博客來Expect turbulent waters, but you can still be at peace because of Christ. This is the message that Joseph Smith’s restored gospel is trying to get across to us: an immediate, accessible, proximate Lord and Savior who understands and comprehends what you are going through and what you will go through and who has the ability to succor you in your every need. It doesn’t mean your burdens are going to go away. It means your burdens are going to be made understandable to you so that what you experience is acceptable and does not harm your soul. Despite turmoil, you can find peace.
What Christ acquired through His suffering was knowledge and understanding of everything you have or will ever go through or suffer. He went through it so He can guide YOU to the same end. There is no magic fairy dust. YOU must rise up. YOU must overcome sin. He has finished His preparations. And now the Righteous (who has knowledge of how to bring you through that) can guide you, can lead you, can succor you in your affliction so that you too can overcome that portion of the world that you have to contend with.
It is hard to hold onto the truth. It is hard to have the Lord walk with you. But that’s only because this world wears on you and asks that you compromise a little here and that you give up a little there and that you indulge a little here. And everywhere you turn in our society today- entertainment, the news, the political voices-they’re all urging you to sin.
The only way that we can become individually worthy is if we do as He instructs us to do. In many respects, it requires Zion for us to fully repent, and yet Zion requires us to be something very different than what we are. Right now, it doesn’t matter where you go or what you look at, every single institution in this world is in the process of losing light, losing grip on true principles, and sliding into increasing error, confusion, disorder, disorganization-and it doesn’t matter if the institution you’re looking at happens to be businesses, governments, churches, or civic organizations. Right now there are unrelenting voices advocating the cause of confusion, unrelenting voices advocating for destruction, decay, and overthrow-everywhere.
And so, at the very moment when the greatest effort is being made to bring darkness and confusion into the lives of all men and children, there will break forth a light-clearer, brighter, comprehending more, revealing more, and establishing again that same gospel and priesthood which was in the beginning. It is going to return. The world is not worthy of it. Therefore, it necessarily must be housed inside sacred space belonging to God in the form of a temple, which is the reason why (in the Answer to the Prayer for Covenant) the Lord makes mention of a coming command to build a temple.
God’s purposes will not fail. His effort is equally relenting with the effort of the adversary to bring about darkness. And I don’t care if it appears as though darkness covers the whole face of the Earth and there’s but one spotlight in one small corner. That will be enough to begin the overthrow of the kingdoms of this world and the powers of darkness that rule here. It will be the beachhead from which our Lord will launch a victory that will be total and will encompass the whole Earth. From that tiny beginning, it will spread until Zion fills the whole of North and South America, as Joseph Smith described it. He didn’t live to get there. He didn’t have the right people listening and giving heed and diligence to the things that were taught. How oft will God gather together people like a hen gathering chicks under her wings? Apparently, He will keep doing it and doing it until, finally, some group of people decide that they will rise up. Hopefully, that will include some of you.
Denver C. Snuffer, Jr.
Sandy, Utah
