In July I was asked to speak in church. It's one of the big, scary things about being a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: we have no paid ministry, and the lay members of the church have the "opportunity" to speak in front of the congregation from time to time. Seeing the bishop's number on your caller ID can strike fear in the heart.
Well, my turn rolled around again. This time, the topic was charity.
Sure, I thought. Charity. That's really a nice topic. It's love. I love love. I think about love all the time.
But as I studied, I realized that charity was so, so much more than just plain love.
I'm not going to copy and paste my entire talk into this blog wholesale. (You're welcome.) Instead, I'm going to just note one scripture that I found. I'd been trying to dig around in the scriptures and find out just what a person can do to develop charity (because if you've done much reading on the subject, you know that "without charity" man is "nothing." And that's in there frequently enough to give you a little bit of a scare, if you start to think about it very much.) So, how do I get it?
I Timothy 1:5
5 Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned:
Mainly, the first phrase is what struck me. That "the END of the commandment is charity." I think it's meaning the end result. And I think the word commandment might be singular to sound poetic. So, my interpretation of this is that the end result of my obedience to God's commandments is the development of charity in my soul.
Well, that...sounded interesting. So I started delineating a few commandments as I put it to the test.
For instance, the commandment to forgive. Yes, obviously! If I forgive, it's my way of thinking that Christ's atonement and love are BIG ENOUGH for EVERYONE, and that there isn't anyone I'd deny that great love to. (And the corollary of this, is that when I do not forgive, it's my way of saying to the Lord, sure. Forgive me because I deserve it. But that guy? He's doesn't. The Atonement isn't big enough for THAT guy. Uh, that doesn't sound good when I put it that way, right?) Anyway, the end result of forgiving others is, voila, charity.
But what about fasting? We have a commandment to fast. (See Isaiah 58 if you want an incredibly beautiful treatise on fasting. Ahhh, it fills me.) When we fast, we also donate the amount of money we would have spent on food that we fasted from to the bishop so he can use it to bless the poor. That's developing self control, giving of ourselves, sacrifice, and loving others more than we love our own passions. Charity.
Extrapolate this with commandment after commandment. It holds up.
And so, I guess the point is, if we want to measure up with charity at the last day and have things be "well with us," to paraphrase Moroni 7:47, a great place to start is by ramping up our obedience to the commandments of God. For all commandments are, if we look closely, attributes of God, the greatest of all being LOVE.
I love how cohesive the scriptures are. How beautiful and rich is the doctrine of God.
