Day 224

• Principle: God loves you.
• Book of Mormon Reading: Alma 49:25 - 50:12
  • How do you see God's love even among turmoil? 
• Reflect again on three parables, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.  Consider the following from David O. McKay
• About the lost sheep:
  • “I ask you tonight, how did that sheep get lost? He was not rebellious. If you follow the comparison, the lamb was seeking its livelihood in a perfectly legitimate manner, but either stupidly, perhaps unconsciously, it followed the enticement of the field, the prospect of better grass until it got out beyond the fold and was lost.
    “So we have those in the Church, young men and young women, who wander away from the fold in perfectly legitimate ways. They are seeking success, success in business, success in their professions, and before long they become disinterested in Church and finally disconnected from the fold; they have lost track of what true success is, perhaps stupidly, perhaps unconsciously, in some cases, perhaps willingly. They are blind to what constitutes true success.” (David O. McKay in CR, Apr. 1945, p. 120.)
• About the lost coin:
  • “In this case the thing lost was not in itself responsible. The one who had been trusted with that coin had, through carelessness or neglect, mislaid it or dropped it. There is a difference, and this is the onethird, which I think applies to us tonight. Our charge is not only coins, but living souls of children, youth, and adults. They are our charges. . . . Someone may be wandering because of the careless remark of a girl of her age in Mutual (and I have in mind a case), and the president of the Mutual lets her go, fails to follow her next Tuesday night and invite her to come. Another may be lost because of the inactivity of the Sunday School teacher, or the indifference of the Sunday School teacher who is satisfied with the fifteen people there that morning, instead of thinking of the fifteen who are wandering because of neglect.” (David O. McKay in CR, Apr. 1945, pp. 121–22.)
• About the prodigal son:
  • “The third parable is the prodigal son, the ‘younger son, we are told, so he was immature in his judgment. He was irking under the restraint, and he rather resented the father’s careful guiding eye. He evidently longed for so-called freedom, wanted, so to speak, to try his wings. So he said, ‘Father, give me my portion, and I will go.’ The father gave him his portion, and out the lad went.
    “Here is a case of volition, here is choice, deliberate choice. Here is, in a way, rebellion against authority. And what did he do? He spent his means in riotous living, he wasted his portion with harlots. That is the way they are lost.
    “Youth who start out to indulge their appetites and passions are on the downward road to apostasy as sure as the sun rises in the east. I do not confine it to youth; any man or woman who starts out on that road of intemperance, of dissolute living will separate himself or herself from the fold as inevitably as darkness follows the day.
    “‘My spirit shall not always strive with man’ (Gen. 6:3), says the Lord. ‘My spirit will not dwell in an unclean tabernacle.’ He who tries to live a double life, who does live a double life in violation of his covenants, to quote one author, ‘is either a knave or a fool.’ Often he is both, because he himself is using his free agency to gratify his passions, to waste his substance in riotous living, to violate the covenants that he has made in the house of God.
    “In such cases there is little we can do but warn and plead until the recreant, as the prodigal son, at last ‘comes to himself.’” (David O. McKay in CR, Apr. 1945, pp. 122–23.)
• What is your responsibility as a disciple of Jesus Christ for his children?
  • Is there someone in your life who has stayed, or who has been neglected, or who willfully left?  What can you do to assist them?  How can you use these parables to help them in their unique way?
• Marion D. Hanks taught:
  • “Perhaps we don’t all of us understand and apply this principle effectively, but there are those who do.
    “Recently a stake president told of his visit, with others, to a Junior Sunday School class. When the visitors entered they were made welcome, and the teacher, seeking to impress the significance of the experience for the youngsters, said to a little child on the front row, ‘How many important people are here today?’ The child rose and began counting out loud, reaching a total of seventeen, including every person in the room. There were seventeen very important persons there that day, children and visitors!
    “That is how Christ feels, and so should we.” (Marion D. Hanks in CR, Oct. 1972, p. 167.
• Jeffrey R. Holland shared:
  • It will help us always to remember Paul’s succinct prioritizing of virtues—“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”11 He reminds us we are all of the body of Christ, and that all members, whether comely or feeble, are adored, essential, and important. We feel the depth of his plea that there be “no schism in the body, but that the members … have the same care one for another. And [when] one member suffer[s], all the members suffer with it; or [when] one member [is] honoured, all the members rejoice.”12 That incomparable counsel helps us remember that the word generosity has the same derivation as the word genealogy, both coming from the Latin genus,meaning of the same birth or kind, the same family or gender.13 We will always find it easier to be generous when we remember that this person being favored is truly one of our own. (Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Other Prodigal”, April 2002)
• Additional Study:
  • Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Other Prodigal”, April 2002
  • Because God Loves Me, Children's Songbook No. 234
  • Love One Another, Hymns No. 308