Mormon Musings

http://mormonthoughts.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/after-all-we-can-do/

http://mormonthoughts.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/be-patient-with-things-of-the-spirit/

http://mormonthoughts.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/divine-destiny/

11 While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the  Epistle of  James, first chapter and fifth verse , which reads:  If any of you lack  b wisdom , let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.   12 Never did any passage of  a scripture  come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed  b wisdom  from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know; for the teachers of religion of the different sects  c understood  the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.   13 At length I came...

"The year was 1820; the season, spring. The boy with questions walked into the grove of his father's farm. There, finding himself alone, he pleaded in prayer for that wisdom which James promised would be given liberally to those who ask of God in faith (see James 1:5). There, in circumstances which he has described in much detail, he beheld the Father and the Son, the great God of the universe and the risen Lord, both of whom spoke to him. "This transcendent experience opened the marvelous work of restoration. It lifted the curtain on the long-promised dispensation of the fullness of times. "For more than a century and a half, enemies, critics, and some would-be scholars have worn out their lives trying to disprove the validity of that vision. Of course they cannot understand it. The things of God are understood by the Spirit of God. There had been nothing of comparable magnitude since the Son of God walked the earth in mortality. Without it as a foundation stone fo...

No work is more of a protection to the Church than temple work and the genealogical research which supports it.  No work is more spiritually refining.  No work we do gives us more power.  No work requires a higher standard of righteousness.  Our labors in the Temple cover us with a shield and a protection, both individually and as a people.   President Boyd K. Packer, " The Holy Temple " page 265

We may be bright and learned. We may be physically fit and fully capable. We may have all of the advantages of circumstance and environment and society, but there is a bond and a servitude and a limitation which if we're not careful may, in fact, be more apparent and evident and to which we may be more vulnerable at that point than at almost any other time. For lack of something else to call it, let me call it the world. I want to read you a few lines about this subject: For that person striving to live righteously, this mortal existence is a testing time indeed. The faithful are plagued with the temptations of a world that appears to have lost itself in a snarled maze of ambiguity, mendacity, and threatening uncertainty. The challenge to live in the world but not of the world is a monumental one, indeed. Our second estate is indeed a probationary state. The choices we are called upon to make every day of our lives call forth the exercise of our agency. That we fail so freque...