Mormon Musings

I frequently think of the difference between the power of God and the power of the devil. To illustrate, here is a structure in which we can be seated comfortably, protected from the heat of summer or the cold of winter. Now, it required labor, mechanical skill, and ingenuity and faithfulness and diligence to erect this building, but any poor, miserable fool or devil can set fire to it and destroy it. That is just what the devil can do, but he never can build anything. The difference between God and the devil is that God creates and organizes, while the whole study of the devil is to destroy. Everyone that follows the evil inclinations of his own natural evil heart, is going to destruction, and sooner or later he will be no more. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 13:4

The cares of the world that, on occasion, can rob us of cheerfulness are certainly real cares, but they are not lasting cares; they pass with the passing of the world. Like the pleasures of the world, the cares of the world are fleeting. Someday, when we look back on mortality, we will see that so many of the things that seemed to matter so much at the moment will be seen not to have mattered at all. And the eternal things will be seen to have mattered even more than the most faithful of the Saints imagined. - Neal A. Maxwell

By emulating the Master, who endured temptations but “gave no heed unto them,” we, too, can live in a world filled with temptations “such as [are] common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13). Of course Jesus noticed the tremendous temptations that came to him, but He did not process and reprocess them. Instead, He rejected them promptly. If we entertain temptations, soon they begin entertaining us! Turning these unwanted lodgers away at the doorstep of the mind is one way of giving “no heed.”--  Neal A. Maxwell

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “  – Mark Twain

The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and He knoweth them that trust in Him. Nahum 1:7

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’  I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night…’   In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.  Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented…It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty…“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things- praying, working, teaching, readin...

The importance of reading, studying, and searching the scriptures is highlighted in several elements of Lehi’s vision of the tree of life. Father Lehi saw several groups of people pressing forward along the strait and narrow path, seeking to obtain the tree and its fruit. The members of each group had entered onto the path through the gate of repentance and baptism by water and had received the gift of the Holy Ghost (see 2 Nephi 31:17–20). The tree of life is the central feature in the dream and is identified in 1 Nephi 11 as a representation of Jesus Christ. The fruit on the tree is a symbol for the blessings of the Savior’s Atonement. Interestingly, the major theme of the Book of Mormon, inviting all to come unto Christ, is central in Lehi’s vision. Of particular interest is the rod of iron that led to the tree (see 1 Nephi 8:19). The rod of iron is the word of God. In 1 Nephi 8, verses 21 through 23, we learn about a group of people who pressed forward and commenced in the path tha...