Sacrament

[babygirl]

man we had the best sacrament today, totally uplifting and wow just great alot of it was on being humble and also on not judging people if u dont mind and even if u do to bad im going to share it with you

Humble: she talked alot about how we need to humble ourselfs and not ridcule others she gave a quote...from a sister Graslie(sp?) "Just because we know what we know does not mean we are better than the rest of God's children" i thought that was really good cuz i mean how often do we down others because they dont believe what we do. she also talked about how having pride can get in the way and drag us down so though we think we are all that and so great we really arnt thats hurting us. if we have pride we dont repent and that causes much greaf to our heavnly father. she was talking about how we have to continualy strive to be humble cuz once we think we have it we dont. she then read the scriptures in Matthew 18 and DandC 93 that talk about being like little children and how thats not saying act like your a "monster" but how they are so inoccent, how they are troubled by evil...anyway that taught me alot i feel sometimes i over look those people who do wrong but i should because i do wrong too.

Judge:this ties right into being humble he quoted alot from Dallin H. Oaks but some of the things he said really stood out to me like. heavenly father can judge because he judges the heart and the hearts intent we cant judge because all we see is the outside we dont see the true desireas of the heart. not only that we have our own problems to deal with...he then used the scriptue...cant remember where but it says you see your brother with a moat but you have a beem in your eye so first cast out the beem in your eye...that one. anyway he then went on to talk about 2 kinds of judging a final judgment and an intermedeat judgement we are forbiden to make a final judgment but are incouraged to make intermedeat judgment as long as it is with rightouseness...then he used the story of christ and the adulterer. and how he did not make a final judgment on her....he did not justify that what she did was okay but he also did not condem her. he then gave 7 guidlines to rightous judgment

1:must be intermedeat

2.by spirit not by anger and hate.

3.in our stewardship

4.dont judge till you have ALL the facts

5.dont judge the people but the situations

6.forgiveness goes hand in hand

7.apply rightouse standerds

he says how you judge will be how you are judged. can you handle it?

he gave this storie...an LDS writer miss typed the date for the restoration and after words got many phone calls beraiting her and using fowl language to her because of this small accident. turn that around how many of those people could handle the way they treated that lady...

then my last say is if you are going to judge anyone at all it should be yourself!

anyway that was longer than inteded but it was all really good and i wanted to share it with all of you. now you tell me how your sacrament was

[CrimsonKairos]

Due to an ongoing (read: 24/7) family emergency, I've been unable to attend Church for about a year now. Thanks for your post Dancergirl, I enjoyed hearing about the talks at your sacrament meeting. It'll be nice to get back to taking notes myself once I can attend Church again. I think the points about being humble and judging righteously were great.

[babygirl]

Due to an ongoing (read: 24/7) family emergency, I've been unable to attend Church for about a year now. Thanks for your post Dancergirl, I enjoyed hearing about the talks at your sacrament meeting. It'll be nice to get back to taking notes myself once I can attend Church again. I think the points about being humble and judging righteously were great.

your welcome i'm gald someone else enjoyed it

[Ray]

Thank you for sharing that, dancergirl. I appreciate the thoughts you shared.

But I appreciate this thought the most, because it caused me to think:

...now you tell me how your sacrament was

I always listen, and pick up a few new thoughts, and feel edified after the Sacrament, but right now I can't tell you what I heard last week, or any other week. At least not as well as you did. And right now I can't even remember what I heard last Sunday... which was 3 days ago.

From now on I'm going to try to remember well enough so I can tell others... just as well as you did... what people said and what I learned from each Sacrament meeting, and I'm going to try to keep remembering until the very next meeting. That is my goal now. :)

[babygirl]

Thank you for sharing that, dancergirl. I appreciate the thoughts you shared.

But I appreciate this thought the most, because it caused me to think:

<div class='quotemain'>

...now you tell me how your sacrament was

I always listen, and pick up a few new thoughts, and feel edified after the Sacrament, but right now I can't tell you what I heard last week, or any other week. At least not as well as you did. And right now I can't even remember what I heard last Sunday... which was 3 days ago.

From now on I'm going to try to remember well enough so I can tell others... just as well as you did... what people said and what I learned from each Sacrament meeting, and I'm going to try to keep remembering until the very next meeting. That is my goal now. :)

your welcome...who knew such a small question could cause a great goal like that to come about? :) i think its wonderful

[Outshined]

Here is the talk I gave in Sacrament yesterday:

Member Missionary Work

Good morning; I’ve been assigned today to speak on member missionary work. However, I’d like to start off with a short story that illustrates the importance of making the right choices. Mostly because I told my kids I’d work this story into my next talk. This is the story of Joe and the Snake, and it is completely true.

I grew up on a small farm in West Virginia, and so had developed an early interest in animals, as many farm kids do. I also had a marked interest in reptiles, particularly snakes. The problem was as I got older, just seeing them or reading about them was no longer enough; I had to handle them as well. By the time I reached my middle teens, I had developed the unfortunate and ill-advised habit of picking them up for closer inspection. When I saw a snake, I would chase it down, carefully immobilize it, and pick it up so I could examine it. This isn’t smart, nor is it safe, but I was young and had enough confidence in my snake-wrangling skills that I did not care.

One summer when I was about 15 or 16, I was helping my grandfather put up hay in a field near our house along with Joe, a man who rented a house from my grandfather and often helped out with chores like that. The hay had already been cut and baled, and we were driving around with tractors to gather the bales of hay on wagons to take to the barn for storage. I was driving one of the tractors, with Joe riding on back to help load hay, and my grandfather was on the other tractor nearby. This field was at the edge of a river, and as we pulled up to a group of the bales, I saw a large grayish-brown snake slither among the hay and make a beeline for the riverbank.

Now this was a particularly interesting-looking snake, so I leaped from the tractor and gave chase. The snake made it to the edge of the weeds on the riverbank just as I reached it, and it started over the edge out of sight. I wasn’t about to lose such an opportunity, so I grabbed the snake by the tail and yanked it back, flinging it through the air it toward the tractor, where Joe stood.

I should pause here to mention that Joe had a deathly fear of snakes; not a casual aversion, but I mean a heart-stopping, cold-sweat kind of terror of the things. I didn’t know that at the time, but I was about to find out.

So there flew the snake like a Frisbee. Looking back even now I’m not completely sure that it happened at regular speed; whenever I remember it, it’s in slow motion, the snake spinning horizontally through the air like a helicopter blade toward Joe’s head, with him frozen in place, eyes roughly the size of dinner plates. Just like in the movies, bad things sometimes seem to take forever to happen.

Somehow at the last moment Joe thought to duck, and the snake soared harmlessly over his head to land in the grass behind him. Joe ripped an enormous board from the side of the wagon and began to flail wildly at the reptile, pounding everything that he thought might be a snake. My grandfather had seen the commotion; he hurried over and asked what on earth was going on, and we told him; my version involved a lot of “somehow” and “sort of”, and Joe’s version involved a lot of words I wasn’t allowed to say. Somewhere among all the shouting and explaining, my grandfather managed to get an understanding of the situation, and turned to me with a simple question: “Why?”

I had no suitable answer; the truth was that I wanted to get a better look at the snake, but that hardly seemed a good reason to do such a thing, especially to Joe, who had suffered the greater trauma. My grandfather always had a sense of humor, and so he laughed off my bad choice and we went on collecting hay. Joe chose to ride with my grandfather from that point on, which is understandable, but he and tractors just did not mix well. A few weeks later, he got his pants leg caught in the PTO shaft on the tractor and got his pants torn off; I’m pretty sure that was the summer that he stopped riding on the back of the tractors altogether.

That day I learned that I had to think before acting; that there are consequences to every decision. As for the snake, it somehow managed to escape in all the confusion, and I’m sure it had tales of its own about what happened the day it met Joe.

Now don’t think I’ve forgotten about member missionary work; that was just a short detour. We’ve all heard the statement that every member is a missionary; well I’m here to tell you that it’s the absolute truth. On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked Peter three times, “Lovest thou me?” Each time Peter’s reply was the same: “Thou knowest that I love thee.” And each time the Savior instructed Peter: “Feed my lambs. … Feed my sheep. … Feed my sheep”. But the Savior was not just talking to the Apostles. He was also talking to every person who has been blessed to hear the gospel and is a member of His Church. The Lord puts it in very simple terms in revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith,: “It becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.”

The Savior’s charge to “feed His sheep” is in force today. Like Peter and his brethren, the members of the Lord’s Church today have the charge to take the gospel to the entire world. This charge is seldom far from our minds, and every Latter-day Saint has the responsibility to be a missionary. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has around 56,000 active missionaries right now, two-thirds of whom are young men. That’s a lot of people working toward building up the Church, but there are people they just can’t reach. A person who might for whatever reason never consider opening his or her door to the elders may have a change of heart because of the example or fellowship of an LDS member they know or work with. The Gospel can thus come into such a person’s life through a more acceptable and effective route. Of course I have a perfect example of this principle. I and my family are here today because of a member’s example. It’s a rather interesting story, actually.

I was raised as I said in West Virginia, and my family was active in a small country church. I learned the Bible stories there, and had faith in God. When I grew up and joined the Army, I rarely attended church, but I still believed. I went on this way for some time, until the Gulf War; I had an experience there that made me reconsider my beliefs. From that experience I decided that God either did not exist or simply did not care what happened here on earth. I did not discuss religion or allow it to be discussed in my presence. As my wife has pointed out, there was a period of years in which I did not even allow the name of Christ to be spoken in our home. I was not exactly what you’d call a good prospect for the missionaries. If I saw someone going through the neighborhood, be it LDS missionaries or Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or whoever, I’d just let the dog out and let her guard the yard. No one ever came through that gate without approval during that time, and certainly no missionaries from any church.

So when I went to work with my present employer, I occasionally worked with another employee, a large bearded man named Luther. Luther looked a lot like Grizzly Adams and I knew he’d once managed a biker bar and lived a very rough life, but he was very different from what I imagined he would be with such a past. He had a peace about him that made me wonder what had changed him so much; I was told by some of the other employees that Luther was a Mormon, but he only had one wife. I didn’t know anything about Mormons, so I asked him about it one day. He told me what I wanted to know, and we went back to work.

It went on that way for some time; I’d be working with Luther, and I’d ask about some detail about the Church or its teachings, and he’d answer me. He never pushed; he just answered my questions. One day, when we’d reached the point that we were talking about the Gospel more than any other subject, he gave me a Book of Mormon. I accepted it, and kept it for a while, though I didn’t read it right away. I began to get a feeling that I was supposed to be doing something; almost like when you have an itch that you can’t quite reach. Finally I called the Nashville mission one Saturday and asked the location and hours of the nearest LDS church, and we went the following day. When I went through the doors I knew it was where I was supposed to be. We sat through sacrament, and were leaving early because we were having some trouble out of our son (he was just two and had never sat still for so long). That was when we met the elders in the hallway; we talked to them a bit and made an appointment to hear the discussions. I guess you call that a golden prospect. The rest is history; we joined the Church and moved here to this ward a few months later. All because of the example of a member.

I tell that story to illustrate the importance of member missionary work. You never know when you will be able to make a difference or with whom. As I’ve told my deacons in class, even when you don’t know someone is watching you, they may be, and it may make the difference in their acceptance of the Gospel.

How can we as members be better missionaries? First, we can live the principles of the gospel. The Lord expects this of us. The Apostle Paul commanded, “Be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” Simply put, our example can influence others to listen to the Gospel. We can introduce our friends and neighbors to the missionaries. We have an obligation to love our neighbors, as it is the second of the two great commandments. Many of our neighbors are not yet members of the Church, so we must be good neighbors. We must love all our Father’s children and associate with them. We can go out with the missionaries when possible and help them spread the Gospel.

Elder Russell M. Ballard said it well; “As we raise the level of expectation for the performance of our missionaries, we must also raise the level of expectation for the performance of all of the members of the Church in fulfilling our missionary duties. We need your help, brothers and sisters, to support and assist our missionaries in finding and baptizing many more of our Heavenly Father’s children. We need you to watch over, protect, and inspire the missionaries, who are servants of the Lord. If the standard is to be raised, it is raised for all of us. We must be more faithful. We must be more spiritually in tune. We must prepare ourselves to assist the missionaries in finding those of our Heavenly Father’s children who will embrace the message of the Restoration.

Remember, brothers and sisters, we’re not marketing a product. We’re not selling anything. We’re not trying to impress anyone with our numbers or our growth. We are members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, empowered and sent forth by the Lord Himself to find, nourish, and bring safely into His Church those who are seeking to know the truth.”

Missionary work as members includes not only sharing the Gospel with those outside the Church, but also in strengthening and fellowshipping new members. It does little good to bring new people into the Church if they don’t stay here. New members need help in order to fit in with LDS culture, to understand the terms we throw about such as “callings”, “patriarch”, “stake”, “ward”, General Authority, and so on. To one who was raised in the Church or has been here a while, these are simple things, but can be confusing for a new member. Likewise new members can be confronted with well-meaning friends or family who present them with materials that cast the Church in a bad light. Without the support of other members, they can be drawn away by such tactics. Every member should be able to find help with any problems or confusion about the Church from other members, and so we should be ready to lend a helping hand, and make sure they know we are available to talk and listen. We should keep in mind the time, effort, and other resources that missionaries and others spend to find and teach one of our Father’s children. Every one of us should be alert, looking for ways to be of service to the newcomer. We might ask ourselves how the newcomers in our wards would be treated if we were the only ones they ever met. Every member of the Church should foster the attributes of warmth, sincerity, and love for the newcomers, as the missionaries are taught to do. We members help with the conversion process by making our wards and branches friendly places, with no exclusivity, where all people feel welcome and comfortable.

In addition to welcoming and accepting recent converts and less-active members, we need to reach out and extend our friendship to others regardless of whether they are interested in the gospel or not. We shouldn’t be too selective in identifying those we feel are worthy or appreciative of our attention. The spirit of true Christian fellowship must include everyone. Our understanding of the gospel should help us see clearly that all people are our brothers and sisters, children of our Heavenly Father. As disciples of Christ, we should feel genuine charity for one another. As we do, new light will come into our own lives. Such charity is essential in missionary work, but we should never allow ourselves to treat our neighbors only as potential converts. We must not be so anxious to share the gospel that we become insensitive to the feelings of others. If we build personal, meaningful relationships with our nonmember friends and acquaintances, interest in the gospel may come later as a natural extension of a good friendship.

Every member is a missionary. When you go to work or even shopping, the opportunity could be there at any time. When I left for Iraq in 2003, the Bishop told me I was going on my own mission. I knew what he meant; not that I was going to discuss the Church with every person I met, but that everyone in that unit knows I am a Latter-day Saint, and my conduct could be the catalyst for others to learn about the Church. It became a point of conversation several times over there, and I will bear it in mind on this upcoming deployment. We never know when we will encounter someone who is ready to hear the Gospel, so we just have to be ready.

Missionary work is a vital element in the growth of Christ’s Church, and members are a vital part of that effort. We do that through our example, and our fellowship. And we do it through our support of the full-time missionaries and new members. As Christ himself said, when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

[StrawberryFields]

Thanks Outshined, I enjoyed your talk. :)

I am sure you are a great example of The Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints where ever you go. I do believe that we are always being watched by those who are curious about our church and this is great reminder.

Any word of when you will be deployed?

[Outshined]

They're saying about mid-March; at least I'll get the holidays at home this year. :)

[CrimsonKairos]

Awesome talk, Outshined. Thanks for reproducing it here.

Also, thanks for your service in America's armed forces. I thank God I don't live in a country where a group of unemployed men with AK-47's and RPG's can ride into town, intimidate the populace, and take what they want from whomever they want.

My father and uncle served in the Air Force (both fighter pilots); both were involved in the first Gulf War. Anyway, I salute your service. When you return to Iraq, go with God.