“This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.” (Matt 15:8) As hard as I try, I find myself sometimes falling into the category of honoring my Heavenly Father with my lips and not my heart. Many of us have good intentions in life but somehow or another we fail to put them in force. We are like the little boy in Sunday School class whose teacher asked the class “who wants to go to the celestial kingdom someday?” Everyone but the little boy raised his hand. The Sunday School teacher asked him, “Don’t you want to go to the celestial kingdom?” The boy responded, “Oh sure, someday. But I thought you were getting up a group to go tonight.” We need to be ready to go now and not live our lives with good intentions.
I would like to suggest ways we can honor our Heavenly Father with our heart.
Honor our Father by honoring our stewardship. King Benjamin was one of the greatest examples of honoring our stewardship. He taught by example. He taught us one of the
greatest principles of the gospel “…that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17). King Benjamin
understood that we are all accountable to God whether a King, a President, a Bishop, or a Primary teacher.
As home and visiting teachers we have been given an urgent and important stewardship. We are responsible to “watch over and strengthen”, “to visit and exhort to pray”, and to ensure that our families are attending “to all family duties.”
I would like to share an experience I had as an Elders Quorum President. I went on a ministry visit with my Stake President and his counselors one Sunday to the home of an Elder and his family. I had been inspired to bring the Stake President into this home but while we were visiting in the home everything seemed fine. Half way through the visit I began to question my decision to visit this particular family. Then the Stake President began asking some penetrating questions and he discovered that this brother needed a blessing. He was blessed with guidance and counsel about issues that had not even been discussed. What a
wonderful experience to witness such magnificent revelation.
As we were driving in the car afterwards, one of the counselors said, “President, you have no fear.” My Stake President responded after pondering that statement for a few minutes, “Yes, I do have one fear, and that is to not do what the Lord expects me to do!”
David O. McKay said that the Priesthood brethren will be asked six questions in their Personal Priesthood Interviews with the Savior. Question number four is “A summary of our
activity in our church assignments. He won’t necessarily be interested in what those assignments were but how we have been of service to our fellow man in our church assignments”. (Quoted from “The Divine Center”, Stephen R. Covey, Bookcraft, Salt Lake City, 1982, p54)
What a wonderful opportunity we have to be members of the true church of Jesus Christ and to be taught eternal principles of happiness. True joy comes from service. Real happiness comes to those who honor our Father in Heaven through honoring our stewardship and “…them that honour me I will honour.” (1 Samuel 2:30)
I challenge each of us today to gird up our loins and honor our Father by serving in the capacity we have been called, and with all our might, mind and strength.
Posted by John in Feature Articles