0:00:00 - 0:00:29 So this series is on Maroni chapter seven. I'll do my best to keep it confined to that text. I am pulling in one or two other scriptures. Um The purpose of this series is to cover the topics in Maroni seven. Um We'll do our best to cover the text that is here, but we will try to stay um as brief as Mormon 0:00:28 - 0:00:51 was. Um we're going to do more than just read what he wrote. But what I mean by this is that any of these topics could occupy many, many, many hours. And um the objective here, if there's a theme to this, it's just to slow down and really think about what he's saying. And most importantly, to think about 0:00:50 - 0:01:17 the implications on each of our lives. Uh namely how can we use what we're learning here from Mormon to draw closer to Christ in our own individual lives by making changes, suggested in how we live by comparing it to what Mormon is saying. So with that, um I will give you the headings of where we're 0:01:17 - 0:01:41 going in this series and then I will start by covering verses one and two. So the topics we'll talk about here are good and evil, laying hold of every good thing, miracles, angels, faith, and salvation, and how they're interwoven by their works, hope and rest. And then amongst this, I've just pasted 0:01:40 - 0:02:03 a little section from DNC 93 so that we can look at the text as I'm talking about it and I'll refer to that later on in the series. OK. So let's start with verse one and now I own, I write a few of the words of my father Mormon, which he spake concerning faith, hope, and charity for after this manner 0:02:02 - 0:02:24 , did he speak unto the people as he taught them in the synagogue which they had built for the place of worship? And now I Mormon speak unto you my beloved brethren and it is by the grace of God, the father and our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy will because of the gift of his calling unto me that I 0:02:24 - 0:02:45 am permitted to speak unto you at this time. This is just one verse, verse two. But there's a whole lot packed into this. And a lot of times when we get these preambles say in the letters of Paul, the temptation is just to skip over them. These words were written for reason and maybe that reason isn't 0:02:44 - 0:03:04 vitally important to you, right? The second. But maybe it is so it's good at some point to take some time and slow down and think about it. And then once you think you have it figured out, maybe it's OK to set aside sometimes, but even then it's always good to revisit things and just check in with God 0:03:03 - 0:03:29 and say, is there anything else I should know about this? So in this case, I think there are some very significant lessons that are encoded into this brief verse Mormon characterizes his uh work here as channeling the grace of God, the father and the Lord Jesus Christ through himself to the people. Now 0:03:28 - 0:03:54 , um I want to a lot could be said about that. I, I just want to zoom into this idea of the gift of his calling unto me. If you refer a few chapters earlier to Maroni, three to short chapters, just a few verses. Um It's four verses. Uh It talks about the, the first verses, the manner which the disciples 0:03:53 - 0:04:24 who were called the elders of the church, ordained priests and teachers. OK? Right out of the gate, we learned something about the characterization of that church. They were called the elders of the church, but they are described as the disciples, disciples of who? Well, obviously Jesus, so what does 0:04:24 - 0:04:53 it mean to be a disciple? It means to be disciplined or in other words, to receive instructions and to follow them. And those are two nonnegotiable elements of the word disciple. If you don't receive instructions and follow them, you are not a disciple. OK? And it's also uh not just to follow them but 0:04:53 - 0:05:16 follow all of them. So you need to receive something and you need to follow all of it. You can't pick and choose. So the elders of that church were disciples of Christ, first and foremost, being elders were, was just a piece of them, carrying out the instructions they received from Jesus. And you can 0:05:16 - 0:05:37 go read their Nephi and read all about those instructions in that process. OK. So they ordained priests and teachers and this is how they did it verse two after they had prayed unto the Father in the name of Christ, they laid their hands upon them. So let's pause there. The very first thing they did 0:05:36 - 0:06:00 was pray unto the father in the name of Christ. Well, I think we know what it means to pray perhaps unto the father. But what does it mean in the name of Christ? The book of Mormon is interesting because it's written in English. But uh it uses a lot of the same words that we find in the Bible and the 0:06:00 - 0:06:22 Bible. Uh You're probably, if you're listening to this, you probably read the Bible in English. There are many translations into English, but the older texts that we have are in Greek and Hebrew. And so through this connection, you can look at a name, a name, you can look at a word like name in English 0:06:21 - 0:06:42 in the book of Mormon. And then you can go to various places to look that up. The first thing you could do uh is look it up in a contemporary dictionary. So the Webster's 1828 dictionary is the one that's closest to the time frame of when the book of Mormon was published. So it reflects the meanings 0:06:42 - 0:07:11 that were in use for these words at the time. So that's a valid resource. And if you look up, name, what you'll find is that the definition of, of name in this sense is character. It's, it's uh what someone does, it's why they do it. And it's how they are. If you uh look up the Greek and the Hebrew uh 0:07:11 - 0:07:40 words into which uh that are translated into the word name in the Old and New Testament translations, you'll actually find the same definition. So whenever you see the name of Christ, you could replace it with the character of Christ, the will of Christ, the commandments of Christ and so on. And in doing 0:07:40 - 0:08:04 this, it's kind of like putting white light through a prism and breaking it into the color spectrum and you can see aspects of it that you probably wouldn't see otherwise. So praying in the f to the father, in the name of Christ, what are they praying about? So what are they actually asking? It says 0:08:03 - 0:08:29 later on? So they are choosing people, they are laying their hands on them and then they are instructing them. So what are the instructions. And then we'll come back to the choosing verse three in the name of Jesus Christ. I ordain you to be a priest or if he be a teacher, I ordain you to be a teacher 0:08:28 - 0:08:53 to preach repentance and remission of sins through Jesus Christ by the endurance of faith on his name to the end. Amen. So we talked about in the name of Jesus Christ, what does it mean to preach repentance and remission of sins through Jesus Christ? By endurance of faith on his name to the end. That's 0:08:53 - 0:09:15 the charge that these priests and teachers are receiving. These disciples are saying this is what you are called to be or do and this is how you are going to do it. So in the name of Jesus Christ, I ordain you and what I'm doing is I'm telling you to preach repentance and remission of sins through Jesus 0:09:15 - 0:09:47 Christ by the endurance of faith. I his name to the end. What does that mean? Repentance means to learn what Jesus would do in your place and to do it and to not do what he would not do in your place. It is to conform completely to what you believe Jesus would do and be if he were in your place. Now 0:09:47 - 0:10:09 , your understanding of Jesus is going to increase through time and your accuracy of your model of what he would and wouldn't do in your place that's also going to improve over time, we'll get much more into this later. But this happens through faith. So obey all you know now and he will teach you more 0:10:08 - 0:10:34 as you go to the end. Priests and teachers preach repentance and remission of sins. So, remissions of sins. How's that connected to repentance? While Jesus said that remission of sins comes through forsaking your sins and following him with full purpose of heart. And this isn't the point of the video 0:10:33 - 0:10:58 . I don't want to quote all the scriptures on that, but the book of Mormon is full of them. So we're just focusing on Mormon and what his charge was and how he was carrying it out. So because of this calling he had, so that's what these people were meant to do. In other words, to show people more of 0:10:58 - 0:11:24 how Jesus is and then to persuade them to bend their life to align with what they were showing them about Jesus. That is the calling of a priest and a teacher. So verse four, after this manner, did they ordain priests and teachers according to the gifts and callings of God unto men? And they ordained 0:11:24 - 0:11:48 them by the power of the holy ghost which was in them. Let's take this apart. Let me ask you, how did they choose these people? We already touched on this. They prayed unto the Father in the name of Christ. What were they praying about? Well, um they ordained these people according to the gifts and callings 0:11:47 - 0:12:11 of God unto men who are the men. There's, there's two men involved here, there's a person ordaining and a person being ordained. And the answer is they both had gifts and callings of God. What was the gift in calling of the person ordaining? It was to know through discernment, who to pick and how did 0:12:11 - 0:12:41 they pick them? It said in the name of Jesus Christ. Well, what their task was was to find the person who was more like Jesus than the people around him. Because the role of the priest or the teacher is to, to minister to the people around them. And they knew that because they themselves had received 0:12:40 - 0:13:12 the gifts and callings of God unto men. And they were more like Jesus than the person they were ordaining and they ordained them by the power of the Holy Ghost which was in them in who again, in both men in the ordain. Because it is by the Holy Ghost that you learn about and become like Jesus and in 0:13:12 - 0:13:45 the person receiving ordination because they had already learned quite a bit about Jesus. I should say a differentiating quantity about Jesus and become like that through the power of the Holy Ghost. So this was not a case of a top down elders of the church, choosing people based on something other than 0:13:45 - 0:14:20 what they already were in order to pass to others. Some thing that was disconnected from start to finish from God. There was no separation from who and how Jesus is from, start to finish. It was a flow from the Lord himself, of whom these disciples knew and who they had modeled their lives after and 0:14:20 - 0:14:48 were continuing in that all the way down to the people that would receive a more clear demonstration of how Jesus was through the teachers and priests ordained to teach them to preach repentance and remission of sins. So that is what Mormon was doing here. And that's a good start to this. We probably 0:14:47 - 0:15:08 won't dive as deeply into any of the other verses, but maybe we will, but I don't want to give the impression that this is going to be a phd dissertation or anything. So, in the next video, we're going to talk about good and evil. So we've gone from why Mormon is saying this to what he says. So his task 0:15:07 - 0:15:17 is to show us more of Jesus than we see right now. He does an excellent job. So I hope you join us for the next one.