2.222 Christ is The Antidote to Poison

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. Christ is the antidote. We are wrapping up our reading this week.

We've been inside Doctrine and Covenants sections 85 through 87 as well as Alma chapters 43 through 47. We spent some time last season in Alma 46, and so I'd encourage you if you go there to learn a little bit more about Moroni, you could go back to season one. Instead, we're going to take a look here on our final verse for this week inside of Alma chapter 47.

Alma chapter 47 is quite a dark chapter, and yet there's a lot to learn from it as we see this rise of Amalickiah using treachery, murder, lying, intrigue, spy, right? Like all the things to become the king of the Lamanites. The section I want to focus on here, it feeds a little bit into something we talked about last season, and that was coming down from the mountain and his moments where Amalickiah is inviting Lehontai to come down from the mountain.

We won't go back through that again. You can go back to season one if you like, for that. Instead, we're going to focus on what happens on the back end.

Alma 47:18 says this: And it came to pass that Amalickiah caused that one of his servants should administer poison by degrees to Lehontai, that he died. Now the key phrase that I picked up inside of there is poison by degrees. It implies that Lehontai didn't realize, nor did anybody else at that time realize, that he was actually being poisoned at all.

And it's given me some reflection in my own life on whether I have these places in my life that I'm being poisoned by degrees. And I don't mean in a physical sense right now, I mean spiritually. Sometimes we use the phrase guilty pleasures to talk about some of our favorite sins, right?

Of commission or omission. And it's got me thinking about how do I fix that? How do I make sure that if I am being poisoned by degrees that I'm also trying to take an antidote?

And it landed me on Elder Renlund's talk "The Powerful, Virtuous Cycle of the Doctrine of Christ." It was from April of 2024. It's a very, very great talk in terms of this idea because he talks about the nature of us repeatedly and intentionally needing Jesus Christ in our lives. And so he doesn't say Jesus Christ is the antidote.

That's me bringing this in as a little bit of a connection. But he does say this inside of the talk, and I'll make sure the link is in there so that you can read it. He says: Our faith in Jesus Christ needs to be nourished daily.

It is nourished as we pray daily, study the scriptures daily, reflect on the goodness of God daily, repent daily, and follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost daily. Just as it is not healthy to defer eating all our food until Sunday and then binge our weekly allotment of nutrition, it is not spiritually healthy to restrict our testimony nourishing behavior to one day in the week. Now, my friends, you and I know, at least those of you that have been listening to Savory Salt for some time, we know the power of reading our scriptures on a daily basis as that's the whole key behind Savory Salt.

But did you catch the things inside that list? They are literally antidote pieces if we have poison being administered to us regularly and by degrees. It's a chance for us to pray, study the scriptures, reflect on the goodness of God, repent, follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost.

These are the things we can do to make sure that we accept the antidote, Jesus Christ. I'm grateful for the lens that Savory Salt has put in my own life. I started this really primarily, as I've mentioned before, for my girls.

And yet, as I've continued in Savory Salt, I am so grateful that the Lord prompted me to just sit down and reflect and to share my testimony in this way because of what it's been for me. It's a chance for me to reflect on my relationship with Jesus Christ and accept him as the antidote in my life to the poison of the world around me. So wherever you are in life, I hope that if you have poison you are aware that you are taking by degrees, that you would consider not taking those poisonous aspects of your life anymore.

And instead, turn to an antidote, which is Jesus Christ, and do so on a daily basis. That's all for today, my friends. Lift up your hearts and rejoice. Cleave to the covenants you have made, and together we will be savory salt.