|
Post by Daughter of Yeshua on Mar 25, 2024 22:44:27 GMT
Family of Yeshua Messiah – Spring Conference –March 23, 2024
Welcome: Joseph
Well good evening and welcome everyone to our spring conference, well at least the broadcast portion of our spring conference. Anybody who would like to come and join in the fun and playing around and the games and prayers over the weekend, you are more than welcome of course, but for the broadcast portion of our conference, welcome.
Alright, so I would like to say welcome to all our visitors and friends from all over the world. There are a couple of connections here I have not noticed before. It is a great pleasure to see everybody as always. We hold our conferences four times a year, every three months and this is our first conference of 2024.
And let us see, so this conference actually lines up with the ancient celebration of Esther, when God delivered his people out of the hands of the Babylonians. And this evening, we have a pretty nice programme prepared. And first though we will begin with an opening prayer, after which I will be the first speaker this evening.
Opening prayer: Maria
Father in Heaven, we thank Thee so much for blessing us that we could have this conference. We thank Thee also that everyone could attend and we thank Thee for the technology that we have so we could connect with our family and friends. Please bless us with Thy spirit. Please bless also and guide all the speakers that they may speak with Thy words, that the gospel may spread forth among the children of men, and Thou, O Father, will have them in thy arms once again. This we pray in the name of Yeshua Messiah. Amen.
The Worth Of Souls ~ Joseph Rockwell
Okay, so this evening, I would like to tell you three stories. These three stories emphasise the depth of our Heavenly Father's love for us and His really relentless pursuit of all of us, which demonstrates His desire for us to come home, His desire for the reconciliation and return of all of his children. Father loves everyone and loves all of us and wants us to come home. He even sends out invitations for us to come home, sends out prophets, even sent His Son to come and show us how, to actually give us an example, instead of just words, to actually show us how to come home. And so I have chosen this evening for the text of my talk to be Luke, chapter 15, so out of the New Testament here. So let me start.
What I would like to do is I would like to read the text and then talk about it just a little bit. So I will start with one story, the first story. At the beginning of chapter 15, it said, And the church leaders murmured saying, this man is out talking with the disfellowshiped and excommunicated members, even visiting in their homes and having dinner with them. And Yeshua spake this parable onto them saying, Now let me talk about this for a moment here. There are a couple of points I would like to draw out and since I have experience with sheep, let me share what happens with the sheep so we can see the comparison, because the Lord is actually comparing these sheep against people. But remember, He is talking to the church leaders. Okay so He is talking to the church leaders and the pharisees and the scribes and all the elders of Israel and everybody who believes that they are so righteous that they do not need the Saviour. So we have to keep that in mind that that is who He is talking to. And remember they were complaining against Him, putting Him down because He was going after those people who the church leaders called sinners and worthless and nobody and people you are supposed to ignore and hate. And so we have to understand a little bit about this.
We need to see that background of why, because in reality, I think there is a piece that gets misinterpreted or misunderstood. This is the part that gets misunderstood, where he says there is more joy over one sinner that repents than 99 who needed no repentance. Now remember, again, this parable began because the church leaders were complaining that Yeshua was seeking after these people who had been kicked out of the church or the people who had left the church, right? The church leaders thought they were worthless, but the Saviour believed of course, like everybody, even the disfellowshiped and excommunicated, the inactive, everybody is of great worth. And the Lord used the analogy of sheep because He knew that the church leaders valued sheep more than they valued the lost souls, right? The sheep were worth something to those church leaders, so he uses that as an analogy.
But the Lord was saying that there would be great joy over all those who repent, more joy than 99 church leaders and self-righteous members who thought they needed no repentance. I do not want anybody to think that our Heavenly Parents would rejoice more over somebody who did evil and then comes back and tries to be good than over people who were good. This is not true. The parable actually says that there is more joy over those who repent than those who are self-righteous, the hypocrites who think they never need repentance. So this could mean even people in the church, anybody who actually repents is where the joy comes in. So do not fall for that little deception of the devil that if you are a good person, the Lord does not love you. That is nonsense. It really is that anybody who is self-righteous, who thinks they do not need the Lord, that is cause for sadness. And if they repent, if any of us repent, that is cause for joy.
And so let me get back to the sheep here since I work with sheep, so let us see if we can do this. And I have had a hundred sheep before, and I can tell you that when one goes missing, we kind of push the others into the field there, make sure they are all there, and then we go off looking for the one that wandered off. And we leave the field often and have to go wander through the woods till we find it. And when we find that lost sheep, we are very happy, of course. And if it is a lamb, we pick it up, and if it is too big, we just sort of herd it back all the way back to the field. And when we get back to the field, we gather up all the other sheep and we herd the lost one into the flock.
And I will tell you, when you put a lamb back down into the flock with the other lambs, they all start bouncing around and jumping around like they are just having a great old time. They are so happy that they are together again. And it is amazing to watch the whole flock have so much happiness, it just picks them all right up just because one lamb comes back. This is a very nice comparison, I think to the worth of souls. And all the righteous people would be thrilled when anyone truly does repent and comes home. So everybody would celebrate.
So let us go on to the second parable here. The second parable is the parable of the lost coin. It says, " Now remember again, this parable followed the first one, which was addressed to those hypocritical church leaders who figured they were righteous and they did not need to be saved or anything else. We have to understand that. And so here, He is comparing it against money, because of course, the church leaders at the time were more interested in sheep, the business and money and everything else, than they were in the worth of souls.
And so let us change this parable and compare it to children. So a family, if a mother had 10 children instead of 10 coins, let us say, if she had 10 children and one of those children wandered off into the woods, that mother and everyone else in the family would be out searching for the lost child. And if she had little children there, she would call somebody to come watch them, because she certainly would not leave them alone, and she would be out searching and searching and searching and everybody, the neighbourhood would be out searching. Everybody would be searching for that child. And when the child was found, would not there be like great joy and the family, everybody would be crying for joy and happiness and praying and thanking God. And when they bring that child home, would not the other children run up and hug that child? And everybody would be rejoicing along with the mother as well, for the little sibling to have come home.
Now, we really need to understand this. It is not that the other children are not worth anything, they are worth everything. It is the concept that the church leaders really were thinking that Yeshua was nothing. That him out there seeking for the lost souls was a useless prospect. They were trying so hard to denigrate the Lord for going after the lost souls, because to the church leaders, they were just written off. They are excommunicated, who cares? And they are going to have to suffer judgement , all that nonsense that they say. And yet, the Lord wants His children to come home. He desperately wants all of His children to come. So any child that repents, every child that repents and comes home, the Lord is pleased, that is worth everything to Him. And we will see that in the next parable here.
Okay, the next parable that I would like to talk about, of course, is the parable of the prodigal son. So in the parable of the prodigal son, we see the son, we see the son will ask for his inheritance. Well, there are two sons, and he will ask for his inheritance and he will go off into the world, because he wants to make his way in the world himself. He wants to make his fortune and all of that.
Now, the parable, as it is written here, is written around just the two sons; the dad and the two sons. But today, we are going to expand that parable and we are going to add in two more children. So let us expand it a little bit here. So in our expanded parable, we find that the wealthy landowner has four children. In this story, we see that three of his children get together and ask their dad to divide his lands and give each one of his children their inheritance now. And so the dad separates his lands, gives each child a quarter of his lands and then the three of his children sell their portions and they take the money and go off to improve on their inheritance.
Okay, the story of one of the young adults is all too familiar. He goes out and wastes his inheritance and has parties and all kinds of things, riotous living is what it says in the scriptures. And he has really nothing but hard lessons to show for it in the end.
The second, he also spends a great deal of his money, but he notices that it runs out, and right before it runs out, he buys a little roadside business so that he can at least feed himself. But he struggles along daily.
The third child, she invests in a good education, she takes her money and goes to university, invests in a good education, she apprentices under good instructors and she works her way up in a company and very soon attains enough stability to raise a family very well.
The fourth child, he does not sell his land. He chooses instead to continue in his father's footsteps. And so, he takes care of his dad in his old age, the dad moves in with him and he takes care of his dad in his old age. And this fourth son, he works very hard following his dad's advice and follows it very, very close, to the tee, which allows him to eventually buy back the other portions of the land which his siblings sold and his land holdings grow and grow and grow. And the fourth son was soon able to hire back most all of the workers who worked for his dad. Then one day, the father was getting very old and he finds himself longing for his wayward children and he sends messengers out to find his children, asking them to come home. He wants to have a reunion and a big celebration.
So the dad plans it all and gets everything ready. He asks his son, since the dad is very old, to help him plan everything and help him hire all the people that are needed and everything else. And so as each child returns, the father of course sees them coming and runs as fast as his old legs can carry him, and throwing his arms around his children, he cries, weeps for joy. He calls to his son's employees and they come and get the returning children, take them, draw baths for them, set clothing out, get everything ready, do whatever laundry they need done, all of that kind of stuff and get their rooms ready and the employees come and guide his children through the process. So the fourth child though, he is of course a very hard worker just like his dad, and so He is out working and when he returns home, he finds the celebration is already underway without him.
And after all that he has done for his dad, and after everything, he finds that he spent so much and all the expense and setting up the reunion and hiring everybody, the caterers and all of that, just so his dad can enjoy seeing his wayward children again, the son was left out. But the old dad comes out and he explains to his son, Son, I just could not wait, I was so happy to see all my children come home and my grandchildren, I just could not wait. And of course, the fourth child's heart goes out to his dad and he realises, of course, he also misses his siblings. And the father and the son walk back to the house together, arm in arm. And along the way the dad whispers, I think a couple of these guys could use jobs. The son says, of course, dad, of course, happy to bring great joy to his father and to his siblings too.
This parable helps illustrate the value that our heavenly Father has on each of us. Now we need to understand here that we are those prodigal children. We are the ones who left heaven to come out to the world and try to build our inheritance. And each of us does things a little bit differently. But that does not preclude that our Father, our Heavenly Father, loves us so much. He still sends out messengers asking each of us to come home. And this eternal inheritance that we have each been given in the parable, it is represented by the inheritance of the farm, right? Of the land. But here, it is represented by the same things that the Lord taught. It is represented by our hearts, our agency, our choice, what type of character we build ourselves into. Each of the children in the parable built their inheritance in a different way. Some did okay and others not so good, but the father loves all of his children and welcomes them back with open arms. Like He welcomes them back and He continues, of course, to work with His children and to teach His children, to help His children. And we can see the struggles that the children go through.
So this Earth life is really like all three of these parables and we are living through it right now. We are striving very hard to improve on our inheritances. And so the question is, what do we do? Really, what do we do to improve on our inheritances? And so this becomes a very big question. I think we need to learn one thing in particular and that we need to learn that heaven is actually within us and we need to build that inheritance that we were given. And this can be a challenge, but from all these stories, our Father never gives up on any of us. So it must be possible. I will leave these thoughts with you for now and always looking forward to our Saviour, Yeshua Messiah. Amen.
The path is easy, but straight and narrow. ~ Kevin Castro
Thank you, Joseph. Well, I hope that there is a couple of things that I can share with you tonight that might be of some value to you. Some years ago, it was 1977, so that has been a few, I was asked by a friend if I would like to go backpacking with him in a place called Canyon Lands. And Canyon Lands is a national park that is down in the Utah desert down in the southeast corner of the state. And as we were preparing for this one week trip that we were going to take backpacking, we met over at his house and he showed me a topographical map of where we were going to be going. And on the map it says, no water, no firewood, camping not recommended. And I asked him about that. I noticed that, a little bit of concern. I said, what about this, George? He said, oh, do not pay any attention to that.
Now, this guy had a college education. He had a degree in recreation science, and one of the things that he used to like to do was to take classes, he would take students when he was in his postgraduate programme, he would take students for summer and winter survival camps. And where he wanted to take us was during the same place that he would take his students for summer survival. So we get there, it is August, it is early August of 1977, and we do not get there until about nine o'clock at night. And we camped on the top of the canyon rim, which was probably a good 1500 feet above the floor of the canyon. When we get up the next morning, we break camp and get everything packed into our backpack and all of the water that we have with us.
And you cannot carry a whole lot of water because water's heavy and it takes up a lot of space. But I had two pints or two litres of water that I had in my backpack. At nine o'clock in the morning, it was 105 degrees on the rim. And when we got to the canyon floor, which took us about an hour and a half, it was probably another hour, hour and a half after we had started on this journey, and by the time we had gotten to the floor, the bottom of the canyon, I had completely drained both of my water bottles. I did not conserve any of these waters, and I had been wandering around. He says, you know, we will find water faster if we split up and go in two different directions. He said, what you are looking for is willow trees because willow trees require a lot of water in order to live. So look for willow trees, Kevin. And I said, well, okay. He said, why do not you go over this direction and I will go over in this direction over here.
So we set off and I looked and I looked and I looked, and after about 45 minutes, which seemed like an eternity, I started calling for him because I did not see any willow trees. In fact, the only trees I saw were dead trees, and I think they died from lack of moisture because they were all tiny like this. And so I did not hear him call back to me and I was starting to feel kind of faint. And I thought, well, I need to sit down and I need to gather my thoughts for just a minute. And so I sat down and I leaned up against this little two inch tree that was dead. And I looked over and about 10 or 12 feet from me, there was a little puddle. It was stagnant rainwater, and there was green moss fuzz algae growing on the top of this. The puddle was maybe 14 inches in diameter, 16 inches in diameter. And right about that time, it was starting to look pretty good, even with the algae on the top of this. And I thought, well, I have some halazone tablets in my backpack and I know it is not going to taste very good if I use these, but it'll keep me alive. So I am just about to dig into my backpack to get these halazone tablets out, and off in the distance, I can hear my friend's voice calling my name. So I headed in the direction of his voice and within about five minutes, I could see him probably 75 to a hundred yards away, and he was standing up on a little bit of a knoll. And so I walked up there and as I walked up to him, He is holding out two water bottles for me.
And he says, where have you been? I have been looking all over for you. And I said, well, I called for you, you did not hear me. And so he goes, here, you thirsty? And he handed me this water bottle and the water that was in it tasted like it had just come out of the refrigerator and it was ice cold and it was crystal clear, just as pure as you can imagine. And he said, come here, let me show you what I found. So I followed him for a few minutes and he came upon, as we approach, I could see here is a willow tree. And underneath the willow tree, there was a lush carpet of green grass, probably about 50 feet, 60 feet in diameter and about six or seven inches long. And as he kneeled down, he pushed aside some of the grass and here, coming out of the ground, was a little artesian well just bubbling up and putting out water.
And then he said, pretty nice, huh? And I said, yeah, that is great, because I was feeling faint and I thought, well, he had left me there to die, I knew he had. And so I was so grateful for him. And then he walked off a little distance. He said, come here. So I followed him and here, coming out of the sand in the middle of this desert was water just coming out of the sand. It is like a little creek bed, but you do not see it tapering off into anywhere. It just comes up. And so we follow it for about 30 or 40 feet and it falls over a little waterfall of rocks into a pond about 25 feet in diameter. It is about three, four feet deep. And he goes, this is our swimming hole, we are going to camp here. And the guy was amazing. He is one of these people that you could throw him in the middle of the Sahara Desert with a knife and a canteen, leave him there for three weeks and pick him up after three weeks and he weighs 10 pounds more than you dropped him off. He had some amazing, amazing skills.
So I have thought about this story so many times over almost the last 50 years. And that water was as important to me in maintaining my life because I was extremely dehydrated by this point. Temperature in the canyon was 110 degrees by then and I did not know what I was going to do. Christ said that he was the living water and that his words, that if we would follow them, if we would drink from the water that he would give the woman, the Samaritan lady at the well, that it would be a spring of water unto everlasting life, and that that person would never have to drink again. And it really brought that home, that experience for me, the words of the Saviour. And Yeshua is the living water.
And I would like to talk a little bit about the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And you frequently hear us refer to Jesus Christ as Yeshua Messiah and that simply is his Hebrew name and title. But living the gospel is also very simple. Gospel is simple. Living the gospel is simple. It is not complicated, but we have to live it to become as he is. And he also told us in a few places in the scriptures, more than once, he said - this is from Book of Mormon, from 3rd Nephi - He said, So we are here for a short period of time and we have the responsibility to try and figure out what Father, what the Saviour want us to do.
And the Saviour was asked one time by a pharisee in Jerusalem, who was also a lawyer, and these guys were always trying to trap him in his words and trying to trick Him, and he asked the Lord, what is the greatest commandment? And Yeshua responded, he said, Well, that is pretty simple, but it is a huge challenge for us to live it. And all the commandments really can be summed up into just two commandments. So let us liken the simplicity of the gospel to the pearl. Perfectly spherical, beautifully lustrous, and it is very rare in its natural state. At one time, Cleopatra is reported to have taken a pearl when she was hosting a feast for Mark Anthony and had it crushed and poured into her wine glass and then drank that. And that was just something that was unheard of because pearls were extraordinarily rare and extraordinarily valuable.
Well, let us take it up a few notches. The Lord told us to become perfect even as He and His Father in Heaven is perfect, a much taller order for us to accomplish all of a sudden. And I have asked a number of people over the years and some of them are Christian pastors that are included about this scripture and the reply is virtually always the same. We cannot do it. That is just figurative. He does not really mean that. All we need to do is to believe that Jesus is Lord and accept him as our Saviour and by grace we are saved. Well then at that point when I hear that, and it is always the same answer it seems, I will ask them, well then which commandments cannot we live that the Lord gave us? Which ones are you not able to live or we cannot live? And in no instance has anybody ever pointed to a commandment that we are not capable of living.
And so the reality of the situation is that we are capable of obedience to each and to everything that heavenly Father has asked us to do. He loves us. He wants us to get back to him. He wants us to become as he is. But we have to get ourself in the proper frame of mind and in the proper spirit in order to accomplish that. See, Yeshua set the example for us in everything that He did, He told us, come follow me. And in other words, do the things that I do. This is how we become like Him. We sometimes refer to it as living the holy order. But of course we have to have help from Him in order to accomplish this. We are not able to do earth life all by ourself, we do not have a big red S superman on our chest. We are not able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. We definitely need the Lord's help in being able to accomplish this.
And He has given us two really important things to help us on this journey and one of them is prayer. Prayer to Father in Heaven and supplicating him for the things that we do need, remembering that we need to ask for the correct things, not ask for the wrong things or just things to fulfil our unrighteous desires. He wants to fulfil desires but they need to be righteous desires. And He has also given us the scriptures and these things are really, really important. So what should we be praying for then? So if prayer is one of these avenues that Heavenly Father helps us here in this life to become more like Him and to get back to Him, what should we be praying for? And let us talk about that for just a minute.
And I have jotted a few things down and this list could be very, very long and could take days if not weeks in order to go through everything that we should be praying for because everybody's life is a little bit different. But we want to be praying maybe first and foremost to have the same love for everybody that He has. That is a tough one because there are a lot of people that are around us that we work with and that we live with that maybe are not so lovable. Yet the Lord Yeshua and our Heavenly Father love all of us. And honestly, it is not about us, we get so wrapped up with ourselves sometimes. It is about loving each other and taking care of each other and feeding each other and making sure that everyone is clothed and making sure that everybody is receiving those things that we need. And so often, this world can be a pretty cruel thing. And so we have the opportunity to be able to go out, to reach out, to help other people, to help our brothers and sisters.
Another thing that we need to be praying for is to be meek and to be lowly in heart as the scriptures put it, humble is another way that we might have it. Meek and lowly of heart. Joseph has taught me and the rest of us on many, many occasions that the Lord is so humble, He is so meek, He is the meekest of all people, of all men. And I believe that.
We want to pray for charity, that we have it. Just a quick scripture. This is from Moroni chapter seven, which is a great chapter in the Book of Mormon. Well, if nobody's acceptable except those who have meekness and humility, then we need to be praying for that for ourself. The Apostle Paul taught that if we do not have charity, we become as a tinkling symbol or sounding brass. Sounding brass is hollow. We have all seen percussion instruments used in a band and they are hollow brass or steel tubes. Now we do not have to be wealthy to be able to share or to help other people. In fact, perhaps the most generous people that I have met are people that do not have money. They have a tendency to have that meekness and that spirit of humility about them and they are happy to share in many, many cases.
To understand what and how the Lord wants us to do, I recommend studying the Sermon on the Mount. It is important for us to remember that when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount, that these are important enough instructions that he gave them to two different groups of people at two different times and they were both taught the same lesson. He taught his followers as well as the 5,000 around Jerusalem. And he also taught the people in the land Bountiful after his resurrection some months afterwards. And I would call the Sermon on the Mount a master class, if I had to describe it, on how to behave ourselves and how to be like him. If you think of love of God and love of your fellow man as the essence of the gospel, because that is what it is, the Sermon on the Mount embroils the doctrine of Christ, it is embedded within it, and it tells us how we go about accomplishing those things. How we are to love, when we are to love, who we are to love. And we are to love everybody without exception, because Father loves everybody without exception.
So we really do need to pray for each other. We need to pray for patience. I need to pray for patience. Pray that we will be forgiven, because if we want to be forgiven by the Lord for our sins and our weaknesses, we have to learn to forgive others. It is about becoming like him. It is about living that holy order.
Now, back to the pearl for just a minute. I have given this story before, but this is The Pearl of Great Price 2.0. And so there was a fisherman and his job was to do pearl diving and each day he would go out, he would get in his rowboat and he would set out from the shore and he would go to the oyster beds where the pearls were were to be found in the oysters and he was able to find a huge pearl. Now the one that I am going to show you is not round, but it is a pretty good size and it has incredible lustre and just a purity to it that is unlike any other gemstone. There is iridescence in it. So you not only see the white of the pearl, but you see pink and you see shades of kind of a teal green in this particular pearl.
And he was very excited and so he pulled up his anchor and he rowed back to shore. He thought, well, I can knock off for the rest of the day. And he went into town and he found the most important merchant in his village. And he went in and he showed the merchant the pearl and the merchant was stunned, he would never seen anything quite as beautiful and quite as large as this particular pearl. So he pays the man handsomely for the pearl and sends him on his way. He takes the pearl into his office in the back room and he just sits there and he looks at the pearl and decides, what am I going to do with this now? And so he has a thought, and he assembles the finest craftspeople from all around the area in which he lives and he assembles them in his office about a week later, sends messages to all of them to come into him. And he shows them the pearl and they are flabbergasted at this pearl. And they say to themselves, well, how can we help? And he says, I want you to construct for me a box. And he said, I want the box to be a work of art. He said, I would like it to be inlaid with precious stones from all over the world. I want to have lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. I want to have opals from Australia. I want to have jasper from South America. I want to have malachite from the centre of Africa and the Congo. And on the inside, as you open the box up, he said, I do not want it too deep, but I do not want it too shallow. And he said, I would like the box lined with stone as well and the mechanism for the lid and the catch on it, he said I would like it to be of pure gold. So he commissions them to go out and a week later, a couple weeks later, they reassemble and they said, we have created what we think is a masterpiece and we would like to show it to you now. And so he said, let us see it. So they carefully unwrap the box and they show him the box and he says, oh, it is beautiful, beautiful. This is a box that is befitting of my pearl. He pays them handsomely and he takes the pearl and he places it into the box. He then puts it into one of his showcases in his store.
And within a few days there is a foreigner that comes into the store and He is looking around and He is looking at the different things that the merchant has for sale, some rare and some pretty exotic items that are in there and he had been known in the region for selling unusual things. And the pearl is sitting in the showcase. There it is, beautiful, lustrous, pure. And the foreigner looks into the case and he said, oh my gosh. He said, this is the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen. He says, I have got to have it. And the merchant said, well, it is very rare and it is very expensive. And the man said, price is not an object. I have to have this. It is obviously one of a kind. And so the merchant says, fine sir. And he reaches into the case and he grabs the pearl and he starts to bring it out. And the man said, no, no, you do not understand, I do not want the pearl, I want the box. And too many of us in this life are picking the box instead of the pearl. The pearl represents the gospel. It is a thing of beauty; it is a thing of purity. It brings us back to our Father in Heaven. It blesses the lives of those who we come in contact with.
There is an individual that made the comment some years ago that too many people spend their life climbing the ladder of success only to find when they get to the top of it, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. He further stated, if in the end we do not choose the gospel, in the end it will make no difference what we chose instead.
Now I want to testify to you that Father in Heaven loves us beyond our comprehension at this point in time, perhaps one day we will understand it more fully. The Lord Yeshua loves us beyond comprehension. He gave his life for us. He set the example in all things for us and He sent us here to succeed. And I am simple enough in my faith to believe that we can and we will need His help. It is my prayer that we might focus on the things that He did, the life that he lived, to crack open the scriptures on a very regular basis, to read from its pages and to go in prayer to Him very frequently and with a sincere heart and that we might do so is my prayer in the name of the Lord Yeshua Messiah.
Training Ourselves ~ Ted
Hello everyone. Kevin, I think that was a really good talk and analogy and everything. And I wanted to kind of run off of what you just finished up saying. And I want to just bring it back to what you said about when you had asked the folks and the pastors if you could live as purely as Yeshua asked us to live or by the same example that he gave and how most of them or all of them said that they cannot and those are just guidelines or that he did all the work and now we just have to trust in him. I have a little bit of a story, a little bit of an analogy, a little bit of a story to kind of illustrate that even more to help everyone understand.
Now, unlike Kevin, I am not a jeweller by profession, I am a horse trainer. And so I can tell you plenty of stories about horses, but what I wanted to say was that similarly to Kevin asking the folks and the pastors if it was possible to live as purely as Yeshua did and does, similarly people have a misconception about training horses. And that misconception is that you have to break a horse. Breaking a horse, of course, being that you take an untouched horse for the most part, you bring it into a big tall pen that has got high walls and usually wooden walls so the horse cannot see out or breakout, and then, you basically run the horse around that pen until it is exhausted or tired or at least willing to put up with you. Then you throw a saddle and whatnot onto the horse. And when it is the first time for a horse, they actually do not freak out very often. It is later on when they start to learn to hate the saddle. But then of course folks jump on it and the horse would freak out at that point because there is a tonne of extra weight on it, a tonne of pressure where there is not usually pressure. And the horse will buck and buck and buck and jump all around over and over and over again until it finally gives up and its spirit breaks. And a lot of people do train horses that way, it is called breaking them.
But there is a different way to train horses. It is generally referred to as gentling a horse. Gentling a horse is basically the same as you train any animal and it consists of starting very slowly and working very patiently and with a great deal of love and diligence. And if you train the horse this way and you do it the correct way, the horse will never buck while you are on it. Unlike the other way where the horse bucks and bucks until its spirit is broken. At one point something could spook the horse or scare it and it would go back into that panic mode and start bucking again, and it could very easily trip, fall, knock a rider off, step on a rider. It could be very bad for everyone. But if you gentle it and you do it properly, you can keep that horse from ever bucking at least while there is a person on it. While they are out playing in the field, that is fine, but while there is a person on top of the horse, you do not want it to buck.
Now, if you go and ask people, a lot of people - I have not asked, but I have heard a lot of people say without having to ever ask - that you are going to get, every now and again, regardless of how you train the horse, you are going to get some buck out of it, it is going to buck for some reason, and there is nothing you can do about that. And the fact of the matter is that I have trained several horses and several of them have never bucked, not once. People often use that, they say that, of course, there is no way to keep the horse from bucking at one point or another, it is going to buck, it is going to break, it is going to snap, and there is no way to stop that. And they say that not because as much that they have had experience with the horses doing that, so much as they say it to justify their own actions regarding their outbursts, when they snap and have their problems. So they say you are unable to train a horse so that it never bucks. They say that so that they have some degree of excuse why they have their emotional outbursts or problems or things that they experience.
Now, a horse is an animal and an animal that is very driven by instinct. It is just the way horses are, and great deal of animals are like that. They have a very hard time controlling their emotions as compared to humans, who are not driven by instinct much at all in comparison. Humans have a much greater capacity for free will. Now when you watch a horse that is been trained correctly, never buck and always behave perfectly despite being driven by that incredible instinct to flight or fight and it never bucks once and it never misbehaves; and humans, who do not have that extreme instinct driving them no longer have an excuse to misbehave. It is a lie that they tell themselves and tell other people to try to justify their own actions.
Now, I have a story that somewhat illustrates that point. Something that happened to me recently, happened to one of the horses I was working with recently. I was working with one horse in particular, a very big horse, very broad, well built, very muscular. This horse in particular was a very twitchy horse. It was quite nervous a lot of the time. It was not very worried about what the other horses did or thought about it. Now, not a lot of people know exactly what horses are thinking and whatnot, but when you spend enough time around them, you have a tendency to pick up on it. And this horse was very quick on her feet, very twitchy, had a lot of things going through its mind and wanted to do stuff all the time, but it also did not care what the other horses thought of it, which is a very quite rare and a very valuable trait in a horse. Sometimes, it actually makes them harder to train though, but if you do it right, it is a very valuable trait. And so when I started with this horse, like all the horses, I started very slow, just a couple minutes a day at first working with it, getting to know the horse, of course, first, so it would learn to trust me. And of course, each day I would work up a little bit more and a little bit more time with this horse.
And there are three things, three virtues that you have to have for training a horse and for training anything for that matter. The first one is love, the second one is patience, and the third one is diligence or you can say dedication. There are many more around this, but those are the central three points. With the love, you have to care about the horse. You have to have a reason for training it, you have to want it to succeed, and you actually have to care about the animal. The patience, of course, I explained you have to start very small and you have to be so slow and steady. And the diligence is that steadiness, that consistency, regardless of what the horse does or thinks or acts like, you are the same no matter what. Horses are, by nature, very moody animals and to work with a horse, you have to be very patient, very loving and very diligent. You have to have a lot of dedication because from day to day, the horse's mood is going to change and the horse is going to act different from day to day. That is just the way they are. And there is really nothing you can do about that as a trainer. There is nothing you can do about it, except, of course, how you respond to it. You cannot change the way the horse acts of course, but you can change the way you respond to it. And the way you respond is you act the same every day regardless of what the horse acts like.
And this does a number of things. It teaches the horse how to behave by example, and horses are very intelligent, even as moody and panicky as they are, they are very intelligent and they can very easily learn by example. The second thing it does is it builds trust. The horse now knows regardless of what it does, you, the trainer, are going to remain the same. That builds immense trust, almost unbreakable trust and is one of course the three key points, one of the most important points.
Anyway, back to my story. I was working with this horse, big panicky horse, and of course I had done all those things with it and was working with it, and it was coming along very nicely, but there came a point where I was riding her and there were some other people out on some other horses that I had been training. And the horses, they were all panicking a little bit, they were getting very nervous. We were in an unknown location to them, a slight mistake on where I was trying to take them, and I was riding this big panicky horse, because I did not want any inexperienced riders on top of her, she might freak out and they might fall off. And I was able to, at that point, and I pushed that horse. I pushed her a little harder than I regularly would have because the situation was kind of going downhill. The horses were nervous, the people were nervous, everybody was a little uncertain. So I took the horse and I took her one direction and I pushed her and she did not want to go at first. And I pushed her a little bit harder and then something happened and she, in a moment, decided that she was going to humble herself and go exactly where I wanted her to go, where I told her to go. And that is almost the entire reason I train horses. Most often, that does not happen in the snap of a finger, in a fraction of a second, most often it does not happen like that. It takes days and days. But this time it did, and it was the most incredible thing in the world.
And I was able to, of course, take that horse now as a leading horse and I was able to lead the rest of the horses out of the place where they were, where they were all getting nervous. And because that one horse, of course, now was leading the rest and was listening to me with almost absolute confidence, the other horses immediately calmed down and relaxed. They say, oh, they know what they are doing, let us just follow them, it is okay. And of course, for the rest of the ride, she behaved perfectly. And even now, she behaves very well.
Something I want to point out, that is important to point out, is that even though that horse changed and decided and made a conscious decision to humble itself and to stop trying to do what it wanted to do and fighting against what I was telling it to do, and it decided, that is okay, I am going to trust you. Just because it did that, does not mean it was any less twitchy of a horse, any less spooky of a horse or that it cared what the other horses thought anymore. All it meant was now it was willing to listen and trust you even more. A lot of times people are afraid that if they were in that position where they, instead of a horse, it is a person, if they were the person who just decided to give in from all their stubbornness and just follow God down to the letter of what he said to do, and some people have a fear that they would lose their individuality almost. They are afraid that if they do that, what makes them any different than anyone else. And it scares them. But that is not true. They do not lose their individuality. Just like that horse, she was still very twitchy and she still had a mind of her own. She still moved very quickly and she still had all kinds of things she wanted to do all the time. The only thing that changed was the direction that all those things were going. And it is the same thing with people. Somebody you might find annoying because they tell dumb jokes could change for the better. And they still tell dumb jokes, and you may still find them annoying, but that does not mean they are not a good person.
And the last thing I wanted to touch on was that it is not really about the horse, it is about the trainer. As I have said through this whole talk, the horse does not change. The horse is moody from day to day, the horse is panicky, the horse is jumpy. The only thing that initially changes is the trainer, and it is the trainer who has that love and that dedication and that diligence and that patience and all of those virtues, regardless of what the horse does. Basically the horse changing is just a byproduct. It is not even the focus. The focus, of course, is what you do. And of course, it is the same with people. You cannot train people, you have to train yourself. You cannot show someone unconditional love and patience and dedication and expect them to change because very often they will not change, but you will change and you will change for the better. And eventually, if that person sticks around, they will feel so guilty that they end up improving themselves as well, very similar to the horses, because it is not about the horses, it is about the trainer.
Thank you for listening. That is all I had. I say these things in the name of Yeshua Messiah. Amen.
Aligning Your Heart, Mind, and Works ~ Will
Hello everyone. Honestly, almost everything I had has already been at least mentioned once in the meeting. So I guess I will just bring everything together in my own point of view. The thing that I would like to talk about today is actually what Kevin already mentioned is the first of the commandments, the most important commandments. And of course, in Mark, chapter 12, verse 28 is where it starts. Now to love the Lord with all your heart, might, mind, and strength and all those things, that is actually kind of a list of things that you can do. As Ted was saying, these are things that you can do in order to prepare yourself. One of the reasons that this is the first commandment is that in order to accomplish any of the other commandments and virtues and the beatitudes, it is necessary to have this commandment. You have to love God. You have to be focused on him. And this, I mean, we have talked about this before in these sorts of meetings. The example is if you want to say, quit drinking, you have to not only physically quit drinking, but you also have to quit thinking about the drinking. You have to stop that emotion, that attachment, all those fond memories of you drinking with your friends. You have to change those, otherwise you will eventually fail. You have to get it all out. You have to change heart, might, mind, and soul.
And people already know this. If you have listened to any sort of inspirational talk or the successful people's guide to success, in any of those self-help sort of talks, they all say the same thing. You have to be completely focused on your goal. You have to be working towards your goal all the time. You have to think about nothing but your goal. You have to feel emotionally nothing but your goal. And so every successful person knows this. It is like where it says in Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, And it is kind of important that your eye is single. So you have to align everything with your goal. Once you have aligned everything together, then you will be able to accomplish this. And as Ted just said, that you cannot make excuses for yourself. If, say, you are trying to train a horse and sure, even if you go through your actions are all step by step and right, but if your mind is not focused on what you are doing, if your heart - if you are cussing out the stupid horses in your heart, you are never going to be able to train them.
And so excuses really are one of the biggest enemies of aligning yourself, of having your eye be single. For example, if you do something wrong, if you end up punching someone in the face or if you want be a little bit more gentle, if you say, cut someone off in traffic, and then you start thinking and you start making excuses, well, he was doing this or this was happening, or I needed to get there first, or I am in a hurry, or anything along those lines; you are making excuses and your eye is not single, it is going different directions. And in your heart, perhaps you are making excuses in your mind, but perhaps in your heart, you know did something wrong and now you are beating yourself up about it and you are beating yourself up about it about not changing it. And your actions, your mind, your heart are all going in different directions and you will stay exactly the same, because as anyone who is paddling a canoe knows, if three people are paddling in three different directions, you will only ever go in a circle. You will not get anywhere.
So I have even seen this the opposite direction, where if someone does something good, if someone says something nice to someone or if they let someone else pass and then they try and excuse it to themselves saying, oh, I really did it for a selfish reason, or, oh well, there are many different kinds of excuses. And once you start making excuses, your eye is no longer single. Well, even worse than that is if you do something nice and then you start to resent that other person because you did something nice for them or you decide to feel that maybe doing that was not worth it. And you know what they say, if the gift is given begrudgingly, it counts against you.
So of course, you need to align your actions, align your thoughts, align your feelings all towards the Lord. And it is simple to say, and it is sometimes a little bit more complicated, but we have got a few step-by-step instructions. For starters, of course the sacred circle has all the steps to get you there. And if you want to break it down to a simple example, if you want to say work on your patience, say you want to start and learn how to train horses, but you are kind of impatient, so you need to start working on that patience. You start with your actions. You start acting patient in every situation you can, even if you cannot get your mind under control quite yet, but you start with your actions. You start with your physical actions, you start with your verbal communications and you keep that patience no matter how hard it is, you keep that patience. And while you are doing that, you start working on your thoughts. And you need to not get frustrated even in your thoughts. And you focus on being patient. You focus on diligently being patient. Diligence is patience with action, and you are continually working towards it and it is a constant thing. No matter what happens, you keep working on your thoughts and then eventually you start working on your heart, so that you are not even begrudging that patience. You do not feel frustrated. You continually work on your heart, a little bit, every day, so that when something happens, all you feel is patience towards someone, someone screws up and you need to help them and you just continually feel nothing but patience for them. You focus on what they need, you focus on what you need to do for them, and you continually feel that patience. And then once all those things are all aligned, you will never be impatient again. You will never be frustrated by someone's slowness again because you have completely aligned.
And of course, you do this for all the beatitudes; you do this for all the virtues. You do this for all the commandments and all the thou shalts and thou shalt nots. And this is a very important key, because if you go back to the original in Mark chapter 12, it is "The Lord our God is one Lord." There is only one goal, that is one direction that you are facing, and you are loving the Lord with all thy heart. Because once you have filled your heart with love, there is no room for anything else. Once you have filled your heart with patience, there is no room for impatience. And with all thy soul, it is your one focus, like all those self-help talks, it is your one focus. You are not pursuing anything else. With all thy mind. Once you start thinking, I mean, I know I have said this before, but the easiest way to not get frustrated or annoyed with someone, is to focus on all your gratitude for what that person does. Even if at first, you do not see what they are doing, but as long as you keep focusing on it, you will eventually start seeing everything that they do and you start appreciating everything that they do, and there is no room for annoyance. And with all thy strength, if you are going out helping people all day, when are you ever going to find the time to go punch someone in the nose? Yeah.
This is the first commandment. And the second is like, that means the second is extremely close to the first. So to love your neighbour as yourself, because that is all the Lord does. And the Lord loves all of His children like he loves you. And if you can love all of everyone else, like the Lord loves you, there is nothing that you will not do for them. There is nothing that will ever stop you from loving them.
In Doctrine and Covenants, section 4, verse 2, And of course when you die and you go up and you meet God face to face and He says... Well, when you get back to our Father's farm and he says, Well, come on in, let me talk to you, let me see what you have made of yourself. And do you want to be the guy who is, Well, I sort of went in circles and right back to where I started. Or are you the guy who can stand and say, Hey, look what I did! And the Lord will be happy and rejoicing and everybody and all of heaven will be joyful with you because hey, look what you have accomplished.
That is all I have had to say so, in the name of Yeshua Messiah. Amen.
Connecting To The Holy Ghost ~ John
Hello everyone. It is good to see you all again this time. We all made it, that is good to know. I wanted to talk about the Holy Ghost. We have already gone partway around the sacred circle. So as we go around the sacred circle, we go through the East, we learn to start keeping the commandments and we are given the Holy Ghost. So what is the Holy Ghost and what does it do?
The Holy Ghost is our connection to the Fathers, to our ancestors in heaven. It comes from keeping commandments and it is a direct result of keeping the commandments. It guides us in how we live and it helps us to align our lives with God's will. It helps us to do the things we planned to do before we came to here on Earth, and it helps us to work on improving the things we planned on improving when we came here.
In John 14, verse 15, it says, He goes on and he continues to explain the first two parts of the East and how to keep the commandments, but for right now, we will just focus on the Holy Ghost aspect of it. In verse 26, I believe it says, After that, John kind of continues into the South of the circle, but if we just come back a little ways, at this time is one of the times when Jesus was talking to his disciples and He was telling them that He had to go and that He was telling them not to be worried and not to be afraid because He would send them the second comforter and that He had to go in order to send them the comforter. And as He goes on comforting them, you start to wonder if maybe He was not just comforting his apostles, it is almost like He is, well, He is like a father who is leaving his children. He is kind of like fussing over them that He is leaving them for a few days. He is like, you guys, you have your lunches, you have all your food ready, you guys, you know what to do in case of an emergency, call this number.
And He kind of continues to fuss over them even though He is the one who is going to go and get killed. And it sounds like He is talking to them to comfort them and to let them know and to let them know that everything's going to be okay and that He is going to come back and that they will see Him again and all these things. But it is almost more like He is also doing it, like He is also saying these things to comfort Himself as well because these are still his friends. They have done everything. And as it says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And it also goes on to say that, no, I will go to the Father and the Father will send you another comforter that He may be with you forever. And I do not think it means the comforter may be with you, but that the Father may be with you forever, because the Father also loves you and He also wants to be with you. It is just interesting, when you realise that He actually loves you too. He wants to be with you and He misses you. Your connection to the Father is not just a selfish connection that tells you what to do and you can do it, check off the list like you are in a video game. This is your current objective, go here, do this, do that, you levelled up. But it actually is a connection that He can show his love to you through as well.
Anyway, so John goes to continue that. Yes, the Holy Ghost is a direct result of keeping the commandments. He says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And to everyone who keeps my commandments, I will send the second comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, the spirit of truth and the spirit of peace as well.
But the Holy Ghost, it comforts us, but it also guides us. Joseph Smith wrote a talk on the Holy Ghost, and I will not go through the whole thing, but everyone should go through it. It does tell you a lot and explains a lot of things and answers a lot of people's questions. He was a funny guy that way. But one of the things he kept trying to refer to was not to look after or seek after all the flashy different things that you can get, not to look for things that can be seen of the world and things that only the world appreciates. People go off looking for gifts like healing and like speaking in tongues and prophecy and all kinds of other things, which are all good things to have, but they are only good when being used in accordance with the will of the Lord. And the only way we know the will of the Lord is through the Holy Ghost. So Joseph Smith wrote, And the difference between a gift or an ability, a talent that you might have and a spiritual gift is if you use it to do good. Any gift or ability you have becomes a spiritual gift when you start using it for the Lord.
In that case, the Holy Ghost is actually the most important tool we have to, well, to do good, because it connects us and actually allows us to communicate with heaven and lets us know what we should be doing. Like I tried to say earlier, it is important that we have it because we need to be able to work on the things we actually wanted to work on before we came here and actually accomplish anything. In order to actually work with God, we need to have the Holy Ghost and we need to be willing to humble ourselves in order to get it. And we get it by keeping the commandments.
It is a very useful thing. It helps us direct our efforts so that we can actually accomplish things. Anyone who thinks that, oh, I can do it on my own, I do not need all these other things, I could be good on my own. Well, you can try, but you will not really accomplish anything because heaven is not the place you can be alone. If you are alone, you are not really in heaven. All those people who think I am going to go be good by myself, and if nobody wants to agree with me and do what I say, then there is more room in heaven for me. Well, that is wrong because if you are alone, it is not heaven, it is hell.
So rather than be all high and mighty and think you can do everything alone, you should really humble yourself to the Holy Ghost. Listen to what it has to say so that you can actually follow Heavenly Father. And by the way, Heavenly Father is the most humble person there is, so you have to be humble enough to listen to him.
So the Holy Ghost helps us do the things we planned, improve on what we wanted to improve. It is really a great organisational tool. It is really good at organising things. And yeah, it helps us connect to the Father, so we are never really alone, which just might be the reason it is called Second Comforter.
Anyways, I think what Joseph Smith was trying to say was that instead of searching for all the fancy things that the world sees and the world looks for - and he does go into a lot more detail in his talk, it is in the Joseph Smith papers, and I will try and find the reference for the minutes on this conference afterwards if anyone wants to look it up - but he goes into detail telling people not to look after things that the world finds entertaining.
And not just Joseph Smith, there are also people who came to Peter and asked him for the gift of the Holy Ghost. Somebody even came up to him and tried to buy the gift of the Holy Ghost. And a whole bunch of people were looking for these gifts of God that were entertaining to them, that were loud and eye catching, and everyone would praise them and it could raise their status. But those things are not where you find God. God is not somebody who you can find in all the rambunctious loud noises of the world and all the covetousness that comes from it or that leads to it, I mean.
Like Elijah, when Elijah said, Lord, where art thou, art thou in the mountain, no, art thou in the whirlwind, no, art thou in the roaring wind or the ocean and like, no, but it is in that still small voice. So we have to actually calm ourselves down and be willing to listen to it. And if you read that chapter of John, John 14 and 15, he does explain how to get the Holy Ghost. It is not that hard. You just keep all the commandments, keep working on improving, on improving in keeping all the commandments, and then you can have the second comforter, yea, even the spirit of truth. Amen.
Book Of Mormon ~ Bill Berrett
I better turn my mute button off. That might help. Well there has been some great stuff said at this conference. And it is all kind of a big pattern that fits together if you look at it. Maybe I'll give a little summary.
I was going to talk just for a minute about the Book of Mormon. We use the 1830 Book of Mormon, at least for now. We are going to have our own version of the 1830 Book of Mormon in the future.
I know one of the first things that happened when I met Joseph almost eight years ago—it was in the in the summer almost eight years ago. And of course, as he typically did with those who he was teaching, he asked people to go through the 1830 Book of Mormon and write down all the commandments and then put them in categories and summarize them, and kind of see what the commandments teach us.
It took me a while to do it. I think it took me over a year. I copied and pasted a list using a computer and put the commandments in various categories. I have a lot of categories here (holding up a printed copy of the list of commandments), and this thing is 140 pages long. So there's lots of commandments we can consider.
When we first started meeting together as a group of like-minded believers many years ago, I mentioned at times with others in our group; I asked, what is our meeting together all about? What is our belief? What are we trying to accomplish?
And over the years, I've kind of come to conclude that everything we're doing is conduct based. You know, we're trying to live the gospel. We are trying to improve our conduct. We are trying to obtain the Holy Ghost.
And so I've got just a couple of scriptures I'd like to kind of share with that in mind. One scripture was what we heard the other day. On Monday night Joseph taught us about one of the scriptures about becoming a Son of God, or a Daughter of God. It's on page 580 of the 1830 Book of Mormon. If anyone hasn't listened to Joseph teaching about this concept at the Family Home Discussion Meeting they should go to that family home evening meeting and listen to it.
And then a couple of pages later, we have a scripture that I wanted to mention. So, the prophet, Mormon, he takes the whole Book of Mormon and he's; he's recording these things. He's reading what all these prophets have made. He writes these things down here and we get the Book of Mormon of almost 600 pages. Mormon is kind of giving us some key things right at the end. This one is also one that we talked about briefly, also on last Monday night.
Right before this scripture I will discuss, Mormon had said something kind of interesting. He's saying, you know, good comes from God and evil comes from the devil. Well, look at the spelling of the words and it seems interesting. It is pretty obvious. You know, they got the same letters in them, really. And so you have to evaluate things kind of like that sometimes. And we have to have hope and expect that we're going to make understand how to discern good from evil and choose wisely.
On page 582, this is again in the end of the Book of Mormon. And this scripture I've always liked. Because Mormon kind of gives a summary of what we have to do. See, here's this pattern that Mormon sees. He's gone through all these scriptures. Repent, be baptized, have faith, fulfill the commandments, the doctrine of the East. Fulfilling the commandments bringeth remission of sins. It brings this change of personality. And remission of sins brings meekness and lowliness of heart. And then because you're meek and have lowliness of heart, then you get what John was just saying. You get the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the record of Heaven, which fills with hope and with perfect love.
And we know from last Monday night what happens when you have perfect love. Now you're called a son of God or a daughter of God. So that's pretty cool. And so, and then it comes to the end, when all the saints shall dwell with God.
So, here is a little summary here, and I think the way I kind of see this is: We know there's a pearl. The pearl is the gospel, which pearl is within us. We've got to live the gospel, we are the pearl. We are the horse, we can be the horse. We are being trained, you know, trained to become that horse, obedient, submissive, and we are the trainer who is responsible for our own conduct. We are also that child with the inheritance. We are here to see what we're going to do with it. You know, we're going to magnify it. We're going to receive it. And Will says, "no excuses." We can't be making any excuses like, oh, I don't want to do that. You know, we've got to be fixed.
And so we are the children who are here to receive this great blessing. And I think it all fits very perfectly. And of course once we do receive the Holy Ghost then we qualify. We seek to be taught personally by the Savior. And that really becomes kind of cool.
Anyway, I pray that we can accomplish these things, and that we can live the Gospel. We can understand it. It is conduct based. It is our conduct that should be changed as we embrace all of these gospel principles. We just need to change.
We can write all these things down, things that we can improve. If we have any anger within us, for example, and the scripture says don't be angry—then we apply the virtue of the gospel, being love, and let the virtue remove the vice. It says, don't be angry, so we love and we take a path using the appropriate virtue to overcome the fault. And we do that with all of the things that we need to improve.
Anyway, I pray we can do this in the name of the Lord Yeshua. Amen.
Conclusion
Joseph: Wow, this has been a very,... really quite an amazing conference. I love how all of these talks go together and build upon each other. And it really is truly amazing how the Spirit always puts everything together. I really like how the talks all centred around the Lord and what the Lord taught, and the Lord taught us that heaven is within us. And if heaven is within us, then that is our inheritance. That is what we are to build and what we are to build upon. And so since heaven is not really a place, but a state of being, it really is up to us. The agency is ours. The choice is ours, to build ourselves into the type of person that we like to be, to build that joy within ourselves. The Lord came to show us how to build that eternal joy, that eternal well of water springing up unto everlasting life.
And we are counselled, of course, not to hurt each other, but to help each other, to love people, to express to each other, all the virtues. This helps us build joy not only within ourselves, but with everyone else as well. And as we live those virtues, that joy begins to grow, not only within us, but also within those around us. As Ted said, with the horse trainer being that stable factor in all things and happiness being that natural result. And this happiness endures even when bad things are happening all around us. These virtues are the things that we would expect from Heavenly Father, like acceptance and forgiveness and love and patience and kindness and charity and humility and diligence. And let us see, temperance, goodness, peace, long suffering, gentleness, faith, meekness, humility, selflessness, whole bunches of them. And this is how that heaven is created within us. And we are those children of our Heavenly Father that He is seeking to come home, and our Heavenly Parents are yearning for that day that we come home. So let us build that heaven within us and return home to give our heavenly parents great joy. It is amazing that our Heavenly Parents have offered us this opportunity to learn and to grow and to become like them, and helped us to understand how to do so. It truly is amazing.
So thank you very much for coming. Thank you everyone for attending, and we hope to see everyone again in three months' time for our summer conference, and we will now have a closing prayer.
Closing prayer: Toni
Oh God, the Eternal Father. We are so very grateful that we could gather this evening and meet together as brothers and sisters. We are thankful for all the speakers and all the wisdom that they have imparted unto us. We ask Thee to please help us to remember the words that they have taught and apply them to our lives. We ask Thee Lord to please help us to remember, remember to be meek, to be humble, to love God with all our heart, might, mind, and strength, and to love our fellow man the same. We ask Thee to help us to have patience and devotion and dedication. We pray that Thou wilt guide us, so that we can improve our inheritance and connect with the Holy Ghost and become the sons and daughters of God that we know we can become. We are thankful for this technology that allows us to meet all around the world, but we pray, Lord, that the day will come when we can all gather in person and worship thee in Zion. And this we pray in the name of Yeshua Messiah. Amen.
|
|