169: Good Cheer, Continued

This installment is titled "Good Cheer, Continued" as a follow-on to the Good Cheer podcast originally released in 2019, where Denver discusses how we can be of good cheer even when the world around us seems to be getting darker. Would you like to be like your Father in Heaven? Well, then, receive ye the Holy Ghost. He is as close, He is as intimate, He is as in connection with you as the very substance out of which you were originally organized. If you would like to be in touch with Him, keep His commandments. Follow Him. You’re not… Even if you do your best, you’re not gonna do a very good job. But the Scriptures talk in terms of your sincerity: those who keep all His commandments or seek earnestly to do so. Even the best of us are doing things wrong that we don’t even know are wrong yet, because we haven’t got that much light and truth yet. And so, we proceed to blunder around in the china shop, breaking the furniture and damaging all of the things that we ought to be holding sacred, and we do it with reckless abandon. And God doesn’t care about that, because He hasn’t brought us that far up the ladder yet to respect the furniture. He’s just trying to get us to stop messing our pants and stop putting graffiti on the walls—if we’ll just settle down enough to do that. The atonement of Christ is a work in progress. He’s trying to fix us, and He does that by giving us a little light, and a little more light, and a little more yet. Until finally you look back upon yourself from two decades earlier, and you say, “What a wretch was I!” Well, it’s a progression in light and truth. You’re still a wretch, you’re just 20 years away from recognizing it still. Start obeying further and getting more light and truth, and you’ll be astonished at what it is you’re going to become. Well, let me end by bearing testimony to you that, in my view, the Church is exactly what it ought to be, staffed exactly as it should be, filled with all you good people, with all of the things that you bring with you to the party. And that this is a perfect environment in which each one of you get the opportunity to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before the Lord. And you ought to be afraid. You ought to be fearful because the things that you hold onto in your secret sins are the very things that you ought to be abandoning. And the fact that you’re holding on to them means you have not yet chosen the light and the truth. You ought to be abandoning that junk, whatever it is. We all have our shortcomings. We all have our temptations. We all have our failings.: Despite the bundle of insecurities (and there were many in the prophet Joseph Smith), the prophet Joseph Smith met the Lord. Despite the fact that Abraham [Isaiah] was a self-confessed man of unclean lips in the presence of the Lord didn’t stop him from entering into the presence of the Lord. The fact that Peter is… Peter is not even a personality; he’s a syndrome. OK? He’s got pathologies. This… Peter: the chief apostle, the rock, the one that the Lord relied upon, the one that He put first and preeminent. And Paul? Well, look… You have to trust Paul to someone with far more… They have to have prescription authority to deal with him. You can’t… A psychologist is insufficient. These people met with the Lord. It is not a distant mountain. It is not an insurmountable problem. Have faith, repent, go and partake of the sacrament—do so (and I use the word advisedly), do so worthily. By the way, do you know how to determine if you’re worthy or not? You ask the Lord. You don’t do as brother Gaskill suggests and simply presume it. You do as Joseph said: And after thinking about his native cheery temperament and his inclination towards irreverence, he decided to inquire of the Lord to find out what his standing was. It had been four years since the First Vision, and Joseph wanted to know. Joseph didn’t presume. In fact, if he were presuming, he would have presumed to the contrary that he was worthy. “How am I doing, Lord?” And the Lord answered, in the form of the angel Moroni. You know, don’t settle for a book about riding the bike. Don’t settle for polishing up the launch pad. It was designed to be set in motion. It was designed to engage you. You’re supposed to be part of this. The prophetic history of all that we read needs to come down to and be embodied in you and your life. You have whole generations of people that went before you and you have people that are coming after whose faith, just like our faith in the pre-existence, was stimulated by the word of God embodied in the life of Christ. You have people looking upon you and having faith as a consequence of what you’re doing. You’re called “saviors on Mount Zion” not simply because you trek to the temple, and you fall asleep during the endowment. You’re called that because all of those that went before and all who come after have an investment in your life. You! You are the source of faith. You are the source of light for many. Live your life as if you’re on stage because, believe me, you are. There are people who are being redeemed as a consequence of the investment that they have in you. A failing, flagging, despondent ancestor is being buoyed up by the example you set. You have no private moments, and you have no private sins, so stop holding on to them. For goodness sake, they’re not only being shouted on the rooftops in the day of judgment, they’re being shouted on the rooftops right now. This is only the illusion of privacy. Everything you do is on display, which is why it is so important that you be one who gathers light and truth. …That doctrine which doesn't abuse, control, compel; but invites and entices, that is delicious, that makes you hunger for more; the principles of the gospel that not only edify but enlighten and enliven. The kinds of things which, despite everything else that separates you, you find you can come together in love and appreciation. That's the gospel. That's the Restoration. I know of no more cheerful a being in the universe than Christ. When He says, Be of good cheer, we ought to all accept that as the mantra. There is nothing that any of us will ever go through that He hasn't gone through, with a considerable greater degree of difficulty. He lived with a higher ‘specific gravity’ than any of us had to ever fight against. And He won for each of us a prize that is potentially eternal. It will be eternal, one way or the other. But if you take full measure of what He offers, it will be delightfully eternal. Cowardice is largely predicated upon fear. Don't be cowardly. Don't be fearful. Fear is the opposite of faith. For goodness sake, you're already in the battle! You're already going to be overtaken. The fact of the matter is that no one gets out of here alive. Live this life nobly, fearlessly. When you take the wounds that come your way, you make sure that they come to your front! Don't let ‘em shoot you in the back. Go about your life boldly, nobly, valiantly. Because it is only through valiance in the testimony of Jesus Christ that you can hope to secure anything—not valiance in your fidelity to anything other than Jesus Christ. The fact of the matter is that faith must be based in Him, and Him alone. The Spirit cannot lean upon you and cannot focus your mind upon the revelation that you are entitled to receive unless you use the scriptures as they were intended to be used—as a Urim and Thummim; as the basis from which you draw out the truths of God. And the best version of that is, of course, the Book of Mormon. You can look at D&C 138, and you’ll find that Joseph F. Smith sat in his room pondering over the scriptures. He's near death—it's about eight weeks before the death of Joseph F. Smith. The Church had a lot of challenges going on at that time. Fortuitously for us, the man who sat at home—infirm and worried about death—happened to happily be the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so when he got an answer (not to his inquiry about leading the Church), when he got an answer to an inquiry that had nothing to do with his position or budgets or anything else that manages an organization—it had to do with his own concern, about his own deepest apprehensions, his impending death, which would follow about eight weeks after this—the scriptures opened like a Urim and Thummim to his view, and we get a vision of the redemption of the dead. It entered… [this is back—verse 12 of the Joseph Smith History], It entered [into his heart] with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again (JSH 2:3 RE). Now that's an interesting statement, because it doesn't appear that this “labor” was a one-off event, but it occurred over and over as he sought more understanding, searching deeper and deeper into trying to understand what it was he ought to do and how it is he ought to accomplish it. … again and again knowing… if any person needed wisdom from God, I did (ibid). You should be asking God so that you can understand scripture. You shouldn’t be trusting the expositions of anyone, myself included. These scriptures have a message for you. God has a message for you. God would like to talk to you, not through me or any other man. God would like to talk with you. You’ll be saved by knowledge, and the things you need to know are uniquely situated; the things you have the right to get from God are uniquely situated. I got an answer from God. That's why 40 years ago today, I went in, and I got baptized. Elder Brian Black baptized me. During the baptismal service, because it was approaching twilight, the sun was beginning to set, the moon had emerged, and the first stars began to shine. And Brian Black commented in the talk that was given by him before laying on hands that all the signs of heaven—the sun, the moon and the stars—had been visible during my baptismal ceremony....