2.335 The Lord Did Go Before Them

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. Are you nervous about the future?

Today, maybe something to think about that helps you calm down a little bit. First of all, let's pause and just celebrate for just a second. We just passed here at Savory Salt our 700th episode.

So, congratulations! Congratulations for those of you that have joined in for more than one episode, and welcome to those of you if this is your first one to Savory Salt. We've done 700 episodes now.

Into our readings for the week, we're reading this week Doctrine and Covenants sections 137 and 138. We'll formally kind of finish the section part of Doctrine and Covenants before we get into some of the declarations and proclamations. We see in the Book of Mormon, summed up in these few chapters in Ether, we watch the beginnings, rise, righteousness, wickedness, failure, and destruction of an entire civilization in just a few chapters.

So if you don't have the wherewithal to go through the entire Book of Mormon and watch that pattern happen, you certainly could do it in an abbreviated version here in the Book of Ether. We're gonna start our week off in Ether chapter 2. And what we're gonna see inside of here is a fascinating look at this people that... in biblical terms, this is this time where the languages are confused, everyone doesn't have the ability to communicate anymore, and yet we get this fascinating story here with this family that turns to the Lord and is preserved, and not only preserved with their own language but taken to a new land to be able to begin a civilization that the Lord promises is gonna be blessed beyond all the civilizations of the earth—quite a, quite an interesting perspective.

Now, if you want these beginning chapters of chapter 1 and chapter 2 to have a little bit deeper dive, you could go to Season 1 and look at days 337 through 339. There's some more deep dive there—I guess a little bit deeper dive than what we're gonna do today anyway. Today for us, we're gonna look at Ether chapter 2 verse 5, and it says this: "And it came to pass that the Lord commanded them that they should go forth into the wilderness, yea, into that quarter where there never had man been.

And it came to pass that the Lord did go before them, and did talk with them as he stood in a cloud, and gave directions whether they should travel." Now this one's an interesting one because we find out these people are gonna be preserved, their language is preserved as a family, but then the Lord's gonna send them to no man's land. I mean, it doesn't say that scripturally, but it basically says it in scriptural terms, the place that never had man been. But the Lord goes before them, and he talks with them, and he counsels them.

My friends, I think I've had people ask me in times where I travel around the world—I love to travel—and I have people say, 'Look, when you go alone, are you like scared of where you're going? Like if you've never been there before, you've never gone on that adventure?' And for some reason for me, I've never been like particularly nervous or anxious about travel or about being in new countries or around new peoples or languages I don't understand. And maybe there's a glimmer of a reason here.

It's that there's nowhere I could go that the Lord can't go before me. And I'm not even talking geographically here. This is something we can all take into our lives.

Whether it's a new job and you don't know what's around the corner, or it's a mission call that you have no idea what's gonna happen. Maybe it's as simple as a calling in your ward and you're really nervous about what the future holds. Nothing and nowhere that we're going is so far out of reach that the Lord can't go before us.

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.savorysalt.org.