Every additional quantity of light and truth will better enable you to successfully interact with reality. The more light you have, the more you can anticipate what others do not see coming. The more light you have, the more capable you are of obtaining material benefits in this world. With every acquisition of additional truth, you have a choice. You can either quietly use that light for your own benefit, or you can use it for the benefit of others. If you choose the former, you will prevent yourself from acquiring more light, but you will be able to avoid a great deal of the suffering endured by others here. If you choose the latter, you will willingly abdicate that life of comfort, exchanging it for the special persecution and pain reserved for those who dare try to help their fellows.
The latter choice is called abasement and condescension. It is the act of willingly abdicating blessings you have earned in order to help others.
The best example of this process is found in the prototype for salvation: the Savior Jesus Christ. What was the condescension of God? In coming from thrones on high, he condescended to a lowly mortal state. He qualified for eternal life, yet chose to live a mortal life, making himself less that he might do more for others.
This is how Paul described it:
5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
9 Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; (Philippians 2)
Abasement is the means by which we leverage the justice of God to encounter greater blessings of experience, wisdom, light and truth than we otherwise would qualify for.
God’s justice is immutable. But God’s characteristics do not exist in isolation. God’s justice does not exist in a vacuum. Like white light is a composite of all colors, God’s character is a composite of all his attributes. One of these attributes is mercy.
The interplay between justice and mercy turns justice from an attribute that harms us into one that helps us. Those who consistently live in a state where they are reconciled to their best understanding of good can rest assured that they are justified , or that they are free from the penalties of their past conscientious sins and all their sins of ignorance, because God’s mercy paid the price for those sins through the atonement of Christ.
For the justified, God’s justice is a ratchet that imparts to them greater levels of light and truth than they could otherwise obtain.
We typically see God’s justice as a negative attribute—one that can only harm us. But for the righteous, justice is a blessing. For them, the day of judgment is a “glorious day when justice shall be administered unto the righteous.” (2 Nephi 9:46)
For the justified, God’s justice is only positive: it grants all rewards for the good one does and, in conjunction with living reconciled to God, frees them from God’s negative judgment for past sins and present and future ignorance.
Willingly abdicating the blessings they have earned by submitting to suffering for others sanctifies the righteous:
34 ...Now this was a great evil, which did cause the more humble part of the people to suffer great persecutions, and to wade through much affliction.
35 Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their humility, and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their yielding their hearts unto God. (Helaman 3)
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. (Mosiah 3:19)
Counterintuitively, exaltation can only come through abasement; the only way to ascend is to first descend. Each iterative ascension can only be exceeded by first enduring a descent greater than anything you’ve previously endured.
Jesus taught about the progressive exaltation and abasement cycle with a parable:
8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.
11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 14)
You are raised commensurate with the degree to which you abased yourself. This happens through the justice of God. Although you can be justified (forgiven, cancelled out debt) through mercy, you can only be sanctified (exalted, increased) through justice. God looks upon your condescension on behalf of those who did not merit it and blesses you by judging you in absence of your sin for which you have been forgiven by and through Christ.
Abasement is not for the faint of heart. The amount of darkness you are willing to walk in will determine the level of light you will acquire. Make no mistakes, this experience is absolutely awful. It is indescribable. This is what the Lord himself went through on the cross. The physical trials—as awful as they were—were not divinely difficult. Many men were crucified, and none of them were counted as a sacrifice to God. The Lord’s experiences were atoning because he unjustly went without connection from the Father during them. The cross was not the first time Jesus had gone without the Father’s contact. It happened at regular intervals, and it was never something he deserved. Instead, he submitted for the benefit of others.
What was it like to be Joseph, son of Jacob? Joseph endured a tremendous amount of toil and affliction in order to come to the point where he was capable of saving the known world—including his family— from starvation. What did it take? Can you imagine being left to die in a pit as a young boy, as punishment for being an obedient son? Can you imagine becoming a slave, even though you are the child of a king? Can you imagine winning over your master through your positive attitude in spite of what has happened to you, only to have him turn against all the good you have done because of a flimsy false accusation? Can you imagine doing it all over again in a dungeon, only to have those whose lives you saved forget you? Who did Joseph turn to during all of this? To which of his peers could he turn and find in them more of the spirit of God than he already had? He had no one to turn to, no one who could understand the burden he carried, and no one who could deliver more light and truth to him. He had to get it all the hard way—by mining it piece by piece from God himself. Every step of the way, he received nothing but contempt from those he helped. Yet he just kept going.
God’s revelation of more and more awareness without reaching the point of peace is like a bank account bearing compound interest that is not deducted from. At any point, the righteous can cash out their chips by saying “Lord, it is enough.” But those who endure the darkness will obtain a greater degree of glory than those who do not. In fact, the accretion of light and truth through unjust duress is much greater than linear.
We are so concerned with temporal blessings. We want companionship. We want comfort. We want money and luxury. Instead of wanting God to pay out your merited blessings every time you endure a test, you ought to grow accustomed to living off of just a bit of the increase—not the principle—of your state with God.
You have to learn to live off of the proceeds of the interest of your abasement. Adopting this perspective will make it so that his blessings in your life start off as much more like a trickle than they could be, but over time that trickle will turn into a flood. Remember that compound interest is an exponential affair, and that the last few steps in the doubling process will make the first half of it relatively imperceptible.
God said: “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33) There is no way of cheating this promise. In order to have it fulfilled, you really do have to place your heart fully on God, not any of the goodies. If you do this, the goodies will flow to you because they are dividends on your investment, not because you seek them. But, because your heart has changed, you will find very little pleasure in these things. Instead, you will see them as gifts from God to bless others. You will also need them, because your body, mind, and spirit will be beaten to a pulp by the time you get there.
Abasement can occur due to factors outside of our control. Job, for instance, did not ask for everything he had to be taken away. However, the most powerful abasement is voluntary.
14 And now, as I said unto you, that because ye were compelled to be humble ye were blessed, do ye not suppose that they are more blessed who truly humble themselves because of the word?
16 Therefore, blessed are they who humble themselves without being compelled to be humble; or rather, in other words, blessed is he that believeth in the word of God, and is baptized without stubbornness of heart, yea, without being brought to know the word, or even compelled to know, before they will believe. (Alma 32)
Jesus was not forced to be born onto this earth. No one made Abraham do what he did. And so it goes with the scriptural examples of righteous people. No one made them do it. It was all voluntary.
We are not capable of exalting ourselves, but we can abase ourselves of our own free will: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” (Matthew 23:12)
Voluntary abasement is the key to the greatest happiness that we can obtain. This is counterintuitive.
It is easy to become jaded. You may reach the point where you have to think for a long, hard time when someone asks you about your happiest moments. The more truth you acquire, the rarer these will be in this life. However, the more truth you acquire, the deeper these happy moments will be, and the more resplendent they will be in the world to come.
Always remember that the whole point of all we suffer is to obtain greater happiness. This is the entire point of everything we do. What seem like deviations from this end are only the required navigation of the unavoidable consequences and constraints of reality.
And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it. (Mosiah 2:41)
Happiness is the path of ascent after descent. It comes through abasement for the benefit of others who did not merit it. You have to endure all the things God has to throw at you before you attain the level of happiness that requires having overcome those things.
In order to obtain eternal life, you must descend to a very low point, and prove faithful all the while. This always occurs in steps of everincreasing abasement followed by ever-increasing exaltation. Every step forward requires you descend below your previous lowest point. This is a pattern we see all over scripture.
No matter how foreign external happiness may be in your life here, the more light you have, the greater will be your internal peace and joy. Your hope for others and yourself propels you through a great deal more affliction than most could endure. You may not have regular happy moments. Instead, you have oriented your life toward a fullness of joy, something that does not occur regularly, but is no small event when it does. Suffering compounds. It bears interest. The more you submit to suffer without quitting, the more God can grant you blessings. It compounds more than linearly, meaning for every bit more you are willing to suffer, you get a lot more out of it.
In summary, happiness is not the absence of sorrow, but the accumulation of knowledge earned through sorrow incurred through righteous intercession on others’ behalf.