Ideas fill the world. They fill our minds. We communicate these ideas through symbols--words. Language.
How cool is that? An intelligent individual can portray ideas in words. We can dress them up in a metaphor, or we can illustrate them through a story. We all listen to others' ideas and develop our own, and then we express them as best we can.
Since the days of Adam and Eve, messengers have been sent by God to teach His gospel. To teach the truth about religion--not the corrupted religions that have caused tyranny and war for centuries, but the true religion of Jesus Christ that can change every person's heart. The religion of love.
But though God has sent missionaries, prophets, Apostles, angels, and even His own Son to teach these things through the symbols of language, many thousands have rejected His sublime truth. Why?
Because the Gospel cannot be understood without the Spirit of God. Everyone has a different amount of that Spirit in their life. Every act of faith in Christ, every uplifting word, invites that Spirit into life, while disobedience to God drives it away. The Spirit of God teaches us the ideas behind the language.
For example, we may hear the words "the love of God" from the pulpit or in the scriptures. What does that really mean? What ideas does it bring to mind? Some will dismiss it as a sentimental or nice-sounding phrase. Others will think, "If God loved me, He would solve all my problems right now. I still have problems, so He must not love me." Only the Spirit of God can whisper the real meaning of God's love to our minds and hearts.
As the Lord revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, "If thou shalt ask, thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge, that thou mayest know the mysteries and peaceable things--that which bringeth joy, that which bringeth life eternal" (Doctrine and Covenants 42:61). "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (KJV John 17:3). How can man know God except by revelation?
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1 comment:
Yes! The word is powerful, and the Word (Christ, as described in John 1) is beautiful. Isaiah says it well in Isaiah 52:7: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!"
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