2.232 Every Man Shall Hear the Fulness of the Gospel

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. Welcome back as we've been diving into Doctrine and Covenants sections 89-92 this week as well as Alma chapters 53-56. Doctrine and Covenants section 89 is worth our time and study with it being the Word of Wisdom.

We're going to grab a couple of verses inside of our maybe lesser known sections that are attached to the reading this week. So we're going to move into Doctrine and Covenants section 90 today for our verse for today. And we're going to see inside of this a reminder from the Lord and a continual revelation that's occurring here with the development of the First Presidency of the Church as we call it today.

And a reminder from the Lord that the keys of the kingdom are with the prophet. Then we get this little glimpse into the plan as the Lord sees it with the fullness of the gospel spreading across the earth. And that's what got me excited about today.

Let's take a look at Doctrine and Covenants section 90, verse 11 today. It says: "For it shall come to pass in that day that every man shall hear the fullness of the gospel in his own tongue and in his own language through those who are ordained unto this power by the administration of the Comforter shed forth upon them for the revelation of Jesus Christ." This one gets me particularly excited because yes, I've been able to go and serve my mission in a foreign land and learn a foreign tongue. And I get excited for that.

I served in Mongolia, as many of you know, that have listened to this podcast for a while. And so a lot of people follow up that question with, "wait, what do you speak?" It's Mongolian, right? But I also wanted to share with you just a conversation I had very recently with a good, a man who's become a very good friend of mine.

He recently returned from serving as mission president in Papua New Guinea. And I've talked about some of my travels over there as well as I had the opportunity to work with him and do a young single adult, the first young single adult conference in the Pacific Isles. I was a speaker with that opportunity.

It was a lot of fun to go over there. And we sat down and had kind of a brunch, I guess. It was kind of between breakfast and lunch.

And I just talked to him about the growth of the Church in Papua New Guinea. And it is growing insanely fast. It's growing by about a stake every five or six months in terms of its pace.

The missionary work there is increasing. In fact, at our young single adult conference he even shared with me that many of the people attending who were not members of the Church were submitting paperwork to serve missions for the Lord. And they hadn't even heard the discussions and gone through the process of becoming baptized and becoming a member of the Church.

Many of those from that conference, which has been a couple of years ago now, many of them actually did go through, become members of the Church, keep their paperwork in and submit it and become missionaries. And so there's an incredible growth happening there. But I love one of the things that he said in our conversation while we were eating together.

He said, you know, it's interesting. Papua New Guinea has basically no centralized government. It has almost no infrastructure at all.

Other than Port Moresby, which is the capital city, the rest of the country is just rough terrain. There's no roads, electricity, running water. There's almost nothing in terms of resources we would consider of development, and yet the Church is growing at an astounding rate.

And one of the things he said that I loved, he said, for a place that is so dark and has been for so long. What he meant by that wasn't the people, just behind, just behind in development, behind in technology, for a place that's so behind, the people hear the message of the gospel and immediately feel light and the love of Jesus Christ, and they know it's true. He shared with me stories of members walking hours, some of them waking up at 2 in the morning to walk down into a valley and over the next mountain and down into a valley to attend church meetings by 9:00 a.m.

Can you imagine seven hours of hiking to go to church and then seven hours return trip to go back home? But they do it because of what we see the Lord promising here in verse 11. They are hearing the gospel in their own tongue, in their own language, and they're hearing it by those who are ordained unto this power by the administration of the Comforter.

Through the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, my friends, I love seeing in our day the fulfillment of prophecy from the Lord. This is one of those. It's an exciting time to be alive.

It's an exciting time for missionaries out in the field. I send messages to my daughter regularly serving and just say thank you for being part of this incredible work. So at the end of today, we've done it before, but find a missionary, give them a high five, thank them for the work they're doing because they are literally fulfilling the Lord's words today.

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. For more information, visit us at www.fema.org.