Repentance

Repentance: Making Straight the Way of God

1 Hearken, and lo, a voice as of one sent down from on high, who is mighty and powerful, whose going forth is unto the ends of the earth, yea, whose voice is unto men— Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 2 The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth unto the ends of the earth, as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth. 3 Yea, a voice crying—Prepare ye the way of the Lord, prepare ye the supper of the Lamb, make ready for the Bridegroom. (D&C 65)

93...that all men may be left without excuse; 94 That wise men and rulers may hear and know that which they have never considered; 95 That I may proceed to bring to pass my act, my strange act, and perform my work, my strange work, that men may discern between the righteous and the wicked, saith your God. (D&C 101)

Chapter 1: Repentance for All People

To repent means to fully reconcile your ideas, desires, and actions to your sincere understanding of what is best.

Repentance is perceived as a religious idea, and not a very popular one at that. While no one, in or out of a religion, seems to get excited about the idea, repentance is a critically important practice for all people. If you understood what it meant and what it leads to, you would, in fact, prioritize it highly.

Repentance is not just an idea for those who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In fact, for Judeo-Christians, atheists, and everyone else, you will not find anything more important to understand and practice than repentance.

No matter what your beliefs are, and no matter what it is that you desire, repentance is the key to obtaining what you desire in life. This point is tautological; if you believe something is best, clearly it holds the highest priority to you among competing options. No matter who you are or what you want in life, the most effective path to obtaining it relies in fully reconciling your ideas, desires, and actions to your sincere understanding of what is best.

Repentance is a concept that is exceedingly easy to understand. Were it not for the many layers of false beliefs and poor examples regarding repentance, the first sentence of this chapter would be sufficient to teach everything one needs to know to practice it.

In order to clear up the confusion, this book contains chapters that will thoroughly explain repentance and surrounding topics. I have made an attempt to make this book as accessible to as broad an audience as possible with the hope that, no matter the ideological background of the reader, they will find a clear explanation of these ideas and sufficiently strong reasons to repent.

Though it will take time to adequately argue, my premise from the outset is that, for all who have not yet done it, repentance is absolutely the most important thing you could understand and practice. It is the gateway to all you desire, all that is good, and all that endures.

From the outset, we will need to address the terms used when discussing repentance. Much of the confusion on the topic comes from a fuzzy vocabulary.

Previously, repentance was defined as fully reconciling your ideas, desires, and actions to your sincere understanding of what is best.

What is best is defined as righteousness. This is, perhaps, the first major point of contention between the religious and not, as the former tend to believe that righteousness is defined by another person, and the latter do not. This probably ought to be less of a disagreement than it is. While a full argument of this point will have to wait until later in this book, it is important to note that “righteousness” is not a static list of ideas or actions. Furthermore, it isn’t something one person can dictate to another without the involvement and consent of the conscience. In other words, the determination of what is best is something that relies on the understanding of the individual. While this can be and is heavily influenced by interactions with others, it is neither proper nor possible for one person to merely dictate righteousness to another. Not even God does this. He reasons with a person, as one person reasons with another. Again, much more will be discussed on this topic later.

Deviation from what is best is called sin. Sin is a word with highly charged connotations that vary wildly depending on who is using it. It ought not be this way. Sin is simply willingly doing less than your best. In this usage, we clearly have not defined what is best, but simply assigned a name to doing anything less. Under this definition, it is obviously useful, good, and desirable to recognize and correct sin, as it reorients someone to what they say they want, not what someone else says they want.

The choice to sin creates the need for repentance. When someone is already living in a state where they constantly think, desire, and do what they sincerely understand to be best, there is no sin and therefore no need for repentance. The state of being reconciled to what is best is called sinlessness.

For too many secular people, sin is something they believe only comes from and applies to the religious. On some level, it is as if they think that deciding not to believe in God frees them from the consequences of not living up to their own ideal. They know very well that it does not.

No amount of disbelief in the faith of others will free you of the guilt you feel for violating your own conscience.

Modern Judeo-Christians believe that professing their belief in God will free them from the guilt of doing less than their best. Their belief is equally ineffective in its aim as the atheists’, who believe that professing disbelief in God will free them from the guilt of doing less than their best.

Somewhere between Christ’s resurrection and now, churches replaced righteousness with religiousness. This is not only wrong, it is strictly antithetical to what Jesus taught, did, and is.

You will have a hard time finding a church that believes that you have to stop sinning to be saved. It seems that every Judeo-Christian congregation teaches people to break God’s commandments or, at least, that they can be saved while still doing so.

The purpose of Jesus’ sacrifice was not to provide mankind with a way to avoid the justice of God. Rather, he came to provide a way that God's justice could result in their blessing, through their choice to faithfully learn and live his instructions.

Jesus' ministry, sacrifice, and resurrection wasn’t to excuse you for present and continued sin, but to give you a way of being forgiven of past sin and a sufficient reason to discontinue future sin.

If you believe in Jesus, you will act, think, and desire as he did and does. If you do not act, think, and desire as he did and does, you do not believe in him.

Church goers will be surprised to learn that God doesn’t care how much time they spend at church, but rather how completely and consistently they do his will in their lives.

Though couched in the worship forms of his time, a poignant description of what the Lord thinks of the religious rites of people who do not actually obey him is provided by Isaiah.

God desires for you to worship him “in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:24) You can’t worship God in truth without actually doing what he says. During his mortal ministry, the Lord asked.

Paul explained.

God wants obedience to him, and no amount of religious rites or ritual can substitute.

God wants you to act, think, and desire as he does. He can teach you how to do this, but not if your life is already filled with church activities and your mind is already filled with the idea that professing belief in him somehow gives you the right to continue to disobey him.

Modern professed Christians have repeated the mistake of the Jews: they assume that their religious affiliation will cause God to pour out his blessings upon them, even when they often and knowingly rebel against him.

During his ministry, the Lord corrected this belief by saying.

We do not need to wonder what the Lord would say of his modern feigned followers. Predicting this situation, he said of these.

That “marvelous work and wonder,” among other things, is the public proclamation that one’s allegiance to God is measured by one’s outward alignment with what they inwardly believe is right, not outward alignment with traditions taught by the leaders of organized religions—men who neither know nor follow Jesus Christ and who actively teach their congregants to disobey him.

Modern Christians would do well to consider the following parable taught by Jesus.

A disciple of Jesus Christ is known not by his vernacular, his church attendance, or his practice of church traditions, rituals, or rites. A disciple of Christ is one who acts, desires, and thinks like Jesus.

Chapter 2: Sin

Sin is a word as employed by the religious as it is spurned by the non-religious. The religious use sin as a delimiter of specific acts whose avoidance makes them feel justified, even when they knowingly contradict what they say they believe. Many non-religious feel that calling something a sin is a deeply offensive and judgmental act. Both groups are equally incorrect about the meaning and value of the concept.

In order to understand sin, it is helpful to begin with consideration of its opposite. Righteousness is the opposite of sin. Righteousness, like its opposite, is a term that most people consider to be religious in nature, when it is actually of utmost importance to all people, no matter their beliefs.

Righteousness means “optimal behavior with respect to reality.” Though it happens to be the case that God knows better than anyone what reality is and the path through it that yields the greatest joy, righteousness is only a religious concept for those who already believe in God. Just as with sin, we can debate the application of the term, which is contextualized on the understanding of the individual, but there ought to be no dispute that righteousness is universally good, desirable, and worthwhile, just as we can say that no matter who you are, sin is not good, desirable, or worthwhile. These things are so by definition.

Righteousness leads to what a person wants. Sin leads to anything else. These are not contrived meanings. They have been this way since the beginning of man.

The Hebrew word for sin is “chatah.” It means to miss the mark, or to deviate from the path that would lead you to the target you are aiming at.

Potential targets for our desire are innumerable. What is best?

This is a simple question, but the answer requires sufficient discussion to merit an entire section of this book. As a preview and placeholder, let us begin here with a discussion of the concept of ideal.

The power of the concept of ideal transcends all differences among all people. No matter the individual or their circumstances, or how often it changes, at any moment, each and every person has a concept of ideal.

A person’s ideal is not going to be an actual person they know. Every person they know will have some or many flaws—deviations from their ideal. Instead, their ideal is the synthesis of their experiences, their culture, and their capabilities into a hypothetical person. A person’s ideal is the composite of the best aspects of human character and action that they’ve witnessed or imagined. Though this ideal person exists only in their mind, as far as they know, their idea of him or her is so vivid that they can imagine what that person would do in every circumstance in which they find themselves.

This ideal that you, me, and everyone else has is one and the same as our idea of what God is like. This is just as true whether a person believes in God or not. God is the embodiment of the actual ideal. Your idea of God is your estimate of the ideal. Everyone, whether they believe in God or not, has an idea of what they imagine him to be like, and that is their model of the ideal human.

This idea is sure to be equally offensive to both the religious and the secular, and yet of vast value and importance to both. The religious would argue that it is blasphemous to reduce the unknowable infinity of God to the limited embodiment of a human. This is one of the many ideas that Jesus was killed for. Secularists will bristle at the fact that, in spite of claiming not to believe in God, they nevertheless judge themselves daily according to their idea of him. All the guilt they feel is actually as a result of their knowing failure to live up to a God they claim not to believe in. Offensive, indeed, yet true in both cases.

Humans have a phenomenal ability to extract and apply values from one situation to another. Even children can readily extract and apply values from the stories they are told, even while they are too young to read for themselves.

The ability for humans to map the ideal transcends differences in circumstance. We can aptly extract and apply values from stories even if the character is taller, stronger, richer, or smarter than us. We can do it across time and across cultures.

For example, we can study the life of Christ and, in so doing, give an answer to the question of “what would Jesus do?” across a surprisingly broad set of circumstances with confidence sufficient to motivate astonishingly deep sacrifice. We can do this in spite of his being the Son of God, in spite of his having lived 2,000 years ago, and in spite of his culture and language being wholly different from ours. Unfortunately, it is rare to find a person whose effort to do as Jesus would do in their place matches their ability to imagine what he would do in their place.

God requires everything we have to give, all the time.

We must ask and answer the question “what would Jesus do” and do it, in every moment of every situation of every day of life. We have to do all things “in his name,” or according to his character.

Salvation requires you to live according to your sincere answer, and to do all in your power to learn more.

Our definitions of righteousness and sin are dependent upon the selection of a target. While you can choose to aim at anything, the ideal target is...the ideal target.

God—the ideal model of human character—is the ideal target. Jesus said.

Can anyone be better than perfect? In God, we find everything worth aiming for: his character, his situation, his joy, and his presence.

Sin means deviating in any way from your sincere understanding of ideal behavior. In other words, sin is deviating in any way from what God would do in your place.

There is an important interplay between the secular and religious views of ideal. The religious have an explicit idea of God, but shy away from overtly attempting to live according to it, deterred by the distance they feel between themselves and God. They fail to realize that their idea of God is not God himself, but merely their estimate of who and how he is. This estimate is much more reachable than God himself (and, as I will argue later, completely within the capability of every person to adhere to). The secular view of ideal tends to feature the kinds of practical, everyday applications that religionists are deservingly ribbed for overlooking, as the Lord and his followers have aptly and repeatedly pointed out (see, for example, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan or his rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 5:20). However, the practicality of the secular ideal tends to be counterbalanced by lower expectations and less stretching than the explicit idea of God.

Until now, everything we have said about the ideal has been couched in the individual’s present understanding. However, God is not limited to what you understand about him. He exists and is how he is independent of anyone’s beliefs about him.

God is at least as good as the amalgamation of the best you can imagine a person being across all situations.

Anyone’s idea of God will necessarily be less than the real thing, because their understanding of him will be less than his understanding of himself until and unless they know everything he does. This does not invalidate any point made so far. In fact, it is an important feature of this line of reasoning, not a flaw.

The target—your idea of God—is not fixed. It is capable of improving in accuracy over time, like a rifle scope can be zeroed through adjustment after noticing where the shots land.

We do not have to speculate about the process of increasing our understanding of God.

The Lord said he was both the path and its fulfillment.

By learning about and becoming like the Son, we learn about and become like the Father. We will return to this later.

Sin can be an omission or a commission.

When you fail to do what you imagine the ideal human would do in your place, you are committing a sin of omission. When you do something other than what you imagine the ideal human would do in your place, you are committing a sin of commission.

When you fail to do what you imagine God would do in your place, you are committing a sin of omission. When you do something other than what you imagine God would do in your place, you are committing a sin of commission.

Good and evil are not static externalities. Good and evil occur inside of you. You decide which to follow, and it is a moment-tomoment process—one that spans every domain.

Every single situation provides an opportunity to conform to or deviate from your model of ideal human character.

The domain of sin spans one’s actions, thoughts, and desires. It applies to the entirety of anything of which you are aware.

Our idea of God ought to be a fine scalpel that operates at the most private and precise level. It ought to guide us in the most subtle of motives and smallest of actions.

Suppose that one could write a list of every sin. After all, the scriptures include various lists of things that the various writers consider sins. For example, Paul wrote.

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to create an exhaustive list of sins.

The impossibility of listing all sins is due to the fact that lists of sins are comprised of rules: specific prescribed behavior in specific situations. Unfortunately, specific situations are too numerous and varied to admit their complete and precise description as rules. A complete list of rules of optimal behavior would necessarily require the whole universe to contain them.

Even if it were possible for someone to name every sin, how do you suppose you would receive such a list? On the list would be many things that you do not believe are sins. What reason would you have to believe them? And where would they come from? Presently, there are many competing lists of alleged sins. Who decides which is right?

Even if it were possible to enumerate the full set of sins, and even if the world agreed on what the complete set of sins was, there would still be massive disagreement on when these sins were or were not taking place.

Assigning a name to a sin does not solve the question of whether or not someone is committing it. After all, the Lord was falsely accused of a great many named sins, including blasphemy (see Matthew 9:3), drunkenness (see Luke 7:34), impropriety with women (see John 4:27), sedition (see John 18:37), and even tax evasion (see Matthew 17:24-27).

What qualifies as a sin is different for different people. One’s conscience is informed by their knowledge.

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. (James 4:17)

The erroneous idea of sin as something you can list makes it easy to incorrectly judge others.

When you see behavior in others that you believe is sinful, there are two possibilities. First, they could actually be sinning, acting against their sincere understanding of God’s character. Second, they could be acting in total compliance to their sincere understanding of God’s character, but their understanding of his character is different than yours. In this case, the question is whether their understanding of God in that scenario is greater than yours.

The reason that people were able to find fault with Jesus during his mortal life, in spite of him being sinless, is that they were judging his actions according to their understanding, not his. His understanding was greater than theirs. He better understood reality itself and the character of the Father. Therefore, his idea of consequences and of what benefited the most differed greatly from theirs. They could have used these differences to learn more about reality or the Father, but instead, they judged him by their lower standards.

When you see what you perceive to be sin in others, you ought to investigate why they are doing what they are doing. You might learn more about God than you previously knew.

Many recoil at the idea of sin because they don’t feel comfortable with someone being able to judge the value of the actions of another. This position is based on two ideas that are equal in their obvious falsehood: that all people are equally good, and all behavior is equally effective.

That value hierarchies exist in all human concepts and actions is obvious. Any who claim that one behavior is equally as good as another are lying, and they know it. Their every action is based on ranking judgment between options available.

It is no major leap to infer that the goodness of one’s ranking can be assessed by objective, rational inquiry. This, too, is an activity engaged in by every human every day, and those who claim it is not possible or appropriate are liars on the grandest scale.

The ability of honest investigation extends beyond personal experience and applies both to the goodness of the outcome sought and the efficacy of the path to obtain it, both of which are choices among many options.

It is abundantly clear that it is possible to accurately judge behavior, but this does not imply that it is easy.

As children, we have no understanding of what God would do in our place. We are not born with a belief in God, let alone a knowledge of how he is. We do not even have the ability to apply the secular definition: we are not born acting consciously. It takes time for us to develop the capacity to think, act, and reflect on those actions. It takes time for us to begin to observe the world and make judgments about what we perceive.

Children cannot sin until or unless they arrive at the ability to understand value. Only then can they choose to act in a way that is less than their understanding of ideal.

Until or unless children arrive at the ability to understand value, they are absolved from the penalties of sin by the atonement of Jesus Christ.

For everyone else, arrival at accountability coincides with their choice to sin.

As all men sin, all men require repentance. However, the sin we are responsible for is our own, not the sin of Adam and Eve.

Too many Christians distort the concept of sin by couching it in the choice of Adam and Eve to break God’s command and eat of the tree of good and evil in the garden of Eden.

The impact of sin on an individual has nothing to do with Adam and Eve outside of providing an environment where you could make your own moral choices and thereby commit sin.

The idea of original sin is a clever way to get people not to accept responsibility for their choices. By reducing any accountability for sin to the fall of Adam and Eve, too many religious leaders have— intentionally or not—excused individuals from recognizing that they are capable of sinning or not sinning. It’s difficult to adopt the idea of accountability for someone else’s choices without feeling a false freedom from accountability for our own. Religions amply teach that a person’s sin lies beyond their power to choose. This is wrong.

We are not held accountable for Adam’s sin in any way except that we all die physically. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ overcomes that penalty. We are held accountable only for our own choices.

Chapter 3: Obedience

Discussions of sinlessness are hindered by broad-brush treatments of the topic. It is important to make a distinction between sinlessness and perfection.

Jesus commanded us to be perfect.

His commandment perplexes many who consider their sinful state and wonder how that could ever be. Their bewilderment is not just due to a lack of faith, but also a conflation of the difference between perfection and the path to it.

In the scriptures, the concept of complete reconciliation to one’s present understanding of God in thought and action is called being “perfect in Christ”.

Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. (Moroni 10:32)

The path to becoming like God is comprised of consistent emulation of how you presently understand him to be, coupled to a successively more accurate understanding of how he is.

The goal of the gospel is to provide a path where men and women can become more like Jesus Christ in character, desire, and action.

The outcome of this process is to become like God is.

However, this outcome is not reached in an instant. As you successively learn and completely adhere to what you presently know, God will make you more perfect.

And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot. (Moroni 10:33)

The idea of total obedience can be overwhelming because people incorrectly think of it as being “perfect” all of the time. Total obedience is simply to do the best you can imagine, all of the time.

Perfect obedience is the same as being “perfect,” because what you are being perfectly obedient to is not perfection itself, but rather your current best understanding of it.

In other words, what God expects of you right now is not to be like he actually is, but to be like you think he is. There is a vast difference between these two ideals.

The reason he does not expect you to presently be like he actually is is because there is a great gulf between how you are and how he is, comprising not only your capability, but also your knowledge.. This gulf is so vast that it isn’t even presently possible for you to understand how he actually is.

Understanding and becoming more like God requires instruction, time, experience, and faith.

Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: (Ephesians 4:13)

The “stature of the fulness of Christ” is a state to which one does not arrive in a day. There is no instantaneous, magical transformation into how Jesus and the Father are. Your obedience to God can and must be perfect, but your understanding of how he is will develop over time.

To maintain plainness, we opt for the word “sinlessness” over the phrase “perfect in Christ,” as the definition of the latter can too easily be hijacked to mean “a magical transformation from a sinner to a saint,” while the former cannot.

Sinlessness is to live in such a way that every action and desire you have, in every moment, aligns completely with your sincere present understanding of the character of God—what you imagine he would do in your place.

Sinlessness is required in order to receive forgiveness of past sins. The scriptures call this justification.

Sinlessness is also required to have eternal life. The scriptures call this sanctification.

John the Revelator described true disciples of God as those who purify themselves, becoming like Jesus by not sinning and by keeping Jesus’ commandments.

Anyone living anything short of sinlessness is destined for hell—to pay the price of their past sins and to eternally contend with the knowledge of what they could have had if they had not turned away from the opportunities for improvement they had in life.

Too many believe that sinlessness isn’t possible. They incorrectly project their own unbelief and lack of conviction onto others. Their choice not to do something doesn’t make it impossible for those who do. Jesus, our example in all things, lived a sinless life.

Though he was born as the Son of God, he was also “in all points tempted like as we are,” but he never sinned, showing that there is nothing about our mortal bodies that precludes us from living without sin.

One of the reasons Jesus had to come to this earth as a man is to prove that it is within the capacity of man to perfectly obey God.

Though Jesus was the only human who kept all of the commandments of which he was aware from birth, many others have followed his example after learning of him.

Many have shown us that sinlessness is possible. Through their example, you are left without excuse.

The highest courts of heaven are filled with “an innumerable number” of those who stopped sinning in life.

We know the names of at least some of these people. Noah, for instance, “was a just man and perfect in his generations, and [he]walked with God.” (Genesis 6:9) The Israelite king “Asa’s heart was perfect with the Lord all his days.” (1 Kings 15:14) The prophet Nephi “kept the commandments from the time” he learned about the Lord (see 2 Nephi 1:24, see also 1 Nephi 5:20). Job “was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” (Job 1:1) Many more men attained to a sinless life, including Adam, Enoch, Abel, Seth, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and John.

Some may be tempted to disregard these examples with some excuse like, “yes, but these are special people. I’m not special, so it’s too hard for me to be sinless.”

Obedience isn’t easier for some people than others. All people have the same capacity for obedience to God. “He fashioneth [all mens’] hearts alike; he considereth all their works.” (Psalm 33:15)

Even the most righteous people have to overcome the same struggles we all face. “Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are...” (James 5:17) The Lord Jesus himself was “...in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) Jesus faced and overcame all potential obstacles in life, demonstrating it can be done. It is possible to become free from sin.

God has given you the power not to sin. You can obey everything God tells you, and you must if you desire to be saved and live with him in heaven.

God has promised that we will never be commanded beyond our capacity to obey.

God makes available to you the knowledge of all commandments which you are presently capable of keeping and only those which you are capable of keeping.

We can be confident that any commandment of which we are aware is within our capacity to obey.

You can keep every commandment of which you know, all of the time. This profound truth ought to lead to significant change in your life. You can move forward with the confidence that any trial you face has been given to you by a loving God with full confidence of your capacity to obey.

As you grow in ability, God will reveal more and different commandments to you. To be perfect in Christ is to maintain obedience to all commandments that you know. It is to be reconciled to the portion of God’s word of which you are aware.

Disciples of Christ understand that God controls their understanding of what is best. You can trust in his knowledge and power to arrange circumstances so that you have the ability to obey and emulate everything about him that you presently understand.

Rest in God, knowing that if he has brought an invitation to improvement to your awareness, he knows you are ready to obey it.

When you believe and lean into this promise, you realize that all of the previous difficulty of obedience is really just the result of your efforts to hold onto things that you know do not accord with your understanding of God while also claiming that you believe him. Choose one: you either believe in God and obey him in all things, or you don’t.

The standard commandments found in the scriptures provide a starting point. If you want to draw closer to God, read the scriptures prayerfully and identify each commandment you are currently disobeying. Repent and obey them. As you do this, God will reveal things in the scriptures that you didn’t previously see. He will also give you additional individual commandments.

Individual commandments can resemble scriptural commandments in scope and form or could be one-time instructions. Custom commandments can range from mundane to deeply profound. No matter how arbitrary it may seem, it is of utmost importance to keep any commandment God gives you or has given you, including what is contained in the scriptures.

As you obey what God has revealed, he will reveal more to you, which you are likewise obligated to obey. If you continue faithful, he will reveal yet more to you.

God will increase the difficulty of each commandment to correspond with your increasing spiritual strength. As he reveals more to you, you must reconcile yourself to him by remaining faithful to the new information he shows you.

If you come to him, he will show you the darkness that remains in you—the ways that you are different from him. There is no darkness in God, and no unclean thing can dwell in his presence. As long as there is darkness in you, you can't be with him. He will reveal to you, line upon line, how you can be more like him or, in other words, how you can more fully take upon you the name of Christ. Eventually, he will reveal to you every law that you need to live to be comfortable in his presence.

You must choose to follow God in each choice, every time. You must deny yourself of all ungodliness, or anything that deviates from the ideal.

If you sin knowingly, you are ineligible for salvation.

If, along the way, you sin—either by disobeying something you previously knew or resisting or rejecting something newly revealed— you remove yourself from his promises, and you must repent and renew your dedication to the Lord.

Two changes happen when you willingly disobey even one commandment.

First, you immediately recover the penalty of your past sins. God’s law requires you to obey all of the commandments you know. If you break even one commandment, you are held accountable as one who does not obey his law.

If you break even one commandment, you are responsible before God for the penalty of all your sins, including those which were previously forgiven.

Second, when you willingly break even one commandment, you lose some of your capacity to discern between right and wrong and regress to a lower level of understanding, making it impossible for you to see and choose as great of outcomes as you could previously.

Those who willingly disobey God will decrease in understanding, making it harder to see paths to improvement and to obtain what they lead to.

You should always obey all of the commandments from God which you know.

Chapter 4: Repentance

The rewards of righteousness are only available to those who are actually righteous. Repentance is the process by which you become righteous.

Repentance means making the changes necessary to bring your thoughts, desires, and actions into complete alignment with your sincere, present understanding of what God would do in your place.

If one had to reduce the definition of repentance to a single synonym, it would be improvement. Repentance requires: 1) perceiving potential improvement and 2) reconciling desires and actions to that improvement.

Potential improvement is typically already perceived in those seeking repentance. Awareness of a difference between the person’s ideal and actual behavior is what motivates the person towards repentance. For those who have already repented, they will perceive potential improvement when they encounter new information.

When you actually believe Jesus, you actually do what he says.

Professing belief in God isn’t sufficient to be saved. You can profess belief in God and still sin.

Jesus can only forgive those who stop sinning.

God’s sacrifice doesn’t make you free to sin—it is meant to make you free from sin. God’s sacrifice makes it possible for bad people to become good people, for sinners to become saints, and for mortals to become more like God.

Desiring forgiveness of your sins is a critical part of repentance, but asking forgiveness is not repentance unless it is coupled to forsaking sin.

It is the sacrifice of Christ—not your petition—that causes the forgiveness of sins. He has already paid the price to forgive any of your sins, on the condition that you repent—or actually change by forsaking sin and fully adopting improved beliefs, desires, and actions.

God has already paid the price for what you have done in the past. What God cares about is what you will do in the future.

God’s purpose is not for us to feel remorse. It is for us to feel joy. You can’t feel joy by feeling sorry for acting in ways that do not bring joy. You must change and start making the choices that lead to joy.

Repentance is not a piecemeal operation. It is not possible to repent of a single sin.

God cannot forgive sins singly; you either obey all of the commandments you know or his sacrifice does not apply to you.

Obedience to God is a binary attribute. You either obey all you know from God, or you don’t. It is not possible to be partially obedient to God. You are either fully submitted to him or you aren’t.

You must bring your life into complete alignment with your sincere understanding of what God would do in your place at all times and in all places.

Those who don’t obey everything they know about God, all the time, cannot go to heaven.

Repentance means total submission to God. Scripturally, the phrase “broken heart and contrite spirit” is used to describe total submission to God.

The Lord explained that this state is defined by complete obedience to him.

A broken heart and contrite spirit is no light thing. It requires total submission, in all things, at all times, and in all places. You really have to fear God more than anything else, and you really have to love God more than anything else.

Too many think that repentance is just trying not to sin. It isn’t. God expects obedience, even unto death. He expects you to obey him at all inconvenience, pain, and suffering.

Many claim that perfect obedience is impossible. When we say something is impossible, we sometimes mean we aren’t sure if it is possible or not. If God has commanded it, it is possible. God does not command us to do things that aren’t within our capability.

A disciple of Christ can never use the excuse of “no one is perfect” to dismiss their willful choice to do less than their actual best. Sinlessness does not require you to do things that are beyond your capacity. It just means you don’t excuse yourself when you are capable of not sinning but choose to sin anyway.

When we say something is impossible, we sometimes mean it’s really difficult. If God has commanded it, it is worthwhile. God doesn’t ask us to do what is not in our best interest.

Most people are quick to make excuses for why their choices are less than their potential.

Capability can be a limiting factor when addressing physical actions: you have limited time, limited money, limited strength, and limited skill. However, when it comes to matters of character, if you can think it, you can do it.

Even with the existence of limits in capability, you must exercise extreme caution in excusing yourself from doing the good you can imagine. While the best you can imagine must certainly be constrained by limits of circumstance, it cannot excuse you from limits of choice. Everyone has to prioritize possibilities because no one has infinite time or resources. When most people refer to “doing their best,” they are actually making excuses for what they know is not a limit of capability, but of comfort.

You will feel responsibility beyond the limits of what others can see and beyond where they would excuse you for doing less than you could. Your conscience won’t let you off as easily as others might. Your conscience will hold you accountable for what is possible, not what is easy or convenient. You will only be free of guilt when you truly do the best you can, subject only to your capability, not your comfort.

If you allow mere discomfort to dictate your obedience to God, how can you inherit the same glory as one who kept the commandments even though it cost his or her life?

The Lord did not mince words when he said.

You cannot allow yourself to choose contrary to God’s will, even if it costs you your life.

God does not disregard “little” or “infrequent” sins. Any deviation whatsoever, no matter by what degree or at what frequency, separates you from God.

God does not average a person’s works. Any sin, and even just one of them, alienates a person from God.

The scriptures include a warning against excusing “little” or “infrequent” sin.

One of the problems with “little” or “infrequent” sins is that they are not obviously indicative of the true depth of their cause. The problem is never just the “little” or “infrequent” sins themselves, but the much larger, much deeper character flaws that make them possible in the first place.

What many don’t realize is that the sins they notice are just the part of the weed above the soil. The truth is that by the time these “small” sins show their head, an extensive root system has already developed underground, leading to both other current sins and the ability to do very bad things under the right circumstances.

Who you are in God’s eyes isn’t just what you do under ideal circumstances. The goal of the gospel is to forge you into a person who does not sin under any circumstances. Whether a person is a sinner or not is determined by how they are at their worst, not at their best.

This life is the time appointed for people to repent.

Death changes your body, and it changes your awareness, but it does not change your character.

Death does not save you from your sins. If you have not reconciled your life to the commandments God has provided to you in this life, you will not be reconciled to God when you are resurrected.

During this life, you can repent at any time. While the massive benefits of doing this sooner rather than later include extra time to learn more about God, qualifying you for the blessings attendant with each increment, the more pressing urgency is to avoid dying in your sins. When you commit a sin—any sin—just once, you bring yourself out of alignment with God, and until you repent, you are at risk of dying out of alignment with God.

Dying in one’s sins relegates an individual to a bitter state of eternal suffering. Having rejected Jesus’ sacrifice by disobeying his commandments to them, these individuals must suffer the penalty of their own sins.

Because this is the state of those who did not repent in this life, it is incredibly important for us to reconcile ourselves to God while in this life.

Those who opt not to repent while in life must inherit an eternal torment.

The circumstances of mortality provide a special opportunity to exercise faith through repentance. After we die, we will be resurrected. As a part of what changes in resurrection, we will gain an awareness far beyond what we have here.

This additional increment of awareness makes it impossible to have the faith we can here. This is why it is not possible to repent after this life and why judgment occurs after resurrection.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to repent while you are still here.

The eternal punishment that awaits the wicked is not arbitrary. It is the natural consequence of the choices the individual has made.

Part of God’s requirement to obtain forgiveness of your past sins is that you forgive all who have offended you.

The Lord said.

If you do not forgive others, you will bring yourself under condemnation.

This condemnation comes because God’s justice requires him to judge you with the same standard with which you judge others.

Chapter 5: Your Conscience is God’s Voice to You

What would you do if, during a conversation with a stranger, you suddenly realized you were speaking with an incognito angel?

This is less far-fetched a scenario than you might imagine. Paul mentioned how, in addition to ministering seen and unseen, angels also minister in disguise as mortal men.

What if, during your conversation, you suddenly realized you were speaking with the Creator of the universe?

This is also a less far-fetched scenario than you might imagine. During his mortal ministry, the Lord had a conversation with a woman who didn’t realize that he was the Messiah she believed would come one day. Consider how Jesus replied to the woman’s expressed longing to hear the voice of the Messiah.

What would it be like if God spoke to you? What would it be like if it happened more than once? What if it happened on a regular basis? As unbelievable as it may seem, this is exactly the case. In fact, not only has God spoken to you, and not only does he do so regularly, he is doing so all the time. At every moment, in every situation, God is speaking to you.

The reason you haven’t realized this until now is because you have only thought of God’s voice in terms of an audible voice from another (such as when your friend speaks to you) or in terms of an internal voice (such as when you talk to yourself). God also speaks in both of these ways, but under more limited circumstances.

The truth is, God does speak in an audible voice. He does so today as he always did, on the same conditions. However, just as he always has, he tends to speak audibly only with those who first listen to his voice through their conscience.

It is a mistake to believe—as most do—that it would be easier to obey God were he to speak plainly to you. Plainness accelerates the progress of the meek, but it does so at the cost of greater condemnation for the disobedient. As Jesus taught in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, those who are unwilling to hear his voice through more subtle channels are unwilling to hear his voice through plainer channels (see Luke 16:19-31). Subtlety is merciful, as it provides a step higher—albeit at a slower pace—with lesser consequences for disobedience than plainness.

Theophanies do occur, but you need not wait for some theophany— your conscience is God’s voice to you, and he is already speaking to you.

God’s primary voice to you is through your conscience. Your conscience is God’s voice to you. It is just as authoritative, just as right, and just as real as if he were to speak in any other way; the only difference is how readily you ignore it.

Some people think that God’s voice is a rare thing and that he only speaks to special people. These ideas couldn’t be further from the truth.

It is through the human conscience that God speaks to all people, all the time.

God’s voice is not something that only comes to special people. God speaks to all people, everywhere, through their conscience.

The Lord said that he is constantly attempting to communicate with us, and any perceived break in this communication is due to our response.

Through your conscience, God is trying to communicate with you every minute of every day. In all that you experience, God is attempting to speak with you and teach you through your conscience.

If God’s voice comes to you at all times and in all places through your conscience, why doesn’t anyone already know this?

There are consequences that activate whenever God reveals truth to or through any individual. The positive consequences that co-occur with any revelation of truth are the benefits of living according to what is revealed. The negative consequences come when people resist or reject what is revealed. They are equal and opposite in proportion to the benefits of heeding the revealed truth.

In the case of something so powerful as knowing that your conscience is God’s voice to you, there are massive consequences that would significantly hurt people not ready to hear this truth. Having arrived at the end times, it is necessary for these things to be revealed plainly. Accelerated progress is needed to prepare people for what is soon to come.

Knowing that your conscience is God’s voice to you makes you accountable for disobeying a direct revelation from God whenever you disobey your conscience—something that, until reading this, you probably thought only possible for someone who experienced some miraculous theophany. But that is backwards—miraculous manifestations of God tend to come to those who already know and follow his still, small voice, not those who have consistently rebelled against it.

Consider the implications of the threshold of revelation being a lot lower than you probably thought previously. God is speaking to you at all times through your conscience, and you disobey your conscience regularly. You are getting revelations all the time!

Most people wonder why God doesn’t send them angels or speak to them with an audible voice. How could he, when you so regularly and repeatedly ignore his voice to you through your conscience? How could he send more?

Your conscience is your model of how God is. The conscience is given to each person by God as a mechanism of characterizing him based on reflections of what you have seen and experienced so far in life. Your idea of God in any moment is comprised of the composite of every ideal human behavior you have witnessed or imagined to that point, subject to your present understanding.

Your model of God is only as good as what you do with it. What kinds of questions do you ask, how often, and what do you do with the answer?

Unfortunately, almost all people treat the conscience as something that only gets their attention when it interrupts the regularly scheduled programming in their mind—much like a compass that stays in a backpack until you are lost. A compass is of little use if you keep it in your pack, and the consequences of doing so can be disastrous.

Most people have not explicitly thought about what their conscience is. They would not be able to say “my conscience is the amalgamation of the best of humanity I’ve ever believed could exist,” although it is. To most, it is merely an implicit, emotional resource that makes them feel guilty when they do less than their best.

Without explicitly understanding what your conscience is, you will not likely make the most of it. You will fail to update it as often as you otherwise would when seeing examples of aspects of human character that exceed what you previously thought possible. You are also unlikely to come to the important conclusion that the perception of an aspect of ideal character in others means it is possible for you to exercise the same.

Your conscience is a guidance system that will show you the way towards God, as far as you presently understand him, as often as you “look” at it. It is your current model of the ideal—not just rules of ideal behavior, but also ideal outcomes and ideal character. It is how he represents to you what he would do in your place, given your degree of understanding of his character. It can show you all things you should do in order to be like how you imagine God to be. In this way, you can use the idealized character portrayed by your conscience to articulate your ideal potential self.

As a model, your conscience can be queried. You can ask yourself questions and, inasmuch as you are deeply honest, God will answer you through your conscience: What could I do better? Am I doing everything I can to get what I say I want? Do I treat people as well as I could? What would make me stronger? Am I doing it? Do I willingly engage in things that make me weaker? Am I doing the best in all I do, all the time?

Many people unnecessarily wrestle with how to determine what is right and wrong. God has described that what is from him is good.

It is easy to determine what is good. The answer is “as plain, that ye may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night.” (Moroni 7:15)

Clearly, any option that is worse than any other option is not good. What is good is what is best. The key to determining what is right is the simple question: what leads to the best outcomes?

What is right is what is best, and what is best is what is right. What is good is what is best. What yields the greatest improvement? What will make you the strongest? The most independent? The wisest? The most honorable? The most capable of helping others?

Improvement as the key to recognizing the voice of God is so plain that it is compared in the scriptures to a compass.

Paul understood conscience-driven judgment. Consider these scriptures.

Right and wrong are determined through consequence. Guilt is caused by choosing less than your best option. That which makes one feel guilty is wrong. Anything that results in a net degradation or weakening of you or others is wrong. Anything that brings you into its power makes you weaker. Anything that does not serve its intended purpose is necessarily less well-suited than what does.

The conscience will lead to all improvement, incrementally, according to your present understanding.

In scripture, when describing what is good, God intentionally leaves out the details, because everyone’s understanding and circumstances are individual.

You don’t need a perfect understanding of all things to make correct choices. Since our progression is a pathway of successive improvements, you need only know the next step in order to be completely aligned with the path. You don't need to know the exact brightness of the sun to recognize it as much brighter than a candle.

We don't need to perceive the complete value in things in order to progress. We just need to perceive greater value in the next step than in our present state.

Any improvement you can imagine is the precise road from where you are to a better place. All improvement leads to God, and you can't get to God except through all improvement. It is as if we are all climbing a mountain. While there are many paths by which you can ascend, the principle thing is that you ascend, and the defining quality is ascent. So long as you are improving, you are headed upward.

Your perception of possible improvement is both God’s invitation for you to improve and his certification that you are capable of doing so.

We have the tremendous promise in scripture that you can obey any commandment which you can perceive.

Put into more general language understandable to someone who isn’t religious, you are capable of every increment of human character you can perceive.

Your realization of what is best is God’s call to you to do it.

God makes it possible for you to do everything you can imagine he would do in your place.

God doesn’t just give instructions through the conscience on certain things. He uses this channel to instruct us in all things.

Your conscience is not just an idea of right and wrong. Your conscience is your composite understanding of all things, including the relationship between cause and effect in all things and including your sense of value in all things.

The conscience provides a lens through which the world can be viewed with instructions from God, in much the same way a director’s commentary can be dubbed over a movie. The conscience can turn any situation in life into a rich learning experience with God.

The universal application of the conscience to any situation makes it of greater value than static commandments from God, which are necessarily limited to the circumstances in which they apply.

Static commandments do not cover every situation. They only apply to the specific situation for which they are given. For example, God’s commandment for the male posterity of Abraham to be circumcised on the eighth day of their lives does not prescribe what should be done for all others on the eighth day of their lives, nor does it describe what Abraham’s children should do for the first seven days of life.

Commandments do not cover every degree of understanding. For example, Jesus gave speeches where he reviewed the law of Moses and revealed an improved way of acting for those who had greater understanding (see, for example, Matthew 5:21-47).

Commandments do not tell us all things that we should do. They provide coverage of some things in some situations. How can we know God’s will outside of those situations? Only through our conscience, which provides a flowing channel for guidance specific to any situation in which and any level of understanding with which we find ourselves.

A clear conscience is worth any price. It is the key to peace of mind, contentment, and freedom from guilt.

You can have a clear conscience, all the time. It is possible to be completely and permanently free from guilt. Just men made perfect, like Paul, lived in this condition.

Imagine the peace of having a clear conscience.

Imagine the courage you would have in attempting the difficult, knowing that you are in God’s grace.

Imagine the strength you would have in trials, trusting fully that everything that happens to you is given as a gift from God to propel you towards greater things.

Imagine having an unshakeable confidence that God hears and answers your prayers.

These are just some of the blessings of having a clear conscience. The importance of maintaining a clear conscience stretches beyond how you feel in life. It also includes what you perceive of life.

Your conscience is not just the seat of right and wrong, but also the seat of your understanding. The conscience is the window through which you will see the world, and as such it is worth keeping clean.

Say what you believe; believe what you say. Do what you believe; believe what you do. Think about what you believe; believe what you think about.

Have the courage to say what you know you believe, even though you know other people do not believe it and will hate you for saying it. Have the courage to do what you believe, even though you know other people will not do it and will hate you for doing it. Have the courage to think what you believe, even though it will require you to challenge old thoughts and rise to new ideas.

Listen to what you say, and don’t say what you don’t like hearing yourself say. Watch what you do, and don’t do what you don’t like seeing yourself do. Pay attention to what you think about, and don’t think about what you don’t like thinking of yourself thinking about.

The price of a clear conscience is to always obey your conscience, all the time. If you haven’t obeyed your conscience, now is the time to start. Just as soon as you start living according to it, you can start having the benefits of doing so.

Your conscience is incremental. As you obey your conscience, it grows.

Every choice you make in accordance with your conscience will make the next right choice more obvious.

As you live according to your understanding, your understanding will grow. As you do what you know, you will know more than you did before.

Every increment of understanding of and obedience to God’s commandments will improve the capacity of your conscience.

God’s knowledge surpasses any person’s. At any time, it is possible to know more than you do presently. At any time, it is possible to gain an improved understanding of good and evil, based on new or different knowledge than you had before.

Your idea of who Jesus was and is will change over time as you learn more about him. This will change your conscience: your value of things will change, and your consideration of what is good and what is evil will change. If these things don’t change, it is safe to say you aren’t learning more about God.

As you learn more and different commandments from God, your conscience will change—it will expand to broader application and advance to deeper accuracy. When you learn new commandments from God, or learn things that change your previous understanding of his commandments, the model of God provided in the form of your conscience becomes more accurate and comprehends a greater increment of reality.

The only limit to the growth of your conscience (and your relationship with God) is your willingness to obey what you already have and your effort in obtaining more.

As you do all you can to learn more, and as you live everything you already know, God will arrange the circumstances for you to be taught more.

New ideas will be brought about by your internal reasoning with or without the intervention of external experiences, which are likely to include interaction with other humans. Some of these humans will have a greater understanding of right and wrong than you; some will have a lesser understanding. Of the former, some will be operating under the explicit charge of ministering in the name of Christ, and some will not.

No matter a person’s circumstances, God’s invitations to improvement via the conscience provide the next rung in the ladder to heaven, giving the individual all they need to reach the following rung. Each step in the ladder to heaven consists of the embodiment of an improved and expanded idea of right and wrong.

When you are interested in the truth, you will both perceive and heed your conscience. The Lord said: “...Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” (John 18:37) He said: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)

Do not underestimate the degree of change that can occur in a person’s character through constant obedience to their conscience. The character of a person can constantly improve to the point of being unrecognizable: the most selfish person can become deeply loving; the greatest fool can become the wisest of people; the most depraved person can transform into a person of tremendous virtue. God is a god of miracles, and he will show anyone who dares to seek and follow him that he has all power to transform men and women into his righteous and noble sons and daughters.

When you live in accordance with what you presently understand, you will come to understand more. When you knowingly live out of accord with your present understanding, you will understand less.

As you disobey your conscience, it attenuates. Every choice you make contrary to your conscience will make it harder to make the next correct choice.

God’s light, which actuates your understanding, will not stay with you if you willingly disobey your conscience.

Those who disobey God’s voice distance themselves from God. They will gradually lose the knowledge they have, becoming less and less like him.

When you do what you believe to be right, your ability to perceive what is right and wrong will improve. When you do what you believe to be wrong, your ability to perceive what is right and wrong will degrade.

As you live contrary to your understanding, your understanding will diminish. As you act against what you know, you will know less than you did before, and you will not perceive the loss.

Do not underestimate the degree of change that can occur in a person’s character through seemingly small disobedience to their conscience. The character of a person can quickly degrade to being unrecognizable: the closest friend or family member can become a bitter enemy; the wisest of people can become the greatest of fools; the kindest person can become shockingly violent; the most virtuous can become depraved. In fact, the more noble the person, the more evil they will become through disobedience to God.

Chapter 6: The Deep Things of the Heart

Repentance is not something that is done some or even most of the time. It’s an all or nothing affair.

While the big, often public changes are an absolutely essential part of repentance, reconciling to your conscience in deep, private ways is even more important.

The Lord explained that our deep motivations are the source of the larger, external, more noticeable sins.

All good outcomes are received commensurate with how continuously and deeply honest you are. All good outcomes can only come to the degree that you yield your thoughts, actions, and words to what you believe is best.

You can’t offend your conscience without harming yourself. All good outcomes flow through your conscience.

We must avoid the temptation to excuse ourselves for our sins.

Most supposed Christians believe that Jesus forgives and saves everyone who asks.

It is astonishing to me that anyone who proclaims to believe in Jesus would believe this statement, which is completely opposite to everything he taught.

To be forgiven, one must stop doing what they know is wrong and do what they know is right, all the time, no exceptions. To be saved, one must learn and do what is necessary to become like God is, meaning to know what he knows, to do as he does, and to desire what he desires.

If you believe in Jesus, you will act, think, and desire as he did and does. If you do not act, think, and desire as he did and does, you do not believe in him.

If and only if you become the person he teaches you to be will he save you. This is how he saves you.

You should ask yourself.

What do you say you want? What do you actually want? What do you do?

How well do these three things align? What changes could you make so that they align perfectly?

One flavor of the “it is ok to sin” doctrine is the idea that your best is somehow less than total obedience to God. You will find this belief in the following common sayings.

“We try, but we will never be like Jesus.” “God just needs our best; he does the rest.” “God understands.” “That's what the atonement is for.”

Those who believe that God can tolerate sin in the least degree ignore his word: “the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.” (Alma 45:16) Those who knowingly engage in sin are cut off from God’s presence. Even partial sin leads to complete condemnation, according to God’s word.

God cannot save sinners in their sins. He can only save sinners from their sins.

If your best is less than your understanding of the ideal, you are excusing yourself for sin. You will not have peace of mind or forgiveness in this life or the one that follows.

Another flavor of “it is ok to sin” is found in the excuse of occasional sin.

Salvation is not about sinning less. It is about not sinning at all.

Giving control to your conscience is not a part-time decision. There are no breaks.

You must actively choose to submit yourself in all things to your conscience, and you must continuously reaffirm this choice at all times, and in all places, for as long as you live.

Another flavor of “its ok to sin” is that some sins are small and, therefore, harmless.

There is no such thing as a little sin. Even small things form steps on paths to great outcomes.

You have no way of telling which “little” infraction is actually a critical step away from something of great value to you.

God weighs so-called little sins quite heavily.

We must always remember that the little things are the big things. Our conscience must be obeyed, even in and especially in the smallest of things.

Your conscience includes accountability for all the little things that no one else knows about. Your conscience will not excuse you for deviating in the least from your true best, even if everyone around you thinks the world of you. Your conscience will not excuse you for deviating from your ideal, even in ways where no one else will ever know.

For example, it is easy to give the impression that you care about other people when others are watching you. Some people say all the right things and participate in charitable giving, but don’t actually care very much about anyone else. As soon as it is inconvenient to help others, they stop. When their conscience prompts them to do something that will cause others to judge them poorly, or when it costs them something they want, they will ignore the needs of others.

This ought not to be so.

Your conscience will not give you a pass when you knowingly do less than your best, even in the deepest, most hidden parts of your desires and acts.

There is nothing that is hidden with God.

Seeking deep to hide your counsel from the Lord is to lie to yourself in the motives for your actions or the actions themselves.

Dishonesty is a special sin that is worth specific attention. It’s a sin we treat differently than the rest, in that it is generally regarded as too offensive to call someone a liar, even if they indisputably are, or to call someone out for lying, even when they obviously are. Interestingly, no one likes being called a liar, even people who love lying.

In today’s deeply dishonest culture, where lies are professed as if they were religious mantras, critical thinking capability has become a rare jewel. The beliefs, words, and actions of the majority are so obviously false that a child could see through them—if you could find one who has not already been brainwashed by their parents, peers, or public schools.

We tend to treat dishonesty as most view drinking alcohol—there is no harm as long as you don’t do it too often. It is a mistake to assume that dishonesty is a matter of frequency. In reality, it is more like feces’ ability to contaminate clean water: exactly how much are you comfortable drinking?

Exactly how much dishonesty does it take before a person is a liar? Instead of calculating in terms of how often you need to drink before you are an alcoholic, we ought be thinking in terms of how many times you need to rape someone before you are a rapist.

Dishonesty, no matter how infrequent, will permanently prevent a person from encountering the most valuable outcomes in life. To claim otherwise is to claim that what you do in life doesn’t impact the outcomes you receive. To claim that occasional dishonesty does no harm is to believe that your actions don’t matter. They do.

Dishonesty is sold as something that has the power to make life better for yourself or others. This is itself a lie.

Everything we say, do, or think while knowing it is not true makes it harder for others to know, do, or say what is true. Everything.

Everything we say, do, or think while knowing it is not true makes it harder for us to know, do, or say what is true. Everything.

Lying causes harm to yourself and others. Your dishonesty will make it harder for others to believe you, and harder for you to believe other people.

When it becomes frequent, dishonesty has a shocking ability to render someone totally devoid of decency and common sense, and can quickly convert what was a normal person into someone capable of the most horrendous atrocities.

When we think of great harm, we think of overtly evil people-those who in a truly malevolent fashion derive satisfaction from hurting people. But these people are not responsible for any substantial amount of evil in this world. Left to themselves, their influence does not reach far before good people restrain them. In order to achieve any measurable evil, these people require many henchmen who are willing to tolerate or support them. It is the supporting people—people who are, in their minds, doing far less harm than the overtly malevolent— that cause the greatest harm in the world.

It has been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whether or not this is true, a similar phrase would be, which is that the road to hell is paved with people who willingly did what they knew was wrong under the first blush of opposition. These are people who cracked under the pressure of losing their job, or disappointing their inlaws, or being ridiculed by their peers. These are the people who are “just doing their job,” or who put up their arms and say “what else could I do? I'm only human.”

If it were possible to sin without incurring lasting effects on your conscience, these people would not be such a threat to the world. But it isn't. Everything conscience-related is cumulative. You cannot deviate in the least from what you know is right without reducing your ability to do or even see what is right in the future.

The road these people willingly descend is a road of enslavement. They accept lightweight cords of bondage, thinking it is easy to break them if the need arises, without realizing that these cords will grow in strength without them noticing (see 2 Nephi 26:22).

One reason so many people think it is ok to sin is that this is what they hear at church.

What church do you know of that does not teach that you can sin a little and still be saved? When a church teaches an idea that is antichrist, they make it so that anyone who will actually believe Jesus must first disavow the church’s dogma. If that church makes it so that those who disavow that idea are disavowed by the church (by excommunication, shunning, silencing, or even a polite invitation to not come back), that church is itself antichrist.

One need not search widely for an answer to the question “why are modern Christians so different from ancient ones in their experiences in life and with God?” The answer is very simple: their religion is extremely different. If you want to experience what ancient Saints did, you need to live the same way they did. You need to understand that total submission to what is right, all the time, is the price of entry to God’s kingdom and that his voice inside of you via your conscience is the source of that instruction.

One reason organized religion is so fruitless and dead is because it is filled with lay people and leaders alike who are liars. They have not entered into “the gate” by deciding to only do what is right. In fact, they all teach that this is impossible.

Too many Christians think that obedience to their denomination’s list of rules causes God to ignore their choice to disobey their conscience on everything else. This is as false as it is pernicious. As Isaiah described.

Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men: (Isaiah 29:13)

The opposite of the precept of men is the conscience. The conscience supersedes fixed rules, especially when these rules are made by men.

God does not want us to worship him only through prescribed and rote rituals. The Lord condemned the religious leaders of his time for focusing on the least important things while neglecting the more important things.

You must absolutely promote your conscience to the highest authority and motivator in your life.

The Lord said.

He was not making a polite suggestion.

Adjusting to the fact that God has instructions for you on all things, and that you are responsible for keeping them, is quite a jump.

Most professed belief in God does not come through the believer’s conscience, but rather in the form of ideas blindly accepted from another who likewise lacks any evidence for what they believe. This kind of belief not only harms the holder—doubly harming them by keeping them from the truth while convincing them they already have it—but also does great damage to those who would come to believe in Jesus if they were not surrounded by so many obviously fake Christians.

Recall that your conscience is informed by the sum total of your experiences: by your reflections on your observations. God works through your understanding. If you are blindly obeying some instruction from some person, you have not undertaken the effort necessary to “ask” God about what it is he wants you to do about it. It is in your understanding of what is said or done, and not in what is said and done itself, that he will lead and guide you personally.

While it is true that God works through his servants (and everyone and everything else in creation, for that matter), he does not do so independent of himself. He retains all dominion in all truth, and nothing is valuable outside of what comes from him.

One of many outcomes that follow from this is that everything he expects of you will flow through your conscience.

As an example of how God’s personal instructions work, consider what the Lord said after asking Peter who he thought he was.

While everyone had an opinion of who Jesus was, the Lord asked Peter what he thought. While Peter had witnessed the same actions and words of Jesus as others had, his interpretation was his own. The Lord knew that Peter’s belief was the result of Peter’s choice to submit to his honest understanding of what he had experienced with Jesus. The Lord said that God’s work through an individual's understanding was the rock on which he would build his church—it was the very means he would use to build and administer his kingdom.

Jesus did not impose his own knowledge onto Peter, but rather worked persuasively through Peter’s own understanding. If the teachings of Jesus Christ himself were not worthy of bypassing the individual’s understanding, quickened by the Father, does any preacher or pastor or prophet have any right to dictate to you what you should or shouldn’t do without first giving you reasons sufficiently persuasive to make the choice yourself?

It is possible to obey an alleged commandment from God without reflecting on whether it truly is from God. As long as you operate according to anything but your conscience, you are contrary to God.

Traditions and commandments of men are not an alternate path to God. They will keep you from him, because there is no other way to him except through what he tells you in your mind and in your heart.

Hardly anyone in this world reconciles themselves to their conscience. Most people struggle even with the far easier task of reconciling to a fixed set of commandments. It is much harder to submit to one’s conscience in all things, with the understanding that this is God’s voice to you.

It is much easier to keep all or nothing rules than it is to actively apply principles. It is easier to always or never do something than it is to do it only when it benefits.

It is easier to make a one-time sacrifice than it is to make a sacrifice continually. When we make a one-time sacrifice—whether by obeying a fixed list of commandments or by making one big decision—we are dealing in the realm of what is completely known and expected. We only have to decide once, and what is right is obvious.

When we submit to continuous sacrifice, we see that everything is a case-by-case basis, that the unexpected lies around every corner, and that we can never let our guard down, take it easy, or rationalize sin “just this once.” The case-by-case nature of principles provides unlimited opportunity to be dishonest in small ways, rationalizing almost anything the person might want to do while pretending to still keep the principle.

The rich young ruler thought he wanted to follow God, but he was under the false understanding that he could do so merely by obeying a list of commandments. Jesus tested his willingness to make a one-time sacrifice by telling him to sell all he had and give it to the poor. He also invited him to make the continuous sacrifice of leaving his former life to follow Jesus full-time. The man failed both tests.

Those who are not willing to give everything in a one-time sacrifice--including all their wealth and even their lives--are without question unwilling to follow Jesus full-time. It is harder to obey Jesus daily than it is to obey him once.

Far too many people include concern for what others may think when considering their obedience to God. It is impossible to outsource your conscience to another.

What you do externally needs to be driven internally. You are not a slave to someone else’s script. You are not playing a role that has been given to you.

No matter your surroundings or circumstances, you can and must actively direct your life according to the dictates of your internal compass. No one else’s opinion of you will affect whether your conscience delivers to you unshakable peace of mind or inescapable guilt.

How you perform in relation to other people is also irrelevant. You are not in competition with anyone else. You are in competition with yourself. Will you do what you believe to be right, at all times and in all places?

Your reputation according to your religious leader, parent, spouse, or child does not indicate your standing with God. If anything, the approbation of others suggests you are contrary to God.

Jesus frequently commended people considered unworthy by the public. He also promised that those who follow him will be hated by others to the degree that they are like he is.

Not only does it not matter what others think about the way you direct yourself in obedience to God, your choice to follow God at all times and in all places is guaranteed to put you at odds with all other people who know and obey him less than you.

It doesn’t matter what other people think about you. Trusting in anyone else is placing the arm of the flesh before God. It is idolatry. It is leaning on a broken reed.

Chapter 7: Baptism unto Repentance

Many faiths practice some sort of baptism. Rather than lay out the many variations of beliefs and make lengthy appeals to the scriptures to refute errors where they exist, this chapter will plainly describe baptism. The reader is invited to search the scriptures to compare the beliefs of any sect to what God has said on the subject.

Baptism is a promise to God that you will live according to your sincere understanding of God in all things.

This means to live in accordance with your conscience, or your view of the ideal human, in all things, at all costs, until you die.

Baptism is a commandment, and it is required for salvation.

The Lord himself was baptized during his mortal ministry, showing the world that it is a requirement.

The Lord said we are to follow his example: [TODOOO]

Baptism is an essential part of repentance. You can’t repent completely without being baptized.

In order to be baptized, a person must willingly decide to follow God at all costs. If they are not willing to do what they sincerely view to be the ideal, in all situations, they are not prepared to be baptized.

As should be obvious, children should not be baptized unless they are mature enough to make an independent commitment to follow God at all costs (see Moroni 8). Babies are obviously incapable of making a covenant with God, but even if they were, there would be no point. Because they are unable to make moral decisions, they are incapable of sin, and because the atonement of Jesus Christ pays the price of the sin of Adam, young children are in no need of repentance. It greatly displeases God when people who profess belief in him baptize little children, because it demonstrates an abject ignorance of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the purpose of this life.

Baptism is a “covenant with God that ye should be obedient unto the end of your lives.” (Mosiah 5:8) If you knowingly break a commandment, you have broken the covenant of baptism, and you are in willful rebellion against God. You must repent again and renew your commitment to God. If you have broken your promise to God and have willingly sinned, you should be rebaptized.

If being rebaptized every time you sin seems excessive, you still do not understand the value of what is offered to you by God through baptism, nor the cost the Lord has paid to offer you forgiveness of your sins. Sinning again once God has forgiven you is serious. If it seems inconvenient or embarrassing to be rebaptized, you are valuing your pride over his sacrifice.

If you are not prepared to keep God’s commandments, maybe you should consider waiting to be baptized until you are serious about the commitment you are making.

In the Lord’s own words, this is how his servants are to baptize.

Those performing baptism ought to qualify for baptism themselves by having completely repented of their sins and ought to feel comfortable declaring that they have “authority given [them] of Jesus Christ.”

This is not a light thing. There aren’t many on the planet at the time of this publication who can honestly say this. This will change shortly.

In the meantime, those without access to a servant of God who is able to baptize them should not be disheartened. Those whose diligent efforts to find a person through whom to receive baptism have not yet been successful should pray to God and wait upon him until their desires are fulfilled while keeping all of God’s commandments as far as they know them (see Mosiah 21:32-35).

There is a lot more that could be taught about baptism, but it is outside the scope of this book. These things will be elaborated on in another volume that delves more deeply into the ministry of men.

Chapter 8: Spiritual Rebirth

Many people speak of being born again, referring to a decision to believe in God’s existence. What the scriptural authors refer to with the phrase is something that far exceeds a mere profession of belief in God’s existence. As James explained, the difference between a devil and a disciple of Christ is not belief in God’s existence, but in obedience to his word.

Many others believe that the process of being born again magically changes you from someone who desires to sin to someone who does not. In reality, as we will see, this is a reversal of cause and effect. It is the choice to not sin again that yields the result of being born again, not the reverse.

Unfortunately, few people at present have experienced the full meaning of being born again. Some have been taught what spiritual rebirth is and what it takes and have not experienced it simply because they are unwilling to do what is required to experience it, but most people have failed to experience it only because they have never been correctly taught what it means and what it takes.

The default state of a person is to passively float through life, not really contemplating what you do or why you do it, animalistically seeking for what feels good right now instead of what is best for you and everyone else in the long-term. This is human nature: it is what a person will be like unless they actively seek to be different.

Spiritual rebirth occurs when you decide to abandon your previous guidance system—usually a mix of doing whatever feels good right now with a sprinkle of occasional long-term optimal decisions—for a model where all decisions are made according to your understanding of what God would do in your place.

When you choose to submit to God in all things, you are forgiven of your past sins, or justified. Through accepting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, you are as if you’ve never sinned, and you are worthy of the receipt of the Holy Ghost, which can teach you much more about God, yourself, and life.

Choosing to follow God means to submit to him in all things, even until death, substituting how you think he would think and feel about your situation in place of how you think and feel about it. It means to be “...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) or to do all things God commands and to suffer all scenarios he might lead you to and through.

This submission is so total that it is described as having a “broken heart and a contrite spirit”.

A broken heart and a contrite spirit requires that you actually do what you understand to be God’s will, no matter what it costs you.

Total submission to God necessarily includes.

Total cessation of all things contrary to your understanding of what God would do in your place. Total emulation of all things according to your understanding of what God would do in your place. Baptism, which is one of God’s commandments, in demonstration of your commitment to keep all his commandments.

The totality of surrender involved in this decision causes fear in most who consider it. Rather than fear what you might miss out on by following God, it’s good to honestly reconcile yourself to the fact that God knows more about what will lead you to lasting happiness than you do, and he cares more about you obtaining it than you do. There is no reason not to trust him more than you trust yourself.

Since sin means anything less than your best, the preceding scripture is not just a warning to avoid hellfire and brimstone, but an invitation to truly pursue the best outcomes you can in life, in the only way one can: by submitting to God and following his instructions unfailingly for the rest of your life.

Just like a baby being born out of their prenatal habitation, a person who is born again has a completely different view on and motivation toward the world than they had before.

It is as if all things are new, because you interpret everything you perceive differently than you did, and everything you do is done for different reasons, even when the actions stay the same.

You reset your mindset; you reset your understanding of how life works, and you reset your view of yourself.

To be born again is to think and act intentionally as you believe God would in your place.

You think differently, you act differently, and you desire differently. To be born again is to adopt as your motive the benefit of the world, just as Jesus would do, seeking the welfare of all people before your own.

To be born again is to live in a constant state of considering and doing what is best—to constantly learn more about what is best.

To be born again is to decide based on reasons, not feelings. It is to learn to act, instead of react—to choose instead of passively float.

To be born again is to learn to see what could be with the eye of faith, not just what is immediately apparent with the eye of the flesh.

To be born again is to be motivated and actuated by your conscience, not your fleshy desires.

To be born again is to submit fully to the contemplation of, increased understanding of, and performance of perfection—so far as you understand it—in all things.

You accept Jesus Christ as your father and as the motivation and instruction for all you do.

You become spiritually-minded: you choose to believe that everything about God is good, you couch your perception of reality in your understanding of God, and you couch your understanding of God in your perception of reality. You reach to reconcile every aspect of your life to what you imagine God might think about it. You flip from being acted upon to being the one who acts. You actively curate your own perception and drive your own reality. You seek to bring what you see in the spirit into physical reality instead of allowing your spirit to be subject to physical reality.

There are many important things to know about the Holy Ghost that are beyond the scope of this book.

For the purposes of the topic of repentance, the key point to understand is that the Holy Ghost is an information channel through which God teaches people more about himself, themselves, and every other aspect of reality.

What God can teach you through the Holy Ghost cannot be compared with what can be received by a person in their default state.

God is available to all people through the Holy Ghost, but not all people qualify themselves equally for this privilege.

The natural state of man is contrary to the Holy Ghost.

As a person rebels against the increment of conscience they have naturally, they disqualify themselves from additional information through the Holy Ghost.

Whenever people do less than their best, they attenuate the information flow through the Holy Ghost towards the minimal increment available to all people.

Repentance and baptism leverage the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to restore the connection between an individual and God through the Holy Ghost through forgiveness of past sins. When this happens, the moment it happens is called the baptism of fire, because the person is suddenly exposed to a significantly increased increment of God’s intelligence, purging away everything that can only exist in the darkness of one’s previous ignorance.

This connection is required in order for a person to learn sufficiently about God to gain greater joy through becoming like him.

Justification is an event. Sanctification is a process. In the scriptures, justification is likened to entering a gate, and sanctification is like walking a path.

It’s very important that you realize that your understanding of God at the outset of the path will not remain the same as you progress in the path.

As you walk the path, God will teach you more about himself.

Surrendering to God doesn’t just mean you agree to your present understanding of him, but that you will continue to obey him as he teaches you more about himself, yourself, and the world he created. Commonly, people make the mistake of agreeing to enter the path but not to progress onward. They limit God to their original understanding of him—an understanding that is severely incomplete and, in many ways, incorrect. Remember, anyone’s starting understanding of God is at best devoid of all the lessons about him that can only be learned through the Holy Ghost. If you limit your future obedience to your present understanding, you are necessarily limiting your progress with God to your present limited understanding of him.

Don’t expect God to conform to your ideas about him or about reality. Don’t limit him to fulfilling your desires in the ways you imagine them being fulfilled. Those who limit what they will do for God limit what God can do for them. If you limit him in any way by resisting or refusing his invitations to you, those limits will translate to poorer outcomes than you otherwise would have had access to.

A significant portion of what he will teach you along the way is how difficult and dark much of life is. As he reveals more of reality to you, you will have to decide whether or not you still want to obey him, even as it requires more faith and more trust in him to do so.

Those who faithfully continue in this path until they die will obtain eternal life.

Unfortunately, very few choose to enter into and walk along this path.

The intended process in life is that we conform ourselves to our initial understanding of God, qualifying for the receipt of the Holy Ghost, then progress onward as he teaches us more about himself through the Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost is the necessary mechanism to convey the fullness of information about Jesus’ character, which is in turn necessary for us to emulate his example in our own character.

There are many scriptures that indicate that being born again is a requirement for salvation. For example.

Why is this experience essential? Like everything else God commands, it is not an arbitrary requirement. There is an absolute limit in the growth a person can experience without the Holy Ghost, and the only way to receive the Holy Ghost is through being born again.

Though the difference is impossible to comprehend without experiencing it, understand that human understanding augmented and actuated by God’s influence is incomprehensibly better than the natural understanding. As Jesus said, it is necessary for a person to be born again to “see” and to “enter into” the kingdom of God.

To “see the kingdom of God” is to perceive and understand more of God’s will. The natural man cannot see or understand what the bornagain son or daughter of God can.

To “enter into the kingdom of God” is to take a position in the kingdom with respect to other people—to serve those with less understanding of God than you have and to receive service from those with more understanding than you. This is beyond the scope of this book, but will be discussed in a future book dealing with the ministry of men in God’s kingdom.

Being born again is referred to as a “mighty change of heart.” There are actually multiple changes that co-occur in this event, and while they are indeed mighty, it is important to understand them individually.

Much of the confusion about being born again is related to misunderstandings about what the individual does, what God does, and in what order.

In general, the individual is responsible for much more in the process than what most understand. This is, in general, why so few people have truly been born again. They are waiting for God to do what he has never said he would do, contrary to what he has said we must first do.

In order to be born again, you must first decide to totally trust in God. Trust in God is not something that God gives you. It is something you choose to believe based on the only honest response to what he has done for you and how he is.

Trust in God typically comes through your response to the testimony of those who have tested God’s trustworthiness through enduring significant affliction. As they encounter God’s compensatory justice at the conclusion of their trial, they are empowered to bear testimony of God’s trustworthiness commensurate with the difficulty they have endured. The scriptures are full of such testimonies. Here is one.

After first trusting him, those who are willing to experiment on the testimony of those who have tested God’s trustworthiness will obtain their own testimony through being born again.

[TODOOO:look_below]

In order to be born again, you must forsake every sin of which you are aware. God will not magically transform you into a person who doesn’t sin anymore. You have to actually choose to obey him.

In order to be born again, you have to desire to do everything that God tells you to do.

Many people seek this mighty change of heart as a way to force them to stop desiring things they know to be against God’s will. It is no surprise that these people have not yet experienced this mighty change—nor will they ever. They must decide, through faith in Jesus Christ, to obey him in all things, at all times, and at all costs. If they do not do this, there will be no change within them. They will continue to sin whenever it is convenient to do so.

Desire is a choice. It is not something that happens to you. God does not compel anyone, ever. It is contrary to the laws of his power.

If God could transmit to you all that he is and has magically, he would surely do it. But he can’t. He can’t give his glory—it can only be obtained by being like he is, and you can only be like he is by learning about him and choosing to live according to what you learn.

If we are responsible for the preceding changes, what part does God have in it all? The answer is information. Information and agency are the only catalysts. God gives you the freedom to choose, and he provides all the information necessary for you to choose correctly. He can’t force you to use reason, but he gives you the gift to be able to should you choose to do so.

God’s role in this arrangement is neither small nor cheap. What he provides costs far more than what we must do to make use of it, and it is far more valuable than anything we sacrifice to receive it.

The information God provides comes from two sources: his servants and the Holy Ghost.

The mighty change of heart is not a magical, externally-driven outcome. The mighty change of heart is brought about by believing information given you by God, through his servants and through the Holy Ghost.

It is “the knowledge of the truth...which leadeth them to faith on the Lord, and unto repentance, which faith and repentance bringeth a change of heart unto them.” (Helaman 15:7)

Repentance comes after an invitation from the word of God through his servants. A holy man named Alma explained that his being born again came as a result of being called to repentance by an angel.

Alma alluded to his extensive experiences preaching the gospel to others. All who believed and repented were born of God, as is always the case.

In another account, Alma describes the pattern, recounting how his father (also named Alma) came to repent and be born again.

The process laid out by Alma was: 1) the word of God was preached by one of his servants, 2) Alma’s father believed what was said and faithfully repented of his sins, 3) he preached the word to others, who also repented. They all were born again.

We see this pattern repeated again and again. On another occasion, a servant of God named Ammon taught the gospel to a king named Lamoni who repented of his sins, then Lamoni taught the word of God to others who also repented, and all of them were born again.

When a person reconciles their thoughts, desires, and actions to all they understand about God, they are freed from the guilt of their past sins, through faith in the words of Jesus Christ, who promises forgiveness of sins to all who forsake their sins. As Alma described of his own repentance.

All who reconcile their lives to God’s will, as far as they understand it, are forgiven of their sins and will be born again. They learn of God’s will through another who knows him more than they do.

Sanctification comes through “yield[ing] to the enticings of the Holy Spirit.” (Mosiah 3:19) The Holy Ghost changes you, but not until after you forsake sin, and only through giving you more information.

After you forsake sin, God will begin teaching you new things through the Holy Ghost, and he will continue doing so as long as you remain reconciled to everything he teaches you.

This process is called sanctification—a word derived from the Latin, sanctificare, which means “to make holy.” You become more holy with every increment of his knowledge that you obtain and reconcile your life to.

One does not become sanctified by the Holy Ghost without becoming without sin—both of commission, which comes prior to baptism, and of omission, which comes over time through revelation of greater breadth and depth of understanding.

The more information you have received and integrated, the more you will continue to receive. The more information you have received and integrated, the more like God you become.

As God teaches you more about the degree of joy available in him and about the disastrous outcomes of sin, you will grow to feel very different about many things than you do now. You will better understand the cost and value of what God offers and all alternatives. You will learn to be repulsed by sin because you will come to understand its cost and alternatives. You will experience much greater joy in greater receipt and awareness of God’s love. You will feel greater sorrow from a deeper understanding of the poor choices people make, how preventable they are, and how often they make them knowingly.

It is important to stress that, though the choice of accepting what God offers is yours, everything about being born again is only available because of what God does for you. Through the water of baptism, you stop sinning. Through the blood of Christ, you are forgiven of past sins. Through the spirit of God, you become more like God is through learning more about him and living what you know.

Having the spirit of God with you in greater quantities does not make it easier to obey him. Rather, it gives you more and better instructions to obey.

Being born again is only as permanent a state as your choice to continue in perfect obedience to God.

You will only be under the influence of God as much as you choose to be. Your access to the Holy Ghost does not make it impossible for you to choose to sin.

You remain born again until you sin again. If you willingly sin, you will return to the same state you were in before being forgiven of your sins.

The spirit of God will not abide in unclean temples.

If you willingly disobey God, the Holy Ghost will withdraw from you.

After hearing the gospel message, one penitent seeker asked his teacher.

This man made the same mistake most Christians do today. He thought that somehow God could magically change his desires from evil to good. Thankfully, he was also willing to make a total sacrifice of all things. As a king, he offered his kingdom, all that he had.

His teacher corrected his understanding, indicating that the catalyst of the change was repentance—his choosing to forsake his sins.

The king humbly bowed down before God and offered to forsake all of his sins.

Even giving away his kingdom was no sufficient replacement for giving away his heart.

There are people today who claim they desire to receive the Holy Ghost, but haven’t. What they desire is something different than what they are asking for, and they will never find it until they realize and reconcile to what it really means to be born again.

The desire to be changed is not the same as the desire to change. The Holy Ghost enables you to change through giving you greater information. If you aren’t interested in reconciling to what you already know about what is best, why would you think that you would enjoy knowing more about what is best, or be any more likely to reconcile to it? If you are unwilling to find the value in improvement now, when the invitations and necessary sacrifice are small, why would you be willing to find the value in invitations to greater change, which require much greater sacrifice?

You will not be born again until you freely submit to God in all things. So long as you hold out any part of your desires—as long as you continue in any sin whatsoever—you will not be born again.

Chapter 9: The Unpardonable Sin

The Lord taught that “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost” is a sin that can’t be forgiven.

The unpardonable sin is called “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost” because it is the act of turning away from our understanding of what is right.

The Lord forgives your past sins on the condition that you forsake them and remain reconciled to him as he teaches you more about himself, the Father, and all of creation. If you violate this condition by knowingly deviating from what you believe he would do in your situation, your previous sins once again become unforgiven.

Whenever you knowingly do anything less than the best you can imagine, you commit the unpardonable sin.

There is a difference between forgivable sins, pardonable sins, and unpardonable sin.

Forgivable sins consist of past sins that you have committed where you have knowingly rebelled against the best you understood. To this point in this book, we have confined our definition of sin to these actions.

Another definition of sin is anything less than the perfection of God. This definition includes our former definition, but proceeds beyond the limits of your understanding to include everything that deviates from God’s perfection.

There is a difference between sins committed knowingly and sins committed ignorantly. Conscientious sins must be forsaken in order to be forgiven. Sins committed in ignorance can be pardoned, meaning they do not require change in order to be forgiven. The vast difference between our best idea about God and how he actually is comprises the space of “pardonable” sin.

The sacrifice of Jesus Christ makes it possible to become like he is through living the best we know and remaining reconciled to each additional increment of knowledge he gives us, line upon line. It gives us a way to be saved through living the best we know, rather than the best there is.

When we obey all that we presently know about God, the Lord forgives us of our previous sins committed knowingly, but he does not give us permission to commit future sins with knowledge. If we commit additional sin knowingly, we separate ourselves from his forgiveness and from any progress, as we will have cut ourselves off from the Holy Ghost.

Our repentance qualifies us for the Lord’s forgiveness of not only all our known sins, but also all sins of ignorance: past, present, and future.

When Jesus said to be perfect like he is and like the Father is, he did not say “be as perfect as you understand us to be.” The commandment is for all of us to be exactly as they are. However, because we cannot become like them beyond the limit of our present knowledge, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ provides a pathway where we can become like they are, line upon line, as the Lord teaches us more about himself and the Father (see the previous chapter).

The unpardonable sin is unpardonable because it violates the condition that makes possible the forgiveness of both past sins of which we know and past, present, and future sins of which we don’t know.

But whoso breaketh this covenant after he hath received it, and altogether turneth therefrom, shall not have forgiveness of sins in this world nor in the world to come. (D&C 84:41)

When you commit the unpardonable sin, you are in open rebellion against God because you are violating his will as far as you understand it by doing differently than you believe he would in your situation. This makes it impossible for him to forgive you, because it violates the conditions he has declared for that forgiveness to occur.

There is a difference between forgivable sins (past conscientious sins), pardonable sins (past, present, and future sins of ignorance) and unpardonable sin (knowingly rebelling against God).

Anyone living in less than complete reconciliation to their understanding of the human ideal lives in alienation from God and will have to bear the penalty of their sins until or unless they repent. This is the situation of almost every single person on the earth today.

However, for those who have been baptized by water and received the Holy Ghost, the penalty for turning away is more severe. For them, it would be better if they were never born.

But, behold, my beloved brethren, thus came the voice of the Son unto me, saying: After ye have repented of your sins, and witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, and can speak with a new tongue, yea, even with the tongue of angels, and after this should deny me, it would have been better for you that ye had not known me. (2 Nephi 31:14)

The reason for this is that while those who have never received the Holy Ghost will not leave this world with more understanding than they arrived with, those who turn away from the Holy Ghost will lose even that which they have.

Every single person who receives the Holy Ghost is living in the unpardonable sin unless they live in complete reconciliation to their understanding of the human ideal.

The new and everlasting covenant is to become like God is through the unconditional resurrection of all mankind and, on the condition of complete adherence to the ideal as far as we understand it, forgiveness of past sins, pardon for all sins of ignorance, and continual additional teaching about the ideal through the Holy Ghost. These blessings were purchased with the blood of Christ, who came here and sacrificed himself to fulfill the requirements of the justice of God.

When you are in the state of open rebellion against God, after receiving the Holy Ghost, you are consenting to the death of Christ.

The unpardonable sin is referred to as shedding innocent blood because to willingly sin is to consent to the death of the only man that ever lived without sinning—Jesus Christ.

You must avoid this condition at all costs. If you find yourself in it, there is nothing more important for you to do than repent.

The unpardonable sin cannot be overlooked, but it can be stopped. As long as you reconcile your life entirely to your sincere understanding of what is best in all things, you will remain free from the unpardonable sin.

If you have willingly sinned, you can escape the penalties of doing so by once again turning to the Lord with all your heart, might, mind, and strength.

Chapter 10: Preparing for God’s Presence

There is an unfortunately prominent mistake in Christianity regarding the approachability of God. The presence of the Lord is no light thing.

The theophanies of the Old Testament feature awe-filled experiences where man’s crude perceptive abilities and lack of purity were dramatically contrasted with God’s glory. Accounts of Adam and Eve, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and others in the presence of God clearly attest to the serious nature of being in God’s presence.

In ancient Israel, only the High Priest could enter into the Holy of Holies, and he could only do so once a year. Even then, he had to wear bells and tie a rope around his waist so that, if he was killed due to some impurity, the other priests could safely extract his body.

While the Lord’s mortal advent necessarily cloaked his glory in the veil of flesh, his appearance to others after his resurrection showed that his glory was as terrible and awesome as ever. The apostle John, who knew Jesus in life so well that he was denominated the apostle most beloved by Jesus, fell down in his resurrected presence, overcome by the glory he saw.

If John the Beloved was overcome by the glory of the resurrected Christ, does any man have any reason or right to assume that his presence is a light thing?

One does not simply stand in the presence of God. It is blasphemous in the extreme to think that a sinful person can casually interact with the glorified Creator of heaven and earth, the King of Kings, the Son of the Most High. We read that even angels, who possess less glory than He who created them, are described as being enveloped in unapproachable fire, sufficiently difficult to endure that the most righteous individuals in scripture—people like Daniel and John, the beloved disciple of Jesus—collapse in reverent exhaustion before them. Do you really think that one who has not given all to the adoration of God in all times and in all places, even under the threat of death—as Daniel and John had—could do better in the presence of one greater?

It is possible to find the pinnacle of joy and comfort in the presence of God. However, the greatest blessing possible comes with the greatest cost possible. To feel as a loving child in the presence of the eternal Father, you must first act like his loving child here and now.

The key to comfort in his presence is consummate dedication in seeking and doing his will at all times and in all places.

If we keep God’s commandments without fail, we will be able to bear his presence, here and hereafter.

The mortal mission, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ provided for the unconditional resurrection of all mankind. The Lord’s death and resurrection brings all mankind into the presence of God, where they will be judged of their works in life.

When brought into God’s presence, those who have accepted the Lord’s offer of forgiveness of past sins by forsaking them will be able to withstand his presence.

To the degree that they sacrificed to know more about him and serve others in life, they will receive eternal joy. They will be filled with joy everlasting in the knowledge that, throughout life, they always searched for, grew into, and rejoiced in all available improvement and truly did everything they could to help others.

Those who rejected the Lord’s offer of forgiveness of past sins, or who turned away from him after receiving it, will experience eternal torment. The wicked person’s insistence on being less than what they knew they could be will fill them with pain more excruciating than they can imagine.

The test of mortality is not whether one has claimed to believe in God or not. The test is whether they truly believed in God. To claim to believe in God is easy. To actually believe in him requires you to desire and act according to your professed belief.

Furthermore, you can believe in what you call God without having beliefs that accord in any way with what he has actually said to you.

To truly believe in God requires conforming to what God has actually said to you, as demonstrated by your desires, beliefs, and actions.

The scriptures that attest to the assertions made in this section are so concise, numerous, and repetitive that, rather than interleave them in the text, a selection of them is given below.

These scriptures and the others attesting to the same truths are worthy of study and consideration, but they are clear enough that additional commentary would not be helpful.

In life, we escape from a true understanding of our uncleanness and our nakedness by ignoring it. We fool ourselves. We pay less attention to the bad in us than we do the good. We pretend that our motives are better than they are. We claim that we aren’t to blame for our faults.

In the day of judgment, there will be no deception and no excuses. All men will receive a perfect knowledge, a complete and correct understanding of their own works.

You and I will stand before God. We will see as we are seen—we will have a perfectly clear understanding of our character: our thoughts, our words, our deeds, and our desires. Standing boldly in contrast to our gross imperfection will be God, in equally clear, undeniable perfection.

Though Christ stands as our judge, he does so as the instantiation of the ideal. It is our own undeniable realization of the gross distance between ourselves and him which serves as our judgment. Man is his own tormentor.

The knowledge we will receive in the presence of God will cause pain to the degree that we did not reconcile ourselves to God in this life. Though we will comprehend his perfect love for us and his perfect righteousness, we will also “...have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness...” (2 Nephi 9:14)

Those who have repented of their sins will be able to stand in his presence in spite of the difference between them and God, due to the sacrifice and promise of Jesus Christ. Those who have not will be filled with eternal torment.

The wicked will feel indescribable anguish under the full weight of their guilt, uncleanness, and nakedness. The wicked will be in agony in the presence of God because they will know exactly what they chose, why they chose it, and that they knew better.

Many mistakenly think that all that is required to dwell with God is asking forgiveness of one’s sins. Forgiveness of sins covers past transgression, but it does not change who you are.

Jesus can temporarily admit us into his presence by forgiving us of our past sins. For example, even Isaiah recoiled from God’s presence until he was told that his sins had been forgiven.

God’s mercy can forgive you of past sins and make a way for you to learn what you didn’t know, but it can’t magically transform you into a righteous person.

Asking for forgiveness without actually forsaking your sins doesn't change your character. The indescribable pain felt by those with unforgiven sin will return to them as soon as they sin again.

As long as you are the same character that committed those sins, you will commit them again, and as long as you commit them again, you can't be with him.

One who is capable of sin remains capable of sin despite having been forgiven of past sin. An individual capable of sin cannot dwell permanently in the presence of God, because he will soon sin again, causing him to recoil from the presence of God due to the indescribable pain of enduring his presence while in sin.

Those who will continue in sin—even if forgiven of past sin—cannot dwell with God. The Lord makes it clear that those who fail to keep his commandments cannot endure his presence.

You have to choose to become the kind of person who is incapable of sin.

Real repentance utterly and completely vanquishes guilt.

Some marvel that the resurrected Christ chooses to retain the marks in his hands, feet, and side. The Lord glories in these tokens of his unsearchable love. They are visible, touchable manifestations of his love for us.

In a similar way, obedience is etched into the very fabric of the body of the disciple.

Those who love God above all else have no doubt where they stand with God. They have willingly sacrificed everything contrary to him, no matter the cost. They will willingly sacrifice everything that they later learn is contrary to him, no matter how deeply it is rooted in them. They have no question where their loyalty lies. They have only one master.

Those who have trusted in God in life by repenting of all their sins will continue to have trust in him after this life, enduring his presence in spite of his glory.

Chapter 11: The Value of God’s Instruction

Most people believe that sin is a problem of capacity. They believe that sin is the manifestation of a fault in capability. In reality, sin is a fault of desire.

In this life, God gives us the power to choose.

Obedience to God is a choice. In this world, we can either choose good or evil. Those who choose good will be saved. Those who choose evil will not.

Most Christians do not actually desire to obey God. They are interested in obeying God, but they allow their desire for other things to dictate their sinful behavior. Desire isn’t the same as interest!

All willful sin is committed because the sinner wanted to sin more than they wanted to obey God. Many people fail to repent because they think they can overcome sin through sheer will.

The key to desire is not willpower. It is knowledge. Your beliefs are what dictate your desires, and your choice to adhere to your beliefs—to have faith in them—is the decision point determining whether or not you will sin.

The question of sin is not whether you will to sin or not, but rather why you desire what you do. What do you believe will happen or not happen due to the paths of action open to you? What do you desire, and why?

While we can choose to behave in a way that is contrary to our beliefs, most sin is tempting only because we do not yet possess the information that sufficiently illustrates the sinful choice to be suboptimal compared to the alternative.

Often, the key to conquering a particular temptation lies in trusting God enough for him to reveal to you the awful truth that shows that what you desire is not worth desiring. This often includes the violent revision of your beliefs about deep-seated aspects of who you think you are or what you think of others. This is why remaining in sin is preferable for those who love anything more than truth. The truth will set you free, but it will hurt to the degree that you cling to what you must let go of in order to embrace it.

Everyone desires something. All intentional human action is pursued under the hope of a certain outcome.

The prevailing opinion is that what God wants is only of import to those who desire what organized religions claim to provide. What organized religions provide, however, is not appealing to all. Many of peoples’ actual desires are not featured among the claims of organized religions, and even when there is overlap, the credibility of organized religions is strained by their tendency to overpromise and underdeliver.

The surprising truth is that all desires lead to God and, perhaps even more surprisingly, that God leads to the fulfillment of all desires. Even what seem the basest of desires can only be realized through true mappings of cause and effect, of which God is the author, arbiter, and agent. If anyone will obtain anything, it will be by living the law God has appointed for receiving it.

Many outwardly dismiss the utility of desires that are less than what they imagine to be ideal, though mostly only when discussing the desires of others, not their own. However, the process of acquiring greater truth is a pathway comprising the continuous discovery of the limits in what is already believed and replacing it with something better. The best way to do that often includes sincerely seeking the fulfillment of what a person desires, no matter how imperfect the object of that desire. In realizing the limits of what they desire, they will be more persuaded of the value of what they previously dismissed when it was offered or lacked the reasons to search for themselves.

Most religionists would balk at the notion that anything they already believe in could be regarded as “evil.” And yet, in the process of pursuing an ideal life, there is no difference in how we ought to respond when something better is discovered, no matter whether what we believed before was something religions teach is evil or something religions teach is good.

We have been designed with sophisticated capabilities for searching out truth. Every person has some degree of inherent intelligence, and each of us is capable of advancing our latent intelligence through effort and honest inquiry. We have time and talents with which to search things out—to drink deeply from the experiences of life and to reflect deeply about what we observe.

All such introspection will eventually, if not curtailed by dishonesty or fear, lead a person to God. While his existence might not be immediately evident, those who dare to face the hard questions and experiences in life will eventually perceive his fingerprints on everything they have ever observed or experienced here.

There is no need to delay this realization. While many false witnesses of God exist—supposed testimonies of those who have not known him, do not obey him, and are not like him—he has arranged for sufficient numbers of true witnesses so as to make it possible to find them, in spite of the noise, for all those who care to look.

Searching out all good things will lead a person to God, and searching out God will lead a person to all good things.

When it comes to searching out the limits of present beliefs and the discovery of greater beliefs, the most direct pathway, and the outcome of all such pathways, is God.

God created everything we know of. He is intimately acquainted with the details of every aspect of his creation.

He knows the past, present, and future as clearly as we know the traversal of the hands of a clock.

We, on the other hand, do not know what God knows. Our understanding is incomparably limited compared to his.

All sin is founded on false beliefs of cause and effect. Either the cause does not lead to the effect, there are more causes required, there are different causes required, or there are better options either in cause or effect for greater happiness.

The limitations in our understanding exceed our lack of knowledge, including limited perception of God’s instructions to us, limited understanding of what we do perceive, limited obedience to what he has already told us, and limited willingness to allow him to work through the circumstances of our lives, including the people we have access to. Each of these limitations limit what instructions God can give us and how much we will make use of what is given. These limitations can be summarized as a lack of trust in God.

As you limit your trust in God, he will only be able to guide you to the best outcomes subject to the paths you are willing to travel or the outcomes you are capable of understanding. In either case, your outcomes will be unimaginably less than what you could have had.

When you reach full trust in God, God will be able to guide you in paths you do not know to outcomes that are better than you know to seek.

[TODO]

This is not to say that those with full trust in God are expected to exercise so-called blind faith. Faith without reasons is not faith at all. Rather, deep faith consists in trusting that God has a plan which consists of a path you do not know to an outcome better than you know to seek while operating step-by-step in what you have sufficient light to see. It is what gives you hope that transcends immediate perceptions of value that would otherwise limit you to what you already understand.

God knows all things. He’s aware of the full impact of present character flaws in all situations, not just the ones presently upon you. A cracked dam can function fine until a flood occurs. If you will trust him, God will make you strong enough to withstand all possibilities in life, not just the ones you are presently aware of.

Power is capability to obtain desired outcomes. It is the possession of the knowledge of the causes that lead to the desired effects coupled with the willingness and capability to accomplish them.

God has power to obtain anything that can be obtained. He has all power to lead you to all outcomes that can be received.

God is not a magician. He operates according to law, or according to relationships of cause and effect. God’s power is limited to the interface between his character and the laws of reality.

[TODO]

Because God’s power is circumscribed by his law, seeking his power is synonymous with seeking his instruction. God has promised to give you what you ask for, but he can’t do it in all ways. It is hardly ever the case that the effectual path to what you say you want lies in the path you are willing to endure to receive it. You will almost always be required to either choose the outcomes you desire, or the path you are willing to endure to receive them. Most often, in seeking God for what we desire, what we are really seeking is either new reasons for our desire that are strong enough to endure what we will not yet suffer for its obtainment or the revelation of a new desire that will merit its cost.

Seeking something from God must include seeking the instructions on the choices you must make and actions you must take to obtain what you seek. If you desire something from God, you ought to seek to know and act according to the causes that produce the effect—according to the law God appointed before the creation of the world.

God alone can direct you towards the greatest outcomes.

The only motive God has in all he does is to benefit all people.

Everything he does is perfectly calculated for the maximum benefit of all.

The Lord said.

You can trust that anything he instructs you to do will lead you to the best possible outcome—even if it is an outcome that you lack the wisdom, as yet, to know about or desire.

God is the source of everything we desire and everything we should desire. He knows everything that will happen, since the beginning, and has all power to arrange circumstances.

It is a correct understanding of God’s knowledge, love, and power that caused the ancients to advise that you “come unto him, and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him” (Omni 1:26), “come with full purpose of heart, and cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you” (Jacob 6:5), and “render to him all that you have and are.” (Mosiah 2:34)

We can trust in him completely by seeking him with our whole soul, knowing that he has the power, knowledge, and love to lead us to what we seek.

As an ancient prophet said.

No matter what you desire, the optimal way to obtain as much of it as is possible is to seek God with all your heart and to follow every instruction you receive from him.

Chapter 12: Commandments, Conscience, and Progression

Commandments are absolutely essential in order to help someone come to God.

Commandments are a critical source for training our model of God. Commandments expose differences between how you and God would act in a particular circumstance, facilitating your choice to change in order to become more like him in that thing.

The term commandment generally refers to a rule which prescribes a specific behavior in a specific circumstance. But commandments are not limited to just rules, nor are rules the highest form of a commandment.

Commandments are given as a way to help train us towards a character more like God’s. All commandments are not equal in this task.

The finite nature of rules ensures a disconnect between static commandments and the fullness of God’s character and knowledge. Rules can only provide snapshots of God’s character as it applies to a specific degree of understanding and a specific situation. God’s character and knowledge predict his behavior and desires in all situations.

Rules do not apply to all situations—just the situations for which the rule is given. Principles, on the other hand, are general. They can be applied across a broad swath of circumstances.

The more general a commandment is, the less prescriptive it is in how to live it. For example, while God has commanded us to be like he is, or to love others as he loves us, knowing how to do those things would require either knowing him or receiving many more commandments more specific than the first.

As we learn a new commandment, we don’t need to stop at merely obeying the immediate context of the commandment. We can use the commandment to tune our model of God by expanding or improving our understanding of how God would act in other situations. In this way, commandments can reveal more of God’s character to us. We learn God’s character in the same way we get to know the character of other people: through observing them in different situations in order to become successively more correct in our prediction of how they would act in others.

You are not aware of all of God’s commandments. You are probably not even aware of all of the commandments he has given that are recorded in the scriptures. But even this list does not contain all of his commandments.

God has on several occasions explained that his instructions never cease.

Consider what it would mean to know all of God’s commandments. You would be as capable as God of describing how to act optimally in all situations.

Because rules are specific and situational, to prescribe optimal behavior in all situations would require a list as extensive as creation itself. Principles, on the other hand, while broad in application, take more time, discipline, and intelligence to learn and correctly apply.

Getting to know God’s commandments requires you getting to know God, and this is a process, not an event.

As new commandments come, they don’t always address new topics. Often, new commandments will expand and elaborate on previous commandments, and sometimes they will even contradict former commandments. This shouldn’t be so shocking. The fact is that God begins to reveal himself to us at very low resolutions because that is all we are able to bear. We should not be any more surprised at abrupt shifts in what he is revealing than we are when a very blurry picture looks different as it is brought into crisp focus.

Are you ready and willing to replace the good things in your life with something better? If not, you will find yourself rejecting or abandoning the paths to the great things God has prepared for you.

Consider the experience of the young man who reverently sought out Jesus for more instruction, only to reject what he was told.

There are several things to note about this experience. First, this man was not superficial in his devotion to Jesus. He ran towards him, and he knelt down before him. He was no slouch—he truly had obeyed God in all ways of which he knew to that point, something few can say. And, he bravely asked what else he could do. However, when Jesus “loved him” by telling him the next increment of truth, the man not only went away, but he did so sorrowfully. He did not appreciate the instruction, and he did not obey it.

Past faithfulness is no indication of future faithfulness. Beware of the limits of your faith, and always prepare your heart to trust God, even and especially if he commands you to do things you thought he never would.

Truth is a wedge. When additional light comes, it reveals contradictory aspects of a person’s understanding. Good people love to have their faults exposed, because they want to be better. Evil people hate to have their faults exposed, because they want to feel good as they are.

You must choose which newly resolved portion of yourself to embrace and which to eject. You cannot keep both. A person is like an astronaut floating in space. When an astronaut throws something, the object flies away from them like it would on earth, but unlike on earth, they will also move in the opposite direction.

Reactions to new commandments generate shockingly extreme transformations in people. When exposed to great light, seemingly normal people can become really good people or really bad people. It is shocking how exposure to further light can reveal things about people you never would have imagined.

When people obey difficult new commandments, they grow towards God in a dramatic manner, because his word sanctifies them, making them holier than they were. Jesus prayed: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17)

When people turn away from new commandments, they undergo a shockingly extreme transformation toward evil. A person who you thought loved you can become so full of hate that they wish you harm with every fiber of their being. As hard to believe as this may be, consider that the Savior of the world was betrayed to death by one of his twelve closest friends, after having been actively persuaded by his unbelieving brothers to do what they expected would lead to the Jews killing him, thus ending a mission where his purpose was to give 19 everything he had for those who ignored, diminished, fought, hated, and killed him.

Be vigilant in receiving and obeying all of God’s commandments so that you don’t blind yourself.

When you turn away from God’s commandments, you deliver yourself into the hands of Satan, and you will be more capable of horrific harm to others.

Unfortunately, one unavoidable pitfall of commandments is the human tendency to make them the end instead of the means. Recall that the Hebrew word for “sin” means “missing the mark.” To make commandments the end is to make them the mark, instead of Christ.

The target is not a list of rules. God’s rules are a means to knowing him. They are not equivalent to knowing him. Knowing him is knowing his character.

Commandments are instructions to direct you towards the mark. They are not the mark itself. They are approximate estimates that bring you closer to how God is: what he does, what he experiences, and why he does what he does and experiences what he does.

Keeping Christ as the mark requires remembering that, no matter how many commandments you receive or what benefits you have seen from them, there may exist a more advanced understanding of God that expands or contradicts what you have already learned. Jesus did not refuse the Father when the Father taught him higher laws which superseded the law of Moses.

There are people who use an understanding of progression to excuse themselves from what their conscience dictates to them. As we follow Jesus’ example in being open to higher laws, we ought to exercise caution that we are not inventing exemptions from situations because they are difficult or costly. As Jesus grew in knowledge of the Father, he received increased persecution. If you find your life getting easier as a result of what you believe is following God, you might reconsider your presumptions.

There are people who use their obedience to certain rules, which they believe are commandments from God, to feel confident that they are in alignment with God. When you make a static list of commandments your gauge of obedience to God, you make the stepping stone of commandments into an impassable stumbling block.

As a prophet taught in the time when Israel was under the law of Moses.

Those who replace obedience to God with obedience to a list of rules can only do so by ignoring what their conscience is saying. Their conscience will identify situations outside of the scope of the rules, and it may even directly contradict the rules themselves.

Those who limit their obedience to a list of rules are not only living in sin, they are measurably worse off than those who freely admit they are living in disobedience to God.

People who believe that their responsibility is limited to keeping a few commandments will be tricked into thinking they are qualified for everything God has to give, that they know everything there is to know, and that they have a relationship with God.

They will find out, sooner or later, that their belief has prevented them from receiving what God wanted to give them, including the many things they did not know and the relationship with God they could have had.

Reality is complex, continuous, and nuanced. Rule-based commandments, by nature, are limited. They only apply to specific situations. There is no nuance.

As you study the scriptures, don’t just stop at literal rules. Seek to extract higher order principles. Study the teachings of Jesus and John the Baptist in the New Testament. A great deal of their sermons attempted to expand the peoples’ understanding from rule-based commandments to principles.

Learn to develop and use your conscience as the seat of your model of God’s character. Rules are limited to specific circumstances.

Your conscience, on the other hand, is a model fitted to the commandments you’ve been told by others and those you’ve been given directly from God. It extends beyond the situational limits of the commandments you know. Your conscience circumscribes God’s commandments of which you are aware and projects light onto situations beyond your previous experience. It will inform you in all situations, not just those situations for which you know specific commandments.

While rule-based commandments inform or “train” the conscience, the conscience is the superior entity. Your obedience to some rules will not qualify you for the blessings of full obedience to your conscience. What God says includes what he says through your conscience. In fact, this is the primary channel through which he will communicate to you.

Your conscience can contradict the specific commandments you know. If a commandment contradicts your conscience, always go with your conscience. This is a hard saying, but those who abide by it will experience unprecedented growth towards God. Though this circumstance is one where you must exercise extreme caution to prevent yourself from inventing excuses to ignore commandments, finding the limits of a commandment is the only way to find something better. Your obedience to a few rules does not free you from responsibility for what your conscience tells you, whose domain includes everything, not just the limited domain of your rules.

Those who think salvation comes from obedience to a few rules will continue their lives without knowing Jesus and without obeying him, because they think they already are, in spite of actively opposing his voice to them in the conscience.

Their claim that the rules come from God will not absolve them of responsibility for breaking what God placed in their conscience. They will be surprised when, at the judgment day, God says he does not know them.

They will never receive higher commandments than what they already possess, and because God delivers outcomes based on obedience to law, they will never receive the higher blessings corresponding to those higher commandments.

You can increase the breadth and accuracy of your conscience through living according to it and exercising effort to learn more about God.

When you disobey your conscience, you attenuate it. You will find it harder both to know what is right and to do it.

When you obey your conscience, you strengthen it. You will find it easier to both know what is right and to do it.

Learning more about God will increase both the number of situations where you have an idea of what God would do and the accuracy of your idea.

Beyond acting according to what you already know, the primary way to learn more about God is to learn more about those who know him better than you do. The scriptures provide a valuable, alwaysavailable resource of these people. As you do everything in your power to extract information about God’s character from the scriptures, you will be more apt to recognize and value the living resources he gives you access to in the people you will encounter who know him better than you.

Reality will teach you about God. The Lord created everything in this world to testify of him. As you pay attention to how things work, you will learn more about him. What you see in things and people, and in yourself, will teach you more about him if you are open to see and willing to learn.

Invitations to improvement can come from your conscience, life, and other people.

Our conscience is a fruitful source of invitations toward improvement. God designed our bodies as living seer stones which constantly emit a vision of greater potential in all things. God will teach you more about whatever you pay attention to.

Life itself provides a constant stream of invitations for improvement through falsified putative relationships of cause and effect. Paying attention to what you or others do, then asking why you or they do it, and then asking whether there is a better way will yield many invited improvements. When you experience undesirable outcomes, it is an invitation to find the path to desirable outcomes. When you experience a problem, it is an invitation to find a solution. Anytime you observe inadequacy, it is an invitation to find adequacy. If you are late to an appointment, ask yourself what you could have done to be on time. If you don’t have enough money, ask yourself what you could do to have more. If you are overweight, ask yourself what you could do to lose weight.

Other people can be a helpful source of invitations toward improvement. They are not blinded by familiarity with our situation. What is jarring to them might be normal to us. Furthermore, they may have more wisdom than we do and be able to see potential that we do not.

Almost no one obeys God. Still, among the few who do, there is a great difference in the amount of diligence exercised in learning more about God.

The justice of God requires that those who exercise greater heed and diligence receive a greater inheritance after this life than those who exercise lesser heed and diligence.

God would cease to be just and therefore cease to be God if he treated two people of differing heed and diligence in the same way. For example, it is not possible for God to treat someone who has given their life in sacrifice to him the same as one who has not.

Each and every individual has a unique quantity of knowledge from God that they obey. Because glory comes from what is understood and lived, afterlife circumstances are as numerous as characters are unique.

Commandments are snapshots of God’s character as applied to a specific situation and a specific degree of human understanding.

Commandments may or may not convey God’s degree of knowledge. Rather, commandments are the pathway whereby people can take a step closer to that knowledge.

Commandments are designed to convey the greatest share and degree of blessings that come from God’s breadth and depth of knowledge to people who do not yet possess God’s breadth and depth of knowledge. Commandments are constrained by the understanding of the individual, the individual’s degree of trust in God, and the rules of reality. God’s goal in giving a commandment is to construct a rule that maximizes a person’s outcomes given these limitations.

God operates according to your limits.

Expect new and different instructions from him as you grow in capacity.

God will send further light and truth the moment you are capable of noticing and obeying it. If you find yourself in a position where you are not being sent further light and truth, it can only mean that you are not prepared for it. Consider how much trust you have in him, whether any potential actions he might ask of you are off limits, and, most importantly, whether you are already aligning with the best you can imagine in all things.

Learning doesn’t come through disjointed jumps. You can’t just be shown how God is and jump to that point. There are innumerable steps in between, and these steps are embodied by people. They are the many “mansions" within his kingdom. We hop from “house” to “house” by learning line upon line the law which sanctifies us, or quickens us, or provides the basis of our experiences—the source of our joy, the substance of our suffering, and the purpose of our pain. It is the source of our power and our ability to understand and contend with things as they really are.

Everything must be explained to a person in terms of where they presently stand. All understanding builds organically. Everything must be built from what is already there.

All additional understanding comes through what you will choose to do with what you already know.

All outcomes will come to you through what you choose to do with what you have already received. The path to all knowledge and the receipt of all things lies along a trail that already stretches from where you immediately are.

This is why the little things are the big things. That little sin that no one else knows about is a terminal blockade to everything God has to give you. It will permanently stop your progress in becoming like him and receiving all he has to give.

The path to everything you desire lies through what you already know but aren’t doing.

The next sequential step of our progression lies in what is already obvious to us—or should be.

God requires you to be true and faithful to what you already know before he will instruct you further. If you desire more light and truth, you should obey all you have been given before you expect anything else. You must reach the point where you can sincerely pray, “Lord, I have been true and faithful in all things.”

Jesus frequently appealed to what his listeners already knew, but weren’t living according to. He knew that in order to progress closer to him, they first had to live according to what they already knew.

You think you have eternal life in the scriptures, but they testify of me (see John 5:39), and you don’t listen to me (see John 5:40). You claim to believe in Moses, but you don’t do what he said (see John 5:45, 47). Because you don’t do what he said, you don’t believe in me, even though he witnessed of me (see John 5:46). You haven’t seen the Father or heard his voice (see John 5:37) and you won’t, because you don’t believe whom he has sent (see John 5:38).

Jesus taught this principle through the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

God will never do for you what you will not do for yourself. It violates God’s perfect justice. While a truth lies in your capacity to understand through studying and pondering the scriptures, he will not send you an angel to explain it to you. While a truth lies in a book you have the ability to acquire and read, he will not reveal it to you through out-of-the-blue revelation. While your friend knows something you do not, he will not send some prophet you don’t know to teach it to you. You are responsible for all the truth you have access to. As you pray for more light and truth, also pray for help in seeing what truth you already have access to that you are taking lightly.

Preparation for further light and truth is solely a factor of your ability to notice and accept it. If you have not noticed or obeyed what you currently have access to, you will not receive further light and truth. To provide such to you would only trigger negative judgment against you.

As you learn more of what God knows, you will do more of what God does because you will share more of his reasons for what he does. You will begin to see what he sees, to feel what he feels, and, inasmuch as you choose to be honest about it, you will act more like he acts, for all the same reasons he does.