Week 37 is scheduled for study Sept. 9-15, 2024. Everything God does for us and to us is born of His love for us. Even His chastening is done out of His love for us.
Day 1
Helaman 13 – The Lord gives warnings through His prophets.
Amos 3:7 tells us that God doesn’t do anything in this world without telling His prophets that He is going to do it beforehand. But why? As I thought on this topic some thoughts came into my head as follows. This whole world, this entire trip through mortality is God’s idea, His project, His gift to us. It doesn’t seem to matter whether we believe He exists or not. It doesn’t seem to matter how much we ignore Him, slight Him, or outright fight Him, He is determined to see this project through to the end. So He warns us of impending destruction when we reject the light of Christ and/or his commandments. When we are faithful He gives us revelations and covenants to increase our happiness. Even when generations of unbelievers come and go, God waits patiently until the right people come along so He can continue the work that was started long before the earth was ever created. All this is to say that God never ceases to be our loving Father who lives in Heaven. He is watching over all of us at all times, doing what is best for each one of us in His own wisdom.
God’s goal is the same today as it has always been, the exaltation and eternal life of as many of His children as are willing to believe in His Son. It seems to me that it is almost more important that we believe in Christ than in God, even though to believe in one you must of necessity also acknowledge the presence of the other. But He wants us to believe in Christ, because it is Christ who paid for our sins and provided us with a resurrection. Jesus is our only path back to our Father in Heaven. God designed our salvation that way. Without Christ and all his works the Father’s whole plan falls apart, so God wants us to look to Jesus for the source of our salvation. No matter how much of the spotlight is on the Savior, our Father still gets personal one-on-one conversation time with all of His children through prayer.
As you read the words of Samuel the prophet, think about God. Samuel is speaking the words of God, our Father. He is telling us how foolish we have been to have given our hearts to the enjoyment of our riches and the vain things of this world. Our hearts are devoted to getting and keeping worldly things, and not drawn out in humility to God for the welfare of our souls. It is because we have been foolishly looking for happiness where there is none to be found, that a curse will come upon our riches and they will become slippery that we lose them and cannot find them again.
When you think of the Lord speaking Samuel’s words, you can feel God’s love and concern for His children in the counsel He gives them. God’s statements of reality are filled with parental wisdom. He knows there is no joy to be found in material things. He knows that devoting our hearts to our earthly toys, our positions, our influence, or our money will only bring us sorrow and destruction in the end. This is what He is trying to get the people to avoid by making better choices. And God uses His prophets to deliver His messages of love and warning to all. In these chapters both Samuel and Nephi are saying the same thing to the people in an effort to save them from their own poor choices.
In this sermon by Samuel we have a multi-layer challenge. Think of his words as the words of God, our Father. See his words as true doctrine we must personally embrace or suffer for its absence in our lives. And we must also see Samuel’s words as applying to all of us in the last days.
Day 2
Helaman 13-15 – God invites me to repent.
President Russell M. Nelson gave a talk in April, 2019. This is a short quote from that talk.
Daily repentance is the pathway to purity, and purity brings power. Personal purity can make us powerful tools in the hands of God.
Repentance shouldn’t be a one time event, but an everyday effort to change for the better. The talk I just quoted was given during a Priesthood session of Conference, so he was only addressing the men of the church, but his teaching applies to all of us. Each of us needs to reflect on our life and decide for ourself what we can do to become more pure each day. Certainly we will each need to give up something we are currently doing or have in our life that prevents us from having more personal purity. This will be a different exercise for each person.
I find myself having to exercise a modicum of patience with the prophet Samuel in today’s lesson. The manual gives us three passages where Samuel talks of repentance. The problem is that Samuel tried to give them the news that would bring them joy, but got rejected and tossed out of the city. So now he stands on the wall and pronounces their impending doom. When he does speak of repentance it isn’t about the joys of further repentance, but of the need to begin to repent or be destroyed. We will all need to look beyond where the Nephites are in this time period and remember the teachings of other prophets who teach us to glory in the joy that repentance brings. The talk referenced above is one of those instances where the prophet speaks of the joys of repenting.
Day 3
Helaman 14; 16:13-23 – God sent signs and wonders to testify of the Savior’s birth and death.
These signs and wonders in the heavens may be difficult for us to appreciate. We are not, as a rule, an agricultural society. These people memorized the heavens. They lived by the movement of the stars and planets. When meteor showers, comets, or other phenomena happened in the sky, that was a big deal. They had no explanation for such things. We on the other hand, are not surprised, for our astronomers see these things coming months or years ahead of time, and they have explanations for all of them.
But some of the signs promised to the people were things no one had ever experienced before. When Jesus, the literal light of the world, he who personally created the sun and the stars was to be born, he gave them a day, a night, and a day with enough light that is appeared to be noonday the whole time. Then when he died, to represent that the light of the world had left the world through death, there was three days of darkness wherein no light could be seen. He took the light with him. No fire could be kindled, no stars, moon, no torches, nothing. It was blackness so intense if could be physically felt for three days. These are signs and wonders for which there are no explanations. These signs and wonders have deep spiritual significance, and they only happened that one time.
What I find interesting is how the people reacted to these signs and wonders as they happened. At first they were impressed. How could they not be. But then Satan began sowing seeds of doubt to harden their hearts. He used the people’s arrogance and pride to feed those doubts. Sure, the prophets may have “guessed” correctly a few things out of so many, but their motives are impure. They seek to impress us and make us think they are something special by surprising us with some cheap parlor tricks then keep us down by ruling over us to get us to do their bidding. They are trying to cleverly lie to us so they can glut themselves on our labors.
These lies they told themselves and each other are exactly what their own religions were doing to them at the time, and they were happily supporting them. Satan does this to us today. Politically he has one party do terrible things, but to hide their guilt they publicly blame the other party of doing those same things so the people are perceiving the opposite party as the guilty one, and not the one who is truly guilty. In the meantime the people are told so many lies they lose faith in ever being able to know what the truth is. In this way Satan can lead them along to do his will and keep them in submission the rest of their lives. These verses in Helaman 16 are very current to our situation today. Only humility and obedience to the commandments can protect us from such measures of control.
Day 4
Helaman 15:3 – Chastening from the Lord is a sign of His love.
I can offer you nothing more than this beautiful talk by Elder D. Todd Christofferson from April, 2011.
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten
Day 5
Helaman 16 – Prophets point me to Jesus Christ.
This is just a short, quick note. Why do prophets always point us to Christ? The answer is because Christ has selected each of them to be his mouthpiece to the people of earth. The prophets have nothing to say to us, except for the words of Christ. They speak of nothing that isn’t intended to bring us closer to Christ. Prophets don’t have their own agendas, either in the personal, political, or social arenas. Their business is the business of Christ, and their message is his message to us. This is why there is a purity about the messages of the prophets. Their sole source for what they say to us is from Christ and his concerns for us.
When the prophet tells us that we need to be better spouses, better parents, more active in our service to others, more quick to repent, or any one of a thousand other messages, these are all things Jesus wants us to know in order to be better prepared to return to live with him in the presence of God, our Father. The prophet’s calling is to be the voice of Christ to all the world, and nothing else. We can always trust the counsel of the living prophet.
Personal Study
Is the gospel in your head or your heart?
The people in this week’s chapters are guilty of intellectualizing their thinking. They chose to believe nothing because they overthought everything. In their arrogance the people asked why Jesus didn’t decide to be born among the Nephites? Surely it must have been because he obviously thought more highly of the Jews in Jerusalem, a people the Nephites had never met, than he thought of the Nephites. Why would the prophets say he would not reveal himself to them during his life on earth? It must have been because these so called prophets wanted the Nephites to believe in something that would never happen among their own people, and no one can be expected to believe something for which they have no proof. Right?
To the people of Zarahemla, who were representative of all of the Nephites, their only belief was in what they could see, hear, feel, or touch today. They were quick to disbelieve, and slow to believe, for they mistakenly believed that if you couldn’t prove your point physically, right here, right now, you must be trying to trick them. The people couldn’t even see their own hypocrisy that they were all too willing to believe the Priestcrafts that taught them that whatever they did was no sin.
The world today views religion more through the eyes in our heads more than what we are willing to believe that must be accepted by faith. Look closely at many Christian churches and you will see that they have become political and all about finery, pageantry, and hypocrisy, rather than about truly caring for the poor and needy, promoting humility, and seeking the influence of the Spirit in everyday living.
Caring for the poor and needy is inconvenient at best. Each person has their own special needs that often require personal attention to help them through their time of need. Many need resources, special resources, education, or just plain time in order to improve their current living situation. And many of them require help for years, and not just once, but over and over again. Not all problems are solved with a single check or a single act of service. This doesn’t lessen their value or the value of the service we render them. If anything learning to serve, no matter how long that service commitment requires of us, teaches us to be more fully dedicated to the principle of serving one another. The sacrifices required of pure service help to bring our religion from our head back down into our heart.
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