Our Promised Lands and Bright Future

Reading:   Deuteronomy 11

Today I'm going to relinquish the reins of my blog to Howard W. Hunter (a most beloved prophet) and his address, The Golden Thread of Choice (October General Conference, 1989).  I'm passing on the torch because I have discussed free agency several times and as the topic crept up again today I felt a new perspective was due.  This address is specific to the chosen verses and I felt it spoke clearly  to what I could only babble incoherently about.  First the scriptures...

DEUTERONOMY 11:26-28

26    Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; 

27    A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day: 

28    And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.

Here is a portion of Hunter's address...

...Today, I would like to address both groups, members of our church as well as others, about one of the most important tenets of our faith and one of the most precious of God’s gifts to mankind. It is our freedom, our agency, our inalienable and divine right to choose what we will believe and what we will not believe, and to choose what we want to be and what we want to do. I wish to speak of our responsibility and our opportunity to choose God, and the good, and eternal life; or to select evil, the destructive, and that which leads to painful misery and despair. 

Abraham Lincoln once asked, “What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?” He then answered, “It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. … Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us.” (Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, 11 Sept. 1858, quoted in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968, p. 636.) 

There are, of course, those who, in bitterness and disbelief, have rejected the idea of an independent spirit in man that is capable of free will and choice and true liberty. 

We declare a bright and glorious view of God and man to all who will hear, a view revealed in and illuminated by the restored light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We testify of God’s loving goodness and of his eternal respect for each of us, for us as individual children of God and for what each of us may become.

...When the children of Israel returned from Egypt and stood on the threshold of the promised land, they faced the clear choice of what was before them. Of the future that was about to be theirs, the Lord said to them:

“Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse;

“A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day:

“And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God.”

That is the choice the Lord puts before us as we face our own promised lands and our own bright futures. We are given the knowledge, the help, the enticement, and the freedom to choose the path of eternal safety and salvation. The choice to do so is ours. By divine decree before this world was, the actual choice is and always has been our own.

Let us be conscious of the fact that our future is being fashioned by the decisions we make. May we exercise our faith and our agency in choosing the blessings God has set before us in the great gospel plan of our Savior I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

I hope that I can focus my sight on the incredible gift I have in choice.  I am free.  I have agency and ultimate liberty.  I am a child of God and need not be afraid of choice as I have the means, through faith and prayer, to decipher and discover the right path no matter how gray the surroundings.  As I stand before my promised land and look to my future and the future of my marriage, my children, my eternity, I must find the means to smile for I am a Latter Day Saint of Jesus Christ and all is well, all is well.

~Kipling