Join hosts Jason Lloyd and Nate Pyfer in this week’s Weekly Deep Dive Podcast as they explore the intriguing concept of judging righteously by examining the fallout from the story of Ammon from the Book of Mormon. Discover how ancient scriptures can offer insight into modern dilemmas, and hear their spirited discussion about faith, perspective, and the importance of following the Spirit. Whether you’re familiar with the story of Ammon or hearing it for the first time, this episode promises to provide unique perspectives and thought-provoking insights. Tune in for an engaging and enlightening conversation!
Transcript:
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome to the weekly Deep Dive podcast on the add on Education network. The podcast where we take a look at the weekly come follow me discussion and try to add a little insight and unique perspective. I am your host, Jason Lloyd, here with our friend and this show’s producer, Nate Piper.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: What’s up?
What is up?
What is up, Jason?
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Always good things.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: That’s exactly right, dude. Only good things are up.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Another week, another opportunity to kind of dive in and talk about the scriptures and just kind of follow up with Ammon.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: This dad. Yep. He’s the best.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: He’s great.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: You know, I think we even talked about this last week. Correct me if I didn’t, but since last week, not relating at all to our podcast or any questions about the podcast.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Just other people have asked me.
It’s come up probably three or four times. Did Alma. Alma, did Ammon really cut arms off of people, or was he just disarming them? Did we talk about that? We talked about that, didn’t we?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: No, we didn’t.
Oh, we talked about him chopping arms off, right? Yeah.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: And I tried. I tried so hard to get an image created of ammon, like, swinging some dude’s arm, beating him with his own.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Arm, because that would have been better. That would have been better episode art, for sure.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: And apparently that violates the terms and conditions of chat. GPT.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Oh, booze and come on, chat. Stop ruining our fun.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: I mean, they gave us the gen z book of Mormon, but they couldn’t give us ammon beating people with their own arms.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: That is. Both of those things are true.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: And so I asked. I asked it to give us what it could provide for me. The best that you could and the best that you could. I was about to throw in the garbage because I saw sheep flying in the air, and Ammon looked like he was ripped off the COVID of some romance novel. And I’m like, what is going on?
But you know what? The sheep flying in the air. And that part was the COVID Yeah. I couldn’t pass on it. In the end, I had to settle on it. So if you haven’t taken a look at the artwork for this last week’s episode. Yeah, it flies.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Worth it. I mean, it’s for sure worth it. That’s what I meant to say. It’s for sure worth it.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: I mean, I think it’s amazing, going back to the question, and it has popped up, I think, three times, four times I’ve been asked this, this week. I guess some people have been teaching or thinking that when it says cutting off their arms, it really means disarming them or knocking the weapons out of their hand. And I was asked, what, what are my thoughts on that? And my thoughts are, I just don’t see where the text bears that out. I don’t know how bringing a handful of clubs is going to be impressive to the king. Like, anybody could go grab a handful of clubs.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Also, just taking a club away from somebody would not necessarily stop that person from attacking you. And so then you would just have ten people without clubs trying to tackle you and still kill you. Like, chopping off their arms is what stops people.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Could you imagine them, like, looking around each other in a circle, like, shrugging their shoulders, like, oh, I guess I can’t hold my club anymore. Yes. I gotta just.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: I guess I gotta turn my head down and just mope away.
That would actually be hilarious.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: I mean, them throwing stones at a distance and not being able to hit them and watching their brothers die did not deter them. I don’t think getting a club knocked out of their hands is going to be like, well, I guess this battle’s over. We’ll see you guys later.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: I’m going to tend to agree.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And I see some similarities in this. When Joseph Smith was in Carthage jail, they smuggled him a pistol and, and he had so many shots, right, so many rounds in the, in the revolver, and he fired them all into the door. A couple of them misfired, but he did hit somebody. And the person that he hit had to leave town and lay low after everything happened because his wounds would have identified him as one of the attackers. As you remember, they all painted their faces and tried to remain some level of anonymity. I think we’re going to see some parallels with that and with what happened with ammonite. When they say, like, his brother was one of the ones, I mean, how do you know? Well, he was the one missing an arm. I mean, those wounds kind of made it identifiable. And I think a major theme of this story was the misjustice that was being carried out before to where now these guys have been identified, branded, and justice is being carried out. So I’m kind of sticking to the story that it was actual physical arms.
I don’t know that the Bible made reference to arms, as we do today, saying, oh, it’s their, they’re holding a gun and their gun got knocked out of their hand. I just don’t see it that way for.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Also, why are we trying to make the story less rad? Why would we, why would we not want the story to be as rad as it is.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: I think there is a cognitive dissonance to go back to a term we used last year in the New Testament.
With us and the shedding of blood, we are nothing around today, and. And we try to distance ourselves from it. We look at it as a very bad thing. It’s just something we don’t have that same familiarity, and we don’t realize that the world that ammon grew up in is a world of bloodshed. They constantly had to go to war to defend themselves. In the ancient world, it was as much as planting and harvesting, fighting was part of the just the annual rituals. And when someone was found guilty of a capital a crime warranting capital punishment, you didn’t have a paid executioner that did the dirty work for you. Everybody in society was supposed to participate and shed the blood of this person, which probably has a way of deterring people wanting to just kill somebody, knowing that they would have to carry out that punishment unless they were sure that that was it. And you couldn’t go to the supermarket and just buy pre prepared meat. Right? You had to kill what you were going to eat. It’s just they were a lot more intimate and familiar with violence, bloodshed, and whatnot.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: This is up until, like, the few hundred years ago, by the way, too. You said during Ammon’s time. I’m going to say up until a few hundred years ago. I mean, it’s like war. War is part of human history more than probably anything else.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah. We have removed ourselves from a lot of the gritty and sacrifice just doesn’t seem to carry the same weight, significance in our world today that it did back then.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: I was watching. I was watching one of those shows on the History channel of, like, the preppers, like, the end of the world preppers. And I actually kind of. I actually am kind of down with these dudes for the most part, because I just. I enjoy the idea that there’s still people teaching their children how to, like, pluck a chicken. But I remember the first time, to illustrate your point, the first time I was watching this, a father was teaching his two young sons how to kill a lamb for them to cook up and eat, right? Because they raise animals. And I remember watching this just going like, oh, no, please don’t show this on tv, right? And then, like, this seven year old child, I think maybe six or seven, and I have a son that’s six, and this, my poor, sweet, innocent child, doesn’t like to step on spiders, you know, what? I mean, like, I’m just saying, like, he.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: I’m the same way.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I love stepping on spiders, but other than that, like, I don’t, you know, I don’t. I’m not trying to kill anything. And watching this six year old have to kind of, like, facetain the initial trauma of taking out a knife and cutting the throat of this lamb and letting it bleed out and stuff like that, it was.
It was horrifying for me to watch this. And then, like, to your point, it’s like, of course we don’t want things to be gritty and horrific and bloody. And by the way, natural and more normal than nothing, right? Like, that’s. I hate thinking about it like that. But I’m just saying is, if we take the history of the world in context, it’s way more normal than it isn’t that somebody knows how to defend themselves physically against somebody else, that a society is way more willing to kill off the problem parts of itself. Like, that’s more normal than what is not normal. So that, I was just saying, to illustrate your point, even I found myself squeamish at somebody having to teach their young child how to kill an animal. I was just like, oh, brutal. And then I’m like, why is that brutal?
Oh, it’s because we have life. Good man. We have.
We live in a very, very peaceful time. And it’s funny to say that with as much war as there is going around the world, but even then, it’s like we still.
I rode my bike down to work today without one thought that I was going to have to defend myself against a marauding army, you know?
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say, and I think that’s something that we’ve kind of been picking away at in the show over time. It seems hard with knowing what’s going on with, with Ukraine, with Russia, with Israel, with, with. I mean, every, every few years, there’s always some kind of skirmish, some kind of. And we say, well, we live in a world where everything’s going worse and worse and worse, but we’re looking at it from a very modern perspective. We try to look back at how people had it before and government sponsored, and, I mean, it’s just, we try to understand the world based off of our perception, and we apply a very modern lens as we look at the problems around us. And, and I think that’s what’s going on. I could be wrong. Maybe somebody’s got a really good argument for why it’s not. I just. I don’t see it. I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t been convinced otherwise.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: But I’ll chat GPT by Broseph Smith Book of Mormon for Gen Z also agrees with us, for whatever that’s worth.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Did it talk about arms getting?
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Yeah, when we read through it, it was just like, yeah, this dude starts chopping people’s arms off. I’m like, all right, chat. GPT we’ll use you as the deciding vote here.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: That’s the tiebreaker. There you go. There you have it.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: Do you think the actual arms, do you think that the king would have been nearly as amazed if it was just a bag of clubs being brought in? Because you could just buy those down at the dollar store, bro. It’s just a piece of wooden.
It could be a setup breaking off.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Branches on the trees. I’m saying, watching locks, but don’t kill us.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Look at, look at what Ammon did.
Yeah, man. Sorry. A bunch of bloody arms is that’s that’s an impactful statement.
I’m rolling with arms.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: And you think they would have taken credit if it was just clubs? Like, look, we took all their weapons away, but, I mean, they wouldn’t they.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Wouldn’T have even brought those before, or the king. They would have just used him as firewood.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: All right, let’s move on.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: All right, let’s get into this week, and this week, honestly, I kind of almost want to take this a little bit different.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about by your fruits you shall know them.
And how do we know if something is the right decision? If we made the right decision and we’re given, not only are we given the prescription, if you will, the means, the way that we should judge, but we’re also given a commandment that we should judge, which I think might fly in the face of how some people have understood this right. Judge not doesn’t say judge not, but God says judge not imperfectly or judge not unrighteously. If we go back to psalms 82, and this is going to be a common theme throughout the Bible, God is saying, how long are you going to judge imperfectly? Let me teach you how to judge righteously. How long are you going to let the widows be ground down and the orphans and not take care of the people that really need your help taking care of it instead? Favoring the rich, favoring the powerful, and trying to find grace and favor with them and giving them a pass while the poor people you grind under your feet be better, be better judges.
And so the Lord says, by their fruits you shall know them. And we think about fruits. Fruits are actions. And I think we can look at this in broad strokes when we look at the restoration of the gospel and we say, what are the actions of the church being restored? Here is what the church doing creating a net positive impact in the world, or is it a net negative impact? What, what are the actions of the church? And we look at how the funds are being used to provide food for people that don’t have food, that are taking care of the poor, that are doing just, I mean, every year during the conference break, you can look at the charitable donations and the outreach and the things that the church are doing, how they always rush the helping hands after disaster. And then on a personal level. So let’s say that we’re not painting with broad strokes. You look at how individuals are changed on a regular basis, and you say, well, here are the fruits. For me, this is easy. I look at that and I say, this is good.
But I think this can get convoluted or difficult for us to try to make the right call based off of this.
And here’s where I want to go with that.
For us, coming from America, living in a land of democracy, we look at the decision that Mosiah made that said, we’re going to do away with kings, and we’re going to create a leadership of judges and chief judges, and you’re going to bring your problems to the judges, and we’re going to shift accountability. Instead of the shoulders of one man, we’re going to put the accountability back on you. As a nation, it’s going to be a people governed by the people, rather than trying to have a monarch that could potentially oppress the people.
And so for us, we look at that and say, wow, good move. We applaud it and say, that was the right decision. But now I want to kind of look at the fruits of that and see if we still see it the same way. And by the fruits of that, when Alma goes with amulek in Ammoniah and tries to teach the gospel, it is the chief judge that kicks the men out of the city. And now when the men, and not all men, right, but the men that believe in Alma and Amulek, the ones that believe in God and prophecy in the church, are kicked away from their homes, sent out, and so that their women and their children are now defend defenseless, there’s no one to take care of them. And it is the chief judge that rounds up the women and the children and executes them by fire.
And so I asked this question. Would that have happened under the monarch? If there was a king there, would they have been executed? It was the chief judge that made that call.
And so we started looking at the impact of changing the system of government, and we start looking at some of these things that happen, all of these women and children that are killed.
Was it the right thing? And when the kings are left, it creates a power vacuum.
And we see this throughout history. When the Babylonian, excuse me, the assyrian empire falls, the babylonian empire rises to fill that vacuum. When that empire falls, the Persian rises to take that spot. When they fall, the Greeks rise. So anytime you have a collapse in the power or a shift or a change in the power, it creates this vacuum. And in a vacuum, there’s this need to feel that, to rise up and to try to take that. And when that leadership is shifted and that role is put off from the monarchs, you have the rise of the nehors that are seeking power and gain. You have the rise of a Malassaid, Malachi, who wants to become a king, and have all these people vote him in as king to resubject the people unto a monarchy. And so look at the consequences of the knee horse. What did the knee horse do again? You have that same problem with Ammoniah. You have them going down into the Lamanites, along with the people of Amalasi, who were inciting the Lamanites due to this mass violence and this wars. So because of this simple decision by Mosiah to give up the throne and to put the power on the shoulders of the people, now you have chief judges that are perverting justice. You have the rise of these people trying to seek power to themselves, that are again trying to overthrow the kingdom, that are causing math, death and destruction. Was it the right move?
Are these fruits? If we’re. If we’re looking at the. The consequences, and I’m going to call consequences the fruits, then, are the consequences telling us that this was the right thing for Mosiah to do? And does that make us feel uncomfortable to even propose that question, that maybe Mosiah made a wrong call by making that shift?
And before we go too far down there, unless you want to jump in, feel free to interrupt me at any.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Point.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: I think we ask ourselves the same question with Ammon and his brothers going to the Lamanites.
On the surface, who can say that that was a bad decision?
It was driven by good motives. They loved their brothers. They wanted to bring them the gospel. And you look at the fruits and say, hey, they brought the Lamanites to the Lord. They were converted thousands of people. Is that not good?
But when you look at what happened from there, when they converted, sure, thousands of people. But then the other Lamanites that didn’t convert it were so upset that they killed over a thousand righteous people over this.
And when they realized that what they were doing was wrong and that they wouldn’t fight back, they took their frustrations out on the Nephites and went and destroyed the city of Ammonihah.
An entire city was wiped out. And you could look at what was the instigator of this. Well, was it not Ammon coming and teaching the gospel? Would they have killed their brothers, been frustrated and left and destroyed an entire city if Ammon hadn’t gone down there and started teaching them the gospel?
And you might justify that and say, well, the city of Ammonia, they were all wicked people anyways. They had it coming. They should have gotten killed.
But after the Lamanites retreated back from there, they again started to kill their brothers, the anti Nephi Lehis. They again made plans to try to destroy them. The anti Nephi Lehis leave there, go up into the land of Zarahemla. Ammon asks Alma and the chief judge what they should do. They provide them with the land in Jerusalem. The Lamanites come in and attack the Nephites again. And it says here that this battle was the worst since Lehi left Jerusalem, and tens and thousands of people died. So in Amen zeal to try to convert a few thousand Lamanites, tens of thousands people died because of it.
Was the price of tens of thousands of people in the battle, not even counting all the people that died in the city of ammonia, and not even counting the thousands of people of the anti nephite Lehis that died.
Were all those thousands of deaths worth the decision to bring these people to the gospel? And when you start looking at it, does the fruit mean that that was a good decision, that that was a righteous tree? Or are the consequences validating the decision to go and teach the Lamanites the gospel?
And it starts making me wonder, right? Are sometimes in my life when I feel prompted or I try to go do something, if I run into obstacles or I run into whatever, and I start to wonder, did I do the right thing right?
Am I doing this right? And is it right? How do we, how do we, how do we judge that? So we started this discussion or this thought experiment with the restoration of the gospel. And I think coming back to the restoration of the gospel. Maybe we can kind of bring this full circle and take this to where I was thinking when Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ, and he had that first vision, experiment, experience, and he’s tasked with the restoration of the gospel, and he goes and tells people what happened.
What are the consequences or the fruit of what happened?
Was he not ridiculed?
Was he not tarred and feathered, beaten, abused, his children killed because of the actions of mobsters and the people that believed him? Some were raped, some were chased out of their homes, were forced to walk barefoot in the snow and the ice, bleeding, suffering.
And in the end, what did Joseph Smith get for his troubles? Martyred next to his brother, who he loved.
And so we start looking at all the fruit and the consequences of him restoring the church and say, boy, wasn’t worth it, was it?
By your fruits, you shall know. And all these bad things that happened, all simply because he loved God. So how do we balance those scales? What are those good fruits that we’re supposed to be judging these from? How do we know that what we’re running into are just natural opposition and obstacles in the path versus signs that we’re running down the wrong path, if that makes sense.
And I think every one of us listening to the show, correct me if I’m wrong, or anyone participating, either here as we’re talking or listening later on as we’re going down this road, would say that because of what Joseph Smith did, we have enjoyed the fruit of it. And it’s been very positive and very great fruit.
And so as I’m trying to square all of this up in my mind, it takes me back to maybe a simple analogy of, of weightlifting.
If I go to the gym and I run and I go and lift weights, maybe immediately after, I’m not super thrilled with my decision because the consequences is that I’m exhausted. The consequences, I’m tired, I’m sore, I hurt. Was it really worth it, putting all of that into it, just to feel like beaten, worn down, torn apartheid and that I’ve just worn myself out.
But over time, because I wore myself out, because I beat myself up, I gain a greater endurance, I gain stamina, I gain strength, and I look at the fruits down the road and they compensate for what I felt. And even at the moment, and I don’t know, maybe anyone who’s lifted weights, I think, can, can understand that even in the moment, somehow you still enjoy it even though you’re beating yourself up. There’s something satisfying about pushing yourself and driving. And it’s like there’s this compensatory feeling that comes to help balance the feelings that are negative.
And when I say that when we’re asked to do something that is hard or go on a mission, and anyone who served a mission knows that as a missionary, you’re going to get rejected, you’re going to go through hard times, you’re working long hours, and sometimes you’re not feeling like you’re getting a lot back.
It feels like the spirit compensates and brings us satisfaction, joy, or feelings that help provide that positive fruit to balance the scales. And so when we’re trying to look at this, sometimes, you know, when you’re looking at a beach from a distance, you never notice the individual grains of sand. But if you pick up a grain of sand and bring it right up to your eye to where that’s the only thing you can see. Now, it’s not that you can’t see the grain of sand. It’s that you can’t see the beach. You miss everything because of that one little thing. And it’s a matter of perspective. And sometimes if we focus on all the little negative things around an action, it’s like taking these grains of sand and putting them under a microscope and studying them and staring at them to where we miss the bigger picture, to where we miss the overall. And sometimes we jump to hasty judgment. And maybe that’s why God has to keep telling us, judge better, judge better, because we keep getting caught up and focusing on the wrong things and making these little things so big that we can’t see the bigger picture? And how does the bigger picture give us a better sense of what’s right? How does the bigger picture vindicate Ammon’s mission? How does the bigger picture vindicate Mosiah’s decision to abdicate the throne to a different form of government?
And how does the spirit, in the meantime, compensate for the negative that’s going around to buoy us up and make us feel positive in the face of affliction? I don’t know. Did I. Did I spit that out? Right?
[00:25:53] Speaker B: I agree. I agree with you on this. We’ve talked about it, and, you know, my feeling on it, again, perspective is so much of this. But you did bring up something that I think should at least be thought through, which is, okay, cool, well, then, what about this thing that was supposedly good that then had just a bunch of death and murdering and destruction after it? Like, okay, cool, is that fruit that we should then be judging Ammon by? Is this fruit. We should be judging Mosiah by like, I mean, we have to be fair. I feel like, to the other side of this, right? Because this is, to me, to me, I do agree that the part of the discussion where we can say, hey, have some perspective when things aren’t great, have some big picture perspective. We preach this. I preach this all the time with at least my own personal life and in the classes that I get to teach and whatnot. I’ve been pretty open about some of the experiences that I’ve had that I thought were bad that ended up being good. It’s like, okay, cool. You just have to be patient.
But I feel like for this discussion then, to actually mean something on the other side of it is like, how long is the appropriate time to wait to see what the fruits of this are? You brought up two really great things even in context of the Book of Mormon, where, what are the fruits of ammon going and teaching and saving a small group of people only to lead to the death and killing and destructions of tens of thousands of more because of it? Or is it even fair to say because of it? Right? Like, that’s. I guess maybe that’s the answer to that question. But because we don’t, we don’t know what the alternative is because the alternative didn’t happen. What happened happened. So do you see where I’m saying it’s like, I do feel like it’s because the reason I feel like it’s important to have the other side of this discussion is because let’s make this personal. Let’s take a look at our lives. Right? Like, what?
When can we then take a look at things that aren’t going right for us in life?
When can we look at those things and have the correct perspective of judgment to go, hey, maybe this is a sign that I made a left turn when I should have made a right turn. Let me go and kind of fix the course that I’m on.
Or it’s like, well, when can we judge something as a bad fruit? Or do we just have to wait for forever to hope that it turns into a good fruit? Do you see what I’m saying? Like, I don’t think it’s fair to just say everything happening, just wait for it long enough to then be revealed as the right thing, 100%.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: And you hit on two important things on this that I kind of want to focus. And then I’m going to come back and see if I can address that question a little bit better.
One, when you talk about what we’re weighing that decision against. Right.
If Ammon hadn’t gone, and we say, okay, then. Then all these thousands of people didn’t die.
But that’s only one side of the scales. What are we balancing that with on the other side of the scales? Who knows what it would have been like had Ammon stayed behind? To your point, if Ammon stayed behind, maybe now, instead of having all of these lamanites, they’re kind of converting to the gospel. All of them get all stoked up and riled to where the Nephites are overrun completely and annihilated. And your end of the book of Mormon happens 600 years earlier than it would have happened otherwise. And it’s not tens of thousands of lives that are lost. It’s hundreds of thousands of lives that are lost. And so it’s really hard for us to make that judgment call when we can only see half of the picture. We can only see what happened because he did go, and that’s sitting inside of the weights and the balances. What we don’t see is what would have happened if we stayed behind. And all we can do is speculate that really God is the only one that can know what would have happened had it not happened. And it requires serious faith and trust in God and trying to fill in the blank to know, is it really the right thing? And I think we’ve touched on this before, because the question is, why did God save me, shach. Shadrach and Abednego, and let Abinadi die in the flames? Why did God speak to save my brother, who fell asleep behind the wheel of a tire, and my mom heard his voice and got out and checked and found him where other kids are run over in the driveway? Why? And we don’t know what’s on the other half of the scale to be able to really measure that out and see. So I’m glad you bring that up, Nate. And one of the best examples, we say, the best cases of looking at this, I think, is Mosiah abdicating the throne.
You have these chief judges, but you know what? You have one localized chief judge that executes the women and the children in the city. What if that guy would have been king over all of Zarahemla? And what if what we would have seen, like, on the scale of Noah in the land of Nephi, what if really there’s a much greater good happening in the city with Mosiah having switched it to chief judges, than what would have happened had an evil monarch stepped up to the plate. Right. We don’t have the other half of the scale. It’s not a fair comparison to say, oh, it would have been so much better had I not.
And if that’s the case and we don’t have the other half of the scale, how do we ever truly measure our side versus the other side, the status quo, or what things would have been like had we not done it? And so the other good point that you make, Nate, and this is something that you hit. I don’t want to sweep this under the rug.
Can we truly attribute some of the actions to Ammon going and teaching the gospel?
A lot of what we attribute to that one action are actually the actions of somebody else.
If Ammon’s going in and teaching the gospel, what are the consequences of what he did? Let’s focus on that. He was able to teach Lamoni. He was able to convert Lamoni to understanding. He was able to bring a lot of people to the gospel. When you look at the people that are killing the anti nephite lehis because of Ammon, can you blame Ammon for them killing it? Did Ammon tell them to go kill them?
Let’s not lay blame at Ammon’s feet for the actions of others.
And as a parent, I think we see this all the time when one of your child says, well, he made me, or, well, she made me do it. I mean, we see this all the time as parents. Right? And, like, did he really? What did he do?
Let’s not. Let’s not assign blame to somebody else for what you did. Let’s take accountability of our own actions.
And when we look at why bad things happen to people, sometimes we very quickly shift the blame to say God and say God did it. When? When, really, who’s the responsible person? God gave us agency, and. And it was this person in particular’s decision that led to those. And so we start looking at the fruits of those decisions going back down the road with Joseph Smith. Right?
Joseph Smith was killed, but who’s the one that made the decision to kill him? And what are the fruits of what they did?
And maybe let’s not assign blame where blame shouldn’t be assigned. I don’t know if I’ve hit that.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: I do. I think you hit that. I think for me, because, again, like, is with a lot of these things, I feel like for myself, I’m able to think through it and rationalize through it, right? And it’s like, oh, maybe it’s just the bigger picture. Maybe it’s just the bigger picture. The hard thing about that is, is that there is a commandment to judge righteously, and we’re told how to do that, which is by their fruits, you shall know them. Right? And so to me, there has to be some sort of, like, functional meaning in that, that we can use throughout our day to day lives.
I would think instead of just going, well, just wait for forever, just wait for forever for things to show you why it is. Right. And I do have an answer to this. My answer to this has been made a lot more clear to me, really, in the most recent couple months because I got asked to speak in church and then give a couple lessons for both elders, quorum and Sunday school, all within like a week, two weeks of themselves, right? And they, a lot of them focused on the idea, really, that revolved around elder gong’s talk from last conference, which is all things can be made for our good, right. I think that there is a profoundness in the idea that we’re not just.
We aren’t just here in this life to be acted upon, to your point, right. That this life is truly about us making things happen.
And if we’re doing it with. If we’re starting out from the right place with the confirmation of the spirit, then those fruits are good fruits regardless of what they may appear like in the moment, right. And that it’s really, it’s really not as much for us to be judging like, or, you know what I mean? Just like, wandering around from a day to day chasing good fruits. Oh, hey, that looks like a good fruit. I’m going to follow that person. Oh, hey, I’m going to chase because that’s fickle. And sometimes we don’t have the perspective and we don’t have the long term thing. In theory, if by their fruits, you shall know them, we should be following every magician down in Las Vegas that’s pulling off some dope trick because you’re like, hey, he’s using magic. And if it’s magic, then it must be something that’s unattainable by humans. We should be disciples of that person, right?
I guess my thought is, if we’re out there chasing fruits, we may be in trouble. If we’re out there growing fruits, we’re going to have something that we can actually rely on and that can actually be sustainable and hopefully something that other people can look towards as well. My thought about this is the perspective that I’ve gained is it’s so much more important to.
To be growing good fruits by our actions and letting God consecrate those things for our good, letting God magnify our weaknesses, all of those things. I feel like it’s so much more of an internal thing than an external thing. And sure, you and I, because of where we’re at with our beliefs and our faiths, I feel like it’s easier for us to look at the tree that is the church and the restoration, and we can look at that with perspective and say, oh, yeah, of course, this is good fruit. Oh, of course, this is great. Oh, look. Look at all these things, right? And we could, within 5 seconds of me pulling up Twitter, find somebody that could look at that and say, look at all of the bad fruits that this is. Look at all of the pain that this has caused certain people, maybe, right? Look at all the trauma that this, like you and I, can look at the exact same thing and judge that as a good fruit. And some might look at it and judge it as a bad fruit, which makes this, in and of itself, a fairly fickle way of making our decisions and judging whether something is good or bad. If it’s only by that you and I, you and I believe correctly, look at the restoration and look at what the church has become. We can look at that as a good fruit, but it’s because of where we are actually anchored, which is from the living water, which is from the actual roots and tree of life, right?
We have the perspective that as we go out and try to magnify our church callings, as we go out and try to minister to our neighbors and to raise good children and all of these things, right, that our actions are being consecrated for the greater good, that those things, those actions that we’re doing are actually planting seeds of good trees. And we should. And this is why, full circle back to the original point, which is if the spirit isn’t with us, I don’t think we can judge righteously.
And if we don’t have, if we don’t have that anchor, we’re playing a dangerous game.
But if we do have that, if we do have that anchor, then I think that that’s the functional day to day answer for me, which is, yes, we are absolutely charged with making judgments on a moment by moment basis throughout our day.
Should I pull out into the middle of traffic right now, even though I have a red light? It’s like no good judgment says, you should probably wait for that light to turn green. Hey, I see somebody at the end of an alley holding a chainsaw and an axe with blood all over themselves.
Maybe I should make a good judgment to walk the other direction from that person. Right. I’m just saying, like, you can get. You can get as nitty gritty of this as you want to. This all comes back to, we have to be living in a way that the spirit can be with us, because the spirit can judge those fruits better than we can naturally. The spirit can.
Can help us judge righteously more than we’ll be ever able to do by ourselves.
That’s kind of my thought on that.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: And I think there are, and I’m going to refer to these as compensatory fruits. And what I mean by that, when a mother is in labor delivering the child, it’s pain, it’s anguish. It’s not a pleasant experience.
And yet all of that is swallowed up in the joy and the love that they feel when that baby’s born and the feeling of being a parent and life and this child is yours. To me, that’s compensatory fruit. You can look at the fruits of this violent, this terrible process, but it’s swallowed up in that love. And I think that’s what you’re saying, Nate, kind of going along those same lines, right? The spirit offers us compensatory fruits. I mean, how did the binai feel?
Probably not great being scourged with, with burning sticks to death, yet knowing that he was able to stay strong through that whole thing and stay loyal to God and being, I would think, filled with compensatory fruit to the sense that he. He feels that I made it. I’m at the end, and I made it, and. And he’s going to be enveloped in this feeling of love. I I think to help us as we’re trying to balance these scales, because there are a lot of voices, there are a lot of people pointing out a lot of different perspectives. And sometimes that grain of sand can fill our full field of vision to where we don’t see anything else. And to help us deal with that is, like you say, Nate, the fruit of the spirit. God knows what the other side of the scale is carrying, and he knows where the balance lies, and he helps us make judgment. He’s asked us to judge, and he provides us with that inspiration, that feeling of love. And I think that’s why in the two great commandments, the first commandment is to love God first, because when we love God first, it gives us the perspective that we need to be able to love our fellow man second, it gives us the perspective we need on how to deal with and how to measure and how to. It puts everything else in balance. When we put God first, then we can correctly judge the way we need to. And history is full of examples of people who, in the name of God, do all sorts of things, but really they’re loving something else first. The lucre, the privilege, the honor, the glory, the whatever else, putting somebody else down. And they didn’t love their neighbor enough because honestly, they didn’t have God as their core to help them make that right decision.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Completely agree. And just maybe for me to put the bow on it is. You just said it, though, is that a lot of times, sometimes the fruit that we need to be looking at might just be the fact that we feel faith and confidence and peace when things around us are gnarly.
That, to me, is the most reliable fruit of, for me, because that’s the one thing that doesn’t get shook by external forces. Right. That peace from within and that confidence from within that things are working out the way they’re supposed to or that I am doing the right thing or that I’m on the right path. So that fruit, I feel like, is, in my opinion, maybe the most reliable fruit to see. With that said, we, you know, we should be on guard, looking around, especially, you know, when there are people that are very sneaky or when there are situations or things that, you know, can very much sometimes portray themselves as good fruit. But it’s so funny because even in a lot of those cases, I’ve noticed, you know, and we say it all the time, is like, that dude gives me a bad vibe, or that thing. There’s something wrong. There’s a disconnect there. There’s not harmony there. At times, even when it can be a very convincing or a very persuasive situation or person that might be pretending to be, this a really great thing. But you, I think initially in those cases, still always should start with, well, how do you feel inside?
What is the spirit telling you about this situation?
And that’s still the most important and reliable fruit that you can look towards.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And it’s not to say there weren’t real, tangible proof fruits that this was the right thing. I mean, even in history, if you wanted to get into a purely logical debate with somebody about whether or not this was the right decision, I think you could cut through some of the weeds and some of the nonsense that gets thrown out there. If we go to Alma, chapter 23, verse 18, and they began speaking of the anti nephite Lehis, they began to be a very industrious people. Yeah. And they were friendly with the Nephites. Therefore they did open a correspondence with them, and the curse of God did follow them no more. You look at the impact. So we look at these things as having taken place in, like, a single year. But honestly, there’s, like, 14 years of time from when Ammon’s in there and before they actually have to go and try to find shelter among the Nephites. In those 14 years, crime rate drops significantly.
The open correspondence with the Nephites, you have trade. You have very prosperous people. They’re starting to get wealthy off of that trade. There’s a lot more happiness. There are some serious fruit, tangible fruit, to make the argument that this was the right thing that they did. And if somebody tries to come in this on a purely logical point of view and say, well, yeah, but look, you had thousands of people die and you had all these war and 100,000, like, wait a second.
Why, again, are we putting the blame of these innocent people dying at the feet of Ammon?
Who was the one that incited them to go and kill their brothers? Was it ammon or was that someone else? And I think too readily in life, we try to assign blame at the feet of God, or God did this or God didn’t do that when it was somebody else’s decision.
And we keep trying to convolute by pulling fruit from different sources and piling it in the scales in the basket and saying, this is why it’s not right. When, when even from a purely logical, I think. I think we could dive into the details and actually see the positive fruit and realize, if we’re honest with ourselves, that what we’re calling as fruit is actually convoluted other sources that we’ve kind of put in there because we’re looking for confirmation bias or we’re blinded by our own grain of sand in our eye that we’re not seeing the full picture because that’s what we’re looking for.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: So rely on the spirit. That’s. That’s the. The. That’s the takeaway for me.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: To help you. To help you judge righteously whether that be good fruit or bad fruit.
Because, by the way, too, some fruit looks really good, and then you take a bite into it, and you’re like, woof.
Like, that was not nearly as fresh as it looked like on the outside.
That’s true. Be willing to toss that fruit out. All right, let’s keep going.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: All right. Something else I thought about as I was reading through these chapters was the time and a place for everything, right? When. When Ammon comes in first off, and says, let me serve you, and he’s not interested in trying to beat the gospel message down anybody’s throat. Aaron’s, on the other hand, standing on his soapbox till he gets thrown into prison. And from prison, he’s still trying to shout this message out, right? And later, when. When Aaron is freed from prison and his brothers and they go to see Lamoni’s daddy, they go in there and they’re like, we’re coming to serve you just like Yammun, right? They’re going to try to do this. And he’s like, stop this nonsense. What are you doing? I need you to teach me. You’re not going to be my servants.
I want to know. And so in chapter three, right off the beginning, it talks about how you got this religious freedom where they can go and they proclaim the gospel. And so the time for serving is kind of past. And now you have a time of teaching, and I think it’s good to know when it’s the time to open your mouth and when it’s the time to teach and to help. And just because Ammon found success in serving, it’s because it was the right time, the right place, the right environment. Kind of going back to what you’re saying, Nate, we really need to rely on the spirit to know when it’s time to speak. When it’s time to what?
Missionaries in a world of religious freedom where they’ve been given the license to go and teach, that should be what they’re dedicating most of their time doing is. Is teaching the gospel. Those doors have been opened where maybe it’s not as important for them to just go and be a good example.
But for the rest of us that aren’t called to be full time missionaries, maybe we bear a large responsibility in serving the people around us so that those doors can be opened, so that when the time to speak comes, the missionaries can come in and teach them, or that they feel comfortable enough to ask us questions about what we believe, to ask us questions about wanting to know more, because that, you know, that the time has changed. So it’s just interesting to see how the missionary work is spread and how it goes. And there really is time and place. Not one silver bullet, unless the silver bullet’s following the spirit. Go ahead, Nate.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: The silver bullet is following the spirit. I’m just going to. I’m not going to push back all the way. But who knows? Maybe. Maybe Aaron was supposed to do that. I don’t know. Like, we can’t know. We can’t know because, like we said, we don’t know what the other side of that scale is. We can’t. And maybe that was important for other events. What I can say is this.
The spirit is the magic bullet. It’s the silver bullet or whatever, but it in more. It’s like we’re commanded to go out and call the world unto repentance.
Do you feel like the. I think the point is, is it appropriate to every week stop whoever is giving their speech in church and to go up over the pulpit and be like, I’m calling this ward to repentance? And start, like, naming names and pulling people out of the crowd and being like, I saw you last week watering your garden on. It was a non water day, and I saw this. You know what I mean? It’s like, is it our job to be going out and airing out everybody’s dirty laundry every week in Sacramento meeting? The answer, obviously, is yes.
I’m just kidding.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: What kind of spirit would we feel instantly in a situation like that, to your point?
[00:51:22] Speaker B: That’s my point, though.
My point is calling people to repentance. I think we have things like that. We kind of put our own narrow definition of what that even would be, which is, oh, that’s getting up on a mic and telling everybody in the ward all the things bad that, you know, that they’re doing right. And that’s. I don’t think that’s one. I don’t think that’s calling people repentance. My point is.
My point is to your time and place, which is like, yes, there are.
There are times in place to have conversations with people, and there are times in place to have, you know, maybe even some of these harder conversations. The good news is, is that the spirit, I feel like, will very much tell you when those things should and shouldn’t be happening. And so I’m a big believer in time and place. I’m also just not going to say that Aaron didn’t maybe have the prompting to go and be like, hey, man, you’re going to get thrown in jail, and this is going to suck, but this is actually crazy important for what’s coming. You got to go and you got a soapbox, man. You got to stand up on top of that thing, and you just got to start shouting, I’m sorry, bro, they’re going to throw you in prison. We don’t know. We don’t know that. Maybe that’s what he was not prompted to do because we don’t have that side of the story. So I’m just. I only say that we just got to be very careful not to. Not to say Ammon did it right and Aaron did it wrong. Like, I don’t know. Like, I think. I think they both probably did it right to the circumstance that they were given 100%.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: I’m glad you said that. You’re right. And I’ve been overly hard on Aaron for reasons unknown. Speaker two.
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Well, it’s hard. It’s hard not to be, considering the context of his story back to back with Ammon story, where Ammon’s story, it reads so much like the hero, the master negotiator, the whole, you know, it’s like his story reads so triumphantly where Aaron’s is just. It reads a little more brutal. Right. It just. It’s kind of abrasive, and it just reads tougher.
I’m just saying, like, I’ve learned way too many times to try to suppose, well, if only this had happened, then that would have been better, because I’m continually shown that be. To be wrong so many times with my assumptions. So that’s. That’s the only reason I even brought it up.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: I’m glad you brought it up. And, you know, it even goes back to what we’re saying about whose feet do we lie the blame at? And. And we say, okay, well, Aaron, because he did this, led him into that. Wait a second. Wait a second. What’s the difference in. And the people that Aaron went to versus the people that Ammon went to? And the people that Ammon goes to? You’re talking about an all lamanite crowd, and. And you’re going to the people that Aaron goes to. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t he going into more of the land of Nephi with the Amulon people? The priests that these people had experience with Nephites before Nephites weren’t new in this situation. You got the people of Malasai over there, the Amalekites, and.
And these people were a large voice in the persecution and the driving of the killing of the Nephites. You know, who knows?
Maybe it’s not Aaron’s approach. It’s the reaction to the people that he went to and their, their experiences that drove that.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: With that said, please don’t get up in sacrament meeting and call war to repentance unless the spirit is very, very, very explicitly telling you to do it, because I can promise how off putting it’ll be to everybody else and how much. Everybody else will probably reject the other amazing things that you have to say. So if the spirit’s telling you to do it, who am I to say not to? But I have a feeling from all of the other information we have, the spirit’s probably not going to tell you to do that ever.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Better make sure it’s the right spirit.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: That’s what I’m saying. You better make sure it’s the right spirit, because if not, you’re sadly probably shutting off everybody else that would otherwise be open to the other amazing things that you might have to testify of.
All right, let’s keep going.
Anything else you want to hit on?
[00:55:28] Speaker A: Yeah, there’s a. There’s a couple things here. Okay. Not. Not a ton. I think we got most of the meat out with. Yep. That was a big discussion I wanted to have. Okay. This week.
[00:55:37] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:55:42] Speaker A: As I. As I’m kind of going back and forth, there’s something I wanted to hit with, with ammonite.
[00:55:48] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: When he’s. I mean, he kind of gets carried away in rejoicing afterwards. Right. And I’m just kind of looking back at these chapters and making sure I’m not missing something before I just kind of skip into that.
Yeah, I. I don’t know. I think. I think we’re good to just kind of move forward with. With them. And I mean it. There’s a lot to be said about them bearing their weapons and how bright they were and trying to maintain that testimony to God that they never lifted him up again. And there’s some uniqueness in there.
These people had a history of violence, and swearing off this violence was very significant to them in this generation. Not that that’s something that would work for us, but maybe we need to find today in our lives what is something that we can bury up or what’s something that we can change for us to stand as a testimony to God that truly we were willing to walk away from our sins.
And that’s more of last week. Anyways, let me get into this week when we talk about chapter 26. And so Ammon and Alma reunite, and Ammon is just overcome with how successful this mission was. Here he has these thousands, thousands of lamanites.
And it’s not like, hey, guys, I just converted a bunch of golden investigators that were, like, knocking at the door of the land of Nephi. I said, land of Nephi. It’d be like Zarahemla, right? It’s not like a bunch of ambassadors from the Lamanites went to the land of Zarahemla. And said, can you please send us missionaries? We are so curious to know about your God. We feel like our forefathers screwed up a long time ago, and we want to make things right with you. Send us ambassadors. Right?
These were people that were eager to kill and people that you could never imagine being members of the church that ended up converting.
And maybe sometimes when we see people, maybe we jump to snap judgments and we look at, could I beat that person up? Or why?
Sizing them up in the bus? And like, man, I’m just waiting for them to give me some sort of excuse to get mad or yell or whatever, right?
Maybe what we should be doing is sizing them up in, like, how would this person work in the church? And what good could they do? What, what. What could their personality or their characteristics help contribute to the work of God? And how do we see them in the kingdom of God? And Ammon being able to see this mighty change of these people that. That maybe you looked at for a long time, like, how do we kill them? How did we offend ourselves? How do you know? What are we going to do when we get in a fight with them? Really? It was, how can I help these people and how can we use them? And how can their talents contribute to the kingdom?
Anyways, I go off and digress on this. And in chapter 26, when Ammon is just rejoicing over this, and Aaron kind of gives him a hard time, like, hey, you’re being a little boastful. How can you not be a little boastful when you’re coming back with a whole nation of converts?
How do you stem that down and turn that down a bit?
And Ammon’s trying to deflect and says, well, it’s not me, it’s God. But at the same time, God used me, didn’t he?
[00:59:13] Speaker B: I mean, I don’t know what makes this story, I feel like, actually even more important is that it kind of lends to the credibility of these being actual human beings and not just characters made up from a story, because this is one of the most human being parts of this whole narrative. When you have brothers, right? One who just had a miserable experience or is about ready, whatever. You see what I mean? One destined for the brutal side of this, the other one with the most triumphant story, maybe in the book, other than when Jesus came, right?
And of course, the ones going like, this was sweet, and the other one going like, take it easy, bro. Like, you know, and then, and then using. And then using, like, you know, and then using kind of like the scriptures to help back him up so that he can be like, you know, we’re not supposed to boast. He’d be like, yeah, but that was sweet, man. And the other one being like, sure, okay. I guess. I guess you see what I mean? It’s like, there’s. There’s a lot of, like, there’s a lot of family and human beings in this story, and I’m not trying to take away from the bigger points, but in a weird sort of way, like, in theory, they can both kind of be right. We’re not supposed to be boasting, and we’re not supposed to be doing that. And also, it’s awesome, man. When you go and you’ve put a lot of work into something and things work out the way they’re supposed to, it’s like, are you trying to tell me that. I mean, again, I didn’t serve a mission in Latin America, South America, you know, any of the. There’s a lot of.
There’s a lot of baptisms in areas that I didn’t necessarily serve my mission in. And so when we would have baptisms, like, it was a big deal, and, yeah, man, it felt awesome. And seeing something. Seeing, like, something that we worked really hard at, payoff was beautiful, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with when we were writing letters home going like, this is awesome. So and so got baptized. We put a lot of work into this. It’s amazing to see how stoked they are. You know, it’s like, I don’t know. There’s. And at the same time, it would be also kind of tacky if it was like, oh, yeah, I got ten baptisms this week. And, you know, if it was a number, I could see, you know what I mean? I guess I’m saying I can see both sides of the story a little bit.
[01:01:50] Speaker A: It is. You know, not too long ago, Alma was saying, can you sing the song of redeeming love? Right? And to me, this is ammon singing the song of redeeming love. I mean, he is overcome. He has to say something.
How can you not, when you have that much emotion running inside of you, just. Just gush forth? I mean, it’s got to go somewhere. And he’s just carried away. He’s just. He’s just emotional. He’s just emotionally overcome with how wonderful. And that’s what it feels like when the fruits of the spirit that we talked about, the spirit. How does it feel when you. When you follow the Holy Ghost and. And the Lord blesses you, and you immediately see this impact. It’s overcoming to the point Ammon’s going to pass out. It’s so emotionally charging. But in. In here, this chapter comes one of my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon. It’s actually verse 22. Ammon says, yea, he that repenteth and exerciseth faith. And remember. Right. Ammon was one of the ones theyre describing as the vilest of sinners. And so for him, repenting is kind of a big part of this process. He that repenteth and exerciseth faith and bringeth forth good works and prayeth continually without ceasing. Unto such is given to know the mysteries of God. Yea, unto such it shall be given to reveal things which have never been revealed.
Yea, and it shall be given unto such to bring thousands of souls to repentance, even as it has been given unto us, to bring these, our brethren to repentance. And I love that verse. It just speaks to my heart. And I try really hard to repent, to change, to exercise faith, to do something good constantly, to always pray that perhaps I might learn things that I hadn’t ever known before or that no one has ever known before. And that. That conviction, that faith, that knowledge could perhaps by some means help bring thousands of people to. To rejoice and enjoy that same feeling. To me, that speaks. It resonates. It’s one of my favorite scriptures of the entire book of Mormon.
And I don’t know, I feel like. I feel like Nate and our processes. Yeah, I feel like. I feel like we have discovered things that have never been seen before.
[01:04:15] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:04:16] Speaker A: I feel like we’ve seen things to be able to come back and offer a new perspective that hasn’t been considered. I feel like that’s something that the Lord offers everybody. It’s there. It happens. It has happened.
[01:04:30] Speaker B: I hope so.
I hope that we can do that. I mean, certainly things that I have never, you know, you’ve. You’ve brought up definitely some. Some things that have really given me new ways to think of things, for sure. So, I mean, I’m with you on that.
[01:04:50] Speaker A: And this last Sunday in our gospel doctrine class or Sunday school, and the teacher compared some of this to learning to pay it, play an instrument. And he asked, you know, how many people have ever learned to play an instrument before? And he had us thinking about this.
And something that kind of hit me is that it is impossible to learn to play an instrument. Correct me if I’m wrong, Nate, because you can play a lot more instruments than I can. It is impossible to learn to play an instrument without making mistakes.
[01:05:20] Speaker B: Correct.
[01:05:22] Speaker A: And if you’re not making mistake, you’re not learning to play the instrument. It’s just not going to happen. And I the same thing. Right now our family is struggling trying to learn a different language. My children never learned Spanish before. You cannot learn to speak another language without making a mistake. And if you just keep your mouth closed because you don’t want to make a mistake, you’re never going to speak the language. You have to make those mistakes.
And so when you go back to this repenting and this idea that everyone needs to repent, here’s the thing. Everybody in this life, you cannot live in life without messing up.
And that’s why we needed the savior before the foundation of the world was even laid. God knew that from the beginning.
It’s not the point to not have screw ups. The point is to learn from our screw ups, to improve, to be better, to become more like God and to live life, to experience life, to experiment life, is to make these mistakes. But through these mistakes, refine our processes, refine who we are and become more Christ like day after day after day. And that is the motivation, that is the drive to become like Christ and to be saved and then repentance.
Yep, love it.
1st 30 and I think I’m about done.
[01:06:46] Speaker B: I got to be wrapping it up on my end too.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Okay. And we have suffered all manner of afflictions and all this that perhaps we might, by the means of saving some souls that we suppose that a joy would be full of, perhaps we be the means of saving some. They didn’t come here with grand expectations that they would convert thousands.
They knew that this was a hard mission and they knew that they were going to suffer a lot. And they were willing to put their whole lives on the line like a binadi. Okay. Remember, they’re coming right after the story of Abinadi, knowing that maybe, maybe one person, like Alma the younger’s father, Alma would listen and that it would be all worth it if one person changed. They were willing to put their lives on the line so that one person could be better, and that’s where their joy comes. And I think that’s what the gospel helps us do and motivate us to try to be our best. If it was worth it for one person, it’s worth it for us to lay it on the line for that one person. And that’s what Christ did for us. And that’s it. I’ll stop there. Nate I love it here.
[01:07:49] Speaker B: No, I love it.
Thanks Jason, for all the time and work you put into this, buddy.
I know it’s a lot. So I appreciate you. And hopefully the people that are listening know how much time and effort you put into making these episodes have good content, hopefully unique perspective. But you did bring up a good point. We are constantly trying to not just give you what you know you’ll probably be talking about each week in Sunday school, even though all of that stuff’s great and important too, but you’ll get that. So hopefully, hopefully you know how much time Jason does put into these to try to bring things that maybe haven’t been talked about and stuff in the past. So I know, I know. I’ve learned a lot. So thanks Jason.
We appreciate you listening. You can get ahold of us at the email address high deep dive.com. send us your questions, comments, complaints, even though I don’t really want you to do that. But you do have the email address so you can do whatever you want. You are agents to work freely of your own free will if that’s what you need to do. But we do appreciate any insights that you might have. We got some really great feedback this week, some great insight, so please keep sending it. We love it.
That’s all we’ve got. So until.
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