Start Thinking Blog

Tying It All Together In preparing for today’s message, I inadvertently tapped on the wrong link in my scriptures and ended up in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation. When I started reading, the verses jumped out at me with several different but connected themes from the recent General Conference and Christ’s teachings […]

Fire and Light Throughout scripture, especially in the account of the Savior’s visit to the Book of Mormon people, the imagery of fire and light describes spiritual manifestations. In Joseph Smith’s first vision, “a pillar of light” appears exactly over his head, above the brightness of the sun. In the light are the Father and

The Dimensions of Jesus A few months ago, I watched a video that featured an Evangelical Protestant pastor who was in the process of reading the Book of Mormon. He was reading 3 Nephi about the destruction of the more wicked cities during the time that Jesus was crucified. He was puzzled that the loving

The Second Coming: How Close Are We? 3 Nephi 1-7 covers roughly the period between Christ’s birth and death. Many of the conditions that existed then exist now. The list includes: Religious skepticism and rejection of prophecy. Prosperity and pride. The rise of coalitions of power that exist behind the scenes who seek control and

Don’t Forget God In Helaman 12, we see warnings about what happens when we forget God. The best way to visualize the consequences of forgetting God is to look at the state of our world today. We have war, political strife, contention, social depravity, and moral decay. One of the greatest blessings of the Book

Doom, Gloom, and A Ray of Sunshine I am generally an optimist, but it’s getting harder to see the good in our world of constant negativity, contention, and war. I can see why the prophet Nephi in the Book of Helaman acted the way he did. His public display of lamentation on his tower was

An Emerging Gift This week, I will diverge a bit from the theme of the Come Follow Me curriculum. My reasons for that are that the subject matter of the particular chapters we are covering is apparent and disturbing in our world and time. We are consumed by it daily in the media during election

A Metanarrative of War In the Book of Mormon, many chapters are devoted to people at war with each other. We sometimes think there are unjustified aggressions against innocent people, but that is untrue. Consider these verses in Alma 50, “… inasmuch as they shall keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. But

States of Being The Book of Mormon is so much deeper than the Bible (with the exception of the words of Jesus Christ) in doctrine that it helps us understand ourselves and deserves intense attention. Alma’s counsel to his son Corianton highlights the idea that we live in different states of both existence and attitudes.

Escaping Bondage This week I did something I never do; I watched snippets of ‘Come Follow Me’ commentaries on YouTube. It was exactly what I expected, and I will not be doing that again anytime soon. The content was about as milk-toast as you can get. They ranged from narrated cartoons to guys in suits