Best 53 quotes in «lds quotes» category

You can't change t he wor ld f rom t he rear view mir ror.

There are conversations going on about the Church constantly. Those conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what our Church teaches... We are living in a world saturated with all kinds of voices. Perhaps now, more than ever, we have a major responsibility as Latter-day Saints to define ourselves, instead of letting others define us.

The revelation to store food may be as essential to our temporal salvation today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah.

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

Adding kidney beans to his cottage cheese and pineapple was an act of bravery Dave had not intended.

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

And every nation which shall war against thee, O house of Israel, shall be turned one against another, and they shall fall into the pit which they digged to ensnare the people of the Lord. And all that fight against Zion shall be destroyed, and that great whore, who hath perverted the right ways of the Lord, yea, that great and abomniable church, shall tumble to the dust and great shall be the fall of it.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we have a responsibility to make our moment bright and to live to ur full potential, married or not.

A proverb in the Old Testament states: 'He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city'. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a hateful expression of anger. I dare say that most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. In their wrath they swore, they lost control of themselves, and terrible things followed, even murder. There were moments of offense followed by years of regret. . . . So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence. We are so easily offended. Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way.

As a General Authority, it is my responsibility to preach general principles. When I do, I don't try to define all the exceptions... I only teach the general rules. Whether an exception applies to you is your responsibility. You must work out individually between you and the Lord.

Grace doesn't grease the wheels of the law. Grace isn't God's way of jury rigging a broken law. It's the other way around. The law is just one small cog in a world animated entirely--from top to bottom, from beginning to end--by grace.

Here they [the Jaredites] became a flourishing nation; but, giving way in time to internal dissensions, they divided into factions, which warred with one another until the people were totally destroyed (p. 15).

But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have beheld his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love.

Dave put a lot of thought into picking out the books his dad would like least.

If you are there for the Lord, He will be there for you. If you love Him and keep His commandments, you will have His Spirit to be with you and guide you.

If we are serious about climbing to higher ground, we will be found in church every Sunday—attending all of our meetings, partaking of the sacrament, participating in Sunday School, and contributing to the spirit found in Relief Society, Primary, and priesthood meetings.

If you cannot undo what you have done, you are trapped. It is easy to understand how helpless and hopeless you then feel and why you might want to give up. . . . Restoring what you cannot restore, healing the wound you cannot heal, fixing that which you broke and you cannot fix is the very purpose of the atonement of Christ.

It is one of the great ironies of Mormon history that Smith, who set the polygamous movement in motion, never experienced it in practical terms. He was content to marry the teenage women who lived in his home and then let them depart when Emma objected. And he was content to let his polyandrous wives live with their first husbands, so he never bore the responsibility of providing for them, financially or emotionally, on a day-to-day basis. He never witnessed the toll practical polygamy would take on an Eliza Partridge...

I have spoken here of heavenly help, of angels dispatched to bless us in time of need. But when we speak of those who are instruments in the hand of God, we are reminded that not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them we walk with and talk with—here, now, every day. Some of them reside in our own neighborhoods. Some of them gave birth to us, and in my case, one of them consented to marry me. Indeed heaven never seems closer than when we see the love of God manifested in the kindness and devotion of people so good and so pure that angelic is the only word that comes to mind.

In recent years we might be compared to a team of doctors issuing prescriptions to cure or to immunize our members against spiritual diseases. Each time some moral or spiritual ailment was diagnosed, we have rushed to the pharmacy to concoct another remedy, encapsulate it as a program and send it out with pages of directions for use... Over medication, over-programming is a critically serious problem.

It is useless to judge nineteenth-century Mormons by late twentieth-century standards. Both men and women were given an impossible task and failed at it. All we can do today is sympathize with them in their tragedies and marvel at their heroism as they suffered.

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.

Mormons invented themselves just as other religious and ethnic groups invented themselves. But Mormons did so in such a singularly impressive way that we will probably always remain baffled as to how exactly it happened.

Many people have asked me, 'How do you make a single life a happy one? My answer is, 'Create the best life possible. The decisions you make determine where life takes you. I would make every effort, married or single, to get closer to Heavenly Father, to get the most education possible, to make my home a heaven on earth, and to learn how to manage my time and finances.' I sought for and still seek for any experience I can have to make my life happier and more fulfilling; being single or married has nothing to do with it.

Maybe I’m strange and perverse, but I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.

No sex?" He looked at me in disbelief. "Well if you can't have ze sex, what can you do?" For the sake of simplicity I took my left arm and lined it up just under my collarbones. "Nothing below here," I said. I took my right arm and lined it up to my knees. "Nothing above here." "What about your armpit?" he asked. "Can your boyfriend do anything he wants to your armpit?" I thought about it. Armpits seemed pretty harmless. "Yeah," I said optimistically. "My boyfriend can do anything he wants to my armpit." "This is good," the Frenchman said. "He can stick his penis in and out of your armpit, and if you grow hair there it is almost like vagine." Is it too late to change my answer? I wondered, pulling a cardigan over my bare shoulders and covering any hint of an invitation.

My knowledge is, if you will follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, every man and woman will be put in possession of the Holy Ghost; every person will become a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and an expounder of truth. They will know things that are, that will be, and that have been. They will understand things in heaven, things on the earth, and things under the earth, things of time, and things of eternity, according to their several callings and capacities.

Not only must we move forward in a monumental manner more copies of the Book of Mormon, but we must move boldly forward into our own lives and throughout the earth more of its marvelous messages.

Our testimonies, our closeness to our Father in Heaven, and our ability to serve and love and laugh and enjoy life do not depend on whether we are married or single. If we look to Christ for answers, He will give them. It also follows that with our increased devotion and understanding of Him, the happier and more complete we will become and the more we will comprehend our true worth in the sight of God.

The Lord needs us. He needs us to be knowledgeable, dependable, and competent disciples. We need to know not only that the gospel is true but we need to know the gospel, better than we do right now. We need to be in the right place at the right time. We will thereby become the right person.

Pornography causes release of adrenaline from an area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, and this makes the heart race in those who view, or even anticipate, viewing pornography. The sexual pleasure of pornography may be partially caused by release of dopamine from the ventral tegmental area, and this stimulates the nucleus accumbens, one of the key pleasure centers of the brain.

Sin acts as if God's original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didn't quite pan out, God offered his grace--but only the bare minimum--to make good the difference. This is exactly backwards. God's boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows.

Sometimes we find ourselves thinking that since the call comes from the Lord, everything ought to work out smoothly, with every potential obstacle removed. We forget sometimes that life is a "schooling" provided for our growth and development, and that if every time we went on the Lord's errand, things were to go perfectly well because of the Lord's blessing, we would be deprived of much of our education. {re 1 Nephi 3:7}

The Atonement has not only helped me be cleansed, and be healed, but it has also helped me live.

The choice for devoted Latter-day Saint women is not just to simply go forward and try to be happy and create a fulfilling life. As women of covenant our goal is to go forward and develop stron testimonies and nurturing and caring hearts that will prepare us for our roles as mothers in eternity. With that end in mind, I determined to go on happily, to become 'anxiously engaged in a good cause' (D&C 58:27), and to believe that the rest would take care of itself.

There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord’s word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly “king’s portion” of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God’s great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body. If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with “king’s meat and wine,” even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can “run and not be weary and walk and not faint.” If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God.

The most important doctrine I can declare, and the most powerful testimony I can bear, is of the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. His atonement is the most transcendent event that ever has or ever will occur from Creation’s dawn through all the ages of a never-ending eternity.

What if we saw the mediocre talk, the overbearing counselor, the lesson read straight from the manual, as a lay member’s equivalent of the widow’s mite? A humble offering, perhaps, but one to be measured in terms of the capacity of the giver rather than in the value received. … If that sounds too idealistic, if we insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers, if we insist on measuring our worship service in terms of what we “get out of” the meeting, then perhaps we have erred in the our understanding of worship. … Worship is about what we are prepared to relinquish—what we give up at personal cost.

There were men in those dark ages who could commune with God, and who, by the power of faith, could draw aside the curtain of eternity and gaze upon the face of God, have the ministering of angels, and unfold the future destinies of the world. If those were dark ages, I pray God to give me a little darkness.

To nineteenth-century leaders the principle was not just an optional revelation - they viewed it as the most important revelation in Joseph Smith's life, which is what he undoubtedly taught them. If they accepted him as an infallible prophet, and if they wanted full exaltation, they had no recourse but to marry many plural wives. Their devotion to Joseph the seer outweighed their experience of polygamy's impracticality and tragic consequences for women, which many men probably did not even recognize. But it is worth noting that the women who suffered so much under polygamy gave it their unqualified support in public rallies and wrote impassioned defenses of it. They too were devoted to the idea that their church was led by practically infallible, authoritative prophets, especially Joseph Smith.

To those who in their turn selectively handle Mormon history and discourage our probing it in a number of areas, one needs to say (or at least to ask): Haven’t we been, if anything, overly cautious, overly mistrustful, overly condescending to a membership and a public who are far more perceptive and discerning than we often give them credit for? Haven’t we, in our care not to offend a soul or cause anyone the least misunderstanding, too much deprived such individuals of needful occasions for personal growth and more in-depth life-probing experience? In our neurotic cautiousness, our fear of venturing, haven’t we often settled for an all-too-shallow and confining common denominator that insults the very Intelligence we presume to glorify and is also dishonest because, deep down, we all know better (to the extent that we do)? Isn’t our intervention often too arbitrary, reflecting the hasty, uninformed reaction of only one or a couple of influential objectors? Don’t we in the process too severely and needlessly test the loyalty and respect of and lose credibility with many more than we imagine? Isn’t there a tendency among us, bred by the fear of displeasing, to avoid healthy self-disclosure—public or private—and to pretend about ourselves to ourselves and others? Doesn’t this in turn breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other? And when we are too calculating, too self-conscious, too mistrustful, too prescriptive, and too regimental about our roots and about one another’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life, aren’t we self-defeating?

treasure up these words in thy heart. Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love.

We must help young women immerse themselves in a selfless work, perhaps receiving little public praise or attention. Instead, they must feel the Lord’s great love for them and their efforts through the influence of the Holy Ghost.

We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true Mormons.

What marvelous things happen when men and women walk with faith in obedience to that which is required of them! I recall reading the story of Commander William Robert Anderson, the naval officer who took the submarine Nautilus beneath the polar ice from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, a daring and dangerous feat. It recounted a number of other exploits of similar danger and concluded with a statement that the commander carried in his wallet a tattered card that had on it these words: “I believe God will always make a way where there is no way.” I too believe that God will always make a way where there is no way. I believe that if we will walk in obedience to the commandments of God, if we will follow the counsel of the priesthood, he will open a way even where there appears to be no way.

When the challenges of mortality come, and they come for all of us, it may seem hard to have faith and hard to believe. At these times only faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement can bring us peace, hope, and understanding. Only faith that He suffered for our sakes will give us the strength to endure to the end. When we gain this faith, we experience a mighty change of heart, and like Enos, we become stronger and begin to feel a desire for the welfare of our brothers and sisters. We pray for them, that they too will be lifted and strengthened through faith on the Atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ.

You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must be spread to others… In this world so filled with problems, so constantly threatened by dark and evil challenges, you can and must rise above mediocrity, above indifference. You can become involved and speak with a strong voice for that which is right.

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don’t grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus’ sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement—a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.) Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as “Alpha and Omega” (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research study. Jesus is also the one who gives value and significance to everything. Robert L. Millet writes, “In a world that offers flimsy and fleeting remedies for mortal despair, Jesus comes to us in our moments of need with a ‘more excellent hope’ (Ether 12:32)” (Grace Works, 62). Jesus covers us when we feel lost and discouraged. Christ referred to Himself as the “light” (3 Nephi 18:16). He doesn’t always clear the path, but He does illuminate it. Along with being the light, He also lightens our loads. “For my yoke is easy,” He said, “and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). He doesn’t always take burdens away from us, but He strengthens us for the task of carrying them and promises they will be for our good. Jesus covers us when we feel abused and hurt. Joseph Smith taught that because Christ met the demands of justice, all injustices will be made right for the faithful in the eternal scheme of things (see Teachings, 296). Marie K. Hafen has said, “The gospel of Jesus Christ was not given us to prevent our pain. The gospel was given us to heal our pain” (“Eve Heard All These Things,” 27). Jesus covers us when we feel defenseless and abandoned. Christ referred to Himself as our “advocate” (D&C 29:5): one who believes in us and stands up to defend us. We read, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler” (Psalm 18:2). A buckler is a shield used to divert blows. Jesus doesn’t always protect us from unpleasant consequences of illness or the choices of others, since they are all part of what we are here on earth to experience. However, He does shield us from fear in those dark times and delivers us from having to face those difficulties alone. … We’ve already learned that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as Atonement means “to cover.” In Arabic or Aramaic, the verb meaning to atone is kafat, which means “to embrace.” Not only can we be covered, helped, and comforted by the Savior, but we can be “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 1:15). We can be “clasped in the arms of Jesus” (Mormon 5:11). In our day the Savior has said, “Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love” (D&C 6:20). (Brad Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, pp. 47-49, 60).

As Elder George F. Richards, President of the Council of the Twelve, said in a conference address in April 1947, 'when we say anything bad about the leaders of the Church, whether true or false, we tend to impair their influence and their usefulness and are thus working against the Lord and his cause.' ... The Holy Ghost will not guide or confirm criticism of the Lord's anointed, or of Church leaders, local or general. This reality should be part of the spiritual evaluation that LDS readers and viewers apply to those things written about our history and those who made it.

George Smith shows how many of the prophet’s followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice … [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.