2.259 Victory and Glory is Brought to Pass

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. What do you do when you follow the Lord and it just seems like you're failing? Let's take a look inside of our readings today.

We're reading this week Doctrine and Covenants sections 102 to 105 as well as Helaman chapters 8 through 12. And our verse for today is going to come from section 103 again. We did that yesterday.

We're going to stay on it one more time as we dive into it here. And we get inside of 103 some of the development here of what would be called Zion's Camp. And Zion's Camp for the Saints at that time was believed to be the group that was going to go and get the lands back.

These lands that had been stolen from the early Saints. And Zion's Camp was to be organized to send a group of men to go and to get it. And we even get a verse today inside of this that I think is very telling for us because ultimately historically we know that Zion's Camp turns out to be a failure and the Saints didn't get their lands back as they had been commanded to go and do from the Lord.

Let's take a look at it and see what we can learn from it here in Doctrine and Covenants, section 103, verse 36. The Lord says, "All victory and glory is brought to pass unto you through your diligence, faithfulness, and prayers of faith." Now that seems like a verse that tells the members of the Church that victory and glory are coming. And yet we know that Zion's Camp was a failure.

And it's interesting because if you look into the historical stories of those that stayed in the Church and those that didn't. And many that stayed in the Church said, "Look, regardless of the outcome, the things that we learned was to follow the Lord." That's what ultimately we learned from Zion's Camp. And that took me down the line inside of Come Follow Me.

There's a quote, you can go into Come Follow Me and find this. Just, it's just in the handbook there, but there's a quote from Orson F. Whitney about this idea.

We have this verse where the Lord promises victory and glory through these key components and yet Zion's Camp fails. So how do we bridge the two of those? This is what Orson F.

Whitney says: "No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God.

And it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in Heaven." My friends, don't rate the success or failure of following the Lord entirely on the momentary outcomes that you see in your life. The Lord's view and lens is eternal. His timeline is different than ours.

Perhaps the victory and glory that we see promised inside of our verse here in verse 36, perhaps that victory and glory is not the momentary victory and glory that the Saints were looking for in Zion's Camp, but perhaps the eternal glory that the Lord promises. I know that through trials and tribulations, challenges and struggles, we have an opportunity to learn. We're promised that all things can be turned for our good if we but seek to stay with the Lord and follow His commandments.

And I believe this is an opportunity for us to see the victory and glory can truly come to pass as we learn greater obedience through the challenges and struggles that we see in our lives. 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. Subtitles by the Amara.org community.