2.20 Have Full Confidence in Divine Manifestations

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. Welcome to our new week. Our week this week is going to deal with some Doctrine and Covenants.

It's going to deal with some Joseph Smith—History and we're going to have our Book of Mormon readings as well. So we've got some good stuff coming ahead this week. You're going to be reading from the following throughout the week.

Doctrine and Covenants, Section 2. Don't worry, that's like three verses or something, right? Joseph Smith—History, Chapter 1, Verses 27 through 65.

As we read that, we're going to see the backside of Joseph Smith's first vision. What happened to him through the following years after the vision. And then we're going to be reading 1 Nephi, Chapter 9 through 12.

Today we're going to be diving straight back into Joseph Smith—History a little bit because I love the story that Joseph tells in the interim as he's trying to figure things out here. And these first key verses, this 27, 28, 29 area of his history is quite telling. A lot of us think that the first vision happened and then all of a sudden Joseph just started seeing angels and Moroni came often and all these other things happened.

And interestingly enough for me, as I read this again, it was a fresh reminder that Joseph Smith has the first vision and then has no other vision or no other contact with angels or ministering of any sort for three years or so. And that had to have been quite a difficult challenge for him as he not only was growing up in his teenage years and dealt with regular bullying and regular, not just ministers, but all those in town that would make fun of him and mock him for his belief that he had seen a vision. All right, so when we think about Joseph Smith, we think about him as a young man who was a young man who had a vision.

And so during this time, he's a teenager. We find out he's kind of a jovial teenager. He likes to have fun.

He makes mistakes. And yet he's often left pondering about his own worthiness because he's had this vision and then nothing for several years. And that's where it gets into our verse for today.

That's kind of the historical context a little bit. Verse 29. So he's described what's happened with his youth and where he sits in his own ponderings in life.

And then we get verse 29. It says, "Almighty God for forgiveness of all my sins and follies, and also for a manifestation to me, that I might know of my state and standing before him; for I had full confidence in obtaining a divine manifestation, as I previously had one." Man, there's some such great stuff inside of this verse here. We see Joseph's own concern, his own feelings of imperfections.

Have you ever had those moments where you're just wondering if you're enough or if you're doing all right? And Joseph's feeling that, and he turns, it says here, "betook myself to prayer and supplication." I don't know if you've looked up supplication lately or if you use that regularly in your terminology. I don't necessarily.

But the prayer part, we kind of understand. Supplication is like begging. It's like asking with everything you've got to understand it.

We realize that that is evidence to us and we can continue forward in our lives building that evidence in full confidence that the Lord will absolutely continue to lead us in divine manifestation as we go forward. I love what Joseph teaches us here and I hope it's something that I can bring more into my life and you can bring more into yours. That every time we have even an inkling of a spiritual manifestation, that we put it into our evidence bags and we continue to collect evidence in our lives that the Lord's hand is in our lives.

Ah, I love that one today. 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.