2.16 Exerting All My Powers to Call upon God

In Matthew 5:13, Jesus calls us the salt of the earth, a bold reminder that our lives are meant to carry his flavor, his truth, and his love to the world. Join me each day to explore one verse of scripture and one thought, striving to stay full of savor and truly live as savory salt. Hello, my friends.

Great to have you with me. Today, let's be anxiously engaged in a good cause and bring to pass much righteousness. I've got a quick question for you today.

When's the last time you exerted all your powers? Today we're going to dive into Joseph Smith—History 1:16 through 20. Perhaps the most common or famous, I don't know the right word to use here, passages of scripture when it comes to Joseph Smith—History, as we're going to have the First Vision occur according to the words of Joseph Smith.

And yet, interestingly enough, I think that there is a verse leading up to it that we can learn a lot from. And it's an opportunity for us to get a little bit more savory as we take a look at this verse today. We're going to look at Joseph Smith—History 1:16.

And then I'm going to encourage you to just keep reading those five verses because they are, as I mentioned, some of the most powerful verses. Feeling the Spirit and inviting the Spirit to testify of the truthfulness of Joseph Smith's story with the First Vision. I loved sharing it as a missionary.

I loved when I was asked to be a ward mission leader. I loved sharing it then. I love sharing it now.

It's a great segment of scriptures here. And yet in verse 16, we have a great lesson that I think we can all take away from this one today. Joseph has now opted into, he's made the decision that he's going to go pray.

And he describes going in to get ready to pray and a thick darkness surrounds him. And really, he starts to believe that he's facing his own demise, his own full destruction. And verse 16 says this: "But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being.

Just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me." Now this is quite a struggle that Joseph experiences. And, my friends, I think we have experiences in our lives that bring great trial and struggle to us as well, whether it be personal challenges with your own testimony or struggles with your faith or times of emergency as Joseph seems to be experiencing here where he seems to be facing his own destruction. I can think of a time in my life, several, but one I want to share with you where I really felt like I was exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me.

And yet, interestingly enough, I wasn't calling upon God to deliver me. We had an instance where one of my daughters, when she was very young, got into some medication that she should not have gotten into. And she consumed some of that medication and consumed what could have been an amount lethal to her.

And she had started to go kind of comatose when we found her and saw what it was. And I can remember in that moment, the challenge, the emergency, the alarm in my mind, as I considered the possibility of losing my daughter to some overdose of medications. We were hustling, we were getting her to the hospital as quickly as we could.

Everything just kind of went into chaos in that moment. And yet before we left, we took an opportunity to give her a priesthood blessing. And in that moment, I can tell you, I felt that I was exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver this little girl, this angel in my arms.

It still gets me emotional to this day. My friends, the challenge that I have for you and me today: What stops us from exerting all of our powers to call upon God in our daily prayers? What stops us from keeping that mindset to lean to God and to turn to him to deliver us out of our everyday challenges as well?

Well, I don't believe that God tires of those requests. I believe he seeks for them. He wants us to turn to him and to turn to our Savior Jesus Christ.

I love this verse because at the end of the verse, God delivers and he delivers in a big way. My friends, he will deliver to us in a big way as well. As we turn to him, exerting all of our powers to call upon him, showing that great faith that we have in him, we too can experience, whether literally or figuratively, the pillar of light exactly over our heads, just as Joseph did as well.

That's all for today, my friends. Lift up your hearts and rejoice. Cleave unto the covenants you have made, and together we will be savory salt. Visit Indeedwellbeing-services.com.