170: Good Cheer, Part 3

This installment is titled Good Cheer, Part 3, where Denver discusses how we can be of good cheer even when the world around us seems to be getting darker. Take any event at any time, in the Book of Mormon for example. You have the family of Lehi and what went on there, or later in time during Alma and Abinadi in the courts of King Noah. Take any of those circumstances and ask yourself: Let’s assume that that was happening today. Let’s assume God was doing things today similar to what He was doing back then. What would that look like? How would that unfold? What would be said? What would the response be? How would you react to that if it were going on today? How would you decide if something like that were happening now, whether or not it was authentic and of God? How would you go about deciding that in your own day, in your own time, among your own people, within your own family, what is happening is of God and not of men? I don’t think that just because something gets enshrined in scripture we should lose sight of the fact that it has always required faith, it will always require faith, and it doesn’t matter what proofs you can muster for or against belief in something. At the end of the day either God is behind it or God is not. And if God is behind it and your heart is open to it, you’ll recognize it; you’ll receive it. The problem we have as people is we don’t really believe the Book of Mormon. We believe in long ago and far way. The Book of Mormon is telling us, “Hey, Gentiles, among you, in your day, in your time, there are going to be things that God necessarily is going to have to accomplish.” What would that look like? What would that unfold like? How would that come rolling forth? Many of the people about whom scriptures are written, and the pivotal moments in which choices have to be made before great things unfold, have remarkably humble beginnings, almost inconsequential, so much so that the biblical record entirely omits Lehi. So much so that the people chosen by the Lord to flee before the fall of Babylon, and to start a new civilization on the other side of the world, remained entirely obscure to the world from the moment they left Jerusalem until the time that the Book of Mormon rolled forth in 1830. Lot chose to live in Sodom. What’s up with Lot? Maybe they had good music. Maybe it was fashion. Maybe they had great art. (I’m pretty sure they had great performance art, I’m just not into that.) When Abraham went to recover his nephew and the angels came and Lot bargained, it wasn’t Abraham who was out to destroy the wicked, and it wasn’t Lot that was out to destroy the wicked, it was the Lord. The Lord is going to take care of the abominations that are out there. Our responsibility is to invite people to see a better way, to conceive of a higher and more noble way to live life. Our job isn’t to rebuke and condemn and to belittle. There are really two forces at work in all of creation. One force is generative, creative, and positive. It fabricates new things. It is ongoingly surprising and life-filled and wonderful. What’s opposed to that are the forces of degeneration, decay, negativity, entropy, destruction. There isn’t enough being done in order to bring that positivity, that creativity, that newness into this world. Even though children are born every day, and life starts over all new again with the birth of every new child, our minds are preoccupied by the forces of negativity and what opposes us. I could spend all day every day responding to negative arguments and negative comments, and if I were to do that I wouldn’t get anything new done, covered, accomplished, or out there. When we take a message out to people about the restoration of the Gospel, the work of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the offering of the Covenant, the expected coming Zion, there is no reason to deal with the criticism. It’s going to collapse on its own. Here’s a great bit of advice: If the criticism level would condemn Jesus Christ, then the criticism is the problem, not the object of the criticism. Now understand, (this is secondhand, because I don’t go there and do this) but my wife informed me that in some Facebook group there was complaining about the Prayer for the Covenant because that was “praying for to be seen of men.” It’s public. Okay, when Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven”, he did it publicly. It got reduced to writing. It’s the most widely read prayer in all of western society. So if you are going to condemn, on that basis, the Prayer for the Covenant, you are going to have to condemn the Lord’s Prayer and in turn condemn the Lord. If you can resolve criticism leveled at you by applying the test and saying, “Jesus would have failed that test, too,” then you don’t even need to respond to the criticism. But if they level criticism at you, and you look at it say, “Jesus would have passed that and I would fail,” then it’s time to start saying, “Well, okay, then I need to clean up something in my own life.” Because all of us deserve some level, we merit some level, of criticism and condemnation. We’re just not perfect. It’s really hard to sit inside your own life and be realistic about your own personal failings. We always tend to apply tests that are given in scripture outwardly and to say, “As long as I use persuasion and pure knowledge then I can beat you into submission and never yield the argument because I am doing what was said is the criteria.” Gentleness—okay, I won’t yell at you. Meekness—okay, I’ll be polite enough to let you say what you have to say, I won’t interrupt. Love unfeigned—okay, I love ya brother, I LOVE ya brother. Persuasion—okay, when I get my opportunity to present mine I’m going for the brass ring. Wait a minute. What if that’s God trying to get through to you? What if the way in which God is trying to persuade you is by the meekness of the humble Lord who speaks to us in plain humility; who comes to us, not to try and overawe us, but comes to us saying: “You are me in embryo. I know what it took for me to become the Son of God, and I know you can do it, too.” What if the Lord is your greatest cheerleader, and he wants nothing more than to try and get you to be more like Him. You can’t be more like Him when the center of everything is yourself and you never self-examine. We all deserve criticism. I was asked if I would bear my testimony and I’m willing to do that. I’ve tried to let people know exactly what has and is going on without the need of resorting to a lot of spectacular descriptions of the Lord’s direct involvement in my life. I want you to imagine for a moment: Moses is on the mount. The setting is awesome. The Lord is speaking to him, and in that setting he is overawed, so much so that when the Spirit of the Lord withdraws, he collapses because it has drained all his strength. He comes to himself and realizes man is nothing and he’d never supposed that. The adversary comes to tempt him. He can tell the difference between a merely pretentious soul whose message is dark, and the God of glory whose message is Light. And then the God of glory comes again and presents to him yet more. This is a spectacular event. He is told: “Take your stick, go to Pharaoh’s court, throw your stick down and we’ll humble the Pharaoh.” Now you’ve probably got–by the time you walk down the mountain, and you get ready and provisioned and make arrangements for your affairs while you are gone–days before you set off for Egypt. And then when you travel to Egypt, you’ve probably got a couple of weeks or more of hard trudging across the desert. You arrive in Egypt and you realize, kind of like God, the pylons of Egypt are awesome. They represent a false religion but they do so impressively. You come, with your shepherd’s sandals and your homespun garments, into the courts of Pharaoh where you are supposed to deliver a message. You tell me that no matter how spectacular the circumstances were on Sinai some three weeks earlier that it didn’t take faith for Moses to confront the Pharaoh and to deliver the message. As the sound of the staff is rattling into a stable position on the floor of the courts of Pharaoh, I suspect Moses was palpitating. “I sure hope He’s God here, too!” Because everyone thought that gods were local. Everyone thought that gods were from different districts. Sinai may have been Jehovah’s. Ra, Fa, who is big cheese here? I can imagine that for a moment Moses held his breath, hoping. We sit back from our distance with the confidence that this was going to play through triumphantly, and it was going to work out just exactly as the story always works out. Moses had absolutely no such assurance. He was sent out to do, what may be to him humiliating and embarrassing things to do and to say, but he did them anyway. Not because he knew he would triumph and history would remember him. He did them because God told him to and he really, really, hoped it was going to work out. I don’t know how often it is, that no matter what I’ve been shown or given, taught or received, that I realize, that at the end of the day, the only proof anyone will have will be the words that I get told to deliver. From my perspective it’s like...the stick rattling on the floor as it settles there, while you swallow hard and you hope that there are at least some who have hearts that are receptive, who are willing to say, “God spoke unto the Fathers in times past, and has spoken unto us by His Son, and again spoken unto us by Joseph, and God speaks again today.” It’s not Joseph, it’s not Moses, it’s the One behind that. It’s the God of Heaven and His Son. It’s the only sound, reliable, and true thing that there is in the universe, and that God speaks again. However unlikely it may seem in the circumstances, God speaks again. There will come a time when there will be people among whom it will not be necessary to say,...