3.282 We Esteemed Him Not

In Matthew 5, Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world, reminding us that our lives are meant to preserve, illuminate, and point others to Him. This season on Savory Salt, we'll walk through the Old Testament, one verse and one thought each day. Perhaps these moments will add greater savor and brighter light to our lives as we seek to truly live as Savory Salt.

Hello, my friends. It's a new day with new opportunities. Choose ye this day whom you will serve.

When's the last time you recognized the Lord in your service? That may be a personal question, but it's one that you get to answer personally, so I'm going to ask it. As we're reading Isaiah 50 through 57, I love seeing the connections to the Book of Mormon through the Isaiah lens rather than seeing the Isaiah lens through the Book of Mormon, if that makes sense.

For example, Isaiah 53 is one where you go, "This is really familiar! I read this before, but it's not in the 2 Nephi chapters. Where is it?" And then you see the reference here that it's in Mosiah 14.

So here we have a different place in the Book of Mormon that this Isaiah chapter is referenced. We get to our verse for today, and I want to give it a different perspective, at least through the lens of how we serve. Isaiah 53, verse 3, says this: "He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and..." The Bible says, "And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him.

He was despised, and we esteemed Him not." Now, I want to connect this idea to the promise that we're given also in Mosiah, earlier in Mosiah with King Benjamin. "When we're in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God." Do you recognize the opportunity to serve others as the opportunity to serve our Savior and our Heavenly Father? Here we have a description of the Savior that makes it seem that He is so rejected that we don't even recognize Him. "We esteem Him not," the scripture says. It got me thinking about the ways that we go about serving others.

Recently, my daughter shared in her mission experiences the opportunity that she has at the Humanitarian Center to prepare blankets. The following is a story from a mother who shared her testimony that she knew the blankets were specifically sent to her family. It was a beautiful story that my daughter shared.

A mother who was down and out had been able to pull out three different blankets to her children, all specific to their favorite color, and then pull out one more blanket for herself to see a beautiful pattern and remind her of God's love. It gave my daughter an opportunity to realign her perspective of the service that she does at the Humanitarian Center during her service mission.