Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:42 — 68.1MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
These remarks were given at a conference held in Southern Utah County on July 30, 2017.
Am I supposed to talk now? I assume that pause means: Get up.
There is a concept that I mentioned just in passing yesterday at the Sunstone conference, that “chosen-ness” does not mean what we oftentimes think chosen-ness means. We tend to view that as something laudable, and it means we’re better than someone else because God’s focused attention on us, and therefore, since we get His attention, there is something great about us. There is a passage in… (I am using these new scriptures, mind you, so I have no clue where you will find it in your actual Book of Mormon).
Comment: First Nephi 20:21.
Denver Snuffer: Oh, First Nephi 20 [LE]. But I am reading from First Nephi 8. This is the Lord talking to ancient Israel and he says: “…For I knew that thou wouldst deal very treacherously, and wast called a transgressor from the womb. Nevertheless, for my name’s sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain from thee, that I cut thee not of. For, behold, I have refined thee, I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction. For mine own sake, yea, for mine own sake will I do this, for I will not suffer my name to be polluted, and I will not give my glory unto another.” (1 Nephi 20:8-11).That doesn’t sound like high praise for the chosen people.
I have a new favorite reality show that’s on the History channel. I think they’ve been doing this for four years now so there are a lot of episodes out there. It’s called, “Forged in Fire.” I don’t know if any of you have ever seen it. They start the show with four blacksmiths. The four blacksmiths are required to take something–they provide them the something. Sometimes it’s a wrought iron fence, sometimes it’s a wrecked car, sometimes it’s a pile of garbage. These people have to sort through whatever it is. The first stage is to fashion it in a forge into a kind of knife blade, which they inspect, and then one of the four people are sent home, and the three that have done the best job then have to finish that product and turn it into something that can be sharpened and hold an edge, with a handle on it, and then they test it. It is fairly brutal testing. Things shatter. If they don’t hold an edge, they’re gone. They have to qualify by producing something that is a fairly well-made knife. Then after they finish and someone gets kicked out, the two that remain are sent home to their own forge and they’re given five days to build some weapon from history. It could be something that they used in France to duel with. It could be something that even the contestants don’t know how to pronounce.
When they finish after five days, they come back and they present their weapons. The judges then put those through tests. Sometimes the test is to stick it into a metal holder and bend the sword 33 degrees one direction and 33 degrees the other. The people watching, that have fabricated these things, are anticipating the shattering of what they’ve built. They hash coconuts with these things. They lock them into a catapult that has a controlled speed, so that every weapon gets tested consistently, and they will smash it down on a metal shield. The objective is to see if it will still hold a sharp edge after they’ve done all this crap to it. Then when they have finished all the strength and durability things, the sharpness test takes over. One of the judges is a guy named Doug Marcaida. He almost invariably uses a pig carcass. He will attack the pig carcass with the weapon, and when he is done, if it succeeded, his line is: “It will kill.” (He is from the Philippines and has an accent.)
I’ve learned a lot watching four seasons of that show on the History channel. There are some kinds of metal that it doesn’t matter what you do with them, they will never hold an edge.
Sometimes what they require the contestants to do is to take metal that will not hold an edge–for example, here’s a bundle of barbed wire and here is some high carbon steel. You have to fuse together in your forge the high carbon steel and the barbed wire that will never hold an edge, and you have to produce something that we’re going to put through these tests. Now if a person knows what he’s dealing with he can take that incapable metal, and he can make a sleeve in which is set the high carbon steel, so that the edge of the high carbon steel is what’s exposed to the force of contact. And if they don’t know what they are doing–they blend it together in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you do–it doesn’t matter how much you work with it, or sharpen it, or fashion it, it’s simply not going to take.
If you go through and read the scriptures about the concept of chosen-ness, almost always you run into words about forging in a fire the product that God regards as His people, which means that God has a fairly realistic assessment of what people are like, and choosing them doesn’t mean He’s found a finished product. Choosing them means He’s found something with which He’s determined to work.
High carbon steel requires iron and it requires a matrix of that carbon to be within the element. Life–all life–is based on carbon. We breathe oxygen. We are carbon based, all of us. In a very real sense, every breath we take, we take and burn it in our furnace. The way that we convey that oxygen throughout the body is by oxidizing iron in our blood. That’s why our blood cells turn red when exposed to oxygen, because the iron element fused with the oxygen oxidizes, or rusts, and so it looks red. And then, when it drops the oxygen off where it’s going to be consumed in the limbs, it loses that element and it returns and it’s blue. Forging us in the fire of affliction, breathing into us the breath of life, talking about being chosen, the example of what it takes in order to fashion something that will withstand and hold an edge, all of these things are types and shadows of what it means to be chosen.
Chosen-ness puts you on display in order for the Lord to either prove what foolishness is in the person chosen, or if they succeed, to put them through an ordeal that demonstrates faithfulness and commitment, desire and earnestness, so that everyone stands back and says: This people represented God, either by the shabby performance, and the persecution, and the failure, and the folly, or it represents God by the diligence, and the effort, and the faithfulness.
I’ve been pretty hard on Latter-day Saint history because from the perspective of triumphal success it hasn’t succeeded. But within the Latter-day Saint history is embedded this strain of diligence, and faithfulness, and sacrifice, and commitment that has preserved enough of what was here at the beginning so that we today have something to work with. The Latter-day Saints are an example of both folly and triumph. It has not resulted in Zion. And it’s certainly headed, in fact now galloping, in another direction. But within that, there has been a preservation and a restoration of material which would have otherwise been lost; would have otherwise been forgotten.
What’s rolling out now in the Joseph Smith Papers is an extraordinary blessing. Now true enough, if I had the archives in my possession I would eliminate a lot of footnotes and editorial comments and you’d get more than we’re getting. I wouldn’t try to package it in a way that defends a story that simply isn’t true. Nevertheless, they are preserving, they are perpetuating, they are publishing materials, and we’re the beneficiaries of that. For that we ought to be grateful.
Within every group of chosen people there are always those who are resilient and faithful enough to pass the test, to hold the edge, to survive when the difficulties come. And when the Lord puts us through the furnace of affliction our burdens are designed to get us to be able to qualify. Our burdens are designed to make us a little more realistic about our own limitations.
I want to talk about a couple of things. I want to remind you that becoming a chosen people or being chosen by God as His, is no guarantee that we aren’t going to be remembered by history for our own foolishness, and an example of how to inspire God’s ire and fall short. I’m a little more optimistic at this point in history because of the hour, because of the signs in the heavens above, because of the things that we see on the earth. I assume that John Pratt is going to address some of the signs of the timing of what’s happening now. And so, someone’s going to do this. Someone’s going to achieve it. The prophecies are not going to fall to the ground unfulfilled. Perhaps coming out of this group will be that example that is pointed to, not as folly and failure, but as vindication of the Lord’s promises.
I’ve taken personally a lot of criticism and I’ve gotten a lot of email, and my wife will read stuff and report back to me what the latest round of nonsense contains. One of the things that gets suggested is that I am personally arrogant and haughty and that I’m relatively untrustworthy because I talk with just too much confidence. Try to put yourself into the position in which God has told you something. You respect God and what he’s told you needs to be delivered, and ought not to be delivered by a shaky voice, an unsound trumpet, a weak attempt. It doesn’t matter how good a trumpeter you are. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself, or whether you would gladly pass that to someone else. If you’re going to speak on behalf of the Lord you have to speak in a way that represents Him as well as you can, however incomplete, however unworthy, however much you may think yourself ill-fitted to the assignment. You’re given the assignment, you need to do it, and you need to do it well.
The confidence with which I speak does not reckon from myself. In fact, like I’ve heard so many people ask about themselves, “What am I doing in this position?” Well none of us really can come down here into this sphere and walk around proclaiming, “Check it out, this is how you ought to be.” There is only one. There is only one who is the prototype of the saved man. There is only one that we can look upon and say, “As to Him, I have confidence in Him.” Everyone else the confidence is misplaced. But if you have confidence in Him, and He has given you something to say, then say it with the confidence that you have in Him. Announce the message that He has given with the respect that He deserves.
Now I know some people were hoping that I would come down here and talk about what God released yesterday on the answer to the petition for a covenant. I’m not going to talk about it for this reason: I don’t believe it belongs to me. I believe it belongs to you, and I believe it is God’s statement to you. For me to try and take up any attention is to distract you from the Lord’s words to you. What kind of a fool would put themselves between you and God and say, “I would like to interrupt the Lord in order to tell you something that I think.” What I have or what I think is wholly inconsequential in comparison with the content of that document. It doesn’t have my voice, it doesn’t have my speech patterns, it doesn’t have me in it. If some of it is a little garbled, I’ll own that. But the message belongs to the Lord, the words belong to the Lord, and they’re words that He was giving to you. Therefore it’s yours, and you have as much right to apply the meaning of those words to yourself and to others as anyone. I have no right to get out and say, “Pay attention to me.” There is, and they really are quite remarkable.
The other thought that my wife and I kick around (and Steph any time you want to interrupt me, come up here and join and take over, if you would like) is this idea: Take any event at any time, in the Book of Mormon for example. You have the family of Lehi and what went on there, or later in time during Alma and Abinadi in the courts of King Noah. Take any of those circumstances and ask yourself: Let’s assume that that was happening today. Let’s assume God was doing things today similar to what He was doing back then. What would that look like? How would that unfold? What would be said? What would the response be? How would you react to that if it were going on today? How would you decide if something like that were happening now, whether or not it was authentic and of God? How would you go about deciding that in your own day, in your own time, among your own people, within your own family, what is happening is of God and not of men?
I don’t think that just because something gets enshrined in scripture we should lose sight of the fact that it has always required faith, it will always require faith, and it doesn’t matter what proofs you can muster for or against belief in something. At the end of the day either God is behind it or God is not. And if God is behind it and your heart is open to it, you’ll recognize it; you’ll receive it.
The problem we have as people is we don’t really believe the Book of Mormon. We believe in long ago and far way. The Book of Mormon is telling us, “Hey, Gentiles, among you, in your day, in your time, there are going to be things that God necessarily is going to have to accomplish.” What would that look like? What would that unfold like? How would that come rolling forth? Many of the people about whom scriptures are written, and the pivotal moments in which choices have to be made before great things unfold, have remarkably humble beginnings, almost inconsequential, so much so that the biblical record entirely omits Lehi. So much so that the people chosen by the Lord to flee before the fall of Babylon, and to start a new civilization on the other side of the world, remained entirely obscure to the world from the moment they left Jerusalem until the time that the Book of Mormon rolled forth in 1830.
(You [Stephanie Snuffer] want to join me? Yeah, yeah. This is a historic moment.) [audience laughter]
[Stephanie Snuffer comments omitted at her request]
Denver Snuffer: We still have 25 minutes left. What are you doing running off for? [Laughter]
I’ve thought some of our exchanges [between Denver and Stephanie] on hikes were the best material I’ve ever recorded anywhere, and it’s just in my journal.
I was looking for something. I was asked to find some dates and it required me to go research through piles of journals. As I am going through (I have to skim them) I ran across a number of things where my wife was going after me on a hike and it was in the journal. It’s not self-deprecating, it’s spouse-deprecating. It was one of those amusing parts of the relationship. She warned me that people reading that stuff later won’t know that it’s funny. They’ll just assume that I’m not telling a joke when I say there are men living on the moon that dress like Quakers, because Joseph made a comment like that and it tells you something about his sense of humor. But there are anti-Mormons that say, “He thought there were men that dressed like Quakers that lived on the moon.” It’s preposterous.
Yesterday while I was talking… We went to lunch with Carol Lynn Pearson a couple weeks ago and she gave me a copy of her book, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy. I read her book. It’s a pretty good book, but I told her afterwards I think she is being really unfair to Joseph, because the typical account of history reads out of the accounts all of what Joseph did before the Nauvoo High Council, and all of what Joseph Smith did in public sermons, to detect and to denounce and to try an put down the practice of plural wives in Nauvoo. Instead, all of that is skipped over, including the Relief Society statement taken out in the Times and Seasons as a joint statement of the women of Nauvoo condemning the practice that Joseph had inspired to take place.
Everyone reads that out and simply homogenizes Brigham Young and Joseph Smith because of Brigham Young’s attribution to Joseph, so Joseph owns everything that Brigham did. After I talked yesterday, she was there and we spoke for a moment. I said, “I loved the book, but I think you are unfair to Joseph, and that everyone is unfair to Joseph. No one really deals with how firmly a position he took in public and before the Nauvoo High Council in opposition to that stuff. But at a minimum you have to admit that, whatever went on Joseph kept out of the public view, and Brigham Young celebrated as something public to be practiced. At a minimum you owe it to Joseph to make that distinction and you didn’t do it in the book. But having said that, the book’s great, it’s wonderful, loved it, and appreciate getting a copy.”
One of the lamentations that appear in her book is how troubling and disorienting the whole concept of plural marriage is to currently living Latter-day Saint women. She did a survey and she collected comments from people in the survey. It’s remarkable. She put hundreds of these comments into her book. It is remarkable how many women fear dying before their husband because their husband can go get another wife and be married for eternity to her, and then she winds up with another spouse in addition to her husband. There was some preview of an upcoming movie that we saw, while we were watching “Dunkirk”. In the preview, it was a comedy, and one woman is talking to another woman and she is saying, “Yeah, I believe in polygamy. I just haven’t found the right guy, and gal, and gal.” That notion hangs over.
One of the great things that happened in the Answer was we now have a replacement for D&C Section 132 that rather clearly explains that it was not so from the beginning. In one respect we should have been smart enough to figure that out on our own, because in the days of Adam… I know that Brigham Young said that Adam came with one of his wives, because to Brigham Young all things were polygamous. But there is no basis in the Bible for that. There is no basis in scripture for that. Adam received “a wife”. Then, in the book of Moses the children of Adam and Eve married two by two, male and female. One of the clarifications that we now have is that the divine purpose of marriage is to multiply and replenish the earth. That answers the question about relationships between the same sex because you cannot multiply and replenish the earth in any other form than that.
Marriage was instituted by God in the beginning. It is an ordinance. It involves the man and the woman, and it doesn’t matter what other kind of social relationship you want to form, it’s not marriage. At its heart marriage is from God and confined to that relationship. When you define marriage as given by God, keep in mind the definition of an abomination. An abomination is something that you practice that is wrong, done as a religious belief. So marriage that doesn’t conform to the pattern of God is, by definition, an abomination. Its result is not only to defile the definition of marriage, but it absolutely precludes multiplying and replenishing the earth. It renders the marriage bed devoid of progeny, incapable of producing offspring. It is desolate. An abominable practice that produces desolation is something that we all ought to take note of. It’s not a social issue, it’s not a civil rights issue. In a secular society I don’t care what people do in the privacy of their own homes. But when you begin to say that that is not merely the right of privacy and the right of association, but is a religious right involving marriage, and it produces nothing but desolation, we ought to stop short of that. We ought to say: Go and do as you will do.
Lot chose to live in Sodom. What’s up with Lot? Maybe they had good music. Maybe it was fashion. Maybe they had great art. (I’m pretty sure they had great performance art, I’m just not into that.) When Abraham went to recover his nephew and the angels came and Lot bargained, it wasn’t Abraham who was out to destroy the wicked, and it wasn’t Lot that was out to destroy the wicked, it was the Lord. The Lord is going to take care of the abominations that are out there. Our responsibility is to invite people to see a better way, to conceive of a higher and more noble way to live life. Our job isn’t to rebuke and condemn and to belittle.
There are really two forces at work in all of creation. One force is generative, creative, and positive. It fabricates new things. It is ongoingly surprising and life-filled and wonderful. What’s opposed to that are the forces of degeneration, decay, negativity, entropy, destruction. There isn’t enough being done in order to bring that positivity, that creativity, that newness into this world. Even though children are born every day, and life starts over all new again with the birth of every new child, our minds are preoccupied by the forces of negativity and what opposes us. I could spend all day every day responding to negative arguments and negative comments, and if I were to do that I wouldn’t get anything new done, covered, accomplished, or out there.
When we take a message out to people about the restoration of the Gospel, the work of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the offering of the Covenant, the expected coming Zion, there is no reason to deal with the criticism. It’s going to collapse on its own. Here’s a great bit of advice: If the criticism level would condemn Jesus Christ, then the criticism is the problem, not the object of the criticism.
Now understand, (this is secondhand, because I don’t go there and do this) but my wife informed me that in some Facebook group there was complaining about the Prayer for the Covenant because that was “praying for to be seen of men.” It’s public. Okay, when Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven”, he did it publicly. It got reduced to writing. It’s the most widely read prayer in all of western society. So if you are going to condemn, on that basis, the Prayer for the Covenant, you are going to have to condemn the Lord’s Prayer and in turn condemn the Lord. If you can resolve criticism leveled at you by applying the test and saying, “Jesus would have failed that test, too,” then you don’t even need to respond to the criticism. But if they level criticism at you, and you look at it say, “Jesus would have passed that and I would fail,” then it’s time to start saying, “Well, okay, then I need to clean up something in my own life.” Because all of us deserve some level, we merit some level, of criticism and condemnation. We’re just not perfect.
It’s really hard to sit inside your own life and be realistic about your own personal failings. We always tend to apply tests that are given in scripture outwardly and to say, “As long as I use persuasion and pure knowledge then I can beat you into submission and never yield the argument because I am doing what was said is the criteria.” Gentleness—okay, I won’t yell at you. Meekness—okay, I’ll be polite enough to let you say what you have to say, I won’t interrupt. Love unfeigned—okay, I love ya brother, I LOVE ya brother. Persuasion—okay, when I get my opportunity to present mine I’m going for the brass ring.
Wait a minute. What if that’s God trying to get through to you? What if the way in which God is trying to persuade you is by the meekness of the humble Lord who speaks to us in plain humility; who comes to us, not to try and overawe us, but comes to us saying: “You are me in embryo. I know what it took for me to become the Son of God, and I know you can do it, too.” What if the Lord is your greatest cheerleader, and he wants nothing more than to try and get you to be more like Him. You can’t be more like Him when the center of everything is yourself and you never self-examine. We all deserve criticism.
I was asked if I would bear my testimony and I’m willing to do that. I’ve tried to let people know exactly what has and is going on without the need of resorting to a lot of spectacular descriptions of the Lord’s direct involvement in my life.
I want you to imagine for a moment: Moses is on the mount. The setting is awesome. The Lord is speaking to him, and in that setting he is overawed, so much so that when the Spirit of the Lord withdraws, he collapses because it has drained all his strength. He comes to himself and realizes man is nothing and he’d never supposed that. The adversary comes to tempt him. He can tell the difference between a merely pretentious soul whose message is dark, and the God of glory whose message is Light. And then the God of glory comes again and presents to him yet more. This is a spectacular event. He is told: “Take your stick, go to Pharaoh’s court, throw your stick down and we’ll humble the Pharaoh.”
Now you’ve probably got–by the time you walk down the mountain, and you get ready and provisioned and make arrangements for your affairs while you are gone–days before you set off for Egypt. And then when you travel to Egypt, you’ve probably got a couple of weeks or more of hard trudging across the desert. You arrive in Egypt and you realize, kind of like God, the pylons of Egypt are awesome. They represent a false religion but they do so impressively. You come, with your shepherd’s sandals and your homespun garments, into the courts of Pharaoh where you are supposed to deliver a message. You tell me that no matter how spectacular the circumstances were on Sinai some three weeks earlier that it didn’t take faith for Moses to confront the Pharaoh and to deliver the message. As the sound of the staff is rattling into a stable position on the floor of the courts of Pharaoh, I suspect Moses was palpitating. “I sure hope He’s God here, too!” Because everyone thought that gods were local. Everyone thought that gods were from different districts. Sinai may have been Jehovah’s. Ra, Fa, who is big cheese here? I can imagine that for a moment Moses held his breath, hoping.
We sit back from our distance with the confidence that this was going to play through triumphantly, and it was going to work out just exactly as the story always works out. Moses had absolutely no such assurance. He was sent out to do, what may be to him humiliating and embarrassing things to do and to say, but he did them anyway. Not because he knew he would triumph and history would remember him. He did them because God told him to and he really, really, hoped it was going to work out.
I don’t know how often it is, that no matter what I’ve been shown or given, taught or received, that I realize, that at the end of the day, the only proof anyone will have will be the words that I get told to deliver. From my perspective it’s like…the stick rattling on the floor as it settles there, while you swallow hard and you hope that there are at least some who have hearts that are receptive, who are willing to say, “God spoke unto the Fathers in times past, and has spoken unto us by His Son, and again spoken unto us by Joseph, and God speaks again today.”
It’s not Joseph, it’s not Moses, it’s the One behind that. It’s the God of Heaven and His Son. It’s the only sound, reliable, and true thing that there is in the universe, and that God speaks again. However unlikely it may seem in the circumstances, God speaks again.
There will come a time when there will be people among whom it will not be necessary to say, “Know ye the Lord,”because everyone is going to know Him. What He will put us through to get from here to there is up to Him to determine. And how He is going to accomplish that is up to Him to decide. But when we get there and the Lord is among us, none of us are going to be surprised. None of us are going to dance around excitedly because we are going to say, “We knew He was with us every step of the way anyway.” It will be ever so nice to come and embrace, and to feel wounds, and to kneel, but you won’t be surprised.
What it takes to get us from where we are to that point is entirely individual. It’s entirely up to every single one of us. But He’s willing to take us on that journey and He’s willing to put us through the forge, and melt us until we are pliable, and hammer us until we are shaped. He is willing to put us through what’s required in order to take people and turn them into something that is far more like Him and far less like the world.
There is a question He poses about the tares that are ripening and so what of the wheat? We are supposed to be godly. We are supposed to be God-like. Imagine yourself trying to be like God. Well, it almost makes you laugh out loud when you think about such proposition, and yet it’s there in scripture and He’s telling you that’s what He wants of you.
The greatest who was ever among us, knelt to wash other people’s feet and did what he could to help those who were infirm. With patience and kindness He dealt with people, till the moment arrived when it was necessary for Him to lay His life down. And then He went exactly where He needed to go, and said exactly what needed to be said, in order to inspire the rage of the people who felt threatened so that they would kill Him, on time, as the sacrificial paschal lamb on the Passover that year. At the end He controlled even the moment of His death. We’ve got the example in front of us.
I have always been surprised at the humility of the Lord, the meekness of the Lord, and the fierceness of His disapproval. Some of what you read in Come, Let Us Adore Him is actually taken verbatim from my journals. I tend to record incidents when they happen, exactly as they happen, and lock down the account at that moment [and] then never change it, because Joseph took criticism for writing multiple accounts of the First Vision. So I write it one time and I don’t change the story, so what you’re reading in Come, Let Us Adore Him is taken verbatim out of the journals. But part of the story is left out because it wasn’t necessary, and it changes the focus and it didn’t belong there. But, I will tell you because I have been asked to bear my testimony.
After I had seen the events in Gethsemane and recorded that in the journal, it was some time later, trying to take all that in. I saw the resurrection and what happened that day. After I had seen it, I sat down and I wrote the account. I’m writing the account, and I entered–literally into my journal I wrote–“The joy of that moment made the suffering that He endured in Gethsemane seem small by comparison.” I literally wrote that in my journal. I was instantly… I couldn’t write another word; I was instantly condemned. I had no right to make that comparison and it wasn’t true. So I closed up the journal. I stopped writing. I went to work, and the whole day was awful.
When I got back from work that evening, I drew a line at that point in the journal across the page and I explained what happened. “What I wrote above I should never have written. It’s not true, and I was condemned for writing it.” Because there was nothing about the triumph that lessoned the price that was paid in Gethsemane, and to suggest that anything mitigated the price our Lord paid for us is untrue and unwarranted. When I explained that in the journal I felt back in His good graces.
The Lord, when He lets you know you’re wrong, lets you know in a way that’s like…our dog Mowgli. She cannot bear to displease her family. She just wears it on her. Everything about her, the ears, the tail, everything about our dog droops when she has familial ire directed her way. That’s how you feel when the Lord is letting you know you’ve offended. I’ve offended Him far too many times for me to even recount. Sometimes I’ve wondered why I’m still involved. I assume at some point He is just going to get tired and I’m going to ignite like a match head and He’s going to say, “Well, he probably had that coming.”
The Lord is real. He is working. The time is short. The evidence of what is going to happen and is presently underway is not just in scripture, it’s also in nature. The evidence of this is written everywhere. And if some of you are lucky enough to be able to hang around for the 6 o’clock fireside with John Pratt, try to keep him here long enough to let the stars come out. He’ll need a laser pointer but then he will really entertain you.
Let me end by simply saying that I know the Lord, and I respect Him enough to confine what I do to exactly what’s asked of me, and leave it to Him to determine everything from content to timing. And that if He says go, we go; and if He says not yet, it’s not yet. I’ve learned that He has an agenda. He’s known about the moment we’re in right now for a long time. Work on what is underway began two years, and more than a year-and-a-half before I was involved. I didn’t look at the people who were involved and say, “Why didn’t you include me?” I looked at them and said, “I’m so glad you did the work.” I didn’t envy them, I’m not jealous of them. I welcomed it. They felt called by God and they did the work. As it turns out, they were. And as it turns out, God is now calling all of us to step up and do some other things. How that will manifest it in each one of our lives is up to the Lord and you.
I bear testimony to you that it is His work. And although it may seem small, great things have small beginnings. By small means the Lord brings great things to pass. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.