*Transcribed from a talk I gave at church on 11/20/2016*
Good afternoon brothers and sisters. I am actually excited
to be here today. I love giving talks, and in fact, volunteered for this one.
However that was two months ago, and that is a long time to be learning about
something. For a lot of people that would be a long time to stress about the
talk. For me it was a long time to be called to repentance repeatedly on this
topic. It is apparently something I struggle with more than I knew that I did.
In Matthew chapter 22 we read about an encounter that Christ
had with some of the Pharisees at the time:
Then one of them, which was a
lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
Master, which is the great
commandment in the law?
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind.
This is the first and great
commandment.
And the second is like unto it,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.
It wasn’t long after conversation that Jesus was in the
upper room in Jerusalem observing the Passover with his disciples. They must
have been stunned when he rose from the table and began to wash their feet.
This was the job of the lowliest servant, and he was their Lord and their Master.
He told them to serve each other, as they had seen Him do, and then told them:
A new commandment I give unto you,
That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye
are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
Hopefully the primary kids recognize those words. That is
one of the first songs we learn in primary, those words set to music. It is a
beautiful thought to love each other. The full weight of what Christ said here
has only dawned on me slowly as I’ve gotten older. It was already a commandment
to love people. His new commandment was to love people the way that He loved
them.
The way that God loves us is something that I’ve learned a
lot about in the last several years and it is overwhelming and amazing. He sees
all of our pain and knows how to succor us in all the problems that we have.
And no matter how naughty and imperfect we are that love never goes away and it
never changes and it never diminishes. He’s never frustrated with us, he’s
never impatient with us, and he’s always ready to love us as soon as we are
ready to turn to Him and let Him. Loving people the way that Christ loves us is
actually a daunting commitment.
So that’s what I have been humbled about for the last to
months. I think I thought that I was a pretty loving person. But as I’ve
studied this topic more, and thought more about what it means to love people
the way God love us, I’ve realized I have a lot of weaknesses in this area.
Because God loves us, he doesn’t just give us commandments
and then say, “Now you’re on your own. Good luck figuring that out.” He’s given
us lots of direction on this topic.
The Good Samaritan
I’m going to start in Luke 10 with the parable of the Good
Samaritan.
There is a man traveling on the road from Jericho to
Jerusalem who fell among thieves. They stripped him of his raiment (took all of
his clothes), beat him, and left him half dead. And as he is laying on the
road, first a priest walks by. And the scriptures tell us that he sees him
there so he turns and walks on the other side of the road, and keeps going.
And then a Levite walks by, and sees him there and doesn’t
want to deal with it, so he goes to the other side of the road and keeps going.
And then a Samaritan comes. In the time of Christ the
Samaritans were the people that people looked own on, and there was a lot of
racism and they were mean to them. The Jews acted like they were better and
treated them poorly. He had probably had a lot of experiences being hurt, at
least emotionally, in his life. And the man in the road was a Jew.
The Samaritan did not walk on the other side of the road. He
stopped. And he nursed him and he helped him. And then, not only that, he took
him to an inn and took care of him there as long as he could, and then left
money so the man would continue to be cared for.
He didn’t just look at the man, and feel bad about his
plight and call that love. And I think, for me, I do that a lot. I feel like if
I have sympathy for the hard things happening to someone, then that counts as
loving them. How we feel about people is certainly part of love, but the way
that God loves us is not just to feel bad for us in our troubles and let us go
on our way. It is to help us in our troubles. And that is what he wants from
us.
The hard part is that there is so much trouble in the world.
It is hard to know what all we need to do. I can’t solved everybody’s problems.
I can’t help everybody with everything they could possibly need help with. It’s
too much. Even in our own community, in our own ward, it’s too much.
The beautiful thing about the gift of the Holy Ghost is that
God can tell us which part of the helping is ours. Sometimes the only thing
that we can do is pray for people, and that’s a good thing. Sometimes what we
need to pray for is how we can help the people. There was a BYU speech I read
where the man was talking about as he had studied the subject of love it
changed his prayers from “please help the poor and needy” to “please help me
know how to help the poor and needy, and give me the resolution to do so.” I
think that that is not just the poor and needy, but the people that we visit
teach and home teach, or the kids in our primary class, or the person that we
see sitting at the end of the row in here that looked sad today when they
walked in. It’s not just please help them, but please help me know what I
should be doing to help them, and give me the strength and the resolution to
actually do that.
At the time of Christ, the priest was considered an
intermediary between the dirty people and the perfectness of God. And so he might
have been thinking that he was keeping himself pure by staying away from the
man and not making himself dirty in the troubles and problems of the world. And
the Levites worked in the temple. For all we know that guy was late for his
shift at the temple, and he was in a hurry and didn’t have time to deal with
that. But in the parable Christ gave these weren’t good enough things. Working
in the temple is good. And the things that keep us busy in our lives, most of
us are busy doing wonderful and good things. But if we aren’t seeing each
other, if we don’t bother loving each other, then the wonderful and good things
are not enough. If we don’t have charity, we don’t have anything, the scriptures
tell us over and over.
The Samaritan was on the road because he was going
somewhere, too. The scritpures don’t tell us that he was taking a leisurely
walk on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem and had nothing else going on
that day. He wouldn’t have been on that dangerous road unless there was
somewhere he needed to get to. And in his business he was still willing to stop.
He was willing to stop when it was inconvenient and difficult, and go out of
his way. And I think sometimes that is really hard for me. I will help when I
have time, but right now I’m busy. And that’s not God’s way. I do that even
with my kids, we do it in our own families. I don’t want to be bothered with
what you are doing. Please leave me alone, I am focused on this. And I don’t
think that’s God’s way.
Not only that, the Samaritan helped in a dangerous place.
Clearly that road was dangerous when that guys was lying there, the scriptures
literally say, half dead. It was clearly a dangerous situation. But the
scriptures also tell us that “perfect love casteth out fear.” So when our
motivations are love, what we are feeling is never fear. And that fear is not
something that comes from God.
And it’s not just dangerous thiefs that might beat us up
that we are afraid of, and that stops us from loving people. Sometimes we are afraid
of doing the wrong thing and embarrassing ourselves. Sometimes we are afraid that
if we are loving in a situation we are letting somebody get away with
something, or that maybe that maybe they are going to think we are ok with what
they are doing. And sometimes we are afraid that if we are loving, then that
person will keep making those bad choice and we just need to be firm and take a
stand.
My experience is that God does not love us that way. That
when I am being wicked, that he keeps loving me anyway. And that happens a lot,
and I am grateful for His continual love.
The Sermon on the Mount
The next thing I want to talk about is another practical
example that Christ gave us about when to love people and how to love people. In the Sermon on the Mount we talk about the
Beatitudes a lot. And then after that He talked about loving people.
In Matthew 5 we read:
Ye have heard that it hath been
said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your
enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for
them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your
Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the
good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
I’ve never noticed before, but loved the idea that God’s sun, and His rain, and His
blessings, fall on all of His children. The ones that are being kind, and the
ones that are being mean.
Loving our enemies, or people that are not being nice, is
really difficult. But it’s what He requires of us, and who He wants us to
become. If we are really going to become like God, then it’s not just loving
our friends, and loving our family, and loving the people that are nice, it’s
loving our enemies. Literally our enemies.
As I said, I’ve known about this talk for a couple of
months. A couple of months ago, while our political discourse in the United
States is always a little bit negative, over the two months that I have been
studying this topic, it has gone extremely negative. And people that I know to
be kind and loving people have been so mean to their “enemies” on Facebook. And
it’s been breaking my heart. Because I know that nobodies feeling happy when
they are yelling at each other, or being sarcastic, or snippy, or liking rude
things that somebody else said about a topic. I know that’s not love. In the
past I would have been right up in there, being passionate and mean about my
opinions also. And I could feel God telling me, look at what you’ve been doing,
over and over and over as it was all happening. And feeling so bad about the part
I’ve played in it.
It’s not just being sarcastic with our enemies, that’s
hurtful, though. We do it to our families when they are on the opposite side of
an issue. It’s not just enemies like this person is trying to kill me and my
family. It’s enemies in a disagreement. It’s I want this to happen and you want
that to happen, and we treat each other like enemies.
I’m really good at being sarcastic and having come backs.
And I’m really bad at being patient and speaking gently. I am not going to be
the sweet grandmother that makes cookies and makes you feel loved all the time.
Though I would like to be. Well, maybe eventually I will repent to the point I
will be that kind of person, but that’s not who I am now. And my family gets a
lot of that criticism and sarcasm and negativity from me. And I have called to
repentance about that also as I have watched other people yelling at each other
or being so mean to each other, and seeing that in myself.
My dad has a theory. In the story of the Garden of Eden when
God is talking to Adam and Eve and
Satan is there and God was casting him out
and cursing him. And Satan was like, “Fine! Then I’m going to take these bodies
of Adam and Eve, and he is saying all these awful things he is going to do. And
so God says that he is going to place enmity Satan and the seed of the woman.
Emnity means being actively opposed or hostile to. And so a blessing that God
gave us is to hate evil and be opposed to Satan. That’s a blessing that He’s
given to all of us. So Satan’s comeback is that he’s going to use that enmity to
buy up armies and cause wars and make everybody mean to each other. And my dad’s
theory is that a lot of the anger that we have in the world, and a lot of the
wars and a lot of the fighting and the bad feelings that we have towards each
other misplaced enmity. We think that we are fighting Satan and he’s tricking
us and making us fight each other. The solution to that is to focus on love. It’s
never God’s way to hate people.
Sometimes we have to fight. Sometimes we have wars, and we
have to do things. But I love the story during World Ward II on Christmas Eve
when the fighting stopped and everyone sang Silent Night. They were fighting to
protect their families, and fighting for what they thought was good. But it
wasn’t about hating each other. I think that we have to be careful. There are
things in this life worth fighting for. And I love that Christ turned over the
money tables in the temple. I feel like that’s part of my call in loving people
is being an advocate, and fighting wrongs. But we have to make sure that who we
are fighting is Satan and not each other. Because his trick is to make us fight
each other instead of fighting him.
Beyond that, we are all sinners, and set ourselves to be
enemies to God. And He never stops loving us, even though we are in a position
to be His enemies.
A couple of years ago, someone that I love a lot, it came
out that he had been making some horrible, horrible choices that nobody knew
about. And his world fell apart because of the choices that he had been making.
His wife left him, and he wasn’t seeing his kids, and he was miserable. And as
I talked to him during that time, because he was someone I loved….. If I had heard that story about someone else,
and there wife had left them, and they were sad…. Up until that time when it happened to
someone I loved, I would have been like, “Good! That’s what you get!” God doesn’t
talk to us that way. He doesn’t love us that way. I didn’t want this person
that I loved to be suffering. I wanted him to repent, and I wanted him to fix
his life and I didn’t want bad things to happen to him. And I know…. And through
that experience I learned that that is how God loves us.
When Omar and I were dating he would always tell me that I
had this mean idea of God. And I really did. I really thought that God was
waiting to get us in trouble all the time. Like a parent, but less loving than
how he really is. He doesn’t want us to suffer, he doesn’t want us to get in
trouble, and he doesn’t want us to ever have to be in pain. And we shouldn’t
have those feelings for each other.
But again, that can be really hard.
Nephi tells us that God never asks us to do anything without
providing a way. One of my favorite books is by Corrie Ten Boom , it’s called The
Hiding Place. She Dutch, living during World War II. They were hiding Jews and
got caught and her and her family got taken to a concentration camp. Her dad and
her sister died there, and there were all kinds of horrible atrocities that happened.
Through that they were able to stay close to God because of their faith. And
after the war, she often spoke publicly of her experiences and of healing and
forgiveness.
On one occasion a former Nazi guard who had been part of
Corrie’s own grievous confinement in Ravensbrück, Germany, approached her,
rejoicing at her message of Christ’s forgiveness and love.
“‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,’ he said.
‘To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!’
“His hand was thrust out to shake mine,” Corrie recalled.
“And I, who had preached so often … the need to forgive, kept my hand at my
side.
“Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I
saw the sin of them. … Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive
him.
“I tried to smile, [and] I struggled to raise my hand. I
could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so
again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your
forgiveness.
“As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From
my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me
to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost
overwhelmed me.
“And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any
more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He
tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love
itself.”
President Hinkley agreed and said, “I am one who believes
that love, like faith, is a gift from God.”
I have experiences that in my life. I got called to be a
primary teacher when we first moved into a ward and I had a really rough group
of kids that liked to fight with each other. They had gone through a lot of
primary teachers, they were that group of kids. And then I got released, and
later I was called to Young Women’s. And those primary kids were now the
Beehives. I knew the feelings that I had for them, and so that prayer that I
had was please give me your love, because gratefully I had learned that concept
already from this beautiful book. And He did. The feelings that I still have
for those girls… I love them so much. They are still some of the most tender
feelings that I have for anyone. And I know it’s not because of anything I did,
but because He gave me His love. He let me see them the way He saw them, and
the struggles that they had and what they were trying to do with the rebelliousness.
And I know that He does that for us.
Most recently somebody did something that was really
hurtful. And it was a situation that had to be dealt with, and I couldn’t see
how to work through. And again, I’ve had 2 months to have love on the brain.
And I knew that somehow in this situation that love was the answer. And I would
sit in my room and think, I do not see a solution to this that has anything to
do with love. I cannot see how to fix this and I cannot see how love is related
to this situation at all. And so that was my prayer, please let me see what
love looks like here. And it took a few days, but eventually, there was that
illuminating feeling, and I knew it was revelation from God, and love was the
answer. And the anger and all the hurt had gone away, and I saw how to love the
person, and how to use love to fix the situation.
I know that God doesn’t give us commandments that he doesn’t
give us a way to keep. And that includes loving our enemies and loving each
other.
My emotions are really close to the surface today. I grew up
in Gridley living on a quarter mile dead end street. We lived about half way
down and my grandparents lived at the end of the dead end. So as I grew they
were a big part of our family. It was just that grandparents were part of your
immediate family. That’s just how my life was. My grandma’s friends were my
friends.
Right now my grandma is on hospice. And I talked to my mom
this morning and she is going downhill fast. Which is good, because this has
been really hard and she’s not having fun at this point in her lie.
I want to tell you a little bit about my grandma. Since she’s
been sick letters and cards, from all over the world have been pouring in. My
grandma thinks that she doesn’t have any talents. Her older sister was musical
and popular, and my grandma was shy and athletic in the 1920s when being athletic
wasn’t something to brag about for a girl. And so she always tells us that she
doesn’t have any talents. But the letters that come say things like, thank you
for always calling me on my birthday, and thank you for asking me about my
child who you know was suffering. She is always someone people called when they
were in trouble and she would listen love no matter the mistakes. Everywhere my
grandma goes she hugs people and she loves people and listens to people. She
isn’t the person who is always cleaning someone else’s house and taking cookies
to everyone. Service is a really important part of loving people. But in conference
this quote really stuck out to me, “The greatest form of charity may be to
withhold judgement.” And that’s what my grandma does. She just loves everybody,
and they feel loved, and so she is everyone’s adopted grandma.
I’m grateful for that example in my life. She told me once that
she was really shy growing up and she never talked to anyone. And you would
never know that now, because she decided that she wanted to be able to love
people. So she just started making herself do it.
I think that’s what it’s about. I think it’s about letting
go of the stuff that makes us uncomfortable and giving people what they need.
The cost of love is vulnerability and pain and bearing each
other’s burdens. But the reward of love is joy. And that’s what God wants for
us. He wants us to know the amazing joy that He has because of His love.
So I am trying to do better, and I know that as we love each
other better in our families, in our ward, and just…. It’s literally everybody
that we need to be loving, which is the really overwhelming part…. That as we
do that our ability to know joy increases, and that really is the point of this
life—to become like God.
