0:00:00 - 0:00:30 Understanding differences in the pace of gospel progression. I want to start this with the prophecy. I promise you that in our generation, you are going to see many people radically rise in progress in the knowledge of and from and power from God. You're going to see many people rise rapidly and radically 0:00:29 - 0:00:59 out of nowhere with great power and knowledge from God. So how great it's going to exceed anything? You know, and people alive today are going to live to see this. Here's a question that stimulated this response. Why do you think Alma the younger could go from quote, murdering the souls of men to standing 0:00:59 - 0:01:21 in the presence of God in three days while many very good people can go their entire lives earnestly seeking God and never have anything close to an experience like that. So we're gonna do a semi deep dive on that. But initially, I'll just say because they're not good people and they're not earnestly 0:01:20 - 0:01:45 seeking God, but there are other answers too, but we'll start there, we'll uh get deeper with that. Um Why is pace so often surprising? Why is it that when one of these Elma characters shows up all of a sudden, it's this vastly different experience than so many other people. The reason is the factors 0:01:45 - 0:02:08 that determine it are invisible to cardinal eyes. So, if you could see more or more correctly, you would see it playing his day. It would be like, uh, your expectations when you throw a tennis ball against the wall, it's, uh, it's very obvious. Ok. So back to this prophecy, um, you know, if we're gonna 0:02:08 - 0:02:31 see this dramatic change, you might be asking yourself where are these people? I will tell you right now, they are not in your religious circles. They are not yet activated. So, what do I mean by this? I'd like to spend way more time on this, but it's not the time if you go and you reread the savior's 0:02:31 - 0:02:54 parable of the 99 and one. So the parable of the lost sheep, this is vastly misinterpreted by folks. Now, the good news about Parables is, it's like, it's like a tool. If you have a hammer, you know, if you get a, give a hammer to a little kid, he or she is gonna go outside and start busting up rocks 0:02:54 - 0:03:13 with it, especially the heat. Um, and they might even chase their brother with it, especially the, he's, but that doesn't mean that that's the best use of it and that's the way it goes with the Parables. They have many useful applications. But, uh, they have one best application, of course, that's situational 0:03:12 - 0:03:34 but uh abstracting out to the general, um there is an optimal interpretation of parables. And so what is it for the 99? And the one, the one is who Jesus came for? Not the 99? And why? And, and I wish I had time to lay this out from the scriptures, but, you know, take it for what it's worth to you right 0:03:34 - 0:03:58 now. It's because the 99 are already satisfied with what they have and what do they have far worse than what the one require. So the one and this is a plural uh those folks, the lost sheep, they are not satisfied with the drivel that is offered by religion today. They are looking for the real stuff and 0:03:58 - 0:04:24 they will wait until they find it and by waiting, you know, they're not actively waiting, but uh they're not going to respond to anything less. So how are they going to be activated? There's two pieces to this. One is information and one is fire. So what do I mean by fire? I mean, affliction. Uh I mean 0:04:23 - 0:04:44 , the situations that will reveal the value of the information. So there's information and there's the revelation of its value. So how does this work? Well, I will explain it to you the way the Lord first explained it to me. He showed me a forest and it was a pine forest that common to the area I live 0:04:44 - 0:05:13 in And uh he said, he said in this forest, there are many seeds that will not grow until they pass through the fire. And uh he went on to explain what I'm explaining to you that uh this information, it's a, it's a fertilizing agent. And then those seeds have to go through the fire. Once they're created 0:05:12 - 0:05:35 , they have to go through the fire before they sprout and grow. And relative to this presentation, the important thing to know is that they are going to grow very fast. In fact, it'll be so fast that it may seem to be instantaneous. And uh you can read all about this in Isaiah among other places. So 0:05:35 - 0:00:00 , here's another analogy. I don't know if you, I've ever hatched chicken eggs, but a chicken egg can be dormant even though it's fertilized if it's a, if it's not at a, a hot enough temperature and I should know, but I can't remember exactly what the temperature needs to be. I think it's 90 degrees. 0:00:00 - 0:06:14 So if it stays below a certain threshold, like if it's just at room temperature, the, the chicken inside that egg, even though it's fertilized, it's not going to grow. And it might be relevant to the analogy that if it doesn't get in an incubator or under a hen, um quickly enough, it will rot and just 0:06:13 - 0:06:39 go bad. But uh anyway, it won't grow until it's in the right condition. And it so happens that the right amount of heat is what causes that to grow? All right. So let's get back to a more tight treatment of the question at hand. What exactly does determine the pace of gospel progress? Well, here's a 0:06:39 - 0:07:07 list. So you've got pre mortal development, sincerity, effort, obedience, trust in God and work by others on your behalf. And the accuracy and content of information falls under that heading because all information comes from God originally and it flows out through His kingdom. So even if you sort of 0:07:06 - 0:07:29 , you know, if you stare at a tree and then come out with this profound idea about life or maybe just trees um that still came from God, it came from God because he created everything that led to that tree being there. And then also he is the source of the understanding in your mind. So uh most often 0:07:29 - 0:07:53 though this is going to involve intermediaries who say things to you like I am right now. So why is this so hard to see? Well, pre mortal development is hidden, it leaves clues, but even those clues are not obvious, you have to be told what to look for or you have to experience it and then you know what 0:07:53 - 0:08:20 to look for because you've already experienced it, right? So um there's also a group of these qualities that absolutely don't look like what people think they look like. At least at first they can come to understand them more accurately and sincerity, effort, obedience and trust in God all fall under 0:08:19 - 0:08:43 that category. And to give you the most radical example I can. That's uh sure to offend people, at least someone, some other people are gonna be like, yeah, that's cool sincerity. It's the gateway of the spirit, it is powerful. So when we talk about holiness and I'm just gonna sidetrack for a moment 0:08:42 - 0:09:13 . Um usually people describe some specific situation but sincerity is a quality that can apply to anything, isn't it? And so the question is, what is the relative importance of sincerity versus some specific situation in terms of holiness turns out sincerity is really important. It's really important 0:09:12 - 0:09:39 . It's so important that if you're doing some specific thing that's regarded as holy and you do not have sincerity, it is closer to worthless to God than it is to uh having any worth at all to him. And it is closer to worthless to God than something that no one would regard as holy would be if it were 0:09:38 - 0:10:03 done sincerely. And I didn't explain that well, but hopefully it came out, ok. What I'm saying is, if you do anything with full purpose of heart in total sincerity, the odds are very high that it will be holier than doing anything else without sincerity. That is a law of heaven. And it's a metaphysical 0:10:02 - 0:10:28 property of our reality, it's inescapable. And this is why one reason, so God doesn't do things for just one reason. Um, usually, uh, at least the examples are kind of hard to find, uh, at least, but one reason that he railed so strongly Jesus did during his ministry against hypocrisy is that hypocrisy 0:10:28 - 0:10:47 is the antithesis of sincerity, right? Um, not only do you lack sincerity but you've gone full board the other side of pretending that you're extremely sincere when you're not. Right? Because you can't be less sincere than doing the opposite thing while claiming the opposite thing strongly, you know 0:10:47 - 0:11:11 , and fighting other people uh over things that you yourself do. So it's a really big deal and there are reasons for this, but we'll just leave it at, it's the gateway to the spirit and if you block that, what do you have? Really? Right. So this is why like you could listen to a song or go to like a 0:11:11 - 0:11:39 rock concert or something that no quote unquote holy man would ever advocate and you know, that holy people will turn up their noses at and if you have magic goggles that showed you what real holiness was, it would, it would be much higher than you would find in almost any church. Why? Because no one 0:11:38 - 0:12:02 believes the garbage they say from the pulpit and even if they believe it, they don't live it. So you could say like they don't actually believe it, right? They might profess it, but they don't live it. Meanwhile, if you go to a musical performance and maybe we can dial down the, the specifics so that 0:12:01 - 0:12:24 you're not, so it's not so hard to believe what I'm saying. If you go to a musical performance or even like a sports performance and that person is putting their heart and soul into what they're doing. And I'm saying, like, soul, even if you look at that and say, um, this isn't how I would live my life 0:12:24 - 0:12:53 or even, hey, maybe there's things they could do with theirs that are more beneficial from an objective standpoint or in the case of music, like this isn't my thing or um these lyrics even aren't my thing. And I disagree with the content of the lyrics. If you, depending on your tuning, you will perceive 0:12:52 - 0:00:00 the spirit of God in greater quantity in that seemingly unholy environment, then you will like in a, in most churches. This is one reason why, uh while I absolutely love some spiritual music, it's like 1% of what's out there because so much of it is insincere and it's very, very, very obvious to me. 0:00:00 - 0:13:44 And unfortunately, I think I've passed this on to my kids, so I've ruined them in this regard too, but they share uh something of my detection in music. And so there's, there's a big overlap in the things we enjoy, which is cool because that means they listen to old school stuff so we can, we can be 0:13:44 - 0:14:05 friends. Um All right. Uh Yeah, but going down the list, we could go down the list with all these things. I'll talk about effort in a second here. If I recall what the next slides are. Um obedience. I just, uh I was writing, uh which I'm doing a terrible job at today because I just keep getting this 0:14:05 - 0:14:31 flood of ideas about videos to make. Usually I just divert those to a file and keep moving on, but this one seemed like the right. So I strongly felt this was the right time to make this one. Um So uh I was just rereading the uh story from the gospels where the rich man comes to Jesus. And he says, good 0:14:31 - 0:14:52 master, what should I do to obtain eternal life? And his idea of obedience was pretty general to the population. And yet Jesus crushed it and he showed in just a quick interaction that he was very far from the mark as far as what real obedience is and, and he structurally dismantled the man's idea of 0:14:52 - 0:15:17 obedience. And uh it's, it's not what we think it is. And, and that's not a secret. I'll tell you what it is. It's a very deep internal thing, it's not just surface. And you know, Jesus, he criticized the Pharisees because he said, I can, I can clearly see how you guys really are just by how you react 0:15:17 - 0:15:41 to me because I know I'm from God and I can see how you're reacting to me. And so I know how you feel about the father because I know how you feel about me. And um he, he spent a lot of time trying to help people see their internal state and get their heads out of the clouds, maybe into the clouds out 0:15:41 - 0:16:00 from somewhere else. Uh to see how they really were because you know, the easiest way to see this with someone is give them the next increment of truth that they don't have, which of course you have to possess it first. But if you give someone the very next increment of truth, all of a sudden these whatever 0:15:59 - 0:16:20 the perception is of their righteousness, you see what really is and depending on your experience, maybe you, you haven't experience what I'm saying, but it would shock you and it does for like the 1st 1000 times it happens. But after that, you learn that almost everyone is a hypocrite and they don't 0:16:20 - 0:16:43 actually going back to the rich man. Uh Jesus said none is good except God and reading that you'd say like, why do you say that? Isn't he God? Maybe he's just talking about the father. That's a common interpretation. Well, was the man recognizing Jesus as God or was he just recognizing him as a good 0:16:43 - 0:17:07 master? So we know because we know his reaction. So if he said all good comes from God and the any good I can extract out of this man standing before me because he didn't know it was, you know, the savior, any good I can extract from this good teacher. I have to treat that good as if it's from God himself 0:17:07 - 0:17:27 . You know, if there's other stuff here, fine, I don't have to do that with this. But um if there's good here that I acknowledge is good. So he was asking Jesus what more he had to do to obtain eternal life. If you believe that some person knows the answer to that question, that's a conversation. You 0:17:27 - 0:17:48 have to take pretty dang seriously and, and to not settle in your mind beforehand, that what they say is exactly what you're gonna do. Why would you even have that conversation? Now, you might say, why would you ever have that conversation with a person in the first place? Let's sidestep that and just 0:17:48 - 0:18:14 talk about prayer. So how often have you gone to the Lord in prayer and said, um I'm doing the best I know to do. Why hasn't XYZ happened yet? So maybe you haven't done that, but lots of people do this and most of them do this without first establishing in their minds that whatever the Lord tells them 0:18:13 - 0:18:35 is what they're gonna do. And like you really have to wrap your head around that because there's a reason he hasn't already told you, this is one reason why he leaned so heavily on messengers because he can't literally transmit this information through the holy ghost because he already knows you're not 0:18:35 - 0:18:59 open to it. So he has to get someone to come to you. Uh, typically who's capable of paying a price for the obstinance that you're going to display. And that usually means it's got to be a mortal minister. And so a mortal minister can pay that price. But I kinda don't wanna get into all that right now 0:18:58 - 0:19:16 . But I'm just saying obedience doesn't look like what you think it looks like. And then trusting God is another one. And I'll get into examples of this. I don't want to drone on too long. But, but then there's this group of stuff we take lightly and that's the work by others on our behalf. When's the 0:19:16 - 0:00:00 last time you thank God for all the people that died so that you could have a Bible because it's, it's a long list and that was what they gave their lives for. That was their thing that they said this is what I'm gonna do even if I get killed for doing it. Um I have a book and it's pretty short and, 0:00:00 - 0:19:52 you know, I'm not necessarily recommending it, but it's called words to die for. And that's what it is. It's the story of all the people that died so that the Bible could exist. Um It's powerful, it's a powerful idea just to know that you don't need to know their stories. But it's nice to read about 0:19:51 - 0:20:17 it. If that's your thing. Um But to know that that was the case, I mean, this is serious and we, we have all the, these resources just plopped into our laps and no one cares, no one cares. Right. So some people care. But, but it, it's amazing how little so many care. All right. So finally, let's talk 0:20:17 - 0:20:43 about Alma. So we're gonna go down the same list if you read Alma 13. Uh, we get an idea of Alma's pre mortal development. And also what I mean by that and I don't have to dive into this deeply. Now, you can go read it. I'll just ask you this question. How do you think he knew those things? And the answer 0:20:42 - 0:21:15 is he was told and how did that? Uh what and what did that consist? So, uh if you read in Abraham, Abraham was shown the noble and great ones and God said to Abraham you were one of these. So the choices that we make do not begin in this life. There's a long chain of choices we made before that. And 0:21:15 - 0:21:37 all of those choices have effects, but those effects are not discernible to those without eyes to see. And it takes one to know one. This is a phrase I'm going to repeat until you're absolutely sick of it and maybe you're already sick of it. So we'll go way farther then moving on sincerity. Oh, well 0:21:37 - 0:22:01 , let's stick with Elma. So he was a troublemaker. He was a troubled youth, right? So my question is who looked at him and said this young man is much more than meets the eye, right? So his dad prayed like a maniac for him. And we don't know if that's just because his dad was a faithful man or if he 0:22:01 - 0:22:19 was super worried about what other people would think since he was a church leader. Just kidding. I don't think that was his motivation. Um My point is that, that we, I don't know how to tell whether his dad invested so much effort and others in praying for him because they saw who he really was. But 0:22:19 - 0:22:49 I can tell you that God does give this ability to people in different situations and sometimes, uh, he turns it on and leaves it on with people that you can discern someone's pre mortal development. I'll, I'll just put it that way but it's the light they carry or could carry. Um, I'll move on sincerity 0:22:48 - 0:23:11 . Um So what evidence do we have? That Alma is off the charts on all of these things compared to normal people. So pre mortal development, I'm not sure the last time you sat down with a random person at, you know, the gas station and they're like, hey, well, that'd be weird anyway. But you know what 0:23:10 - 0:23:26 I mean? You meet a random person, new neighbor. You're like, oh, it's just food in the neighborhood. Yeah. Uh, let me tell you about the pre mortal decisions we made and how we all kind of started zero and any differences. And, you know, people are sanctified by these choices that they make again and 0:23:26 - 0:23:45 again and again in harder and harder situations and that, that probably has never happened. Right. Um And it's not just because that would be weird. Um, it's because people don't know these things and why don't they know these things because it doesn't apply to them. That's not to say that they didn't 0:23:44 - 0:24:10 experience development before they were born or make choices before they were born. Uh It's just to say that and I'll get into this a lot. Uh In a different presentation, the distribution of quality in humans is Pareto and um exceptional people are exceptional. They're not average, they're not common 0:24:09 - 0:24:42 . So that's why, all right, moving on. What evidence do we have of his exceptional sincerity? So when he saw an angel, he immediately pivoted 100 and 80 degrees. He had invested serious social capital in developing this identity of being anti the church that his dad had founded. He, he was all in on 0:24:42 - 0:25:05 that. Now, I wanna tell you a little little nugget here. I wanna share a little nugget with you. Oh man, this could go deep. We could talk about snakes, man. It goes deep. I'm just gonna keep it as brief as I can and maybe I'll get something done today, but this is great. Though, I love this. So it's 0:25:05 - 0:25:42 ok even if I don't get other things done. Um, so if you swing big, you are going to hit home runs and if all you ever do is bunt, you will never ever hit a home run. Uh, we could probably do a little, a few more sports analogies. Big moves create big answers, small moves, create small answers and small 0:25:42 - 0:26:14 answers are hard to see. Right. So, um yeah, we could, we could do analogies on this all day long. It's very important to know that the way of life is to go all in. Now, the direction that you travel in is absolutely going to fluctuate because God's gonna teach you things which incidentally you will 0:26:13 - 0:26:45 learn much faster and make much broader jumps forward because you're all in. But the magnitude of that vector, the speed at which you travel, that knob is the same knob that says, how much are you in? I hope you heard that because it's important. If you want to develop faster with the Lord, you have 0:26:45 - 0:27:14 to crank that knob all the way. Take it to 11. So this is a an attribute of hidden holiness. OK? I could give you real life examples of people who aren't spiritual at all who do this like Elon Musk. If you wanna know what noble and great ones are like and you want to do it in a context free of all spiritual 0:27:13 - 0:27:36 uh presumed Presumptions. Right. So sometimes when you want to learn something and you have preconceptions about it, the best thing you can do to free yourself from the bias is go to an analogous thing. So an example of this is when I believe it was Samuel, I always confuse which ones were Samuel and 0:27:36 - 0:27:58 which ones were Nathan. Uh it must have been Nathan because Nathan came second and this is later on. So Nathan goes to David and he wants to help David see just how bad he messed up with Bathsheba, but he doesn't do it by saying, let me tell you about this. He says, oh, there was this poor shepherd and 0:27:58 - 0:28:17 he had this sheep and blah, blah, blah and David's furious and then he goes thou art the man and that's called transfer learning in machine learning. It's pretty neat. You can train a machine learning model on one set of data and then flip it over to another context and see how well it does. But with 0:28:17 - 0:28:38 this, what it does is it frees you from biases. It's one way to mitigate the influence of bias. So if you look at Elon Musk and I don't mean read the articles about people who are really mad about him, like watch little biographical videos on youtube about him and watch what he says about his life and 0:28:38 - 0:28:56 what happened at spacex before they were successful and all these other things. And I'm by no means saying you know, let's model our life after Elon Musk. Although for very many people that would be an improvement, believe it or not, this goes back to my comments about what holiness looks like and how 0:28:55 - 0:29:18 it's not what we think. Uh The dude is sincere. There's absolutely no question off the charts plugged in um and effort too. So um yeah, he, he chooses something to do and then he puts his whole soul into it. But seeing the more human aspects of that, um with him talking about his childhood and how he 0:29:18 - 0:29:39 felt growing up and you know how he's felt all along the way. It, it might teach him more about this than anything I could say for now. But anyway, um when you go all in, into something that's absolutely the first ingredient on the recipe of fast progress with God. But here's the problem like so many 0:29:39 - 0:29:59 good things. It's like it increases the overhead of needing to make the correct next decision. Or else you're gonna be worse off than if you had never done it. And maybe you can rewind that and listen to it again rather than have me saying it again because it's important to understand and I don't have 0:29:59 - 0:30:29 time right now to develop this further. But a huge pitfall for people who are all in is to not understand that while the magnitude of their vector will not and should not reduce, they should keep that knob all the way up the direction of travel. They absolutely should expect that to change and not just 0:30:28 - 0:30:50 once. So I kind of teased you with the idea of a snake, but I'll just go ahead and say my little snake idea very briefly. There are several types of locomotion, which is a nice fancy word for snakes. They move in different ways without getting into all these details. I just want to show you two. One 0:30:49 - 0:31:10 is when the snake moves straight ahead and the bottom of its stomach just ripples back and forth is the weirdest looking thing. But basically, it looks like that thing is just kind of hovering over the dirt because it's not winding. It's not, it's just moving straight ahead in this weird ripple thing 0:31:10 - 0:31:34 . It's almost like it's crowd surfing and um, it's really slow but they go straight ahead like that. And so it's really slow but they go straight ahead, but it's slow. And of course, this presupposes they're going in the right direction and this is how there's a certain flavor of person. They tend to 0:31:34 - 0:31:58 be very religious and I will say it, they tend to be female. They tend to be female because they're cautious, which is a great thing for females to be. They have every reason to be that, but they tend to move straight ahead and they don't change their path and they go really slow. There's another kind 0:31:57 - 0:32:21 of person who is like the typical snake that you think of that's winding back and forth like a sinusoidal signal, which is funny to use as an analogy because most people are like what they just sneeze. Um But you know, a wave um without going into too much details and trying to make too hard of a case 0:32:20 - 0:32:41 , I'll just throw out the phrase fiery flying serpents and there's a reason. Um but light travels, energy, light travels in waves, It doesn't travel in straight lines. So the funny thing is is that even though these snakes are quote unquote, making mistakes because they're not going straight, they're 0:32:41 - 0:33:04 going, they're basically going the, the, the worst possible way except for backwards. But then they turn and they're turning so frequently that it's basically all they do. And somehow in the weird physics that God designed, they move forward like a million miles an hour faster than the one going straight 0:33:03 - 0:33:21 forward. If a snake's coming at you straight forward, you say, like have a nice day, Mr Snake and you keep moving on because it's going in slow motion. If a snake's flying at you doing the, the normal snake thing, you're gonna get scared because this snake's about to bite you, right? Or, you know, whatever 0:33:21 - 0:33:41 , but it's scary normally for normal people. Um So then there's another kind of motion. I said, I'll only give you two, but I want to tell you the counterfeit of this is the side winder because it kind of looks like it's doing the wave thing, but it's not moving forward, it's moving on its side, but 0:33:41 - 0:34:01 it turns its head forward. So it's just lying the whole way. It's just a big pile of lies and you could probably guess where I'd go with that. So my point is we think straight line is the fastest way to go. And of course, that's what you should try. You should always move in a straight line to what you 0:34:01 - 0:34:25 towards what you think is best right now. That is not what I'm suggesting otherwise about. But you have to go, you have to fling yourself in that direction, knowing full well that God is going to correct your path and it's not infrequent that he does so so dramatically that you end up going the opposite 0:34:25 - 0:34:52 way. And this is not my opinion. There's this thing called the scriptures, go read it. No, not to be too snarky, but like, look at the man born blind, why does Jesus take him all the way outside of Jerusalem to a pool that whose name is one cent to heal his blind eyes so that he can see. And then he 0:34:52 - 0:00:00 goes back into Jerusalem and gets his chops busted by the religious leaders who tell him no, this is actually a bad man and a bad thing that he is doing. Why? So why is the way narrow? And yet we think that there can be churches with millions of people in them that are doing the right thing. Anyway, 0:00:00 - 0:35:44 that was really long for one bullet point. But hopefully that so Alma, sorry, let's actually talk about what we're meant to. Um, he had tremendous momentum in this direction. And yet the second he had this experience, he turned completely in the other direction and he never looked back, the rest of his 0:35:44 - 0:36:12 life was absolutely consecrated. And so I want you to think about any person, you know, that's hard charging, right? They're in it. The knobs on 11, what would it take to persuade that person to change directions completely? 180 degrees. There are people hidden holiness. There are people who have done 0:36:12 - 0:36:38 this multiple times in their lives already and they're not even old yet. And there are people who are old who are doing this, which to me is amazing. I love it. And you'll notice that Alma and his buddies, one of the things they did immediately is they turned around and started preaching in the synagogues 0:36:38 - 0:36:59 and to all the people that had listened to them before saying we were dead wrong about this. We were dead wrong and they got mocked for it by some, they didn't care. And then as also is almost always the case. So basically, if you imagine the, the slow snake going straight forward, you've got the wiggly 0:36:59 - 0:37:22 snake that hauls to the right of the slow snake and then they go away 180 to the left of the snow Slow Snake. And um, that happened with Alma and his buddies because then his buddies say, well, you know, we're not content with the good we can do here. We've done everything we can. And now we want to 0:37:22 - 0:37:42 go preach among the Lamanites. By the way, we're princes and we're set to inherit all this, but we don't care like you can have it. We're just gonna go probably get killed. But uh and probably like really suffer before that and that's what we're gonna spend our lives on. And they were mocked, openly 0:37:41 - 0:38:06 , mocked by people for doing this. So who do you know? That's like that, right? So these people who take a stand publicly on certain issues, do they then pivot and then are just as, or at least as public on their new position, even though they're ridiculed for changing because God forbid people learn 0:38:06 - 0:38:25 something, right? Like we want all of our messengers to be perfect from day one or else we're not interested and we don't realize that that means that all they can give us is what they knew on day one, which probably isn't that great. And uh if you want to know why we don't have any stories about Jesus 0:38:24 - 0:00:00 before his 30th birthday, except the, the one in the temple, I just told you the answer anyway, who do you know who's like this? So I was touched recently, Tim Robbins took, he's in a movie or two that I really like, he took a public stand that was sort of predictable uh on the whole COVID reaction. 0:00:00 - 0:39:10 And I have massive respect for him because he's been on a public campaign taking the opposite position. And I did listen to one of his visits on a show and he stated why he came to that conclusion. And it was from his experiences, he had his eyes open and he said, hey, what I'm experiencing is totally 0:39:10 - 0:39:31 different from what I've been told. Maybe, and it was really touching to me is his first reaction to that was I want to talk to these people myself who have a different position than I do. I'm gonna go outside and talk to them because there was a protest right outside the place he was staying. Um And 0:39:31 - 0:39:51 so he went and he talked to them face to face and he said not to argue with them. I wanted to understand where they were coming from. And I was like, I knew I liked this guy for a reason, right? And, uh that's amazing. Who do you know who does that seriously? And so what's been great about these end 0:39:51 - 0:40:10 times events that we have begun is that they're providing many opportunities for people to get slapped upside the head with irrefutable evidence that they're wrong about something, or at least that they're missing something that they didn't know they were missing And so it's fascinating to find, to watch 0:40:10 - 0:40:31 people react. It's also really sad. So fascinating is not the most honest word, but sometimes it's great because it's amazing what people do when they make the right choices. Ok. What evidence do we have? That Alma was exceptional when it comes to effort. Well, he talks about how he could not rest his 0:40:31 - 0:40:49 entire life for the rest of his life. He never sat around saying, yeah, I've done enough. He's, it's always like, hey, um you know, I'm the chief judge. It's the highest political position in the land and apparently you do pretty well financially. Uh And he said, no, not good enough. I'm gonna resign 0:40:49 - 0:41:15 and I'm just gonna go serve missions. And uh along the way, he's being beaten, spit upon starving, almost dying. So there's another uh verse about Ether how from sun up to sun down, he testified about the Lord. He, he tried, we can take this in broader terms. He was so oriented to the improvement of 0:41:15 - 0:41:37 mankind that he never stopped trying from sun up to sundown. There was no time off. If he was awake, he was working. And so if you wonder why people don't have the experiences Alma did in the time frame, Alma, did I ask you, you know, are they like that? Who do you know that's like that? Do they have 0:41:37 - 0:41:59 those experiences obedience? I already mentioned the, the afflictions he went through in uh obey, obeying God's commandments, trusting God a vignette I selected for this was when he, he and Elma are sitting there, I believe naked, all tied up, starving half to death. And then they bring in everyone who 0:41:58 - 0:42:20 had listened to their preaching and burn them alive. And Alma turns to him and says, can't we do something, didn't God give us power? And Al Alma says, uh no, we're not gonna do anything. And basically, he says, because I don't think God wants us to. And so that's real trust in God, isn't it? Um And 0:42:20 - 0:42:39 of course, it'd be kind of lame to cite a willingness to watch other people suffer as an example of trust in God unless we had examples of even greater suffering in his own life as he trusted in God and knowing something about how it must have actually been worse for him and am aye to watch that than 0:42:38 - 0:43:02 it was for those people to suffer it. And that sort of thing can happen. I don't know if that seems like it's a reasonable thing to say to you or not, but it, it, it can happen. And then finally, um how did Alma respond to the work by others on his behalf? So his dad and his community had spent his entire 0:43:02 - 0:43:28 youth trying to teach him these things. Now, he wasn't really listening or at least agreeing, but he still experienced all of that. He had a tremendous backlog of information that was in his mind that he could call upon after he changed his mind. And an angel had visited him. And I should say, just for 0:43:28 - 0:43:46 the benefit of anyone who's like, but an angel just because you can say, well, of course, he turned around when an angel came, we have examples of angels coming to people and they don't listen, right? They don't even remember that an angel came. Nephi says to his brothers, don't you remember that an 0:43:46 - 0:44:08 angel came to you and said these things, I'm not making it up. They couldn't even acknowledge that that really happens with people. OK. Hopefully that answers your question. Um I, this came up with a Q and A coming up and uh this is too much to handle in a live stream and I thought that these specifics 0:00:00 - 0:00:30 Understanding differences in the pace of gospel progression. I want to start this with the prophecy. I promise you that in our generation, you are going to see many people radically rise in progress in the knowledge of and from and power from God. You're going to see many people rise rapidly and radically 0:00:29 - 0:00:59 out of nowhere with great power and knowledge from God. So how great it's going to exceed anything? You know, and people alive today are going to live to see this. Here's a question that stimulated this response. Why do you think Alma the younger could go from quote, murdering the souls of men to standing 0:00:59 - 0:01:21 in the presence of God in three days while many very good people can go their entire lives earnestly seeking God and never have anything close to an experience like that. So we're gonna do a semi deep dive on that. But initially, I'll just say because they're not good people and they're not earnestly 0:01:20 - 0:01:45 seeking God, but there are other answers too, but we'll start there, we'll uh get deeper with that. Um Why is pace so often surprising? Why is it that when one of these Elma characters shows up all of a sudden, it's this vastly different experience than so many other people. The reason is the factors 0:01:45 - 0:02:08 that determine it are invisible to cardinal eyes. So, if you could see more or more correctly, you would see it playing his day. It would be like, uh, your expectations when you throw a tennis ball against the wall, it's, uh, it's very obvious. Ok. So back to this prophecy, um, you know, if we're gonna 0:02:08 - 0:02:31 see this dramatic change, you might be asking yourself where are these people? I will tell you right now, they are not in your religious circles. They are not yet activated. So, what do I mean by this? I'd like to spend way more time on this, but it's not the time if you go and you reread the savior's 0:02:31 - 0:02:54 parable of the 99 and one. So the parable of the lost sheep, this is vastly misinterpreted by folks. Now, the good news about Parables is, it's like, it's like a tool. If you have a hammer, you know, if you get a, give a hammer to a little kid, he or she is gonna go outside and start busting up rocks 0:02:54 - 0:03:13 with it, especially the heat. Um, and they might even chase their brother with it, especially the, he's, but that doesn't mean that that's the best use of it and that's the way it goes with the Parables. They have many useful applications. But, uh, they have one best application, of course, that's situational 0:03:12 - 0:03:34 but uh abstracting out to the general, um there is an optimal interpretation of parables. And so what is it for the 99? And the one, the one is who Jesus came for? Not the 99? And why? And, and I wish I had time to lay this out from the scriptures, but, you know, take it for what it's worth to you right 0:03:34 - 0:03:58 now. It's because the 99 are already satisfied with what they have and what do they have far worse than what the one require. So the one and this is a plural uh those folks, the lost sheep, they are not satisfied with the drivel that is offered by religion today. They are looking for the real stuff and 0:03:58 - 0:04:24 they will wait until they find it and by waiting, you know, they're not actively waiting, but uh they're not going to respond to anything less. So how are they going to be activated? There's two pieces to this. One is information and one is fire. So what do I mean by fire? I mean, affliction. Uh I mean 0:04:23 - 0:04:44 , the situations that will reveal the value of the information. So there's information and there's the revelation of its value. So how does this work? Well, I will explain it to you the way the Lord first explained it to me. He showed me a forest and it was a pine forest that common to the area I live 0:04:44 - 0:05:13 in And uh he said, he said in this forest, there are many seeds that will not grow until they pass through the fire. And uh he went on to explain what I'm explaining to you that uh this information, it's a, it's a fertilizing agent. And then those seeds have to go through the fire. Once they're created 0:05:12 - 0:05:35 , they have to go through the fire before they sprout and grow. And relative to this presentation, the important thing to know is that they are going to grow very fast. In fact, it'll be so fast that it may seem to be instantaneous. And uh you can read all about this in Isaiah among other places. So 0:05:35 - 0:00:00 , here's another analogy. I don't know if you, I've ever hatched chicken eggs, but a chicken egg can be dormant even though it's fertilized if it's a, if it's not at a, a hot enough temperature and I should know, but I can't remember exactly what the temperature needs to be. I think it's 90 degrees. 0:00:00 - 0:06:14 So if it stays below a certain threshold, like if it's just at room temperature, the, the chicken inside that egg, even though it's fertilized, it's not going to grow. And it might be relevant to the analogy that if it doesn't get in an incubator or under a hen, um quickly enough, it will rot and just 0:06:13 - 0:06:39 go bad. But uh anyway, it won't grow until it's in the right condition. And it so happens that the right amount of heat is what causes that to grow? All right. So let's get back to a more tight treatment of the question at hand. What exactly does determine the pace of gospel progress? Well, here's a 0:06:39 - 0:07:07 list. So you've got pre mortal development, sincerity, effort, obedience, trust in God and work by others on your behalf. And the accuracy and content of information falls under that heading because all information comes from God originally and it flows out through His kingdom. So even if you sort of 0:07:06 - 0:07:29 , you know, if you stare at a tree and then come out with this profound idea about life or maybe just trees um that still came from God, it came from God because he created everything that led to that tree being there. And then also he is the source of the understanding in your mind. So uh most often 0:07:29 - 0:07:53 though this is going to involve intermediaries who say things to you like I am right now. So why is this so hard to see? Well, pre mortal development is hidden, it leaves clues, but even those clues are not obvious, you have to be told what to look for or you have to experience it and then you know what 0:07:53 - 0:08:20 to look for because you've already experienced it, right? So um there's also a group of these qualities that absolutely don't look like what people think they look like. At least at first they can come to understand them more accurately and sincerity, effort, obedience and trust in God all fall under 0:08:19 - 0:08:43 that category. And to give you the most radical example I can. That's uh sure to offend people, at least someone, some other people are gonna be like, yeah, that's cool sincerity. It's the gateway of the spirit, it is powerful. So when we talk about holiness and I'm just gonna sidetrack for a moment 0:08:42 - 0:09:13 . Um usually people describe some specific situation but sincerity is a quality that can apply to anything, isn't it? And so the question is, what is the relative importance of sincerity versus some specific situation in terms of holiness turns out sincerity is really important. It's really important 0:09:12 - 0:09:39 . It's so important that if you're doing some specific thing that's regarded as holy and you do not have sincerity, it is closer to worthless to God than it is to uh having any worth at all to him. And it is closer to worthless to God than something that no one would regard as holy would be if it were 0:09:38 - 0:10:03 done sincerely. And I didn't explain that well, but hopefully it came out, ok. What I'm saying is, if you do anything with full purpose of heart in total sincerity, the odds are very high that it will be holier than doing anything else without sincerity. That is a law of heaven. And it's a metaphysical 0:10:02 - 0:10:28 property of our reality, it's inescapable. And this is why one reason, so God doesn't do things for just one reason. Um, usually, uh, at least the examples are kind of hard to find, uh, at least, but one reason that he railed so strongly Jesus did during his ministry against hypocrisy is that hypocrisy 0:10:28 - 0:10:47 is the antithesis of sincerity, right? Um, not only do you lack sincerity but you've gone full board the other side of pretending that you're extremely sincere when you're not. Right? Because you can't be less sincere than doing the opposite thing while claiming the opposite thing strongly, you know 0:10:47 - 0:11:11 , and fighting other people uh over things that you yourself do. So it's a really big deal and there are reasons for this, but we'll just leave it at, it's the gateway to the spirit and if you block that, what do you have? Really? Right. So this is why like you could listen to a song or go to like a 0:11:11 - 0:11:39 rock concert or something that no quote unquote holy man would ever advocate and you know, that holy people will turn up their noses at and if you have magic goggles that showed you what real holiness was, it would, it would be much higher than you would find in almost any church. Why? Because no one 0:11:38 - 0:12:02 believes the garbage they say from the pulpit and even if they believe it, they don't live it. So you could say like they don't actually believe it, right? They might profess it, but they don't live it. Meanwhile, if you go to a musical performance and maybe we can dial down the, the specifics so that 0:12:01 - 0:12:24 you're not, so it's not so hard to believe what I'm saying. If you go to a musical performance or even like a sports performance and that person is putting their heart and soul into what they're doing. And I'm saying, like, soul, even if you look at that and say, um, this isn't how I would live my life 0:12:24 - 0:12:53 or even, hey, maybe there's things they could do with theirs that are more beneficial from an objective standpoint or in the case of music, like this isn't my thing or um these lyrics even aren't my thing. And I disagree with the content of the lyrics. If you, depending on your tuning, you will perceive 0:12:52 - 0:00:00 the spirit of God in greater quantity in that seemingly unholy environment, then you will like in a, in most churches. This is one reason why, uh while I absolutely love some spiritual music, it's like 1% of what's out there because so much of it is insincere and it's very, very, very obvious to me. 0:00:00 - 0:13:44 And unfortunately, I think I've passed this on to my kids, so I've ruined them in this regard too, but they share uh something of my detection in music. And so there's, there's a big overlap in the things we enjoy, which is cool because that means they listen to old school stuff so we can, we can be 0:13:44 - 0:14:05 friends. Um All right. Uh Yeah, but going down the list, we could go down the list with all these things. I'll talk about effort in a second here. If I recall what the next slides are. Um obedience. I just, uh I was writing, uh which I'm doing a terrible job at today because I just keep getting this 0:14:05 - 0:14:31 flood of ideas about videos to make. Usually I just divert those to a file and keep moving on, but this one seemed like the right. So I strongly felt this was the right time to make this one. Um So uh I was just rereading the uh story from the gospels where the rich man comes to Jesus. And he says, good 0:14:31 - 0:14:52 master, what should I do to obtain eternal life? And his idea of obedience was pretty general to the population. And yet Jesus crushed it and he showed in just a quick interaction that he was very far from the mark as far as what real obedience is and, and he structurally dismantled the man's idea of 0:14:52 - 0:15:17 obedience. And uh it's, it's not what we think it is. And, and that's not a secret. I'll tell you what it is. It's a very deep internal thing, it's not just surface. And you know, Jesus, he criticized the Pharisees because he said, I can, I can clearly see how you guys really are just by how you react 0:15:17 - 0:15:41 to me because I know I'm from God and I can see how you're reacting to me. And so I know how you feel about the father because I know how you feel about me. And um he, he spent a lot of time trying to help people see their internal state and get their heads out of the clouds, maybe into the clouds out 0:15:41 - 0:16:00 from somewhere else. Uh to see how they really were because you know, the easiest way to see this with someone is give them the next increment of truth that they don't have, which of course you have to possess it first. But if you give someone the very next increment of truth, all of a sudden these whatever 0:15:59 - 0:16:20 the perception is of their righteousness, you see what really is and depending on your experience, maybe you, you haven't experience what I'm saying, but it would shock you and it does for like the 1st 1000 times it happens. But after that, you learn that almost everyone is a hypocrite and they don't 0:16:20 - 0:16:43 actually going back to the rich man. Uh Jesus said none is good except God and reading that you'd say like, why do you say that? Isn't he God? Maybe he's just talking about the father. That's a common interpretation. Well, was the man recognizing Jesus as God or was he just recognizing him as a good 0:16:43 - 0:17:07 master? So we know because we know his reaction. So if he said all good comes from God and the any good I can extract out of this man standing before me because he didn't know it was, you know, the savior, any good I can extract from this good teacher. I have to treat that good as if it's from God himself 0:17:07 - 0:17:27 . You know, if there's other stuff here, fine, I don't have to do that with this. But um if there's good here that I acknowledge is good. So he was asking Jesus what more he had to do to obtain eternal life. If you believe that some person knows the answer to that question, that's a conversation. You 0:17:27 - 0:17:48 have to take pretty dang seriously and, and to not settle in your mind beforehand, that what they say is exactly what you're gonna do. Why would you even have that conversation? Now, you might say, why would you ever have that conversation with a person in the first place? Let's sidestep that and just 0:17:48 - 0:18:14 talk about prayer. So how often have you gone to the Lord in prayer and said, um I'm doing the best I know to do. Why hasn't XYZ happened yet? So maybe you haven't done that, but lots of people do this and most of them do this without first establishing in their minds that whatever the Lord tells them 0:18:13 - 0:18:35 is what they're gonna do. And like you really have to wrap your head around that because there's a reason he hasn't already told you, this is one reason why he leaned so heavily on messengers because he can't literally transmit this information through the holy ghost because he already knows you're not 0:18:35 - 0:18:59 open to it. So he has to get someone to come to you. Uh, typically who's capable of paying a price for the obstinance that you're going to display. And that usually means it's got to be a mortal minister. And so a mortal minister can pay that price. But I kinda don't wanna get into all that right now 0:18:58 - 0:19:16 . But I'm just saying obedience doesn't look like what you think it looks like. And then trusting God is another one. And I'll get into examples of this. I don't want to drone on too long. But, but then there's this group of stuff we take lightly and that's the work by others on our behalf. When's the 0:19:16 - 0:00:00 last time you thank God for all the people that died so that you could have a Bible because it's, it's a long list and that was what they gave their lives for. That was their thing that they said this is what I'm gonna do even if I get killed for doing it. Um I have a book and it's pretty short and, 0:00:00 - 0:19:52 you know, I'm not necessarily recommending it, but it's called words to die for. And that's what it is. It's the story of all the people that died so that the Bible could exist. Um It's powerful, it's a powerful idea just to know that you don't need to know their stories. But it's nice to read about 0:19:51 - 0:20:17 it. If that's your thing. Um But to know that that was the case, I mean, this is serious and we, we have all the, these resources just plopped into our laps and no one cares, no one cares. Right. So some people care. But, but it, it's amazing how little so many care. All right. So finally, let's talk 0:20:17 - 0:20:43 about Alma. So we're gonna go down the same list if you read Alma 13. Uh, we get an idea of Alma's pre mortal development. And also what I mean by that and I don't have to dive into this deeply. Now, you can go read it. I'll just ask you this question. How do you think he knew those things? And the answer 0:20:42 - 0:21:15 is he was told and how did that? Uh what and what did that consist? So, uh if you read in Abraham, Abraham was shown the noble and great ones and God said to Abraham you were one of these. So the choices that we make do not begin in this life. There's a long chain of choices we made before that. And 0:21:15 - 0:21:37 all of those choices have effects, but those effects are not discernible to those without eyes to see. And it takes one to know one. This is a phrase I'm going to repeat until you're absolutely sick of it and maybe you're already sick of it. So we'll go way farther then moving on sincerity. Oh, well 0:21:37 - 0:22:01 , let's stick with Elma. So he was a troublemaker. He was a troubled youth, right? So my question is who looked at him and said this young man is much more than meets the eye, right? So his dad prayed like a maniac for him. And we don't know if that's just because his dad was a faithful man or if he 0:22:01 - 0:22:19 was super worried about what other people would think since he was a church leader. Just kidding. I don't think that was his motivation. Um My point is that, that we, I don't know how to tell whether his dad invested so much effort and others in praying for him because they saw who he really was. But 0:22:19 - 0:22:49 I can tell you that God does give this ability to people in different situations and sometimes, uh, he turns it on and leaves it on with people that you can discern someone's pre mortal development. I'll, I'll just put it that way but it's the light they carry or could carry. Um, I'll move on sincerity 0:22:48 - 0:23:11 . Um So what evidence do we have? That Alma is off the charts on all of these things compared to normal people. So pre mortal development, I'm not sure the last time you sat down with a random person at, you know, the gas station and they're like, hey, well, that'd be weird anyway. But you know what 0:23:10 - 0:23:26 I mean? You meet a random person, new neighbor. You're like, oh, it's just food in the neighborhood. Yeah. Uh, let me tell you about the pre mortal decisions we made and how we all kind of started zero and any differences. And, you know, people are sanctified by these choices that they make again and 0:23:26 - 0:23:45 again and again in harder and harder situations and that, that probably has never happened. Right. Um And it's not just because that would be weird. Um, it's because people don't know these things and why don't they know these things because it doesn't apply to them. That's not to say that they didn't 0:23:44 - 0:24:10 experience development before they were born or make choices before they were born. Uh It's just to say that and I'll get into this a lot. Uh In a different presentation, the distribution of quality in humans is Pareto and um exceptional people are exceptional. They're not average, they're not common 0:24:09 - 0:24:42 . So that's why, all right, moving on. What evidence do we have of his exceptional sincerity? So when he saw an angel, he immediately pivoted 100 and 80 degrees. He had invested serious social capital in developing this identity of being anti the church that his dad had founded. He, he was all in on 0:24:42 - 0:25:05 that. Now, I wanna tell you a little little nugget here. I wanna share a little nugget with you. Oh man, this could go deep. We could talk about snakes, man. It goes deep. I'm just gonna keep it as brief as I can and maybe I'll get something done today, but this is great. Though, I love this. So it's 0:25:05 - 0:25:42 ok even if I don't get other things done. Um, so if you swing big, you are going to hit home runs and if all you ever do is bunt, you will never ever hit a home run. Uh, we could probably do a little, a few more sports analogies. Big moves create big answers, small moves, create small answers and small 0:25:42 - 0:26:14 answers are hard to see. Right. So, um yeah, we could, we could do analogies on this all day long. It's very important to know that the way of life is to go all in. Now, the direction that you travel in is absolutely going to fluctuate because God's gonna teach you things which incidentally you will 0:26:13 - 0:26:45 learn much faster and make much broader jumps forward because you're all in. But the magnitude of that vector, the speed at which you travel, that knob is the same knob that says, how much are you in? I hope you heard that because it's important. If you want to develop faster with the Lord, you have 0:26:45 - 0:27:14 to crank that knob all the way. Take it to 11. So this is a an attribute of hidden holiness. OK? I could give you real life examples of people who aren't spiritual at all who do this like Elon Musk. If you wanna know what noble and great ones are like and you want to do it in a context free of all spiritual 0:27:13 - 0:27:36 uh presumed Presumptions. Right. So sometimes when you want to learn something and you have preconceptions about it, the best thing you can do to free yourself from the bias is go to an analogous thing. So an example of this is when I believe it was Samuel, I always confuse which ones were Samuel and 0:27:36 - 0:27:58 which ones were Nathan. Uh it must have been Nathan because Nathan came second and this is later on. So Nathan goes to David and he wants to help David see just how bad he messed up with Bathsheba, but he doesn't do it by saying, let me tell you about this. He says, oh, there was this poor shepherd and 0:27:58 - 0:28:17 he had this sheep and blah, blah, blah and David's furious and then he goes thou art the man and that's called transfer learning in machine learning. It's pretty neat. You can train a machine learning model on one set of data and then flip it over to another context and see how well it does. But with 0:28:17 - 0:28:38 this, what it does is it frees you from biases. It's one way to mitigate the influence of bias. So if you look at Elon Musk and I don't mean read the articles about people who are really mad about him, like watch little biographical videos on youtube about him and watch what he says about his life and 0:28:38 - 0:28:56 what happened at spacex before they were successful and all these other things. And I'm by no means saying you know, let's model our life after Elon Musk. Although for very many people that would be an improvement, believe it or not, this goes back to my comments about what holiness looks like and how 0:28:55 - 0:29:18 it's not what we think. Uh The dude is sincere. There's absolutely no question off the charts plugged in um and effort too. So um yeah, he, he chooses something to do and then he puts his whole soul into it. But seeing the more human aspects of that, um with him talking about his childhood and how he 0:29:18 - 0:29:39 felt growing up and you know how he's felt all along the way. It, it might teach him more about this than anything I could say for now. But anyway, um when you go all in, into something that's absolutely the first ingredient on the recipe of fast progress with God. But here's the problem like so many 0:29:39 - 0:29:59 good things. It's like it increases the overhead of needing to make the correct next decision. Or else you're gonna be worse off than if you had never done it. And maybe you can rewind that and listen to it again rather than have me saying it again because it's important to understand and I don't have 0:29:59 - 0:30:29 time right now to develop this further. But a huge pitfall for people who are all in is to not understand that while the magnitude of their vector will not and should not reduce, they should keep that knob all the way up the direction of travel. They absolutely should expect that to change and not just 0:30:28 - 0:30:50 once. So I kind of teased you with the idea of a snake, but I'll just go ahead and say my little snake idea very briefly. There are several types of locomotion, which is a nice fancy word for snakes. They move in different ways without getting into all these details. I just want to show you two. One 0:30:49 - 0:31:10 is when the snake moves straight ahead and the bottom of its stomach just ripples back and forth is the weirdest looking thing. But basically, it looks like that thing is just kind of hovering over the dirt because it's not winding. It's not, it's just moving straight ahead in this weird ripple thing 0:31:10 - 0:31:34 . It's almost like it's crowd surfing and um, it's really slow but they go straight ahead like that. And so it's really slow but they go straight ahead, but it's slow. And of course, this presupposes they're going in the right direction and this is how there's a certain flavor of person. They tend to 0:31:34 - 0:31:58 be very religious and I will say it, they tend to be female. They tend to be female because they're cautious, which is a great thing for females to be. They have every reason to be that, but they tend to move straight ahead and they don't change their path and they go really slow. There's another kind 0:31:57 - 0:32:21 of person who is like the typical snake that you think of that's winding back and forth like a sinusoidal signal, which is funny to use as an analogy because most people are like what they just sneeze. Um But you know, a wave um without going into too much details and trying to make too hard of a case 0:32:20 - 0:32:41 , I'll just throw out the phrase fiery flying serpents and there's a reason. Um but light travels, energy, light travels in waves, It doesn't travel in straight lines. So the funny thing is is that even though these snakes are quote unquote, making mistakes because they're not going straight, they're 0:32:41 - 0:33:04 going, they're basically going the, the, the worst possible way except for backwards. But then they turn and they're turning so frequently that it's basically all they do. And somehow in the weird physics that God designed, they move forward like a million miles an hour faster than the one going straight 0:33:03 - 0:33:21 forward. If a snake's coming at you straight forward, you say, like have a nice day, Mr Snake and you keep moving on because it's going in slow motion. If a snake's flying at you doing the, the normal snake thing, you're gonna get scared because this snake's about to bite you, right? Or, you know, whatever 0:33:21 - 0:33:41 , but it's scary normally for normal people. Um So then there's another kind of motion. I said, I'll only give you two, but I want to tell you the counterfeit of this is the side winder because it kind of looks like it's doing the wave thing, but it's not moving forward, it's moving on its side, but 0:33:41 - 0:34:01 it turns its head forward. So it's just lying the whole way. It's just a big pile of lies and you could probably guess where I'd go with that. So my point is we think straight line is the fastest way to go. And of course, that's what you should try. You should always move in a straight line to what you 0:34:01 - 0:34:25 towards what you think is best right now. That is not what I'm suggesting otherwise about. But you have to go, you have to fling yourself in that direction, knowing full well that God is going to correct your path and it's not infrequent that he does so so dramatically that you end up going the opposite 0:34:25 - 0:34:52 way. And this is not my opinion. There's this thing called the scriptures, go read it. No, not to be too snarky, but like, look at the man born blind, why does Jesus take him all the way outside of Jerusalem to a pool that whose name is one cent to heal his blind eyes so that he can see. And then he 0:34:52 - 0:00:00 goes back into Jerusalem and gets his chops busted by the religious leaders who tell him no, this is actually a bad man and a bad thing that he is doing. Why? So why is the way narrow? And yet we think that there can be churches with millions of people in them that are doing the right thing. Anyway, 0:00:00 - 0:35:44 that was really long for one bullet point. But hopefully that so Alma, sorry, let's actually talk about what we're meant to. Um, he had tremendous momentum in this direction. And yet the second he had this experience, he turned completely in the other direction and he never looked back, the rest of his 0:35:44 - 0:36:12 life was absolutely consecrated. And so I want you to think about any person, you know, that's hard charging, right? They're in it. The knobs on 11, what would it take to persuade that person to change directions completely? 180 degrees. There are people hidden holiness. There are people who have done 0:36:12 - 0:36:38 this multiple times in their lives already and they're not even old yet. And there are people who are old who are doing this, which to me is amazing. I love it. And you'll notice that Alma and his buddies, one of the things they did immediately is they turned around and started preaching in the synagogues 0:36:38 - 0:36:59 and to all the people that had listened to them before saying we were dead wrong about this. We were dead wrong and they got mocked for it by some, they didn't care. And then as also is almost always the case. So basically, if you imagine the, the slow snake going straight forward, you've got the wiggly 0:36:59 - 0:37:22 snake that hauls to the right of the slow snake and then they go away 180 to the left of the snow Slow Snake. And um, that happened with Alma and his buddies because then his buddies say, well, you know, we're not content with the good we can do here. We've done everything we can. And now we want to 0:37:22 - 0:37:42 go preach among the Lamanites. By the way, we're princes and we're set to inherit all this, but we don't care like you can have it. We're just gonna go probably get killed. But uh and probably like really suffer before that and that's what we're gonna spend our lives on. And they were mocked, openly 0:37:41 - 0:38:06 , mocked by people for doing this. So who do you know? That's like that, right? So these people who take a stand publicly on certain issues, do they then pivot and then are just as, or at least as public on their new position, even though they're ridiculed for changing because God forbid people learn 0:38:06 - 0:38:25 something, right? Like we want all of our messengers to be perfect from day one or else we're not interested and we don't realize that that means that all they can give us is what they knew on day one, which probably isn't that great. And uh if you want to know why we don't have any stories about Jesus 0:38:24 - 0:00:00 before his 30th birthday, except the, the one in the temple, I just told you the answer anyway, who do you know who's like this? So I was touched recently, Tim Robbins took, he's in a movie or two that I really like, he took a public stand that was sort of predictable uh on the whole COVID reaction. 0:00:00 - 0:39:10 And I have massive respect for him because he's been on a public campaign taking the opposite position. And I did listen to one of his visits on a show and he stated why he came to that conclusion. And it was from his experiences, he had his eyes open and he said, hey, what I'm experiencing is totally 0:39:10 - 0:39:31 different from what I've been told. Maybe, and it was really touching to me is his first reaction to that was I want to talk to these people myself who have a different position than I do. I'm gonna go outside and talk to them because there was a protest right outside the place he was staying. Um And 0:39:31 - 0:39:51 so he went and he talked to them face to face and he said not to argue with them. I wanted to understand where they were coming from. And I was like, I knew I liked this guy for a reason, right? And, uh that's amazing. Who do you know who does that seriously? And so what's been great about these end 0:39:51 - 0:40:10 times events that we have begun is that they're providing many opportunities for people to get slapped upside the head with irrefutable evidence that they're wrong about something, or at least that they're missing something that they didn't know they were missing And so it's fascinating to find, to watch 0:40:10 - 0:40:31 people react. It's also really sad. So fascinating is not the most honest word, but sometimes it's great because it's amazing what people do when they make the right choices. Ok. What evidence do we have? That Alma was exceptional when it comes to effort. Well, he talks about how he could not rest his 0:40:31 - 0:40:49 entire life for the rest of his life. He never sat around saying, yeah, I've done enough. He's, it's always like, hey, um you know, I'm the chief judge. It's the highest political position in the land and apparently you do pretty well financially. Uh And he said, no, not good enough. I'm gonna resign 0:40:49 - 0:41:15 and I'm just gonna go serve missions. And uh along the way, he's being beaten, spit upon starving, almost dying. So there's another uh verse about Ether how from sun up to sun down, he testified about the Lord. He, he tried, we can take this in broader terms. He was so oriented to the improvement of 0:41:15 - 0:41:37 mankind that he never stopped trying from sun up to sundown. There was no time off. If he was awake, he was working. And so if you wonder why people don't have the experiences Alma did in the time frame, Alma, did I ask you, you know, are they like that? Who do you know that's like that? Do they have 0:41:37 - 0:41:59 those experiences obedience? I already mentioned the, the afflictions he went through in uh obey, obeying God's commandments, trusting God a vignette I selected for this was when he, he and Elma are sitting there, I believe naked, all tied up, starving half to death. And then they bring in everyone who 0:41:58 - 0:42:20 had listened to their preaching and burn them alive. And Alma turns to him and says, can't we do something, didn't God give us power? And Al Alma says, uh no, we're not gonna do anything. And basically, he says, because I don't think God wants us to. And so that's real trust in God, isn't it? Um And 0:42:20 - 0:42:39 of course, it'd be kind of lame to cite a willingness to watch other people suffer as an example of trust in God unless we had examples of even greater suffering in his own life as he trusted in God and knowing something about how it must have actually been worse for him and am aye to watch that than 0:42:38 - 0:43:02 it was for those people to suffer it. And that sort of thing can happen. I don't know if that seems like it's a reasonable thing to say to you or not, but it, it, it can happen. And then finally, um how did Alma respond to the work by others on his behalf? So his dad and his community had spent his entire 0:43:02 - 0:43:28 youth trying to teach him these things. Now, he wasn't really listening or at least agreeing, but he still experienced all of that. He had a tremendous backlog of information that was in his mind that he could call upon after he changed his mind. And an angel had visited him. And I should say, just for 0:43:28 - 0:43:46 the benefit of anyone who's like, but an angel just because you can say, well, of course, he turned around when an angel came, we have examples of angels coming to people and they don't listen, right? They don't even remember that an angel came. Nephi says to his brothers, don't you remember that an 0:43:46 - 0:44:08 angel came to you and said these things, I'm not making it up. They couldn't even acknowledge that that really happens with people. OK. Hopefully that answers your question. Um I, this came up with a Q and A coming up and uh this is too much to handle in a live stream and I thought that these specifics 0:44:07 - 0:44:11 would produce something more valuable. So there it is.