You Are Eagerly Invited: a devotional
Contents:
This sacrifice of time pleases Me and strengthens you. Do not skimp on our time together. Resist the clamor of tasks waiting to be done. You have chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from you. What are some others that come to mind? Listening to what God is saying to you in the Scriptures is a skill that you can develop with practice. It also comes from having a right understanding of how the Lord sees you.
How do you believe Jesus looks at you right now? Is He frustrated, frowning? Is He delighted with you? In this section, you will reflect on a Bible passage in which Jesus visits the home of Mary and Martha. As you read, it is important to keep in mind that Jesus was close friends with these two sisters, as He was with their brother, Lazarus.
Also notice that it was Martha who opened their home to Jesus. In the culture of that time, she would have been expected to provide hospitality to her guests, and she would have expected her sister to help her with the preparations. Read the following passage aloud. Then spend several minutes in silence rereading the passage and picturing yourself in the scene.
You can put yourself in the place of one of the characters—Mary, Martha, one of the male disciples accompanying Jesus—or you can be in the room watching. As Jesus and His disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.
The Great Invitation: Come! Drink! Eat! Live! | Desiring God
Tell her to help me! Now, looking back on those years, I can see that the Lord Jesus Christ was way ahead of me, working in my life and preparing the way before me. I want each of you to know that He is working in your life right now and preparing the way before you. That is what I want to talk about today. My message is a simple invitation: I will begin with a story that I hope will help you begin to understand what that invitation means.
Almost twenty years ago I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. My kidney doctor told me that in ten to twelve years I would need to go on dialysis or have a transplant. I will be disciplined and diligent, and the Lord will bless me. I will die of something else. That was my plan. And for several years it worked pretty well.
But then my kidneys began to fail. My doctor told me I needed to prepare for a transplant. I received a very clear impression: His plan had a transplant in it, and I needed to get ready. So I sent out a simple message to my children and my siblings: If any of you would like to give me a kidney, please call this number. Here is an example: Every night that I was in the hospital, the nurses woke me several times to give me a shot, check my fluids and my vital signs, weigh me, or give me medicine. That was the plan, and I embraced it. I use the word embrace because I want you to accept the plan gladly and eagerly—to adopt it into your life fully and completely.
In the premortal realm, spirit sons and daughters knew and worshipped God as their Eternal Father and accepted His plan by which His children could obtain a physical body and gain earthly experience to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize their divine destiny as heirs of eternal life. Our Father knew that mortality would be hard and blessed, dangerous and peaceful, and full of adversity and glorious opportunities.
He knew we would all sin and all face the challenges of mortal life. The Son of God. Not only will all be resurrected, but those who come unto Christ, repent of their sins, and make and keep sacred covenants with Him may receive peace in this life and the great gift of exaltation and eternal life with their families in the world to come.
Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally. If you act with faith in Jesus Christ to embrace the plan, He will direct your path, open doors for you, put you where He wants you, and give you opportunities to serve Him in the greatest of all the causes on the earth—the cause of Christ.
Embracing the plan is not something we do once; we embrace the great plan of salvation and our role in it by the choices we make all through our lives. No matter what the opportunity may be, there is always opposition. It is the combination of opportunity and opposition that creates the need for choice. Which path will you walk? Whose voice will you hear? Whose plan will you follow? The crucible of choice is a test of your faith in Jesus Christ. I will focus on three crucibles of choice that are essential to eternal life and that are particularly important for you at this wonderful time in your lives.
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They are 1 deep learning, 2 serving the Lord, and 3 creating an eternal family. My purpose is to help you see what you must do to embrace the plan and to receive the marvelous blessings Heavenly Father has prepared for you. We are the spirit children of Heavenly Father. Every single one of us has the potential to become like Him. We all have different gifts and talents and we all have different challenges in mortality, but our Father has blessed us with the opportunity and the capacity to learn deeply through His eternal plan.
The power of deep learning has great value in your family, in your service in the Church, in your work, and in your community.
Embrace the Plan
It also brings great joy. Think of a time when you figured out how to solve an important problem or challenge you faced. It probably felt like a light went on in your mind and in your heart. The scriptures use words such as enlarge, enlighten, delicious, quicken, and joyous to describe what happens when we learn deeply. Deep learning applies to all truth, in any field of knowledge.
However, the most important knowledge we need to acquire is a knowledge of the things of God. Spiritual knowledge, therefore, must have the first place in our hearts and in our priorities. Making spiritual knowledge a priority means making time every day for personal prayer and study of the Book of Mormon and other scriptures.
It means taking religion classes. It means treasuring up what we learn by writing it down. And it means worshipping in the temple often. Putting spiritual knowledge first ensures that we will rely on the Lord and the Holy Spirit in all our learning. I have spent my life trying to deepen my learning and trying to help others learn deeply too. Embracing the plan and seizing the opportunities for deep learning means working diligently with faith in Jesus Christ. It means humbling ourselves before the Lord and seeking the companionship of the Holy Ghost. Arrayed against those wonderful attributes of diligence, humility, and righteousness stands the opposition: Of these, I believe the most dangerous is pride.
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Deep learning will increase your value in the world. Recognition, rewards, good jobs, and admission to graduate schools may come your way. Along with all of this good will come the temptations of pride. I want to share with you an experience from my first semester in graduate school. I took a class from a very prominent professor.
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I worked hard in that class all semester, prepared for the final exam, and prayed to Heavenly Father for His help. The exam assignment was really simple but also really hard: As I read the first paper, something wonderful happened. In the analysis I did and in the writing of my critique, I was blessed with insights and help beyond my own.
When I finished, I picked up the second paper and had exactly the same experience. I have never forgotten that day. When good things come, it is easy to get prideful. If we do, we stop learning deeply.
Most people in the world have no experience of lasting joy in their lives. All of our resources exist to guide you toward everlasting joy in Jesus Christ. The Lord is moving among us at Bethlehem to stir up a heart for people without Christ. For many of us, new ventures in evangelism are in the offing. New power and new boldness are coming to many. As I returned from vacation, I was eager to stoke this fire with the word.
I was eager to get into the Old Testament for a while. And I was eager to do some continuous exposition of a longer passage of Scripture. I believe the Lord led me to Isaiah 55 to satisfy all these goals. And what I want us to see in this first message based on Isaiah The great and wonderful thing about God is that he is inviting in both these ways. No text in the Bible shows this more vividly than Isaiah Let me put it in context for you.
Look at Isaiah Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Therefore I [God the Father] will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors. I persisted, and then she taught me the lesson of a lifetime. Deseret Book, , 1—2. Remember with gratitude who you really are, where you came from, and what the Lord Jesus Christ has done for you. He argued that this text is a great missionary text and that the point of it is that God wills for his people to expand until all the peoples of the world are included. The boat is boring. In verse 1, we are offered water, wine, and milk.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? So, he died not for his own sin, but for the sin of his people — the people who trust him and follow him. Therefore I [God the Father] will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors.
Death was not the end of Christ. He bore the sins of many. But God then honored him with the spoils of victory over death and sin. He is now alive and reigning in heaven till he comes again.
God’s Presence Invites You
So, in chapter 53, we can say that the prophet Isaiah sees the work of redemption as accomplished in the death and resurrection of Christ years in the future. Let me just show you one of these that will lead us to our Great Invitation in Isaiah On Wednesday, May 31, , William Carey, about to become the father of modern missions, preached a sermon to his fellow Baptist pastors from Isaiah He argued that this text is a great missionary text and that the point of it is that God wills for his people to expand until all the peoples of the world are included.
For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities. It is for all the nations. And this leads us then to The Great Invitation in Isaiah The answer is, two kinds of people. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. So, let me say a word to those of you in this category. You have come this morning with thirst in your heart. Your heart feels like the brown grass in my backyard. A lot of old hopes have dried up. Dreams have waited and almost died. Dead-end streets again and again.
The Great Invitation: Come! Drink! Eat! Live!
Knowing there has to be something more to life. But now everything that looks good is out of reach. But at least a longing.