I love this talk because, while all of the talk is good, there are many parts of this talk that are particularly quotable. Here are a few of my favorites:
God the Eternal Father did not give that first great commandment because He needs us to love Him. His power and glory are not diminished should we disregard, deny, or even defile His name. His influence and dominion extend through time and space independent of our acceptance, approval, or admiration.
No, God does not need us to love Him. But oh, how we need to love God!
For what we love determines what we seek.
What we seek determines what we think and do.
What we think and do determines who we are—and who we will become.
Since the beginning of time, love has been the source of both the highest bliss and the heaviest burdens. At the heart of misery from the days of Adam until today, you will find the love of wrong things. And at the heart of joy, you will find the love of good things.
And the greatest of all good things is God.
That's all just from the first half of the talk, and there were plenty more paragraphs in the first half of the talk alone, but I didn't want to end up copying and pasting the whole talk. If you wanted to read the talk, you could just follow the link.
From these few quotes, it seems clear that what we love is a very central and important defining characteristic. When we love good things, we seek good things. We think about and do good things. As a result, we become better people and find joy.
There are other things in this world that promise happiness or a feeling of satisfaction. Some people turn to those things, seeking happiness, but they end up loving those things more than they love the things of God, so they seek those things rather than seeking God, and as a result, the "happiness" that they find fails them, and they're left feeling just as empty as they felt before. Only God can offer true, lasting happiness.
That is why God asks us to love Him and seek Him, not because He needs the comfort of being loved, or because He enjoys having people worship Him, but because that love that we have for Him is what motivates us to be good people. As President Uchtdorf says later in his talk:
His pure love directs and encourages us to become more pure and holy. It inspires us to walk in righteousness—not out of fear or obligation but out of an earnest desire to become even more like Him because we love Him.
By doing so, we can become “born again … [and] cleansed by blood, even the blood of [the] Only Begotten; that [we] might be sanctified from all sin, and enjoy the words of eternal life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come, even immortal glory.”
(Moses 6:59)
Though God's actions or inactions don't always make sense to me, I'm coming to understand that everything God does, He does out of love. Because He loves us, He desires what's best for us, and because of His great knowledge and wisdom, He knows what's best for us, even when His plan doesn't make sense to foolish and ignorant people like us. However, for me this is proving to be a hard lesson to learn. On one level, I know that I'm foolish and that He is much more wise than I am, but at the same time, I want to make my own decisions, which sometimes means going against His advice. Hence the knowledge and admittance of my own foolishness. But even though I know I'm foolish, I'm still allowing myself to make the decisions on whether I follow God's directions or my own. When will I ever learn?
1 comment:
<3
I found this post profoundly moving.
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