Good Afternoon!
I am grateful for my wife and her excellent talk. I hope mine can be even half as good. We have lived here in the ward since June. I was a little disappointed that I had to wait until now to give a talk; it took a little while for anyone to ask us. I am not sure that I have given a talk since I moved down here from Alaska in February of last year. Maybe that goes with the territory, in alaska there are about six people and you give talks frequently, while here in Provo there are many thousands and you never have to give talks. Well; that is not quite true. I first moved to Lehi and we did not move to Provo until my Solveig and I got married around thanksgiving 2023. but I still do not think that I have yet been asked to give a talk down here.
I am speaking today about how living the gospel can help you to find joy in daily life. I like this topic, because I find life to be joyful and I hope that many of you do as well… in fact, a prophet once said that "men are that they might have joy". The gospel is intended to bring us joy.
Maybe it would be good to address what the gospel is before moving onward.
- Faith
- Repentance
- Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
- Receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost
- Other stuff.
Other Stuff includes living the baptismal covenant and striving to become like Jesus Christ through taking on further covenants.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. (galatians 5:22-23)
The fruit of the spirit is joy.
Life does not always seem joyful
Many people are not all right. Bad things happen to everyone. Sometimes they are caused by others, and sometimes we cause them for ourselves, but most people have something undesireable going on in their lives. One of my favorite chapters in the scriptures is in Hebrews.
In chapter 11, Paul writes about the afflictions of the saints (that is: us) and how they were able to overcome them through faith. The whole chapter is great, but it is fairly long and I probably cannot read the whole thing.
By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.
By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.
Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.
He also lists some examples of the trials that the early Christians faced.
36 And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
37 They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;
38 (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
He concludes that all of these individuals had one thing that allowed them to overcome their desperate situations: They had faith, which allowed them to have hope that the promises God made them would eventually be brought to pass.
13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them […]
The Gospel did not reach its fulfillment during their lifetimes, but they had the faith in God requisite to believe that He would keep his promises one day.
Finding joy through the Gospel
Joy is not the opposite of sad. Sometimes it is possible to be both joyful and sad at the same time. I am sure that the early Christians who were torn apart or sawn asunder were not super thrilled with the way that their life was going at that moment, but they still had joy, because they had the faith that lit the fire of hope in their hearts.
One favorite quote of mine is from the lectures on faith. I promise that I will not quote more than just a fraction of one, and not derail this talk into some weird corner of speculation or something like that. It says that we can have faith in God when we come to understand our relationship to Him and what sort of person that he is. We naturally come to have faith in God, because we understand what his character is through interacting with Him through prayer and other Gospel principles.
The gospel helps us to come to know God, understand him, and allows Him to make promises to us in a formal setting. We trust that He will not break His word because we know what sort of person He is. God promises to bring about the exaltation and eternal life of as many people as will accept it, and makes this promise individually and with each one of us through the Gospel covenants. This is the hope that we have. We can hope for this even though each of us will suffer terrible things during this life and will finally die. Like the saints, we can see afar off the fulfillment of the covenants and know that all of it will be corrected at some distant time.
So, joy does not mean not sad, it means that we will one day overcome our desperate situation through the grace of God. Sometimes that can be during this life, sometimes it is not. Probably none of us will overcome death in this life.
My father is a psychiatrist in a small town in Alaska. Despite the rules for client confidentiality (which is the clients to dispense with), his patients often approach him in the supermarket or at the gas station or wherever to ask if they can have a refill of their medication or to tell him about some thing that happened to them recently in their lives. So when I was young, I would often hear their stories if I happened to be tagging along with him on an errand. In between the stories of abuse or self-defeating behavioral patterns, there were sometimes stories of redemption. Perhaps a new mother is able to find the strength to overcome an addiction when she thinks about her new child. Or maybe she leaves her boyfriend who spends most of his days screaming at 13-year-olds in Call of Duty lobbies. So sometimes people do in fact overcome difficult circumstances during their lives.
I do not think that God speaks only to people who are faithful members of the Church; He speaks to everyone in ways that they understand. And whenever we heed Him, we can bring about positive changes in our lives. The gospel transforms the ordinary acts of day-to-day living into something transcendental. Good and bad happenings in our lives are recast as temporary situations that we are destined to overcome if we are faithful.