Scripture Insight: Mosiah 2:21

I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath...

Discussion
I think the use of the word "lending" here is interesting. King Benjamin could have said "giving" but he didn't. He went with "lending" which has connections with owing something in return. The Lord provides us our lives here (our "breath") so that we can carry out his work. He doesn't just give it to us. He wants us to pay him back via our faith and dedication in Him and His work.

Study Recap: “My Ways Are Not Your Ways” By Elder Clayton M. Christensen

Title: “My Ways Are Not Your Ways”
Author: Elder Clayton M. Christensen
Source: February 2007 Ensign
Link: https://www.lds.org/ensign/2007/02/my-ways-are-not-your-ways?lang=eng
Rating: 5/5

Favorite Points

• Many of the Savior’s most profound teachings are counterintuitive. “Love your enemies” is an example. The solutions that our minds are prone to develop are often different from those the Lord would have us pursue. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).
•  When we encounter roadblocks in our efforts to build the kingdom, the reason often is that our solutions are grounded in the wisdom of men—which is foolishness to God (see 1 Corinthians 3:19).
• The Savior taught that good shepherds go after individual sheep that don’t return to the fold. Yet we frequently focus on the ninety and nine, leaving those who are lost to continue wandering from the Church. In every sacrament meeting, for example, our clerks count the number of sheep who returned to the fold. They store this number in a safe place for the quarterly report, and then we go home. If we conformed our ways to God’s ways, we’d list the names of the individual members who could have returned to the fold on that Sunday but didn’t come. Then we’d go find them.
•  We should be careful not to offend members who deliberately do not want to attend. But helping each member who only occasionally returns to the fold on Sunday to feel needed and feel our love is a simple practice that every ward and branch can begin. Many less-active members got that way because they didn’t return to the fold one Sunday and nobody seemed to notice.
• Some wards and branches suffer from inadequate leadership. The reason is often that we rely on the same qualified people to fill key callings, denying others experiences in which personal growth can occur. When a branch is just emerging and there are no alternatives, leaders extend callings to people who don’t fit the traditional mold of talented, capable leaders and invite them to assume important responsibility. During such periods, the branch and its members often grow in exciting ways. Many times, however, there comes a point when a group of talented, experienced leaders and teachers has coalesced. When there are capable people available to ensure that Church programs run efficiently, we often stop drafting people from the periphery of capability into the positions of responsibility in which they can grow. Because they seem less qualified than those in the experienced core, we leave them on the periphery. The experienced leaders and teachers play musical chairs, exchanging positions of responsibility. This is not the Lord’s way.
• Building His Church on the backs of the simple and weak (see D&C 1:19) was not a temporary, stop-gap staffing plan to tide the Church over during its early years until enough experienced, committed, qualified leaders had arrived on the scene.
• The Lord deliberately weakened Gideon’s army so that Israel wouldn’t get confused about whose power had led them to victory (see Judges 6; 7). None of Jesus’s original Twelve Apostles had evidenced adequate experience or commitment when He called them. Enoch, Moses, Samuel, David, Jeremiah, Amos, and Joseph Smith were unqualified by the world’s standards when the Lord put them to work. But God transformed them.
•  ...the focus of many parents and youth leaders is to help our youth find their lives. Too often we define strong youth programs as those with a large “critical mass” of youth, well-planned activities, and opportunities for Latter-day Saint friendships. These are good things to have. But while we work so hard to provide enriching experiences for our youth, we sometimes deny them the most important opportunity of all—the chance to lose their lives for the sake of the gospel.
• The Savior’s formula for converting our hearts to His cause is unambiguous. He instructs us to lose our lives in His service.
• A strong youth program is not defined by the numbers of youth. Nor is it defined by the charisma of youth leaders. Rather, it is one that gives every young person the opportunity to lose his or her life for the sake of the Savior.
• The youth whose lives leaders need most urgently to influence are those whose parents do not regularly enroll them in the Savior’s service. A strong youth program isn’t one that coddles these at-risk youth. Rather, it will give them opportunities to sacrifice in the service of God, to feel needed in the Church and feel the Spirit as they serve.
• If the reason for attending church between ages 12 and 18 is fellowship and fun, then Relief Society and elders quorum can be a shock: they aren’t very fun.
• The burden of adult discipleship looms heavy if young people have never shouldered the Savior’s yoke.
• Long ago I had concluded that it was quite simple to administer the mechanics of missionary meetings, but I could not lead that work with passion and credibility unless I could speak in present-tense verbs and first-person pronouns about finding people for the missionaries to teach.
• When Moroni foresaw that many in the last days would believe God had ceased to be a God of miracles (Mormon 9:15–20), perhaps he had in his view not just those of other faiths but some of us as well. When we are doing all we can and our leaders ask us to do even more, miracles are the only option. That is why the Savior asked us to forsake the rational limits of our adult minds and employ the faith of little children instead.
• I once felt passed over when another man was called to a leadership position I had felt I might receive. In the crisis of self-confidence that ensued, I realized that because our minds are finite, we create hierarchies and statistically aggregate people. We perceive stake presidents to be higher than bishops and Primary presidents higher than Primary teachers because they preside over more people. But God has an infinite mind. He needs no statistics above the level of the individual in order to have a perfect understanding of what is happening. This means, I realized, that the way God will measure my life is not by the numbers of people over whom I have presided but by the individual people whose lives I have touched with His love and with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
•  There is a calling far higher than that of stake president, bishop, or Relief Society president. It is to be a doer of good, a disciple of Christ, an intermediary through whom God answers others’ prayers.

Study Recap: “Settle This in Your Hearts” by Elder Neal A. Maxwell

Title: “Settle This in Your Hearts”
Author: Elder Neal A. Maxwell
Source: October 1992 General Conference
Link: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1992/10/settle-this-in-your-hearts?lang=eng

Rating: 5/5

Favorite Points

• Instead, these comments are for the essentially “honorable” members who are skimming over the surface instead of deepening their discipleship and who are casually engaged rather than “anxiously engaged.” (D&C 76:75; D&C 58:27.)
• Though nominal in their participation, their reservations and hesitations inevitably show through. They may even pass through our holy temples, but, alas, they do not let the holy temples pass through them.
• Some regard themselves as merely “resting” in between Church callings. But we are never in between as to this soaring call from Jesus: “What manner of men [and women] ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am.” (3 Ne. 27:27; see Matt. 5:48; 3 Ne. 12:48.)
• All are free to choose, of course, and we would not have it otherwise. Unfortunately, however, when some choose slackness, they are choosing not only for themselves, but for the next generation and the next. Small equivocations in parents can produce large deviations in their children!
• While casual members are not unrighteous, they often avoid appearing to be too righteous by seeming less committed than they really are—an ironic form of hypocrisy.
• Some of these otherwise honorable members mistakenly regard the Church as an institution, but not as a kingdom. They know the doctrines of the kingdom, but more as a matter of recitation than of real comprehension.
•  One common characteristic of the honorable but slack is their disdain for the seemingly unexciting duties of discipleship, such as daily prayer, regular reading of the scriptures, attendance at sacrament meeting, paying a full tithe, and participating in the holy temples.
• When the determination is first made to begin to be more spiritually settled, there is an initial vulnerability: it is hard to break with the past. But once we begin, we see how friends who would hold us back spiritually are not true friends at all. Any chiding from them reflects either resentment or unconscious worry that somehow they are being deserted. 
• In any attempt to explain to them, our tongue is able to speak only “the smallest part.” (Alma 26:16.) We continue to care for them, but we care for our duty to God more.
• Brigham Young counseled candidly: “Some do not understand duties which do not coincide with their natural feelings and affections. … There are duties which are above affection.” (Journal of Discourses, 7:65.)
• Some would never sell Jesus for thirty pieces, but they would not give Him their all either!
• One might share talents publicly yet privately retain a particular pride.
•  Still others find it easier to bend their knees than their minds. Exciting exploration is preferred to plodding implementation; speculation seems more fun than consecration, and so is trying to soften the hard doctrines instead of submitting to them.
• Each of us is an innkeeper who decides if there is room for Jesus!
• When, at last, we are truly pointed homeward, then the world’s pointing fingers of scorn can better be endured. As we come to know to Whom we belong, the other forms of belonging cease to mean very much.
• For now, consecration may not require giving up worldly possessions so much as being less possessed by them.
• A little criticism of the Brethren, which seems harmless enough, may not only damage other members but can even lead to one’s setting himself up as a substitute “light unto the world.” (2 Ne. 26:29.)
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