102: Love, Part 3

This is the third part of a special series on Love, where Denver teaches us how we can live according to the two great commandments: Love God, and Love One Another. Transcript Think about what it means to be given the power of God. Think about what it means for God to be able to do all things, including sustaining you from moment to moment by lending you breath. With that great power, God says to us, “You are free to choose to do whatever it is that you choose.” Think of the patience of our God. Think of the meekness of our God. And think about the test you are presently taking to prove who and what you are. Ask whether or not, in the circumstances of this test, you are proving that you can be trusted to have the meekness, to have the patience, to endure in humility what must be done. Will you endure the abuses God allows to take place in order to permit His children to gain experience? Do you respect God’s plan so that in the long run we can all ultimately know the difference between good and evil? Will we voluntarily choose to love the good and to stay away from the evil. Think about that. And think about this record, and think about the test currently underway. Think about what it is you in your life should be choosing, doing, desiring and holding to your breast. [What do you love?] Your children will make mistakes. It is not your job to force them to avoid the mistakes. It is your job to counsel them, and to let them have the experience through which your counsel then makes sense, and is vindicated. You hope the mistakes they make are not too serious, but even if they are serious and they involve lifelong struggles, it is their right to choose. It is your obligation to teach and to persuade, and then to rejoice when they return after they are tired of filling their bellies with the husks the pigs are fed.3 It is your job to go and greet them and put a robe on their shoulder and put a ring on their hand and to the kill the fatted calf.4 It's not your job to beat them and chain them to the farm so that they cannot go away and behave foolishly. They need to know that your bonds of love towards them are stronger than death itself.5 They need to know that they will endure as an object of your love within your heart into eternity. Not only your children, but one another, because we all make mistakes. Do not exercise dominion, do not exercise compulsion; but exercise long-suffering, gentleness, meekness and kindness. Some of the biggest disasters come when you did not give people the right to choose freely, and you attempt to coerce them. Be wise, be prudent, be someone who they would respect and who they would gladly listen to. [Your children will correctly measure you in the end, even if they do not do so at the beginning.] God does not judge righteousness the way we do. If you've read the 10th parable,18 what was it that attracted the attention of the angels? They looked at the marriage, and they said, "This! This looks like what we come from! This relationship, this marriage, the man and the woman, this is what heaven itself consists of. And look! It's on the earth!" And the angels went and they brought the Lord to behold. They said to Him, "Behold the man and the woman!" Then the Lord set in motion everything that was needed. What more do you need to see from the theme of the Book Mormon than this passage, in order to realize when it comes to the relationship of marriage, this is the image of God. This is what God would like to preserve into eternity. It is so much easier to take people who have this kind of a marriage and to preserve them into eternity than it is to take someone who may know all mysteries, but whose marriage is a tattered ruin, and attempt to preserve them. Look at the example of your first parents. Moses 3: 22-25. "And Adam said: This I know now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh." You may have a spouse who is Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian or Mormon. You may have a spouse who is Community of Christ Mormon. You may have a spouse who believes in dancing naked at Wiccan ceremonies while high on peyote. You and your spouse need to love one another. You and your spouse have something far, far greater, potentially, between you and your children, than all the distractions of this world. You and your spouse face the challenge of becoming one. And if you are one, remember that the Lamanites were condemned, consistently in the Book of Mormon, BUT they were praised and ultimately preserved because of their marriages, because of the love of the spouses. Now, if you claim you have enough love for two or more women, then I'd ask you, can you not love your one wife enough to give her your full attention? Every day my wife and I get up and we have a 4 mile hike that we do every morning before we get ready for work and the day. We spent about an hour doing that. That hour is filled with conversation, every day, about what's going on in my life, what's going on in her life, what's going on with this big problem, or what is going on with our children. Every day. I come home for lunch very frequently and we spend the noon hour talking. We probably call each other, I don't know, four or five times during the day. I drive down to Utah County a couple of times a week. Driving down I am on the phone talking to my wife, driving back I am on the phone talking with my wife. We have a lot to talk about. I do think marriage can be something that is godlike, and two people can in fact, become one. It requires effort. You should make that effort. There is so much left to be done! Right now the only thing that can be done is to remind you of the Restoration, and that is available to all. Everyone is invited. Everyone. But don't expect the Lord to give us anything further, or permit us to move one inch further, until we first remember what we've been given. Even if you are in a fallen world, among a fallen people, who are proud and who are arrogant to think themselves more than they really are, if you will love your wife, and if your wife will love you, you are in the image of God and that will be preserved unto all eternity. No matter what else you may have to go through between now and then, that's what He's trying to preserve. That is the image of God. The fact of the matter is that the freedom... That is not a bad thing. That is a normal thing. Try to envision yourselves as a temporary family. A temporary gathering together of members of a family. If you don’t have some wonky aunts and some curious uncles, in fact maybe an uncle or two that you want to keep the kids away from. Every family has some strange folks in it. Consider the fellowships nothing more than an extension of that and try and love one another. The fact is that there are going to be those who through their behavior in fellowships are going to disqualify themselves from being able to be gathered because they are just not the kind of people that can live in peace one with another. That also is a good thing. Then there are others who come to the fellowships and their primary interest is in what they can take and what they can get. There are others who come with the only idea in their heart being what can I give, how can I serve. And even through they may not be able to give or serve much that’s what’s in their heart. And you all recognize that, you can all see that in people. Those are the kinds of people from which the Lord is going to gather and build Zion. No one in Zion is going to be a threat to someone else. It can’t be. It defeats the purpose of it all. To be able to live in peace with one another means that you literally are harmless to one another. The diversity in which you find yourselves and the ability to bump the corners off one another in fellowships, those are healthy, good, normal things. Hopefully they run their course and eventually result in people becoming smoother and becoming easier with one another. There are some people I admire immensely and they’re tough personalities and they are difficult to deal with. And there are other people who are hard to deal with because they are too easy going and they really need to speak up more. They have more to add but they won’t do it until you coax it patiently out of them. If you don’t figure out that you have to coax it patiently out of them, you’re missing the treasure that this person represents. In your fellowships think of one another as members of a family and then work out your issues, because that is how you grow into being a community. You may really prize the more difficult members if you take that approach. So far as I can tell Joseph Smith greatly respected women, in what he said, and what he taught, and how he taught it. I know all the arguments. I’ve read all the histories. I’ve read what the people say. I’ve read what the accusations are. The fact of the matter is that they are not accurate. The histories that they are based upon and much of the information was ginned up in consequence of litigation, in which Joseph F. Smith went around gathering affidavits in the two affidavit books from which we draw most of the information to redefine what Joseph Smith was doing in Nauvoo and earlier with plural marriage. Plural marriage was denounced by him as an abomination. He got up and said before a crowd, “I hear all the time that I have wives, I’ve got seven wives. I’m looking out in the audience and can only see one.” (Meaning Emma.) If you read the letters that Joseph sent to Emma and you read the letters that Emma sent back to Joseph, and they are preserved in the correspondence and the documents of the Joseph Smith History, you realize that those two, whatever else was going on around them, those two were in love with one another....