As Matt got his call this
week, and as he will be leaving soon to serve his mission and because I
have been thinking about it a lot lately, about happiness, and The
Atonement.
I love what I have learned about
happiness in the mission. I have learned how happy God is and how
anxious He is that we can be happy as well. In Abraham 1:2 Abraham
explains perfectly what the gospel, righteous living, and the blessings
of the priesthood offer to us. Happiness, peace, and rest. Alma is one
of my favorite teachers of happiness. He himself having tasted misery
and then the true happiness of the gospel is a powerful teacher of what
Christ and the gospel offer us. Alma 41. The laws that we have to
understand to lead us to happiness are just as real as the laws that we
have to understand to make a plane fly. A lie that Satan has put in the
world is that there are lots of ways to be happy. There are a lot of
ways to find pleasure, a lot of which actually kill our happiness, but
there is no other way to be happy other than to be like our Father. In
this chapter it says that the nature of God is the Nature of happiness,
that God knows how to be happy. I am only starting to understand
happiness but I have learned enough to realize that it is true,
happiness is found in our Father. Christ offers to bring us to our
Father so that our happiness can be complete.
I
have been trying to study about the atonement to try and understand
what Jesus Christ did for us. And I just wanna share a couple scriptures
that helped me and hope they'll help Matt. First in DC 19:16-19. I love
these verses so much. In this Jesus Christ Himself explains and
testifies of His atoning sacrifice. First He tells us about His
divinity, testifying of what was really sacrificed, "I, God." the
atonement was the physical and spiritual sacrifice of a God, a perfect
being that descended from Godhood with His Father, to save his helpless
brothers and sisters. Next He tells us in a few words what that sacrifice included, a
payment so great it caused a God to sweat blood, to cry to His Father
and ask if there was some other way. His anguish was something eternal.
Next He tells us what we must to do receive the grace of such a
sacrifice, if Christ was willing to descend to the deepest pits of hell
to drag us out, there would have to be something required of us,
repentance, it would be painful, would require everything of us, just
like the atonement required everything of Him, but because God is good,
it would be a price far less than that that He paid.
And to end He told
us that He suffered these things, not so that He could be glorified, but
so that His Father would be, and so that we can be saved from
ourselves. CHRIST SUFFERED SO WE DON'T HAVE TO. That is something that is
so essential in the atonement, the hell that Satan and we put ourselves
through is not necessary, Christ suffered so that we don't have to. God,
the Son of God, gave everything, so that we don't have to lose
everything. That is something that every missionary needs to learn and
then to teach. Christ suffered so that we don't have to. There are so
many miserable people that just choose to be that way because they won't
come unto Christ, misery is the bitter cup that we insist on filling
after Christ drunk it and gulp her down ourselves. Why do we do that?
Don't
be miserable on the mission Matt. Be obedient, don't waste a minute of
your time, in the MTC, in your training, in the field, not a minute. and
hey don't worry about a new language, haha your gonna look
stupid....every freaking day. Get over it. If you pick it up fast, que
bueno, if not your humility more than your ability to speak is the
purpose of your mission.
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