern here in what is not said and what is said.  Instead of an expression of pride, the Father expresses His love for His Son and His joy in what Jesus has accomplished, including bringing glory to the Father through His mortal ministry.  No one ever honored his father more than Jesus honors the Father, and no one ever loved a son more than the Father loves His beloved Son.

It is not that the Father’s love exceeds and envelopes pride.  Pride has no part in the Father’s love, for His son or for us.  There is no scriptural account, ancient or modern, of either Jesus or the Father expressing pride in anyone, not in Abraham, not in Moses, not in David, not in Peter or any of the Apostles, or in any prophet, ancient or modern.

The perfect love of our Heavenly Father and of His Son, Jesus Christ, does not exceed pride; it overpowers it.  On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed to the Father, one of the holiest prayers of which we know.  The prayer was witnessed by His Apostles and reported by John.  The Son concluded His profound prayer to the Father with this request, “that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them” (John 17:26).  Could anyone hope for anything greater?  The Father hears His Son and grants His requests, including the Son’s plea that the Father extend to us the same perfect love.

In comparison, the Lord has nothing good to say about pride, not a positive word in the thousands of pages of His scriptures.  He does say much to warn us about pride, because it is the opposite of love.  A modern day prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, described pride this way:

The central feature of pride is enmity—enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen. . . .  We are tempted daily to elevate ourselves above others and diminish them.  The proud make every man their adversary . . .

Much evil flows out from pride.  Only good extends from the love of God. 

I neither claim nor express any pride in my sons and daughters.  I am, however, well pleased by all of them, personally.  Each is beloved by me and by their mother.  They often observe the Savior’s admonition, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)  No pride is there, but much goodness as they take the gifts they have received from the Father and bless others with them.

I hope for the day when each of us may hear the Lord say personally, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

Of Dead Family Members and Getting to Know Them

Some years ago a radio commentator expressed revulsion toward the popular fascination with genealogy.  To make his argument short, he did not see the point.  In his view all of those people are dead and gone. What do they matter?

Inasmuch as the comment was made before recent notable advances in research on gene-based hereditary diseases, we can excuse the radioman’s ignorance of how important genealogy can be to tracing the roots of many things that make us ill.  At the time, however, I would have liked to relieve his ignorance of other points perhaps even more relevant and important.

In all fairness, I agree with a narrow part of his argument, his objection to the democratization of the old aristocratic practice of using genealogy to prove yourself better than someone else.  Such a pitiful exercise in arrogance and pride is pointless.  Given how family trees intertwine in just a few generations, there is probably nary a person of western European background who is not a descendent of Charlemagne.  The story is similar for people from other parts of the world.  And we are all descendants of Noah and Adam, so where are the bragging rights? 

It is on his central point where the radioman’s rejection of genealogy falls to the ground.  What a woeful and lonely view of man’s condition is embodied in the view that once someone dies he is forever gone!  Genealogy, or more broadly speaking, family history, is founded on the belief that the dead in profound respects live on, that they do matter to us.  Let me suggest three ways among many, ranked in a generally progressing order of importance.

·         The members of our family who have passed on are in many aspects part of us, beyond the shared DNA.  Much in our habits, practices, language, beliefs, and our culture in general has deep roots in those who raised and taught those who raised and taught us.  Most of that is probably worth retaining and cherishing, some of it in need of overcoming, but there is a rich heritage there to be discovered.  Significant personal meaning can be found in the recognition that the current generation is only the leading edge of something very big that has been going on a long time.

·         As I mentioned, you do not have to do much family history research to discover that we are linked together, more connected than separate.  Few genealogists can avoid the powerful realization of being part of the family of man.  Our respect for humanity and for each other deepens.

·         Most important, the dead are not gone.  They have merely passed from this brief state of mortality, brief for all of us, to the next state on the journey that makes up eternity.  Each of us will soon be joining those who once walked where we walk.  Family history is the effort to get to know them now, whom we have the privilege of knowing better for a much longer time than mortality has to offer.

Explaining the resurrection to the Sadducees, Jesus Christ reminded them that our Father is God of the living, not of the dead (Mark 12:26, 27).  The mission of Jesus Christ is to provide life to all, to carry out the “work and the glory” of God, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)

Jesus Christ speaks more than symbolically and beyond His own relationship when He refers to God the Father.  The family relationships and ties, so precious to us now, are eternal.  That means that they not only are intended to last forever, but they reach across the generations, beyond death—to generations past and future.  They can be among those few precious things we take with us to the grave and beyond.  That is not a vain wish of every loving husband and wife and father and mother.  It is an inheritance from our Divine Father. 

We can begin to build and extend and preserve those relationships here and now.  Why wait?

Of the G-20 and Running the World

When you think about it, it is ridiculous.  In fact, it would be pitiful, if they were not so serious and did not have the power to do seriously bad things.  I am referring to the leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations, who recently met in Mexico, thinking that they run the world.

If the question were put to you, “Who runs the world?” there could be several correct answers, but none of them would be this group of people, or any subset of them.  Nevertheless, because they think that they do run the world, and because they act on that belief, they do a lot of things that not only do not work but that make things worse.  Then they gather again and try something else, much of which is designed to clean up the mess caused by their previous foray in hubristic action.

The world is a complex place, with billions of people each doing complex things and interacting with each other in complex ways.  Then the planet itself does a lot of complex things.  Take the weather, for instance.  With computers and a hundred years of scientific study, weather forecasters have succeeded in the ability to predict the weather with a passable degree of accuracy two or three days out.  Beyond that, the accuracy of forecasts declines to about 50-50 (flip a coin) and drops from there.  The ability to change the weather, after a lot of work and investment, remains elusive. 

You have to be very smart, or think that you are, to convince yourself that you can in any significant way control the economy of your own nation, let alone of the world together.  The Russians, who are very smart people, tried it for 70 years with less than success and with the death and misery of tens of millions of their people.  The communist Chinese gave it a go, too.  Lately they have been reluctantly recognizing that there might be a better way—though they act like they are still not so sure.

Consider how many of the most serious problems facing mankind today are caused by people like these G-20 government leaders who fancy that they run things.  A few examples:

• The economic malaise in the United States.  The U.S. economy has just passed through a very deep recession, caused by government programs that encouraged people to buy houses that they could not afford, investors to invest in the mortgages used to buy those houses, banks to take government investments in their capital that they did not need, and people who could afford to pay their mortgages to walk away and leave the keys on the counter.  To solve those problems, the U.S. government spent a trillion dollars it did not have, increased rules and regulations on businesses that could otherwise create new jobs, “created” a quarter of a million new jobs at the cost of eliminating a million jobs in the private sector, and threatened investors and small businessmen with stiff tax increases.  Economic activity remains in the doldrums.

• The second economic recession in Europe.  The European economy went into recession about the same time that the U.S. economy did, for rather similar reasons.  It then weakly recovered, briefly, and then went back into recession when the promises that the governments of southern European countries made over decades to buy votes at last became more expensive than they could borrow money for—let alone pay for.  Now, every couple of weeks Greece, Italy, or Spain goes into economic crisis, the rest of the European leaders make empty promises to solve the problem, followed a couple of weeks later by new crisis and another round of promises.  That has been going on for about a year, while economic activity heads south.

• The availability of energy.  From the gasoline that we put in our cars, the electricity that lights our houses, to the natural gas that warms our offices and homes government rules affect the availability, price, distribution, and supply of energy.  The United States imports enormous amounts of oil from unstable countries that use the money we pay for it to threaten our people at home and abroad.  Meanwhile, we have more than enough supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil located in oil shale and oil sands and off our own shores to meet all of our needs now and for the foreseeable future, but government efforts to run the energy business prevent us from using them.

These are just three groups of examples of many.  Once again I call on the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman, the great Union general of the Civil War, who famously refused to run for President of the United States with the assertion that if nominated he would not run, if elected he would not serve.  He gave his friend and colleague, U.S. Grant, who did not make such a refusal, a piece of excellent advice:

My opinion is, the country is doctored to death, and if President and Congress would go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, the country would go on under natural influences, and recover far faster than under their joint and several treatment.

(William T. Sherman, letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1868, in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, p.922)

If someone should ask you, “Who runs the country?”, the correct answer is, “no one.”  Plenty pretend to, and many others wish to, but none do and none can, and we would all be better off if they would stop trying.  Our nation’s founders would have recoiled in horror at the question, because they intentionally created a nation that no one could run.  Why else have three branches of a federal government, one of which is divided into two separate houses, and state governments take their share of governmental authority?  They had seen Europe and knew of Asia where people for thousands of years had royally messed things up by trying to run their countries.

Instead, the American founders created a system where each person would run his own life.  The leaders in government were to run the government, that for the most part was to stay out of people’s lives and keep foreign governments at bay should they have any thoughts of trying their hand at running the lives of Americans.

That vision of the founders has been fading.  Today, make a list of the things that you can do that do not involve some sort of authority or permission from government.  It will not be a long list, and it has not been getting any longer in recent years.  Then ask yourself if life has been getting any better.  If it has, congratulate yourself on your power to overcome.

Of Churchianity and Priestcraft

While driving to church meetings this past Sunday I was surfing through the radio stations to find something wholesome and uplifting, in keeping with the spirit of the Sabbath day. That is not so easy to do. At least, I seem to remember that when I was a child Sunday morning radio and even television were almost reserved for worship programs. It is easier today to find politicians and sports figures—and their commentators—on Sunday morning radio and television; I will leave it to you to conclude whether those are the new predominant objects of worship.

With a little persistence I did find a couple of programs on the AM dial, and their messages were memorable. The first featured a religious figure with a call-in talk show in which he gives religious-psychological counseling to troubled callers. The one example I heard was from some woman who was living with a man, the father of at least a couple of her children, who was now involved in a sexual affair with some other woman. The caller wanted out of the relationship, but she was dependent on financial support from the non-husband father. She felt trapped, and indeed she was. The host of the program gave what seemed to me some sensible advice, which he admitted was common sense counsel that just about anyone could have given to the woman.

After that point I guess that the caller line must have thinned out, because the host proceeded into a prolonged criticism of organized religion, what he called “churchianity.” He took pride in the fact—pride is the right word—that he was not associated with any particular religious denomination. His argument, to sum it up, was that Jesus did not belong to any church and did not form any church, that He just went around counseling and helping people and then moved on. As the host explained, some people “fell away” but others “made it.” The host complained that organized religions are just businesses, and people do not need them. He took a while to say all of this, but that is the gist of it.

It is a wise practice to consider that in every criticism there is at least an element of some truth, and it would be wise to look for it and profit from it. The kernel of truth, however, does not justify accepting all the rest, any more than the bait justifies swallowing the fisherman’s hook. The churchianity critic is correct that too much of religion today, as was also found anciently, is a business. Paul and his missionary companions were menaced by mobs in Ephesus when his preaching of the resurrected Jesus Christ threatened to upset the business of the idol makers for the cult of the Greco-Roman goddess Diana. Martin Luther was driven to his break with the Roman Catholic Church in great part due to the church’s apparent selling of forgiveness. The Prophet Joseph Smith was martyred in Illinois by a mob inspired by local clergymen worried that restoring the ancient church of Jesus Christ was threatening their trade in manmade religion. And there is no lack of examples today of preachers seeking popularity for praise and profit.

It is true that Jesus Christ never intended His religion to become a business. He railed against professional preachers who made a business out of salvation. That is called priestcraft, and it was the leadership of the corrupt priestcraft of His day who conspired to have Jesus crucified. It is wrong, however, to conclude that Jesus Christ did not establish a Church. As Jehovah of the Old Testament, Jesus Christ called prophets and priests, had them ordained under divine commission, and by revelation instructed them on their duties. You have to overlook much of the books of Moses and reject Moses himself not to acknowledge that.

Similarly, during His mortal ministry on the earth, when the priesthood among the ancient Jews had become corrupted and turned into a business, Jesus Christ withdrew his authority from the old priests and established a new Church, with apostles and prophets. Observe how the Apostle Paul described it to the members of the Church of Christ in Ephesus:

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye are also builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22)

I am not sure how more clearly Paul could describe an organized religion, “the building fitly framed together”. If Jesus Christ did not build a church, then what do we do with the apostles whom He ordained, and the Seventy whom He called to assist the apostles? In fact, without the Church of Jesus Christ, we would not have the scriptures that tell of His ministry nor the spreading of the gospel of Christ throughout the Roman world and beyond.

It would perhaps not be inappropriate to mention at this point that the churchianity critic concluded this portion of his commentary by mentioning that regular payments from his listeners of $5 and $10 would allow him to continue his campaign against the business of religion. In another post I may discuss the other program I heard yesterday, where the announcer offered the exact date of the Judgment Day.

Of Organized Religion and Living Apostles of Christ

Sign me up for organized religion, if God is the organizer. I have little interest in being part of the religions of men or observing the commandments of men, and I understand why others are put off by manmade religions. Equally, I find it hard to see why someone would not want to be part of a church that is run and organized by the Savior Jesus Christ, the Author of all good, the Source of all knowledge, the fountain of all love. What is there not to like? All that can be desired, all that really matters, all that is really joyful, is there.

The Apostle Paul described Christ’s church—its organization and purpose— in a letter to the saints in Ephesus:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: 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: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive . . . (Ephesians 4:11-14)

It is clear that Christ intended His church and all of its parts to continue until all of God’s children became like Christ. And it also seems clear that without this church and its various parts, the children of God would become vulnerable to the doctrines and teachings of men.

Fortunately, Christ’s church is on the earth again, with all of the component parts that made up His church anciently, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, together with the other important offices, “Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Ephesians 2:20).

This past weekend, as they do twice each year, the apostles and prophets of the Church of Jesus Christ gathered in conference and spoke to all the world. Their words were a combination of the timeless and the timely, just as they were anciently. Test them and try them. They can be found at this website:

http://www.lds.org/general-conference?lang=eng

While the messages are spoken for all, as you listen carefully you will invariably hear messages spoken directly to you. For me, one of those messages was delivered by the Apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf. He spoke of the sin of pride, reprising the words delivered more than a decade ago by the Lord’s prophet at that time, Ezra Taft Benson. He described the difference between two ways in which we use the word "pride." First, there is what we call pride, which is really rejoicing in the accomplishments and achievements of others, the pride we feel in our children, in our spouse, in our fellows, a pride that unites us. That is far different from the pride denounced by God throughout the ages, the pride that separates us from our fellowmen, the pride of comparison and hostility that has, in the words of Ezra Taft Benson, enmity at its roots.

The cure is humility. But the apostle did not mean the self-demeaning attitude that some mistake for humility. In his inspired words, “Humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking less about ourselves.” Working with, and among, and together with others, reaching out beyond ourselves, this true humility is a great antidote to the pride that would separate us, because it is built upon charity, the pure love of Christ.

This was a simple but powerful message, as were the many others presented. Whether on family and marriage, faith, deliverance from addictions, financial security, the power of gratitude, or the worth of the individual, the cures for the problems of society were offered through words inspired from heaven.

I could have received or enjoyed little of this left to my own devices. It was made available in an eternal abundance through the religion organized by Christ and offered to all of God’s children. And for that I am grateful.