Day 8, Doing the Will of the Father, Suffering the Will of the Father

Описание: Day 8, Doing the Will of the Father.

Suffering the Will of the Father

Let’s finish up our brief study for now, of doing the will of the Father.
Let focus on a word that is used in the passage we read from 3 Nephi 11, where it said that He “suffered the will of the Father.”

Suffer actually has several meanings: one of them just means that He yielded—He suffered it, He accepted it, He yielded to it.
But another meaning is, He ‘actually’ suffered because of the will of the Father.

Now… I hope that you don’t suffer too much in your life, but you should be disappointed if you don’t suffer a little, because salvation’s not a cheap experience.

Becoming like our Father and Mother in Heaven, isn’t done cheaply; and it’s definitely not done conveniently. I don’t want you and I to be worried about suffering. But I wonder if that word wasn’t chosen specifically—that if we do the will of the Father, we probably have signed on for at least some suffering, at least a little.

Kind of like the sacrament is a symbol, and temple ordinances are symbols, and other ordinances that have symbols. I guess there is a symbol in our life’s labors if there is a little suffering like unto the Savior’s.

We started off with what it might be like to see the Savior when He comes again. I look forward to that; I pray for the Second Coming. I literally pray for the Second Coming. If I am being honest, I’m so weary of the world’s ills and woes and sorrows.

I don’t know when that final event will be. But I do understand that the doctrine of the Church is that when He comes in a resurrected body, it won’t be perfect. Now, apparently everybody else’s will be, we believe a resurrected body is going to be perfect.

But clearly Jesus’s will not be—at least not immediately. But we are told—as with that wonderful early example in the Book of Mormon, so too with His final appearance—that when we see Him, we will see the wounds in the palms of His hands, and in the wrists of His arms, and in His feet, and if it’s possible, the mark of a Roman spear in His side.

He has, with the Father, chosen to use the marks of suffering, of atonement, of forgiveness, of mercy, of pain as the signs of His divinity. And by that, as it was for the Nephites, so too will we know that Jesus is the Christ, that this is the Son of God, that this is Jesus of Nazareth, that this was our Elder Brother who paid for our sins and redeemed our souls. We will know that it took suffering, that it caused pain, and it did leave marks.

All those marks turn into positives, all that pain is ultimately sanctified.
But without discouraging you and I, be prepared to pay something for your mission in life, that you did what you were supposed to do. That you were obedient to the will of the father. That you taught your family by example, that you prayed continually unto the Father, and became what God expects you to be by covenant and ordinances.

The reality is you and I are going to have to pay something, too.

We don’t have to look for sorrow; we don’t have to invite suffering, But, it’s mortality, it will find us. You and are in the true and living Church of the true and living God, we, who as disciples of Jesus Christ could hardly, and legitimately use that identity, disciple, if we don’t spend just a little time in Gethsemane and take at least a step or two toward Calvary—all with the weight of the cross of Christ and the visible image of those wounds.

Yes, I take them as remarkable, wonderful, great, significant tokens, a token and a symbol of the love of God and the sacrifice of His Son, of the divinity of His work, and why this work means everything to me. And why we must do the will of our Father which is in Heaven.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.