What is the purpose of creation? What is the purpose of my life?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: Jan 5-11
I am a child of God. As a child of God, I have a divine destiny.
Once upon a time, we were born whole—magnificent and holy. As literal children of God, we were fashioned with the spark of divinity. Perfect and pure. As we grew, at times we forgot that we were “trailing clouds of glory,” as William Wordsworth wrote, and we rejected the gift of grace because we were convinced that we could do it on our own. In our suffering, we forgot both who we were and whose we were. We built up walls to separate us from God and each other. But Jesus intervened, sitting with us until we remembered—and sharing His life with us once we did.
—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing
Joseph Smith … gives us the Book of Moses as a kind of an addendum, but also kind of corrective to many of the incorrect definitions, descriptions of God and his interactions that take place in the Bible.
—Terryl Givens, “So Who Wrote the Bible?”
Heavenly Father has a work for me to do.
The poor will receive the kingdom of heaven. The brokenhearted will be healed. The captives will be liberated. The blind will see. The bruised will be made whole. In the ultimate sense, this is the work of atonement and reconciliation that only our Savior Jesus Christ can fully accomplish. But in the more immediate sense, the call of the Restoration is for each recipient of Christ’s redeeming love to extend that grace by co-participating with him as “saviors... on Mount Zion.”
That salvation cannot and will not wait for the next world. The restoration of God’s people is here. The restoration of God’s people is now
—Patrick Mason, Restoration
With the Lord’s help, I can resist Satan. I can resist Satan’s temptations.
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.
Read an excerpt from Elizabeth’s book Fully Alive, included in Issue 4 of Wayfare, where she explores the modern temptation of acedia, or an inattention to life, and offers concrete suggestions and spiritual practices for overcoming it:
Read more about the temptation of acedia in “Sitting in the Dark” by Duncan Reyburn, also included in Issue 4 of Wayfare:
Matthew Bowman examines the temptation to idolatry in “Spiritual Cartography”:
Martin Luther said that “whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.” Idolatry tempts you to invest a fallible and limited human idea or institution or practice with absolute faith and confidence. Idolatry is the child of certainty. It leads you to reject the possibility that you might be wrong. …
Because we worry about our own flaws, we invest power in things that we hope will protect us from failure. We project confidence, we feign certainty, we embrace righteous anger. We believe in simple answers. And then we grow vehement about defending the things we have invested in, since deep down the anxiety remains, because money or ideology or doing this thing or that won’t help you fix all the ways this world is broken. It can’t.
Idolatry destroys because it is a product of anxiety that only feeds that anxiety in turn. Idolatry is like scratching a mosquito bite; it is satisfying in the moment, but in the long run the underlying problem only grows more inflamed.
(Learn more about the sin of certainty in our conversation with Pete Enns.)
Thomas McConkie teaches us more about where sin comes from and how to follow the example of Jesus Christ in overcoming temptation in “Divine Vulnerability”:
The moment we feel intense sensations building up in our bodies, our instinct is to escape. In an effort to escape the reality of our embodied vulnerability, we often say things and do things that are harmful to ourselves and to others. We justify our actions because we feel at a deep level that if we don’t do something to escape, we’ll be overwhelmed with pain, or possibly harmed beyond repair. In a gospel context, we can understand this psychological process as the drive toward sin. … In our worst moments, we’ll justify any kind of behavior it takes to escape the specter of being swallowed alive by our core vulnerabilities. Sin in this sense is a vain but understandable attempt to avoid our deepest suffering. …
To the extent that we’re willing to not only endure but embrace our personal Gethsemanes, we curtail sin’s capacity to tempt us. After all, if we’re willing to feel absolutely every experience that the Divine consecrates for our sanctification, what need is there to act out? What power does sin have to tempt us in the end? Christ is the living incarnation of this path.
… The task is simple but difficult: Let your eye be single to God’s Glory. Let this sanctifying Light infuse the most vulnerable parts of yourself again and again. In exactly the most disturbing moments of your life, you can train yourself to open up, relax, and trust that something from beyond is making you holy.
… Every time we crash, every time we fall apart, we can stop and realize that this is an opportunity to be tender and fully embodied with this disturbance, with the most vulnerable parts of our humanity. As we do this, we discover exactly where we stand in need of healing. We feel our wounded humanity being redeemed.
God’s work and glory is to help me gain eternal life.
“The twin projects of Mormonism are Zion and exaltation. It’s about creating communities here on this earth in which there’s no male or female, or rich or poor, or bond or free, or Jew and Gentile; we’re all one in Christ… And, we’re never going to solve all the problems in this life. It is why we have a lively hope in life in Christ after we die. It is why we look forward to the resurrection because we know that that’s when Christ will wipe away all our tears. And so we keep Zion and exaltation together and we do both projects at the same time.”
—Patrick Mason, “Who is the Church for?”
God in the book of Moses says, Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. So what God forefronts, it seems to me in that revelation, is his actions in the world. And his actions in the world are about bringing his children exaltation and eternal life in his kingdom.
…The important thing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not it has the perfect theology that gives us the answer to everything in the world. The important thing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing God’s work in the world, and it has a necessary and vital role that God has given to it in his work in the world, and it’s trying to do that work.
And theology, that’s one of the tools that we use in doing that. But the primary purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of God’s children. It’s not to make sure that you’re never mistaken.
—Nate Oman
I lived as a spirit before I was born on earth.
Everything begins in hope. All that the Gods voiced, every hopeful “And God . . .” is followed by “. . . and it was good.” What was good was that our Heavenly Parents created a world, and in that world a garden, a garden of hope for a future of fruitfulness and fecundity, of hope for a beginning where love would expand, flow outward to fill the universe, and overflow the bounds of space. And into this garden with infinite hope and love they placed our first parents, and they called it the Plan of Happiness. As premortal beings looking down from the heavens on that beginning, our hearts were filled with boundless, borderless light and love and with immense hope for what it all meant for us. …
Ours may be the most hopeful religion in the world. With its teaching of an embedded premortal hope, with its optimistic theology of the necessity of mortality, with its promise not just of exaltation but of universal resurrection and near universal glorification, and especially with its concept of loving and infinitely patient Heavenly Parents, Mormonism constitutes the ultimate hopeful news that, as Job says, God has set his heart upon us (Job 7:17). Our Parents’ ultimate hope is that we will set our hearts on and return to them—that we will make it home, back to the birthplace of all the hopes that yearn within us.
—Bob Rees, “A Perfect Brightness of Hope”
