Study Recap: "Remember Lot's Wife" by Jeffrey R. Holland

Title: "Remember Lot's Wife"
Author: Jeffrey R. Holland
Source: devotional address given at BYU on 13 January 2009
Link: http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1819&tid=7
Rating: 4.5/5
Favorite Points

• Apparently what was wrong with Lot’s wife was that she wasn’t just looking back; in her heart she wanted to go back.
• As Elder Maxwell once said, such people know they should have their primary residence in Zion, but they still hope to keep a summer cottage in Babylon.
• So it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future.
• The past is to be learned from but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future.
• So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind.
• I can’t tell you the number of couples I have counseled who, when they are deeply hurt or even just deeply stressed, reach farther and farther into the past to find yet a bigger brick to throw through the window “pain” of their marriage. When something is over and done with, when it has been repented of as fully as it can be repented of, when life has moved on as it should and a lot of other wonderfully good things have happened since then, it is not right to go back and open up some ancient wound that the Son of God Himself died trying to heal.