Week 42 is scheduled for study Oct. 14-20, 2024. This week we consider what it means to be children of the covenant. God hasn’t finished His work with us yet.
Day 1
3 Nephi 20-22 – In the latter days, God will perform a marvelous work.
I don’t know about you, but I have always had difficulty in pinning down what exactly is this marvelous work and a wonder that is supposed to take place in the last days. So this time in my reading I tried to put into perspective what today’s verses are either explicitly saying or implying. I think my problem has been that prophesy has been so plentiful in my ears down through the years that I don’t really consider how wonderful and marvelous their pronouncements really are. I have taken them for granted as being always there and real. It is like having a phone with you all the time. I don’t usually think about what a wonder and miracle the workings of a phone represent.
The prophesies of the restoration of the gospel and the gathering of scattered Israel have been around for many thousands of years. Think about it. What are the odds that a people would become great, but then be scattered over the face of the whole earth. Then in some future day God would reveal Himself to a prophet, who would then begin the work of revealing to the world God’s dealings with His ancient people that had lain hidden for almost a thousand years. And after this book of God’s dealings with His covenant people came to light, missionary work would commence that would begin to find the long-lost descendants of all those Israelites and bring them back into the covenant fold God had promised to their ancient progenitor Abraham.
On the surface that seems like an absolute impossibility. An absurdity. But that is exactly what has happened. It has all come to pass precisely as promised in the prophesies given to Abraham and his descendants over the course of thousands of years. We are only in the middle of these prophesies being fulfilled now. The New Jerusalem is still in the future, but everything else that was promised has already been fulfilled or is in the process now.
Day 2
3 Nephi 22; 24 – God is merciful to people who return to Him.
Today’s verses are an eye opener to show us that God’s intention is consistently the same from generation to generation, even when we have forgotten He is there. God still reaches out to those with whom He has made covenants to offer us the same blessings those covenants offered our ancestors. We may have forsaken Him, but He still honors His part of the covenant to find us and offer us the same rewards He promised our ancestor Abraham, who received the covenant in the first place.
Our memories may be short. We may forget and wander off into forbidden paths, but God is always concerned for our spiritual welfare, and His efforts to save us from our poor choices never flag or fade. The Nephites had been separated from the main body of the Jews in Jerusalem for more than 600 years, yet our Father felt it was important enough that they know certain promised blessings and conditions that He commanded Jesus to quote the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi to the people during Jesus’ visit with them. They probably had Isaiah’s prophecies in their record, but they had never heard of Malachi, for he was born some 200 years after Lehi left Jerusalem. But Malachi’s prophecies were important, so Jesus taught them to the people and commanded that they be included in their written record.
Malachi was the last prophet God sent to fallen Israel. They had rejected all other prophets, so Malachi was their last chance. His words are the final offer to return to God and receive His promised blessings. Malachi lived some 400 hundred years before Jesus was born. There were no prophets sent to rebellious Israel during those years. It was only after they also rejected Malachi that they eventually created a scholarly class to replace the prophets we now know as the Pharisees. Israel wouldn’t accept spiritual leaders, but they would listen to their own intellectual interpreters of their law. Their bad. Even now, hundreds of years after the Pharisees came to power Jesus is once again offering the chance to return to God and be forgiven and blessed.
From generation to generation God’s offer to His covenant people always stands. Return to Me and be healed, blessed, and prospered. That is God’s message to all of us. In fact, this is the message we take to the whole world. Come to God and be healed, so He can bless you and offer you covenants and happiness you can’t find anywhere else.
Day 3
3 Nephi 23:6-13 – Recording spiritual experiences can bless my family.
Today’s message is one of shame for most of us. If God were to come into our homes and judge us by our written record of His dealings with our family, what do you think He would have to say to us? Ouch. How many spiritual experiences have we had, how many witnesses received, or lessons we have learned over the years, but have failed to record for posterity? It isn’t like it hasn’t been commanded that we keep journals, for we have.
Very few of us have been careful to record for our posterity (as well as our own reminders) what God’s dealings with us have been. Yet we have been told over and over again that it is important that we write down those things revealed to us by the Spirit, and that we record our lives for the benefit of our posterity. I believe that most of us simply don’t believe our lives are important enough for anyone who comes after us to care what happened to us. This is not true. Many of the most cherished and valued documents in Church history are those journals and letters written by everyday members of the Church to friends or family. We gain strength from reading of their faith and the challenges of their lives. I seriously doubt they believed they were any more important than we think of ourselves. Yet we are depriving our posterity of the lessons we are learning. Sadly, we will have to answer to God for our lack of faith in this command to record our life’s experiences.
Day 4
3 Nephi 23: 26:1-12 – The Savior wants me t0 search the scriptures.
Just a point for today’s lesson. To search for something means to seek for something intentionally. If we search for something we generally know what it is we want to find. When we search the scriptures what is it we are looking for? Just reading the scriptures is not searching the scriptures, it is just reading. To search is to seek, whether it is for specific information, understanding, perspective, or anything else that is important to us. The point is that searching the scriptures is a commandment, but too often we don’t do it. We hope that by just reading the scriptures something will jump out at us and push its way into our consciousness. Spirituality doesn’t usually work that way.
It has been my experience that when I go to the scriptures with specific questions or desires and search for those within the scriptures, that is when my mind is opened to possibilities and answers. This doesn’t usually happen if I am just reading them. There is power in searching for understanding of specific things. And even if what you set out to learn is not what you take away from your studies that day, your quest to search opens the door for the Spirit to teach things you never imagined you might find. Searching the scriptures is an exercise in faith.
Day 5
3 Nephi 24:7-12 – Paying tithing opens the windows of heaven.
I love the law of Tithing. It is such a great example of how most things work in the gospel of Christ. It is a simple law of obedience on the surface, yet the blessings are anything but simple. When we obey the law of Tithing and the windows of heaven open, we never know what blessings might fly in through that window. Anything is possible. We might receive financial rewards, spiritual rewards, relationship rewards, or emotional rewards. We just don’t know how God might bless us because we obeyed this simple law.
Day 6
3 Nephi 25:5-6 – The Lord sent Elijah to turn my heart to my ancestors.
I wish I could figure out how the priesthood keys held by Elijah work. This whole business of turning the hearts of the children to the fathers, and the hearts of the fathers to the children is fascinating. All I know is that the keys don’t violate our individual moral agency. The keys somehow instill in people all over the world a desire, even a longing, to know more about their ancestors, to be somehow connected to them. And if they are to work properly, the keys must also work across the veil of death to turn the hearts of those who have already passed on to those currently in mortality.
These priesthood keys are central to all that we do in the Temples. It is due to these keys that so many people around the world have become so interested in finding out about their ancestry. This has, in part, driven the development of so many computer programs to make this process easier and easier. Many of the developments of the last 50 years has been a boon to searching for our kin, because the programs themselves search for our relatives behind the scenes and just inform us when they have found people to baptize or people for which ordinances can be performed. What a blessing!
Personal Study
Look for inspiring words and phrases.
It is true that what you find inspiring I might not, and what I find inspiring won’t even phase you. This is what makes scripture study so wonderful. It is completely personal and individual. When you ask the Lord, before you begin to read your scriptures, to open your eyes to things you need to know about or think about, be aware when suddenly a word, phrase, or story jumps out at you. This is just what you asked for. Now that you have been given something to consider, it is up to you to figure out what it is the Lord wants to remind you of, or what He wants you to learn from what you have found.
Often, those things we are specifically looking for are not what we find. Instead of finding our specified item the Spirit says, ‘No, this first.’ So no matter what it is that jumps off the page or makes you stop dead in your tracks while you read, look at it. There is a reason for “tripping” over that word or phrase, or suddenly feeling disturbed about a particular story. Investigate! That is what the scriptures are for! They are the key to learning by the Spirit.
There are times when something that stands out to us today won’t be made clear to us for years to come. But that gives us time to ponder, consider, learn, and grow. The day always comes, sooner or later, when that same word, phrase, or story is made more clear and we now see how it is related in particular ways to what we have already learned. The Spirit is just priming our pump for the future gusher of spiritual water.
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