Remembering Christ as Our Deliverer
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: April 6 - April 12
I can choose to soften my heart.
I wondered about faithful believers, my kin in pain, for whom hope is treacherous—who suffer mistreatment at work, church, in families, or on missions—who boldly pray for deliverance, and then are left to “hope” God will soften the hearts of their persecutors. But what if the tormentors choose not to be changed by God? How can we pray when our peace is riven by the agency of some other person? Or by the circumstances of mortality? What about the prayers of those who are fighting cancer? Or infertility? Or loneliness? How do they pray when a remission doesn’t come, again? Or a pregnancy ends, or doesn’t even begin? When we are suffering, and hope is exhausting?
My wrestle with hope required a paradigm shift—a way to preserve faith in God’s goodness while I placed my hopes and desires on the altar and grieved. During this process, I read the third chapter of Mormon with new eyes. Here, Mormon seems to have experienced a shift as he loved and led his people, who were devolving individually and as a nation. He lamented, “My soul had been poured out in prayer unto my God all the day long for them; nevertheless, it was without faith, because of the hardness of their hearts” (Morm. 3:12). I had read this in the past and wondered at Mormon’s reaction. Didn’t he know that faith is to be centered in Jesus Christ? But with the lens of my own pain, I wondered if he, too, was experiencing a paradigm shift. What if he’d assumed that God would be able to change the people if Mormon believed hard enough? Perhaps he was wrestling with what faith is, and whether hope is always present in tandem. Roughly thirteen years passed as Mormon watched the Nephite and Lamanite armies retake and lose multiple times, in a bloody loop, the city Desolation (what tragic irony!). However, Mormon seemed to have laid his hopes for the repentance of his people upon the altar, where they were consumed. Later Mormon writes that he was “without hope” (Morm. 5:2). But I wondered if, in surrendering hope in a specific outcome, he found his faith.
—Leanne Bingham Hansen, “The Night is Coming On”
Jesus Christ can save me because of His Atonement.
How does Jesus’s atonement work? How are we saved by grace? What role do human works play? In this episode of Meet the Early-day Saints, Dr. Cecilia M. Peek takes us back to the early days of Christianity to take a look at these questions again. She also lays out different ways Christians understood Jesus’s saving work–from illuminator, to restorer, to victor, to victim and sacrifice:
At age four, I attended my first funeral. I was very confused about death and what it was, but my mother explained to me that everybody dies and gets buried in the ground, and we don’t see them anymore. Then she reassured me that it was all okay because Christ died for us a long time ago and then came back to life, and now we will all (even my great-uncle Leon, lying in front of me in a casket) come back to life.
This is the first Atonement lesson I can remember, and I spent the entire year after that asking my mom over and over again when my Uncle Leon would come back to life. I thought I understood what Christ had done for me, but my understanding was as if I had seen a single picture of an oak tree and then declared that I understood the forest.
The Atonement is difficult to comprehend. Since that first lesson, I have had many more lessons and conversations about the Atonement with family members, teachers, friends, missionary companions, and the Spirit itself. And sometimes I feel like I am still four years old, trying to wrap my head around a concept I don’t have the capacity to understand. It is difficult to comprehend something that is infinite and eternal while also being both intensely personal and full of enabling power, but I want to try. I want to do all I can to understand the Atonement so that I can fully appreciate my Savior and access the miracles he has made possible.
I believe Christ has performed the Atonement, but faith is not the same thing as understanding. My faith has grown through personal, powerful experiences of heavenly love. My understanding has only come through stories.
- Chanel Earl, “Atonement, Metaphor, and Fairy Stories”
Explore further through Chanel Earl’s Atonement and Fairy Story Series
The sacrament helps me remember my deliverance through Jesus Christ.
It’s a ritual I’ve been participating in for longer than I can remember. Sunday arrives. My wife and I arrive at the chapel. We shake hands. We tousle a few Sunbeams’ hair. We’re happy to be here. We sit. We sing. We pray. Then the main event:
Bread first: break, bless, pass, eat.
Water second: bless, pass, drink.
Repeat weekly. It’s a simple routine. It’s all over in a matter of minutes. I’m as guilty as the next person of sometimes just going through the motions. But though I’ve taken the sacrament more times than I can count during my lifetime, lately it’s taken on new meaning for me. It’s become anything but routine.
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In truth, healing is exactly what Christ is offering to each of us every week as we receive the sacrament. But we have to want it. We have to yearn for it. We have to reach from deep down inside of us and bring forth our brokenness, believing that He will receive our broken selves and heal us. This requires faith. It requires focus, as much focus as was present in this suffering woman. Our brains get distracted and wander so easily. The cares of the world seep in so effortlessly. Our shame and guilt beg to stay hidden even from ourselves.
- Brent Croxton, “The Outstretched Hand”
Learning how big and beautiful and shared the world is, I try to share myself and my family more—to open myself to receive the grace God has to offer me. During sacrament meeting, I no longer try to contain my children to our pew (except during the sacrament itself). I let my baby wander the aisles. She shares her Cheerios and steals applesauce pouches and sits on the lap of a childless man in our ward. I tell my son, we are Heavenly Father’s and Heavenly Mother’s children, so we are all family. We can trust our family to help take care of our baby. We can trust our family to take care of us.
—Lindsey Meservey, “‘All Things Common’ Among the Courtyard”
James Goldberg’s Tales of the Chelm First Ward is a collection of fictional stories set in a Latter-day Saint ward in the imagined town of Chelm—a nod to Jewish folklore and the famous “village of fools.” The humor in the book is wonderfully absurd, but beneath the silliness is something powerful and profound. Enjoy this short story from the book about Passover:
The Lord has power over all things.
