We need to continually not occasionally deepen make it fuller, more complete our knowledge of and obedience to Heavenly Father. Deepen your knowledge of Heavenly Father through study, prayer, pondering, and experience. We have more written about the Savior than Heavenly Father and Jesus said if you have seen him you have seen the Father. The Holy Ghost is the one that reveals the Savior to you and the Savior is the one that takes you to the Father. It could happen all at once, but if it doesn't....you can't skip a step. Follow the promptings of the Light of Christ, then the whisperings of the Holy Spirit, then the companionship of the Savior, then the presence of the Father. Deepen your obedience by examining your motives for obeying. Turn it to love instead of duty or fear. The love will come from knowing Him and His love. Our relationship with Him is eternal. We are His beloved children, and that will not change. We are hearing over and over to not disconnect from this knowledge. Nothing that is happening, will happen or can happen should override our knowledge of our Father's love for us and every thread of our lives that touches. How are we going to wholeheartedly accept His invitation to draw near to Him Again, we're looking for a complete and constant commitment to God and thus enjoy the blessings He longs to give us It is our unbelief is what keeps us from parting the veil in this life and in the world to come?
The Lord said to ancient Israel, and He says to us, “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: He is constant, we are not therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.”1 He is always trying to "draw" us in...I like to think of it as a divine "tractor beam" Speaking as would the Father, He also says to us, “Thou shalt abide in me, and I in you; therefore walk with me.”2 Do we trust Him enough to abide in Him and walk with Him? What does it mean to abide 'in' Him and for Him to abide 'in' us? John 15:4,5 explains it this way: "4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. 5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. We are the branch and Christ is the vine. We cannot bear fruit if we are not attached to and receiving our strength and nourishment from the vine. Without Him we can do nothing. Why are so many in the world choosing to walk without Him? To not trust Him?
We are here on this earth to learn and grow, and the most important learning and growing will come from our covenant connection to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Our covenant relationship begins with Repentance. Certainly we have significant learning and growth through honest and continual repentance. From our faithful relationship with Them come godly knowledge, love, power, and capacity to serve. Blessings worth the price - a 'faithful relationship'. It implies not leaving the relationship and one where both people are committed, involved and communicating.
“We are duty-bound because we have made covenants to learn all that God has revealed about himself.”3 Read and study the talk for footnote 3. It will help you deepen your knowledge of God! We must understand that God the Father directed His Son, Jesus Christ, to create the earth for our growth, that Heavenly Father gave His Son to pay the demands of justice for our salvation, and that the Father’s priesthood power and the Son’s true Church with the necessary ordinances were restored for our blessings. Can you feel the depth of love running through Their preparations for our joy and growth? Think of all the planning and time and attention and sacrifice - all for YOU! We are His full time love and concern and yet we struggle to give him even a portion of our love and concern. How is that possible? We need to know that Heavenly Father’s plan of salvation is that we obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel and gain eternal life and thus become as God is.4 This is the true and lasting happiness Heavenly Father offers us. There is no other true and lasting happiness. If we are eternal beings, then we should only seek happiness that is true and lasting. Forever is a long, long time....
Our challenges can pull us off this course of happiness. We can lose our trusting connection to God if trials drive us to distraction instead of sending us to our knees.Hmmm...trials driving us to distraction? What kind of trials do that? Wealth? Ease? Peer pressure to have, do, go? If you don't give in to these distractions or pressures, will you not then have to go to your knees to stay in a frame of "right thinking"? How much better to trust God than the arm of flesh!
This simple couplet begs us to do some priority sifting:
We are here on this earth to learn and grow, and the most important learning and growing will come from our covenant connection to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Our covenant relationship begins with Repentance. Certainly we have significant learning and growth through honest and continual repentance. From our faithful relationship with Them come godly knowledge, love, power, and capacity to serve. Blessings worth the price - a 'faithful relationship'. It implies not leaving the relationship and one where both people are committed, involved and communicating.
“We are duty-bound because we have made covenants to learn all that God has revealed about himself.”3 Read and study the talk for footnote 3. It will help you deepen your knowledge of God! We must understand that God the Father directed His Son, Jesus Christ, to create the earth for our growth, that Heavenly Father gave His Son to pay the demands of justice for our salvation, and that the Father’s priesthood power and the Son’s true Church with the necessary ordinances were restored for our blessings. Can you feel the depth of love running through Their preparations for our joy and growth? Think of all the planning and time and attention and sacrifice - all for YOU! We are His full time love and concern and yet we struggle to give him even a portion of our love and concern. How is that possible? We need to know that Heavenly Father’s plan of salvation is that we obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel and gain eternal life and thus become as God is.4 This is the true and lasting happiness Heavenly Father offers us. There is no other true and lasting happiness. If we are eternal beings, then we should only seek happiness that is true and lasting. Forever is a long, long time....
Our challenges can pull us off this course of happiness. We can lose our trusting connection to God if trials drive us to distraction instead of sending us to our knees.Hmmm...trials driving us to distraction? What kind of trials do that? Wealth? Ease? Peer pressure to have, do, go? If you don't give in to these distractions or pressures, will you not then have to go to your knees to stay in a frame of "right thinking"? How much better to trust God than the arm of flesh!
This simple couplet begs us to do some priority sifting:
Some things matter; some things don’t.A few things last, but most things won’t.5
Sisters, what matters to you? Will it last? What is lasting to you? Does it matter? A matter of lasting value to the Father is that we learn of Him, humble ourselves, and grow in obedience to Him through earthly experiences. He wants us to change our selfishness into service, our fears into faith. If I'm not serving, I'm being selfish. If I'm not exercising faith, then I'm living in fear. These lasting matters can test us to our core. What is this test? In the July Ensign, Elder Bednar quotes President Benson as saying, " Ours then seems to be the toughest test of all, for the evils are more subtle, more clever. It all seems less menacing and it is harder to detect. While every test of righteousness represents a struggle, this particular test seems like no test at all, no struggle and so could be the most deceiving of all tests.
“Do you know what peace and prosperity can do to a people—It can put them to sleep. The Book of Mormon warned us of how Satan, in the last days, would lead us away carefully down to hell. The Lord has on the earth some potential spiritual giants whom He saved for some six thousand years to help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly, and the devil is trying to put them to sleep. The adversary knows that he probably won’t be too successful in getting them to commit many great and malignant sins of commission. So he puts them into a deep sleep, like Gulliver, while he strands them with little sins of omission. And what good is a sleepy, neutralized, lukewarm giant as a leader?
It is now, with our mortal limitations, that the Father asks us to love when loving is most difficult, to serve when serving is inconvenient, to forgive when forgiving is soul stretching. How? How will we do it? We earnestly reach for Heavenly Father’s help, in the name of His Son, and do things His way instead of pridefully asserting our own will.Recognize when you are in the struggle and let that send you to your knees in humble recognition and submission as you sincerely plead for help to do it His way.
I recognized my pride when President Ezra Taft Benson spoke on cleansing the inner vessel.6 I imagined myself as a pitcher. How was I to get the residue of pride out of my pitcher? Independently forcing ourselves to have humility and trying to make ourselves love others is insincere and hollow, and it simply doesn’t work. Our sins and pride create a breach—or a gap—between us and the font of all love, our Heavenly Father.The breach is created by our refusing to repent and refusing to ask for help. Father will not violate our agency. We are the ones distancing ourselves from Him when we try to go it alone.
Only the Savior’s Atonement can cleanse us of our sins and close that gap or breach. Repentance.
We want to be encircled in the arms of our Heavenly Father’s love and guidance, and so we put His will first and with a broken heart plead that Christ will pour streams of cleansing water into our pitcher. At first it may come drop by drop, but as we seek, ask, and obey, it will come abundantly. This living water will begin to fill us, and brimming with His love, we can tip the pitcher of our soul and share its contents with others who thirst for healing, hope, and belonging. As our inner pitcher becomes clean, our earthly relationships begin to heal. Healing begins with repentance.
Sacrifice of our personal agendas is required to make room for the eternal plans of God. Seriously...do you want your plan or God's plan? (Which was probably yours and His plan in the pre-mortal world...)The Savior, who speaks for the Father, pleads with us, “Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you.”7 Drawing near unto the Father can mean learning of His truth through the scriptures, following prophetic counsel, and striving to do His will more completely. More completely. Evaluate your obedience. Is it "complete"? That could mean your intention or actions or desires. Check it all...
Do we understand that Christ has the power to bring us into loving fellowship with the Father and with one another? He, by the power of the Holy Ghost, can give us needed insight into relationships. Listen to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit to guide you in your relationships...what to say, not say, how to say it, what to notice, how to help, when to hold, when to lift...all motivated by your love for God and out of gratitude for the love you feel from Him.
A Primary teacher told me about a powerful experience with his class of 11-year-old boys. One of them, whom I’ll call Jimmy, was an uncooperative loner in class. One Sunday the teacher was inspired to put aside his lesson and tell why he loved Jimmy. He spoke of his gratitude and his belief in this young man. Then the teacher asked the class members to tell Jimmy something they appreciated about him. As class members, one by one, told Jimmy why he was special to them, the boy lowered his head and tears began to roll down his face. This teacher and class built a bridge to Jimmy’s lonely heart. Simple love, honestly expressed, gives hope and value to others. I call this “repairing the breach or the gap.”Love repairs the breach.
Perhaps our life in a loving premortal world set up our yearning for true, lasting love here on earth. We are divinely designed to give love and be loved, and the deepest love comes when we are one with God. The Book of Mormon invites us to “be reconciled unto [God] through the atonement of Christ.”8 Everyone wants to be loved.
Isaiah spoke of those who faithfully live the law of the fast and thus become for their own posterity a repairer of the breach. This is an interesting statement. How does faithfully living the law of the fast repair the breach for our own posterity? President Eyring sheds some light on this in his talk "Is Not This the Fast That I Have Chosen?" They are the ones who, Isaiah promises, will “build the old waste places.”9 In a similar way, through sacrifice the Savior repaired the breach, or distance, between us and Heavenly Father. He, through His great atoning sacrifice, opens the way for us to partake of God’s loving power, and then we are enabled to repair the “waste places” in our personal lives. Healing emotional distance between each other will require our acceptance of God’s love, coupled with a sacrifice of our natural selfish and fearful tendencies. These selfish and fearful tendencies keep us from fulling living the law of the fast and generously giving of our means to repair the breach for those who are less fortunate.
One memorable night a relative and I disagreed about a political issue. She briskly and thoroughly took my comments apart, proving me wrong within earshot of family members. I felt foolish and uninformed—and I probably was. That night as I knelt to pray, I hurried to explain to Heavenly Father how difficult this relative was! I talked on and on. Perhaps I paused in my complaining and the Holy Ghost had a chance to get my attention, because, to my surprise, I next heard myself say, “You probably want me to love her.” Love her? I prayed on, saying something like, “How can I love her? I don’t think I even like her. My heart is hard; my feelings are hurt. I can’t do it.”I love her honesty. We must be honest with the Lord before we can truly repent.
Then, surely with help from the Spirit, I had a new thought as I said, “But You love her, Heavenly Father. Would You give me a portion of Your love for her—so I can love her too?” This is a blessing of deepening your knowledge of God - knowing that He truly loves ALL His children and that He is able to share His love for others with you when you have none of your own to give. My hard feelings softened, my heart started to change, and I began to see this person differently. I began to sense her real value that Heavenly Father saw. Isaiah writes, “The Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound.”10
Over time the gap between us sweetly I loved that it happened 'sweetly' :) closed. But even if she had not accepted my changed heart, I had learned that Heavenly Father will help us love even those we may think are unlovable, if we plead for His aid. We must desire it; choose it. Ask. Seek. Receive. The Savior’s Atonement is a conduit for the constant flow of charity from our Father in Heaven. We must choose to abide in this love in order to have charity for all. Remember, to 'abide' in His love is to receive it from Him as we stay connected to Him and see Him as the source.
When we give our heart to the Father and the Son, we change our world—even if circumstances around us do not change. Think of it! You can change your world without changing the circumstances! We draw closer to Heavenly Father and feel His tender acceptance of our efforts to be true disciples of Christ. Our discernment, confidence, and faith increase. These are three vital gifts of the Spirit!! Give your heart to the Father and the Son. Make the effort to draw closer to them.
Mormon tells us to pray with all energy of heart for this love and it will be bestowed upon us from its source—Heavenly Father.11 Only then can we become repairers of the breach in earthly relationships. Pray with energy. Engage your heart. Ask for charity to be given to you from your Father in Heaven so be a "repairer of the breach".
Our Father’s infinite love reaches out to us, to bring us back into His glory and joy. He gave His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to repair the breach that gapes wide between us and Him. Reunion with Father in Heaven is the essence of lasting love and eternal purpose. We must make the connection with Him now to learn what really matters, to love as He loves, and to grow to be like Him. Connect with your Father NOW. Ask Him what really matters and let go of what doesn't. Pray for charity so you can love as He loves. Allow your experiences to take you TO Him and not away from Him. I testify that our faithful relationship with Heavenly Father and the Savior matters eternally to Them and to us. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Talk
INVITATION
Sisters, what matters to you? Will it last? What is lasting to you? Does it matter? A matter of lasting value to the Father is that we learn of Him, humble ourselves, and grow in obedience to Him through earthly experiences. He wants us to change our selfishness into service, our fears into faith. If I'm not serving, I'm being selfish. If I'm not exercising faith, then I'm living in fear. These lasting matters can test us to our core. What is this test? In the July Ensign, Elder Bednar quotes President Benson as saying, " Ours then seems to be the toughest test of all, for the evils are more subtle, more clever. It all seems less menacing and it is harder to detect. While every test of righteousness represents a struggle, this particular test seems like no test at all, no struggle and so could be the most deceiving of all tests.
“Do you know what peace and prosperity can do to a people—It can put them to sleep. The Book of Mormon warned us of how Satan, in the last days, would lead us away carefully down to hell. The Lord has on the earth some potential spiritual giants whom He saved for some six thousand years to help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly, and the devil is trying to put them to sleep. The adversary knows that he probably won’t be too successful in getting them to commit many great and malignant sins of commission. So he puts them into a deep sleep, like Gulliver, while he strands them with little sins of omission. And what good is a sleepy, neutralized, lukewarm giant as a leader?
It is now, with our mortal limitations, that the Father asks us to love when loving is most difficult, to serve when serving is inconvenient, to forgive when forgiving is soul stretching. How? How will we do it? We earnestly reach for Heavenly Father’s help, in the name of His Son, and do things His way instead of pridefully asserting our own will.Recognize when you are in the struggle and let that send you to your knees in humble recognition and submission as you sincerely plead for help to do it His way.
I recognized my pride when President Ezra Taft Benson spoke on cleansing the inner vessel.6 I imagined myself as a pitcher. How was I to get the residue of pride out of my pitcher? Independently forcing ourselves to have humility and trying to make ourselves love others is insincere and hollow, and it simply doesn’t work. Our sins and pride create a breach—or a gap—between us and the font of all love, our Heavenly Father.The breach is created by our refusing to repent and refusing to ask for help. Father will not violate our agency. We are the ones distancing ourselves from Him when we try to go it alone.
Only the Savior’s Atonement can cleanse us of our sins and close that gap or breach. Repentance.
We want to be encircled in the arms of our Heavenly Father’s love and guidance, and so we put His will first and with a broken heart plead that Christ will pour streams of cleansing water into our pitcher. At first it may come drop by drop, but as we seek, ask, and obey, it will come abundantly. This living water will begin to fill us, and brimming with His love, we can tip the pitcher of our soul and share its contents with others who thirst for healing, hope, and belonging. As our inner pitcher becomes clean, our earthly relationships begin to heal. Healing begins with repentance.
Sacrifice of our personal agendas is required to make room for the eternal plans of God. Seriously...do you want your plan or God's plan? (Which was probably yours and His plan in the pre-mortal world...)The Savior, who speaks for the Father, pleads with us, “Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you.”7 Drawing near unto the Father can mean learning of His truth through the scriptures, following prophetic counsel, and striving to do His will more completely. More completely. Evaluate your obedience. Is it "complete"? That could mean your intention or actions or desires. Check it all...
Do we understand that Christ has the power to bring us into loving fellowship with the Father and with one another? He, by the power of the Holy Ghost, can give us needed insight into relationships. Listen to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit to guide you in your relationships...what to say, not say, how to say it, what to notice, how to help, when to hold, when to lift...all motivated by your love for God and out of gratitude for the love you feel from Him.
A Primary teacher told me about a powerful experience with his class of 11-year-old boys. One of them, whom I’ll call Jimmy, was an uncooperative loner in class. One Sunday the teacher was inspired to put aside his lesson and tell why he loved Jimmy. He spoke of his gratitude and his belief in this young man. Then the teacher asked the class members to tell Jimmy something they appreciated about him. As class members, one by one, told Jimmy why he was special to them, the boy lowered his head and tears began to roll down his face. This teacher and class built a bridge to Jimmy’s lonely heart. Simple love, honestly expressed, gives hope and value to others. I call this “repairing the breach or the gap.”Love repairs the breach.
Perhaps our life in a loving premortal world set up our yearning for true, lasting love here on earth. We are divinely designed to give love and be loved, and the deepest love comes when we are one with God. The Book of Mormon invites us to “be reconciled unto [God] through the atonement of Christ.”8 Everyone wants to be loved.
Isaiah spoke of those who faithfully live the law of the fast and thus become for their own posterity a repairer of the breach. This is an interesting statement. How does faithfully living the law of the fast repair the breach for our own posterity? President Eyring sheds some light on this in his talk "Is Not This the Fast That I Have Chosen?" They are the ones who, Isaiah promises, will “build the old waste places.”9 In a similar way, through sacrifice the Savior repaired the breach, or distance, between us and Heavenly Father. He, through His great atoning sacrifice, opens the way for us to partake of God’s loving power, and then we are enabled to repair the “waste places” in our personal lives. Healing emotional distance between each other will require our acceptance of God’s love, coupled with a sacrifice of our natural selfish and fearful tendencies. These selfish and fearful tendencies keep us from fulling living the law of the fast and generously giving of our means to repair the breach for those who are less fortunate.
One memorable night a relative and I disagreed about a political issue. She briskly and thoroughly took my comments apart, proving me wrong within earshot of family members. I felt foolish and uninformed—and I probably was. That night as I knelt to pray, I hurried to explain to Heavenly Father how difficult this relative was! I talked on and on. Perhaps I paused in my complaining and the Holy Ghost had a chance to get my attention, because, to my surprise, I next heard myself say, “You probably want me to love her.” Love her? I prayed on, saying something like, “How can I love her? I don’t think I even like her. My heart is hard; my feelings are hurt. I can’t do it.”I love her honesty. We must be honest with the Lord before we can truly repent.
Then, surely with help from the Spirit, I had a new thought as I said, “But You love her, Heavenly Father. Would You give me a portion of Your love for her—so I can love her too?” This is a blessing of deepening your knowledge of God - knowing that He truly loves ALL His children and that He is able to share His love for others with you when you have none of your own to give. My hard feelings softened, my heart started to change, and I began to see this person differently. I began to sense her real value that Heavenly Father saw. Isaiah writes, “The Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound.”10
Over time the gap between us sweetly I loved that it happened 'sweetly' :) closed. But even if she had not accepted my changed heart, I had learned that Heavenly Father will help us love even those we may think are unlovable, if we plead for His aid. We must desire it; choose it. Ask. Seek. Receive. The Savior’s Atonement is a conduit for the constant flow of charity from our Father in Heaven. We must choose to abide in this love in order to have charity for all. Remember, to 'abide' in His love is to receive it from Him as we stay connected to Him and see Him as the source.
When we give our heart to the Father and the Son, we change our world—even if circumstances around us do not change. Think of it! You can change your world without changing the circumstances! We draw closer to Heavenly Father and feel His tender acceptance of our efforts to be true disciples of Christ. Our discernment, confidence, and faith increase. These are three vital gifts of the Spirit!! Give your heart to the Father and the Son. Make the effort to draw closer to them.
Mormon tells us to pray with all energy of heart for this love and it will be bestowed upon us from its source—Heavenly Father.11 Only then can we become repairers of the breach in earthly relationships. Pray with energy. Engage your heart. Ask for charity to be given to you from your Father in Heaven so be a "repairer of the breach".
Our Father’s infinite love reaches out to us, to bring us back into His glory and joy. He gave His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to repair the breach that gapes wide between us and Him. Reunion with Father in Heaven is the essence of lasting love and eternal purpose. We must make the connection with Him now to learn what really matters, to love as He loves, and to grow to be like Him. Connect with your Father NOW. Ask Him what really matters and let go of what doesn't. Pray for charity so you can love as He loves. Allow your experiences to take you TO Him and not away from Him. I testify that our faithful relationship with Heavenly Father and the Savior matters eternally to Them and to us. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
What are we being invited to do/understand/become?
What are the promises we should hold fast?
What are the promises we should hold fast?
Talk
INVITATION
- Continually deepen my knowledge of Heavenly Father
- Continually deepen my obedience to Heavenly Father
- Wholeheartedly draw near to Him and enjoy the blessings He longs to give me in this life and in the world to come.
- Trust Him enough to abide in Him and walk with Him
- Learn all that God has revealed about himself; the depth of His love for me.
- Allow my trials to send me to my knees, instead of to distraction
- Do some priority sifting - What matters? What lasts?
- Change selfishness into service
- Change fears into faith
- Earnestly reach for Heavenly Father's help, in the name of His Son to:
- Love when loving is most difficult
- Serve when serving is inconvenient
- Forgive when forgiving is soul stretching
- Cleanse myself of pride and sin, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, to repair the breach between me and Heavenly Father
- Sacrifice my personal agenda to make room for the eternal plans of God.
- Draw near to God through the scriptures, following the prophet and striving to do His will more completely.
- Give hope and value to others through simple love, honestly expressed.
- Become a 'repairer of the breach' for my posterity by faithfully living the law of the fast.
- Choose to abide in the Love of God to have charity for all
- Give my heart to the Father and the Son
- Pray with all energy of heart for charity
- Make the connection with Heavenly Father and His Son now, to learn what really matters-to love as He loves, and to grow to be like him. It matters, eternally, to Them and to Us.
PROMISES
- "Our relationship with Him is eternal. We are His beloved children, and that will not change."
- "Thou shalt abide in me and I in you."
- "As we seek, ask, and obey, it (living water) will come abundantly."
- "As our inner pitcher becomes clean, our earthly relationships begin to heal."
- "Christ has the power to bring us into loving fellowship with the Father and with one another."
- "He, by the power of the Holy Ghost can give us needed insight into relationships."
- "Heavenly Father will help us love even those we may thing are unlovable, if we plead for His aid."
- "The Savior's Atonement is a conduit for the constant flow of charity from our Father in Heaven."
- "When we give our heart to the Father and the Son, we change our world-even if circumstances around us do not change. We draw closer to Heavenly Father and feel His tender acceptance of our efforts to be true disciples of Christ, our discernment, confidence, and faith increase."
- "Pray with all energy of heart for this love and it will be bestowed upon us from its source - Heavenly Father."
SNAPSHOT
Invitation:
Invitation:
- Deepen knowledge of and obedience to Heavenly Father- CONTINUALLY!
- through scriptures and prophets
- learn the depth of His love for me
- Trust Him
- Pray always-in trials; for charity
- Sift priorities
- Love simply and honestly
- Serve
- Forgive
- Have faith
- Repent of pride and sin
- Fast
Promises:
- I will always be a beloved child of God
- I can abide in Him and He in me
- I can receive abundant living water
- Relationships will heal through my sanctification
- Jesus Christ will bring me to the Father
- I can have needed insight into relationships with others
- I can receive a constant flow of charity through the Atonement of Christ
- Discernment, confidence and faith increase as I give my heart to the Father and the Son
- If I pray for charity, with all the energy of my heart, my Heavenly Father will bestow it upon me
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