Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Alma 5:18-20

"Or otherwise, can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that ye have set at defiance the commandments of God?
I say unto you, can ye look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you, can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?
I say unto you, can ye think of being saved when you have yielded yourselves to become subjects to the devil?"
Alma 5:18-20


 This is an amazing chapter, and although this part sounds kind of negative, I think that it is great in that it gives us hints about what judgment day will be like, and as the chapter continues on, it helps us know what we need to do to avoid this fate. :)
I like the idea of having a perfect memory after this life.  I think on earth we get mixed up with people seeing things different ways and maybe even mixed up with the way we *wanted* it to be sometimes.  But after, we'll remember clearly, and hopefully also without the fog of self-deception that we cling to so tightly sometimes.  (Weird how clinging to fog doesn't work so well....)
I think that we all have things that we feel remorse about.  Guilt is pretty much a way of life for some of us. :)  But I think of the alternate possibility... of feeling internally unburdened and free.  No guilt and no remorse at all.  Being able to stand before God, feeling clean and whole, and having a real hope that he will save me.  And I want that. :)
Later in this chapter it talks about how to get there.  That we have to wash... repent... really change ourselves and our hearts.  Today, let's try to imagine ourselves as people that could stand before God with a pure heart and clean hands.  As people that *can* think of being saved.  Let's shun Satan, and be clean.  No matter how true this vision is for all of us, we are still here, and we can change.  Let's get clean, inside and out.

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