Taking Time For Reflection

This is my one-hundredth post to this blog, and it will be the last regular posting. As future times and circumstances warrant additional writings, they will be forthcoming.

As I began this blog some nineteen months ago, my intent for this enterprise was to establish a written record of my most important thoughts, understanding, and testimony pertaining to the restoration of the Lord’s full gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this dispensation. This I have accomplished. As a professional historian, I am well aware of the multitude of records that may follow any individual through subsequent history. However, while an historical record detailing the activities and involvements of an individual is certainly of interest and importance, writings that detail the subject’s beliefs, aspirations, and thoughts are for me personally much more satisfying.

Additionally and speaking primarily to my family both living and yet unborn, these writings are in part my legacy to you. It is important to me that you have an opportunity to understand what I both know and what I believe after a long life of gospel study and religious experiences. To the extent that these writings become of benefit to others, so much the better. There have been certainly other periods in my life when I have spent more concentrated weekly hours in gospel study when preparing to instruct Gospel Doctrine and Institute of Religion classes. However, writing this blog has allowed me to focus on a wide spectrum of specific church and gospel topics as well as related issues like never before.

As I look back over a long life of church activity, there is one impression that overshadows all the rest because of its importance. I was reared in Salt Lake City during the middle of the twentieth century. When I graduated from high school, there were twelve operating temples in the entire world. Today, 160 temples are in operation or are under construction or have been announced. In my youth, temples were places one went to be married and later in life were places where the aging Saints could spend productive time when the rigors of rearing families was largely a thing of their past. Regular temple participation was neither spoken of in church meetings per se nor an activity that families were inclined to plan into their monthly routines. How very different the situation is today, and it needs to be this way for the preservation of the Saints in the Lord’s Church and the well being of the world’s people in general. Rampant personal pride, failed integrity in the family, community, and government as well as the proliferation and flaunting of sexual perversions are obvious signs of the intensifying wickedness in this world as are the increasing numbers of wars, rumors of wars, and incidents of civil disobedience. Can we be living in anything other than the last days?

Temples are portals to heaven. Nowhere on the earth may we be closer to heaven on a consistent, uninterrupted basis. There we are instructed on the finer points of that which we must be and do if we hope to someday be found worthy of the blessing of eternal life. It is there that we may seek inspiration concerning decisions that trouble us, answers to nagging questions, and the comforting balm necessary to endure when troubles and challenges weigh heavily upon us. We learn from the dedicatory prayer offered in the Kirtland Temple [D&C 109], that blessings of direction and strength follow those who participate in temple work regularly, and that these blessings flow outwardly to our families and into our communities to reinforce the Light of Christ that is already a constructive force there. How else do we explain the historical results that followed the dedication and diligent use of the Freiberg Temple in the communist German Democratic Republic? The vast, vast majority of the peoples of this world have no concept of the power and role The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints plays in staving off what would otherwise be their destruction resulting from the unbridled and rampant forces of Satan upon the earth. But such is the reality whether they realize it or not.

The writings on this blog have been written prayerfully, and very often, what has been written was the result of inspiration. For what I have learned and experienced these past many months, I am most humbly grateful. I would be remiss if I did not thank Erika, my wife and eternal companion, for her love and support in this endeavor.

The Doctrine of Christ

The “doctrine of Christ” is simply another way of expressing the “gospel of Christ.” This the Prophet Jacob makes clear in his rehearsal of his confrontation with Sherem, the anti-Christ, and the event’s aftermath. “And it came to pass that he came unto me, and on this wise did he speak unto me, saying: Brother Jacob, I have sought much opportunity that I might speak unto you; for I have heard and also know that thou goest about much, preaching that which ye call the gospel, or the doctrine of Christ” (Jacob 7:6). The purpose of this writing is to expand upon the common scriptural declaration of what comprises the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The fourth Article of Faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a good starting point: “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.” That these are the basic elements of the gospel is confirmed by the Lord himself to the Prophet Joseph Smith in October 1830. “Yea, repent and be baptized, every one of you, for a remission of your sins; yea be baptized even by water, and then cometh the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost. Behold, verily, verily, I say unto you, this is my gospel; and remember that they shall have faith in me or they can in nowise be saved” (Doctrine and Covenants 33:11-12). Within two years, the Lord declared what the gospel is from a different standpoint. “And this is the gospel, the glad tidings, which the voice out of the heavens bore record unto us--That he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness; That through him all might be saved whom the Father had put into his power and made by him” (D&C 76:40-42).

The additional and necessary element that makes these brief declarations concerning the gospel true is the often unspoken but well understood requirement that each of us must remain faithful to our covenants until death. The importance of this additional element is substantiated in the discourses of the resurrected Savior as well as the Prophet Nephi as they preached on very different and distant occasions to the Lord’s Saints living upon the American continent.

Nephi’s sermon on the doctrine of Christ is the thirty-first chapter of 2 Nephi, and it is beautifully compact yet complete. Concerning this fifth element of the gospel, Nephi testifies, “And I heard a voice from the Father, saying: Yea, the words of my Beloved are true and faithful. He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved. . . .Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life” (2 Nephi 31:15 & 20). The words of the Lord delivered himself to the surviving and humbled Saints are no less clear. “And it shall come to pass, that whoso repenteth and is baptized in my name shall be filled; and if he endureth to the end, behold, him will I hold guiltless before my Father at the day when I shall stand to judge the world. And he that endureth not unto the end, the same is he that is also hewn down and cast into the fire, from whence they can no more return, because of the justice of the Father. . . . And no unclean thing can enter into his kingdom; therefore nothing entereth into his rest save it be those who have washed their garments in my blood, because of their faith, and the repentance of all their sins, and their faithfulness unto the end” (3 Nephi 27:16-17, 19).

What more need be said?