2.204 That Every Man May Improve

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, it's great to have you with me.

Today let's be anxiously engaged in a good cause and bring to pass much righteousness. My friends, how much does the Lord want us to improve? That's been a question I've been stewing on this week as we've been inside of Doctrine and Covenants sections 81 through 83, as well as Alma chapters 34 through 38.

Specifically, I've been in Doctrine and Covenants 82, And as I mentioned yesterday, I kind of wish I could go through this verse by verse, but we don't have the time, nor do I really have the expertise to break this down first by first, let's be honest. But I'll give you the things that I've been stewing on here. As we dive into our verse for today, shout out to verse 10.

I mean, that one's very common. It's been used a lot in general conference talks. Take some time inside of there see what the Lord telling us This united firm this united order really fascinates me because the Lord is really testing the early saints to live a higher law And it a law that we know failed at the time And so I ponder inside of this about the coming days of this higher law and what it might mean for us And so as I was looking at this one of the things that kind of stuck out to me was verses 17 18 and 19 It all one sentence as is common as we talked about often here but we only going to do one verse and I going to do the cream filling of the Oreo sandwich so to speak I going to do verse 18 So make sure you read 17 18 and 19 together 18 says this, and all this for the benefit of the church of the living God, that every man may improve upon his talent, that every man may gain other talents, yea, even a hundredfold, to be cast into the Lord's storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church.

And then it continues to go. And again, 17 starts that sentence. But this is such an interesting one to me because the use of the term talent there, if you follow the footnotes inside of there, it takes you obviously to kind of the parable of the talents.

And so there's the money side talents that the parable of the talents is talking about. And then there's the term talent, right? Like the things we do well.

And so here we have this idea that when we all come together to the benefit of the church, that we may improve our talents so that other people can improve their talents even a hundredfold. Right now that's a crazy huge increase. And so then I thought about this and what do we do it for?

It's so that all of the church can be lifted up together. When I do trainings, when I work professionally with teams, one of the things I love What I love to bring into the teams is the idea that if any one person on the team improves the entire team actually gets the benefits of that And so for those business owners and sorry to go business for just a second, but I think it'll come full circle here. For those business owners that think that it's only about the bottom line of the business and that we need to focus on the business numbers.

And I think it's interesting here, the Lord's saying, let's all focus on improving because when we focus on improvement, we lift the entire church itself. The whole church lifts because of it. And then that took me down to the idea of improvement itself.

And I thought, where did improve come from? And so I did a little etymology. Sometimes, you know, I like to look up words and kind of dig into them and check this out.

This one's really interesting. Early on, early 14th, 15th century, when you get the term improve here, initially, the terminology is a little bit more specific than we do. Like we tend to just improve just means, you know, make things a little bit better than it is.

And yet improve in its original etymology all the way back. It says it's it's meant to turn a profit or to make useful. Now, isn't that interesting to go back to the parable of the talents and the story that we have there and those servants going and improving on the talents they were giving they turned a profit for their Lord right My friends what can you and I do to turn a profit And I'm not talking about money here.

What can we do to turn a profit to the church of the living God? What can we do to improve upon our talents and skills so that others around us can gain I hope I can continue to improve, bring profits to Him as I go forward. That's all for today my friends.

Lift up your hearts and rejoice. Cleave into the covenants you have made and together we will be savory salt. © 2012 University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Office of Communications and Creative Services