Saturday, July 18, 2015

Articles of Faith 1:13 -- On Going All In with God

"We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."
Articles of Faith 1:13


There is so much good in this. :)  I think we sometimes take parts of the gospel and try to pick them apart.  We don't like this little detail because it doesn't allow us to do what we kinda wanted to do... so we pick at it and justify it and say, oh, this part doesn't matter, or it's outdated, or everyone does it, or we have to live in the real world, or ... thousands of things.  But I think, here, we see a big list of things and it is so clear that it is all about love and goodness and helping people, and we want to do ALL the things that fall in that category.  We want to be happy and make the world better and be on God's side. :)  Everything God asks us to do is all part of the same idea... to make us all better and happier.
We often envision life as kind of a poker game with God.  We try to see how he is going to play, we see if we can bluff, we play it close to the vest, trying to keep things back from him, so maybe we can win.  And somewhere in the middle, we realize that not only has God been letting us win, but we aren't even playing the right game.  When we finally read the rules we find out the game has more than two players and is cooperative.  God is actually on our team, helping us against the evil and despair that we are all working together to eradicate.
Today, let's stop arguing over the wrong rules and fighting people who are on our team.  Let's try to stop picking at the details and justifying our favorite "exceptions,"  Instead, let's go all in with God, using his plan to improve ourselves, and to make the world the best it can be.

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