Preparing Our Hearts to Love God & Others
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: May 11-17
“Love the Lord thy God with all thine heart.”
We err, I think, when we see the great commandments as prescriptive statements, as though loving God and our neighbors were the purchase price of eternal salvation. The great commandments are not injunctions on how to qualify for heaven after we die, but instructions for how to build heaven while we are still on earth. The Kingdom of God is, by definition, a society in which everybody focuses their attention on God and each other—rather than on their own needs and desires. The overwhelming message of the New Testament is that we can have this society anytime we want it, but we cannot have it cheaply, because the only way to create it is to give up everything else. This has everything to do with how we allocate our attention.
—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”
“The best way I can show God that I love him and I'm following him is how I treat other people.” —Richard Ostler, “Are We Listening, Learning, and Loving?”
With modern neuroscience, we understand that our hearts and minds aren’t fixed. What we do with our attention and how we train ourselves makes a difference in the way we experience the world.
And the fact that you use the word instrument there. Any of us who have learned an instrument also implies a level of practice and development.
Yes, it’s a craft. It’s a craft of the heart.
—Oren Jay Sofer & Stephen Kapp Perry, “The Craft of the Heart”
“Beware lest thou forget the Lord.”
I imagine the Savior preparing his friends for his upcoming death and departure. He knew that, although they loved him and would grieve over losing him, eventually their grief and sorrow would diminish. Their minds would return to the mundane and worldly. Human nature would make them forget. They would need a way to remember. So he gave them the sacrament. He gave them an act that symbolized him—a practice that gave them emblems, physical reminders of his body and blood, tangible tokens of the way he died, with a broken body and spilled blood. He created a time and a place and a way for them to quietly take into themselves these remembrances. He initiated a routine that would give them a way to commemorate him, honor him, reverence him regularly.
—Sunny Grames Stimmler, “In Remembrance”
Helping people in need involves generous hands and willing hearts.
I have experienced moments I can only call magical—whether sitting in the bishop’s office or at the side of a child as they fall asleep—where, almost in spite of myself, I find that the capacity that so often seems absent suddenly appears: beautiful and fully functioning. It is as if, in some instantaneous endowment of grace, I am, either because of or despite the infinitesimally little that I could do, gifted with the heart that was absent. Suddenly, blood that I did not know existed flows through a vasculature I did not know was there, bringing the life-giving oxygen of affection to people and in places I never knew I could understand or fully see. It is in these moments that I best understand what the scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus offering new life, or a new heart, or new birth, or new vision—of an understanding of a world that simply wasn't there before.
—Tyler Johnson, “Create In Me a New Heart”
The Lord invites me to choose between good and evil.
As a result, while supposedly trying to solve the problem of evil and suffering, reason can take us on a detour away from the question of how to imitate the love of God. The proper question for us is “How do I respond to suffering?” rather than “Why is there suffering?” Premodern thinkers assumed that they knew why we suffer and focused on how to respond to that suffering. Modern thinkers began by acknowledging that they didn’t know why we suffer and focused on how to resolve that ignorance. Joseph Smith’s teachings suggest that ultimately we do not know why there is evil, though we know it produces suffering. But if the question about the origin of evil and suffering has no answer, then his teaching should return us to the question of how we respond to them. …
To encounter suffering is to be called to do good without regard to the origin of suffering. As Christian theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann emphasized in the twentieth century, the trust of all Christians is that by responding to suffering in love, in imitation of Jesus, we can be recreated by the Father, made into new beings. The God of scripture, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, is a being who suffers with us, weak and vulnerable even when he has all the power there is. The human and then resurrected Jesus is the same God we see in all of scripture. Unlike the god of the philosophers, he is not a god who refuses to answer our cries, a god who, because he has a pure theoretical view of the perfect essences, has the answers to our theological conundrums but remains silent. Too often, however, when we think of God and our suffering, we do so in philosophical rather than scriptural terms. We forget that our God is who he is because he cares8—though, as Sam Brown reminds us, “It hurts to love us.”9
Given Joseph Smith’s revelations about the nature of God, persons, and the all-that-is, it seems likely that suffering and evil are inescapably aspects of all-that-is. There is no being without the possibility of suffering. Famously for Latter-day Saints, God himself suffers, and not only during his life on earth (Moses 7:28). Yet, even if suffering is inescapable and ultimately inexplicable, trusting in God means trusting that he has the power and ability to save us from sin and the resulting physical and spiritual death, whatever our suffering. God has the power to transform us into something new, to do everything he has said he will do (Alma 12:15). That means recognizing that there has been and will be evil and suffering and that we have been called to work with God by responding to them with love to repair this world and create a new world, called Zion, perhaps not a community of eternal bliss, but certainly a community of love.
—James Faulconer, “In Suffering, Love”
How might we think about sin and temptation? In this conversation, Elizabeth Oldfield explores the concept of sin through examining the seven deadly sins. She asks, What can envy teach us about having a stable sense of self, especially in this age of social media? Is acedia, or sloth, really about attention? How can we continually recall our attention to the things we hope will shape our souls? Elizabeth demonstrates that at the end of the day, the seven deadly sins aren’t a legalistic list of ways to be in debt to God, but a loving guide for how to be in right relationship with the people around us.
Because of my covenants, I am part of God’s people.
Distributing the bread and water of the Lord’s Supper on trays that we hand to each other in the pews; solemnizing the promises of the endowment and the sealing ceremony through the intimate act of taking each other by the hand; eliminating the markers of distinction through a single uniform clothing in the temple.
All of these things encourage the Saints to understand themselves at the very level of the body as part of a new community separate from the world outside the ritual—a community of common commitment, kinship, and obligation. These are easy words to say. The purpose of ritual, though, is to inscribe these realities on the body.
—Matthew Bowman, “Rituals of Becoming”
Ultimately, the covenant of the Book of Mormon doesn’t just redeem the Lamanites but all the family of Lehi and Sariah and all those who have joined them (see D&C 3:17–18). . . . Because the plates and their story move both ways, they capture all the associated individuals and families not only in a chain but in chain mail, surrounded by linkages lineally and laterally, stretching in all directions. The chain-mail links include those in less traditional family situations who may not fit neatly into a conventional lineal inheritance, such as those who never married, widows and widowers, LGBTQ+ people, those who cannot have children, those who die prematurely, families who are separated, and anyone who cannot care for others. God wants all to be included in the covenant family. As Joseph Smith explains, “they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (D&C128:15).
—Sharron Harris, “The Widening Circle”
Prophets teach us about Jesus Christ.
We sustain the prophets not because of their own merits but insofar and inasmuch as they preach “the word of Christ with unshaken faith in him, relying wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save.” (2 Nephi 31:19; see also Moroni 6:4.)
Latter-day Saints are not Smithites, or Nelsonites, or even Mormonites. We are Christians. We look not to our prophets but with them to “Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”
—Patrick Mason, “Searching for Infallible Prophets?”