From time to time. I get messages from people who have been spending a lot of time and effort on something other than repentance, who have been pursuing God through time and effort spent on something other than repentance. And they also point me to other people who do the same thing. Here's the problem
with that. Repentance is not a side quest. There's no second channel of the gospel that you can progress in while not repenting those things in your life that you know, do not align with God. Those things will absolutely prevent you from drawing nearer to Him in anything else. Now, you can run on that
hamster wheel for as long as you'd like. But God was very plain. He said He wants obedience, not sacrifice. It doesn't matter how much time and effort you spend in other things. You're not pleasing him. In fact, you're, you know, in many ways, you're just increasing His anger against you because you're
defying Him with greater and greater intensity. It's commensurate with all the, the intensity of effort, the frequency of effort. Uh how often you do these things and how intensely God does not give more knowledge to those who willfully disobey him. You can't get any planer. There is a large volume of
scriptures that attest to this principle, just like God's power. God's knowledge, cours with his other qualities, you can't separate them. What God is. Cours how He is cours, you want his power. You also need his love, you want his power, you also need his mercy. You want his power, you also need his
knowledge. You want his knowledge, you have to have all that too. His justice. You need to know the laws that he lives by and you need to live them yourself. There is no other way. It all comes together. Obviously, there are a whole lot of people who seek his power without seeking his character qualities
and guess what? It doesn't work. This is the same. So the only learning, well, uh when it comes to the unrepentant additional knowledge, it comes in the form of unnecessary suffering, not wisdom because you're denying the wisdom that's already given to you. And if you won't learn by precept, you must
learn by experience and it's always the negative kind. And when you do finally learn and you do finally choose to obey, you will have a reduced blessing. Compared to if you had listened the first time, all things come through faith, all of God's blessings come through faith. And when you listen early
, you have greater faith and therefore greater blessing. So let's talk about some of these things that distract people. Here's one temporal preparation. We could talk at length about specific examples of this. It tends to do with how people spend their time and money. I'll tell you though, the threat
of disaster is not meant to get you to care more about making money or to get you to go buy things that you wouldn't buy in normal life. Oh, I need AAA bug out trailer and RV, I need a property in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna buy me a bunker. You know, I've got 10 years of chef boy RD packed up on
a pallet ready to airlift in a helicopter in the hangar. This kind of faithless response. It's not anything new. None of Satan's tactics are new. Remember how Israel went to Egypt for help? The Lord warned them that they would be militarily destroyed and instead of turning to him and repenting of their
sins, which was the cause of the destruction in the first place. Instead, they went down to Egypt to get help because Egypt was a military superpower and they were warned not to do that. God said that's not gonna work. I'm telling you don't do it and you can predict what happened or you could read the
book. You aren't worth saving until you repent. Don't trust in horses and chariots, trust in God. It doesn't matter what the modern equivalent is. Why are you doing what you're doing? Address that instead, here's another distraction, teaching others the gospel. This, any of these points could be much
longer than I'm making them here. And I'm trying to keep this very short. So many people out there think that they can teach the gospel without first living it. This is an anti scriptural idea. How exactly are you helping these people? Are you sharing your hypothesis with them? Because it's not something
you've proven through your own life. Don't you understand how weak your witness is before you're actually living what you're teaching? How can you say that you've obtained his word if you're not living it? And if you haven't obtained his word, why are you bothering to try to preach it to other people
? Are you hoping that they'll do what? You haven't done that? Somehow you have not found the motive to actually live what you're teaching, but somehow through what you're teaching, you're gonna give it to someone else. You can't teach with power unless you have the sincerity of actually living what you
preach. Another distraction is humanitarian work. I could say a lot about this. You can't help people through what is coming without the power of God. That's what it comes down to. There's so many things you can scurry off and try this or that and if you do and you put everything into it, you're going
to find at the end of the day that it's just another hamster wheel just like that. Phrase, ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. You're ever helping but never actually helping anyone. No one will be better off without the power of God. That's the only thing that can change people
long term. And you can't do that very much at all until you're changed. The power of God comes in proportion to how much like Jesus you have become. That is a principle. It's inviolable, the power of God comes in proportion to how much like Jesus you have become. Work on that instead and you'll do so
much greater good gospel mysteries. This is another distraction. It's the last one we'll talk about Jesus said of John the Baptist. He's the greatest person who isn't in the Kingdom of God. That might be a revelation to you. But that's what he meant when he said the verse you're familiar with. He's the
greatest person who isn't in the kingdom of God. A similar thing can be said of all the scribes today. They know more than anyone else, not in the kingdom of God. It's, it's a compliment and an insult. At the same time, every time I see a scribe who's spent years, maybe their whole life piecing together
theories about gospel topics. I mourn for how much less time and effort it would have taken them to actually repent of their sins. One thing these people have in common is that maybe they get a bunch of things right. But they have no idea what they're talking about. The greatest value what they do has
is to people who don't actually need them because the gift they have of being able to read what they write or listen to what they say and pluck out the valuable parts and recognize the error. They don't actually need their work. They can figure it out themselves from God or with other resources as, as
they experience other resources. Jesus clearly said that until you're born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God. Why are so many people who claim to be Christians spending so much time trying to see the Kingdom of God without being born again. God, does it weigh actual repentance on one side of the
scales and your time and effort in other things on the other? He doesn't say, well, you know, I told you to repent of all your sins, come follow me and you didn't do that, but you did get a phd in some theological topics. So I guess we'll just call it even. He doesn't say well, you didn't actually repent
of your sins. You're not actually treating your husband and your kids or your wife and your kids or the people around you as I would in your place in the little things that you know about and you sin against me every day in those things. But you know, you spend two hours a day studying the scriptures
trying to figure out this mystery about uh the, the feet of the statue in the vision in the Old Testament. So I'm gonna go ahead and just wave your sins and call it good. You're not gonna find that in the scriptures. Ok. He was very clear. Joseph Smith once said, if you could gaze into heaven for five
minutes, you'd learn more than you could in a lifetime of scripture study. I tell you, you can learn more in five minutes after being born again than you can in five lifetimes of not being born again. You are absolutely wasting your time. The Lord has repeatedly told us the conditions required for him
to reveal his mysteries to us, which he wants to do. What's the key repentance? It's quite simple. Stop doing what he wouldn't do. Start doing what he would in everything you do all day long, every day, sort that out and the floodgates of heaven will open and he will reveal so much to you that you won't
have the ability to capture it all. He will literally overwhelm your ability. And the same goes for all the other things. If your real motives are any of these things, temporal preparation, teaching others the gospel humanitarian work, learning gospel mysteries or anything else other than this, the only
honest way to pursue these things is to align your life completely with Jesus. There is no other way. Now let's chop this down and make it practical. The first place to focus is inside of you. Your conscience is God's voice to you. Start obeying it all the time. The second place is in your family as
you think about your role in that family and, and everyone has a family, no matter if you're married or single, you have parents, you probably have siblings, you might have Children, whatever your role is. Think about all the good you might do in that family. You've now at this point become practiced
in asking what would Jesus do in my place? What would he not do? Why and applying that and living up to it? Now, do it with your family. If you look at your dad, you'd say, what would Jesus do in my dad's place? Is it the same? Is it different if it's different? Let me talk to him about it. Start constructing
strategies to help other people live more like Jesus in their lives. You do the same with everybody. It doesn't matter what your role is, you just go, you fan out in your family and do everything you can to help them be more like Jesus once you've done that and you've caught up on the backlog because
at first just like in your self repentance, there's going to be a lot to handle, read, joy on purpose. If you feel overwhelmed, that's a book that will help you not be overwhelmed. The book's called Joy on purpose. It's not called Joy. I'm not saying, read the book, Joy on purpose. It's quote, Joy on
purpose after you have cleared out the backlog with your family, then start on your interactions with other people. These are friends, these are coworkers, everyone you have um contact or potential contact with. And it should be clear that while this will start with the people, you already know, it just
keeps going because there are 7 billion people to get to until you sort these out in this order. And I'm not saying you have to talk to 7 billion people before you can learn more gospel mysteries. I'm saying you have to clear out that backlog on all of these things and until you actually repent, you
can guarantee that anything else is a distraction. And I just want to be crystal clear. An application of that is that you don't go and try to call other people to repentance in your family. Say like your spouse before you repent yourself. The first step is you get yourself right. It's required because
God's power cannot flow through you while you're a filthy mess, cleanse your vessel first and then carry the goodness of God to others. If you seek this first to be in his kingdom, all other good things will flow to and through you.