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All right, I'm gonna give you a 12 punch. Here. We give you a joke that you probably won't find very funny. Then we're gonna talk about some serious things. I guess before we get to that, I, I put a comment up on, in response to another comment on the channel here, gentlemen was commenting on one of the videos and he said, you know, uh every time something like every time I make some progress, I feel like the adversary hits me pretty hard. And I replied, and I said, well, hit him back harder. If you do that, you won't, you won't get through that too many times before he thinks twice, you make him regret it because like any bully who go off to find an easier target. So we read how the devil prowls around like a lion looking for prey and lions they'll watch for the week. The devil's power. It's, it's based on faith, believe it or not, all power comes through faith. And so this is actually a really critical thing for the end times to understand an awful lot of puzzles, puzzle pieces. But there's a process for destroying the faith of Satan. And part of that is a certain number of people living up to a certain level of faithfulness to the Lord or learning and living a certain level of knowledge about him in opposition to a certain level of, of um obstruction against that affliction suffering. Anyway, that's, that's a very important idea. And I'm making this video preaching after preaching as a practice, practicing what I preach um after getting a series of gut punches today, which is nothing unusual . So here we go. Let's hit back and hit back harder until the, the boxing stops and the, the victor is standing. So uh I want to now tell you a joke in the most robotic way possible, I suppose. So I'm in the store the other day, I got a $15 off $50 purchase, $50 or more. And because I can do math a little bit, I know that the closest I can get to 50 the higher the percentage discount will be. So now this is fun. So I'm, I'm going through the grocery store as fast as I can because that's always what I'm trying to do, finding the best deals on things that we would buy anyway. And um I, I like to think in my mind, I like to think of myself as like the special forces of grocery shopping in our family because my wife is the main force and she does the routine stuff, but she's she's not nearly as, as much of a cheap skate as me. So I make a game out of finding the deals and stocking up on things and, uh , I'm just at a loss. This is a weird store and I don't, I'm only there because I have a coupon and, uh, I, I'm struggling to find things. This is after Thanksgiving. So I said, well, turkeys are on sale. Plus I got this coupon and that means some real deals. And I go over and there's this whole bay of Turkeys from different, different brands and things. And here you need, you need a little more information. I don't, I don't, I'm sure you've heard of the Amish before. But there are actually various branches of Mennonites. And out here we have Hutterites. In fact, there are sub branches of Hutterites anyway. They have their specific beliefs, but they're really into produce and they, they make uh a pretty substantial living in this state farming. And I saw a bunch of turkeys and it said how to write turkeys. And I was thinking to myself, man, their evangelism must be on point because they've even got the turkeys converted. Oh boy. So now I'd like to uh just pivot that right into this, this uh this fun verse, this important verse in Doctrine and covenants. This is section 68 8 and it says, go ye into all the world preach the gospel to every creature acting in the authority which I have given you baptizing in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Ghost. Now, I've made a joke about converting turkeys. Um, and I happen to think actually most of the Christian world are turkeys, but, um, turkeys are creatures, right? And we don't, we don't talk about preaching the gospel to, to creatures , right? But it's very interesting that the word creature was used here. Now, if you go to the 1828 Webster dictionary, the first definition given for creature is that which is created, you don't have to be too imaginative, imaginative to guess what comes next. Every being besides the creator or everything , not self existent, the sun, moon and stars, the earth animals plants light darkness, air water, et cetera. Are the creatures of God or you know the created of God. Now, why do you suppose the Lord chose the word creature in this verse? Because he, he could have said to every human to every person and he didn't. Now, if you know your scriptures, you'll know that he said something similar in the New Testament, but it's different. So let's read that at the very end of, of the book of Matthew, he says to his disciples, go ye therefore and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever. I have commanded you and lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. Now, there's some Trixie Greek here. Whenever you see phrases that you assume, talk about time periods in the, the Bible, particularly the New Testament, you should think twice because they don't usually just refer to what we would think of as time periods and sometimes that's not even the main meaning. So time with God, it's a very interesting concept. It's not too hard to understand, but it's very different than how we normally understand it. Time with God, it's more about fulfilled conditions. So when you think about time, maybe you think of the, if you're old enough, you think of the hands on a clock and maybe you can visualize the second hand ticking away or if you think of a digital clock and there might be some notion of milliseconds or even seconds on the clock. And so you can see this pattern, this uh this rhythm, this regular rhythm time with, that's all you know, sometimes in, in modern times, we have, we like to talk about artificial constructs or societal constructs. In other words, it's just made up. That sense of time is completely made up. And I'm I'm not speaking now from a, a spiritual or religious perspective. This is pure the science of time. If you dig deep enough and I don't want to Shanghai this, this presentation, these thoughts with, with all this, but you can look it up. Any clock is actually based on and imperfectly repetitive physical process. So the atomic clock, which is renowned for its precision, even that is not precise, it's so precise that it far exceeds almost anything any human would care about, but it has limits in precision. It's irregular all time is irregular. The only reason we need. So , so quartz crystals, uh other mechanisms of of counting time oscillations and quartz crystal, whatever it might be, those also are all based on physical um physical patterns, I guess. But those already exceed what most humans care about. The reason the atomic clock was so important is because of GPS . So, so when you're registering the satellites, you have to know if you want the GPS to be precise on the ground within a certain space, you have to know exactly where that satellite is in time and you have to coordinate the two and, and that this is why it's important in a nutshell. So anyway, the end of the world here, even unto the end of the world doesn't mean on such and such of a year in the month of whatever, on the sixth day or whatever it is at 10:30 a.m. Greenwich median time. This thing is going to happen. That's not what that means. It means until the completion of what's got to happen here. I am with you until the completion of everything that has to happen here. That's a side note, I guess, but it turns out that it's not a side note. It's actually, it's completely interwoven into where we're going with this. Another reference I wanted to mention is Matthew 2414. And here the Lord again, in the previous verse, he mentions the end and he says in 14, in this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for witness unto all nations and then the end and then shall the end come? Hm If you hit the Greek on this, I'm not going to do this right now because I happen to already know verse 14, that word witness. That's an important one. I've, I've mentioned this before but that route, it's, it's the same root of the English word martyr, that word witness. It doesn't just mean you know how Christians they like to say and I'm saying they now because I'm differentiating what I would do versus them. I refer to myself as a disciple of Christ. All disciples of Christ are Christians, but very few Christians are disciples of Christ because in order, you can call yourself a Christian without actually doing what Jesus says. But the definition of a disciple is someone who has discipled themselves or reconciled themselves with the Lord. You do what he would do. You say what he would say, you think what he would think, you even feel what he would feel. So Christians, they'll say witness, especially evangelical Christians, they'll say oh, I'm going to witness to this person and what they mean is I'm going to say things about Jesus. That's not what this word means. That's a tiny slice of it. But this Greek word, it also means to demonstrate what's the difference between talking about the gospel and demonstrating the gospel. Paul talks about preaching the gospel with power, with Jesus , talks about with signs following. You can talk about the gospel without living the gospel yourself. Personally, you can talk about the gospel without doing any of the stuff that you're talking about personally, but also without doing it to the world around you. And that's the key of where I'm taking this. We're gonna get back to converting turkeys, whether they're the animal turkey or the human turkey. There's plenty of both, there's plenty of both and there's, we've got to do this work before their goose is cooked because the end is going to come. And when that happens, not to make light of an extraordinarily serious thing. When this, even unto the end of the world happens, the conditions change, the conditions change. And now all of a sudden in that moment, that's when you'll see the fulfillment of passages that speak about testing a man's work by fire to see what it's made of straw or something . Sterner, brass, silver and gold can pass through fire. Straw can't, wood can't the flesh can't when the ancient Israelites were conquering the resident people in the promised land. There were instructions on what spoils of war they could take. And a common instruction that the, the instructions vary depending on the people in, in the particular battle. But a common instruction was that the booty had to go through the fire that all those treasures they had to go through the fire. And so you can't put living people through the fire because their flesh will consume and they'll die. But precious stones , silver gold that all came through animals. You can't put sheep through fire, they'll burn up cattle, can't do it. The fire of the end of the world, it's, it's coming. And the challenge is to learn enough about the Lord and live everything you learn so that you can walk through that fire and preaching the gospel. The point isn't to make more people that can talk about Jesus without doing any of the things that he says, it's to make disciples. That's another verse. Maybe I'll look that one up just to prove that I'm not making this up. Oh, we were so close to it. This is also for Matthew, this is uh Matthew 28. Oh It's just that I'm sorry. It's just that we actually read that verse. It's just another translation. Um So I was reading from the King James, if you go to the new King James, it says, instead of saying go ye therefore and teach all nations, it says go therefore and make disciples of all the nations. And when there's a discrepancy between the King James and the new King James, in my experience, if you go back to the Greek, the new King James or Hebrew, the new King James is almost always more accurate in any difference. Versus the old king James, I only use the old King James because one, I have copies of it and two, if I'm, if I'm searching through these things, digitally, people are much more familiar with the old King James. So I'll use that unless it's, it's uh significant enough to, to need to switch. There's an overhead in people's minds when you use other translations. So it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a battle you need to choose. Um But if you go through the other translations, the new international version also says make disciples, the NRSV. Uh what other well known ones are here? E well, even the contemporary English version says, make disciples. Um So there you have it there, you have it. So now we've tied back to that little point I made about disciples. This is great. So preaching the gospel is not about generating new people that can talk about Jesus. It's about making disciples. Disciples can walk through the fire because they already do walk in it. You see with all of this, you can willingly walk in the fire now and willingly lose all of the parts of you that can't continue in that you lose yourself to find yourself or you can wait until it comes upon you involuntarily and there probably won't be anything left. That's the choice. So now I want to get back to this doctrine and covenants version of this idea where it says preach the gospel to every creature. So what we're doing here is we're merging these ideas. Now, I, I start all this with a joke about making or converting a turkey. Um But that's actually not terribly far from exactly what I challenge you to try to do. Let me explain if I asked you. So, Jesus, when he's teaching how to pray, he says, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How did Jesus, what did Jesus do to further instantiate the will of God on earth as it was in heaven? Well, to answer that question, we'd have to start in the first verse of the New Testament, the Gospels. You could pick one and end on the last verse. And that's actually not the whole story, but that at least during his mortal life, that's the whole story, right? Uh As much of it as we have written, it's quite a bit that's not in there. So just highlighting a few elements of his life because this would be a long video. Otherwise, how is he making earth more like heaven when he cursed the fig tree? Do you remember when that happened? He cursed the fig tree. So the story goes, he was on a road, he saw a fig tree and the leaves on the fig tree had sprouted . And apparently when, when fig trees, which is one fruit tree have never grown and, and, uh, it's not gonna happen here unless some serious geographical upheaval happens. Uh, it's too cold but apparently when a fig tree sprouts its leaves, that's a sign that it's going to fruit because fig trees don't fruit at predictable times. It, it's not like um my apple trees. I know roughly when they're going to fruit but fig trees, I guess there's some correlation between the leaves and the, and the fruit. So if you see a leafy fig tree, you can get excited and say, wow, there's gonna be some fruit on that thing. Let's see what we've got. But when he got to the tree, it was barren, there were no fruit, there was no fruit. And so he cursed it and he said, henceforth and forever, you will never bear fruit and it withered away in real time. And the people with him were amazed now I don't wanna get into why he did that. Maybe I just led you on. I don't know, you got excited that you were gonna learn something. But the long and short of it I'll tell you is that, that that fruit tree wasn't doing what it was supposed to do and he was regulating his creation. Now, this raises a very important question without which you cannot understand the mechanism of miracles. Why would it ever be the case that anything on this planet would not reflect, reflect the will of God? Because you say, well, humans have agency and we are given power by God to rebel against Him if we choose. But what about everything else? You remember how I was explaining time? And I said that there's a, a question of imprecision. There is a question of imprecision in every aspect of this mortal world. You can think of these as rounding errors. Now, there are no errors with God. Nothing is random. But what you can think of with this is if I were to take this picture, if you're watching this video and pixelated it, those pixels are still correct. They're just not very precise. The color of each pixel will be determined by the higher resolution information, but it's, it's lossy. It won't retain that resolution. And so what happens with miracles in a sense is that God reaches in and he corrects the pixel. He increases the resolution again. This is one way of thinking about it just to get your, we're talking about turkeys, get your juices flowing. I'll, I'll give you another example. So, so to terminate that one, Jesus preached the gospel to that fig tree. Do you see how now you say? But that was Jesus? Well, we could get into this. My disciples will do what I do. I'm going to the father so you can do even greater things. We could go into John and he speaks about how the Holy Ghost will come and he'll take from him and give to us that he comes for various things. 11 of his roles is to reprove, comes to judge. Judge. We think of judge like I don't know, a judge on the bench. Judge Judy punitive judgment. That's not what judgment means in God's kingdom. It's both ways. It's positive and negative. It's blessing and cursing. Moses was the judge over the nation of Israel. He sat as a judge and the people brought him situations where they said, we don't know God's will. Please judge us use your knowledge of his character to teach us what he would have us do here. And he delegated the easier things to people that knew Him less, knew God less than Moses. And then he took the things that they couldn't handle when Solomon sits in judgment as king over Israel and a judge and a king. That's, it's the same role in this sense. At least he had the two ladies that came to him and they said, hey, we got this baby. We don't know whose baby it is right now. They had the law of Moses, but this was the situation that fell through the cracks. It was not specifically addressed by the law. So they didn't know what God wanted. And so they went to the man. They knew most like God Solomon who had the greatest wisdom in the kingdom and said, what should we do? When King David sat on that throne before him, there were several situations where David stipulated absolute actions to take that were external to not in conflict with the law of Moses. When the prophet Nathan came to him and said, the spoke this, this, it was an, it was an allegory, but David didn't know it about Bathsheba. And he said, oh, there's this man and he has a sheep and there's this man and he took the sheep and David said that man will surely die. So David's authority was so absolute that to judge or to preach the gospel to make earth more like heaven. He had the authority to take a man's life hearing the facts and saying if God himself were here, he would kill that man. And then Nathan said, you're the man, thou art the man in another case after David goes into exile because one of his sons rebels against him and usurps the kingdom. So he's off in exile for a while. When he comes back, he holds court and everyone comes to him so that he can arrange uh reregulate the affairs of his domain, which is God's domain over which he is a steward. And one very important story from this is when MS Mephibosheth, that's fun to say Mephibosheth who was the son of Jonathan who was the son of Saul comes and, and David has to sort out this controversy because the PBA chef has a servant. And uh there was some intrigue on one of the two betrayed David and David was exhausted, but he was trying to figure out what was going on. And interestingly before all this Mephibosheth received all the lands of Saul. David said, I want to do something good for the house of Saul once he took the throne. And um most of Saul's household had been killed as part of the judgment of God against him. But uh Jonathan had a son, a febo chef and um he, he was handicapped. He had been dropped as a young child by a nurse who was fleeing from the report that his father and grandfather had been killed in battle. And Mephibosheth uh was brought before David and he was grown now and David restored to him, all the lands of his grandfather, Saul, those weren't just sitting mothballed in some warehouse. They belong to someone and David took that land from the people who had it and gave it back to the house of Saul to Mephibosheth. Now, when he comes back out of exile, years later, he's, he brings Mephibosheth or orders for him to be brought before him. And he said, what what just happened? I was in exile . You did nothing to support me after I showed you all this kindness and what he had done in the meantime, is David gave all those lands to Mephibosheth S servant Ziba. And I, I won't get to the end of the story, but I absolutely love that story. It's such a powerful lesson. But uh about how we need to be with the Lord, which is how Mephibosheth was with David. It's a, it's a very important story anyway, so David had the power to take and to give and it was absolute within his kingdom. That's what it means to be a king in the kingdom of God. You stand in the place of God with all rights to do what he would do in your place as far as you know it. Now we've talked about this before in your own life. In fact, you've been taught this in since gospel 101. When you get baptized, what do you promise to do to stand as a witness? Remember that word to stand as a witness of God at all times and in all places starting with your own life. So the baby steps, the first step to this commandment is go into all your life and preach the gospel to every facet of your life acting in the authority which I have given you immersing every facet of your life in the name of the father and the son and the holy ghost. And as you do that and you get that sorted out, not as you do it, but once you do it once you're done with that, you take the first step outside of yourself, your immediate surroundings, which is your family. That's the first step. And you preach the gospel to every creature in your family and some Children , they really can be creatures. Some spouses are creatures. Unfortunately, and you preach the gospel to them. You immerse them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy Ghost. You fully reconcile your world, your inner world, your immediate outside world, and you just keep going out every time you finish the next shell, the next sphere of your influence. Once it's completely reconciled, if you still have anything surplus, you keep going. Now there's a maintenance cost to keep it reconciled. You're going to continue learning more someone within that sphere, whatever it is, you, your family , your social group, maybe work, maybe outside of that, a new friend, maybe they'll take off with so much light. Once they get activated, once they get connected to the Holy Ghost, they'll take off with so much light that maybe they have things to teach you, which is wonderful. You couldn't ask for greater blessing and you'll have to reconcile to that because it's the light we're after, it's the Lord we're after. And that change will become part of their preaching the gospel to every creature and now you're the creature. But beyond the maintenance cost, if there's any surplus, you just keep reaching out your arm which becomes the arm of the Lord, the hand of the Lord here on earth, making earth as it is in heaven through the hearts of every human and the everything else of every other creature. And now let's get back to that business. Let's get back to Jesus preaching to every creature while he was here. He said I am the light of the world because I'm in the world and I'm going to go and then you will be the light of the world. That's right in the New Testament. He says those things, you will be the light of the world. Why? Because the light of the world has to be in the world. He said in John 17, I'm leaving. He was praying to the father. He said, I'm out of here, but they are still here and they're still in the world. And he asks for special blessings on them, his friends because he's not gonna be there to do the things that he would do if he was because he had protected them. And that's , that's why one reason why he says I've told you not to have a sword because of taking care of you. I've kept you in the word, but I'm going to the father and you'll need a sword. And there are reasons for that loving reasons, the reasons always love with God anyway. So how else did he preach the Gospel while he was here? To the creatures. You remember when he was on the rough seas and he was sleeping. And the disciples said, master, don't you care? We're all about to die. And he said, you have little faith and he got up from his nap. And what did he say to the, to the storm? He said, peace be stealth . Let's now, you might ask yourself. Yeah. Well, what, what did the disciples say? They said, what manner of man is this that even the winds and the waves obey him. Let me ask you why it took him saying something, didn't they know who was on the ship? Do you know the effect of the flesh in which you are en robbed? Do you know the blessing that it conveys to you? I was surprised the other day, I looked up, I wanted to have a better idea of the composition of the villages in Galilee at the time of Jesus. And so I formulated myself some questions and I went on my little trek to find the answers. And I was shocked that there were millions of people according to the, to the internet, millions of people that lived in that region. Now, there were just a few relatively small villages along the shoreline, but there were people all over the place. It's not a terribly huge area now, maybe those numbers aren't exactly right. You just have to sort of figure, even if they're off by a bit, they could be off by quite a bit and the point still stays, it still stands. There were a lot of people up in gallery at the time of Jesus throughout his ministry, there were huge crowds of people that gathered. Uh One thing I was curious about if you care to know is I was, I was curious what the likelihood was of him having met all of the disciples prior to the beginning of his public ministry. I was, I was curious at what point he met them for the first time, which isn't readily obvious from the text. And I had reasons for really caring about that answer. But the point is that it's easy to imagine, I'd say it's, it's, it's stronger than imagine. It's easy to defend the idea that Jesus interacted with. Well over 10,000 people during his mortal ministry, it could have been a lot more than that for three years. He was just circuiting the whole place, not just Galilee, obviously all of all of Israel. So and you can re reconstruct that journey to a point. The chronological order of the journey is not super clear because there are discrepancies between the gospels with that. So let me ask you this, how many of those people do you think have free access to Jesus in the heavenly realm? Now, you might be of the persuasion that, that you believe that all of us just have this uh free form flow in heaven that, that everybody can go anywhere. I would ask you. There's, there's, we could have a long discussion with this and probably there are much stronger points to make. But one thing that jumps into my mind is why do you think the angel Gabriel made such a big deal of announcing to people, not just his name, but right after I am Gabriel, he said, who stand in the presence of God, who stands in the presence of God . When we have descriptions of the throne of God, even if you haven't been there and you haven't seen it. It's not a description of countless numbers of angels all up in jesus' face. There are concourses or concentric rings of angels and there are only four at his throne. There are four and we could go through the hierarchy and the numbers, but they are, they are small numbers for several layers. As you go out, there's the four, there's the seven, there's the 24 OK? And each of these have a fundamentally different degree of access to the Lord when he was on earth. Some random lady who had a bleeding problem managed to sneak up on him from behind in a crowd of people. That was all it was like a concert pushing in on him. She managed to push through and grab his his robe. Some random other lady from a foreign country managed to get closer to him and ask him, excuse me. To heal her daughter. And that's , that's the story where he calls her a dog. Do you think that in heaven people can just do that? They can't? So in this veil of flesh, we have the wherewithal to interact freely with beings of much greater light than we have access to in heaven. Direct access to as free access to here on earth. People will go through all sorts of trouble to get. I mentioned a concert. Have you ever been to a concert and, and tried to fight your way up to the front rail? I have it, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work. But if someone's coming to preach a message, it's all you can do to get people to show up. They won't even drive a half hour to here, especially now in, in the post COVID era where everyone just expects to be able to watch something online or listen to it while skipping through while they're eating cereal or something in their pjs. But people will pay some crazy amount of money to go to a Taylor Swift concert. You know, they'll pay some insane amount of money for a meet and greet with a movie star even if it's just five seconds. So back to Jesus on the boat. Why did the water respond to him after he said that? And why didn't it do anything before except what it did? Why, why was it just storming and raging and why did it stop? Was it the words he said or was it something different when the, the certain vagabond Jews, that's the phrase from the book of Acts. There is a collection of men going around exercising demons casting them out in the name of Jesus and these demons, they, they came out and they said, Jesus, we know and Paul, we know, but who are you? The man said the same words as those who did it effectively. But the, the same results did not follow the demons beat up those men. Why? See most people in, in current religious traditions, they'd say because the men didn't have authority. And here we've read in DNC 68 8 preach the gospel to every creature acting in the authority which I have given you in Matthew 28 reads a little different. Go ye therefore and teach all nations or make disciples baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost teaching them to observe all things whatsoever. I have commanded you. What's the authority? What's the authority? Well, what does it mean to be a witness? You need to know and you need to live. That's the authority, that's the authority. It's a silly thing to think that a man can receive authority from God in any other form. And by being taught how God is and choosing to live that way yourself. There is no authority but God. And if you want authority, the only way to get it is to be like Him because it's his authority. They're not, those devils weren't responding to those guys, nor did they respond to Paul. As Paul said, he said, I don't baptize in the name of Paul, I baptize in the name of Jesus. There is no name under heaven whereby salvation comes except the name of Jesus. And so the waters responded to Jesus, not because of the words he said, but because of who he was because of every single decision he had made in his life to that point. So let's tie this up to preach the gospel to every creature to go into all the world, to act in the authority which he has given us. How does Jesus give authority? Is it some paper permission slip? Is it some random person laying their hands on your head ? It's saying some words, these things, they have a time and a place but they're not what empowers you. He gives you authority by showing you how he is. He does this by himself and through his servants and even through all of creation because all things testify or demonstrate, testifies another one of the, the similes of that word, the the root martyr, all things testify of Christ, his authority. He's all around you. And as you learn more about him and you live everything, you know, you have it and you exercise it by going into all the world and making everything, everything as close to how you sincerely believe it would be. If the Lord himself were there, you do everything he would do and nothing he would not do. That is the charge that Jesus has always given to his disciples. We are his servants. Here's our example. He is what we should do. He is why we should do it. So whether the turkey that you're trying to convert is a fellow human being or whether it's a literal turkey with whom you're trying to interact the way that Jesus would or a tree or rock or a lake or your family or your spouse or the man you're sitting next to on a bus, of course, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature acting in the authority which the Lord has given you and immerse them in the name of the father and of the sun and of the Holy Ghost.