August is more than half over. When August ends, I will have only a month left until early October. If I want to finish blogging about last General Conference's talks before the next General Conference happens, I had better get a move on.
In his April 2105 Priesthood Session talk, Priesthood and Personal Prayer, President Henry B. Eyring counseled us to "always pray that God will warn and protect you from evil." Warning someone and protecting them are two different things. When you warn someone, you make them aware that they are in danger. When you protect someone, you face the danger for them or with them, or at least make them more capable of facing the danger.
One of God's most common methods of protecting us from evil is by warning us about it. Evil is sneaky. By warning us of the temptations we face, by pointing them out to us, God makes it so we are better able to resist the temptations that we otherwise might not have fallen prey to. Thus, God protects us from evil by warning us of it, but President Eyring's quote suggests that that's not all He does.
We are encouraged to pray that God will both warn us of evil and protect us from it, so there must be more to God's protection than just warning. I believe that God also offers us protection so effective that we may not even know it happened. When I blogged about Prince Philip's rescue from Maleficent's Forbidden Mountain, I mostly wrote about a set of obstacles that might have thwarted Prince Philip had the three good fairies not protected him, and that he might not have noticed had he not been paying attention. It's possible that God protects us from obstacles that we might not know we might have had to face. If God were to remove an obstacle from our lives before we became aware of it, we might never have learned that that obstacle was ever there. In short, God might be giving us more protection than we realize.
There is a lot of evil in the world, and as Christians, we have to withstand it. Thankfully, we don't have to resist all the world's evils alone. I believe that God is willing to protect us from the evils we're not ready to face and warn us of the evils that might have slipped through our defenses. We just have to pray and ask for His help, and then to heed His warnings and use the tools He gives us to win. With God's help, we can overcome evil, so we should always pray that God will warn and protect us from it.
One of God's most common methods of protecting us from evil is by warning us about it. Evil is sneaky. By warning us of the temptations we face, by pointing them out to us, God makes it so we are better able to resist the temptations that we otherwise might not have fallen prey to. Thus, God protects us from evil by warning us of it, but President Eyring's quote suggests that that's not all He does.
We are encouraged to pray that God will both warn us of evil and protect us from it, so there must be more to God's protection than just warning. I believe that God also offers us protection so effective that we may not even know it happened. When I blogged about Prince Philip's rescue from Maleficent's Forbidden Mountain, I mostly wrote about a set of obstacles that might have thwarted Prince Philip had the three good fairies not protected him, and that he might not have noticed had he not been paying attention. It's possible that God protects us from obstacles that we might not know we might have had to face. If God were to remove an obstacle from our lives before we became aware of it, we might never have learned that that obstacle was ever there. In short, God might be giving us more protection than we realize.
There is a lot of evil in the world, and as Christians, we have to withstand it. Thankfully, we don't have to resist all the world's evils alone. I believe that God is willing to protect us from the evils we're not ready to face and warn us of the evils that might have slipped through our defenses. We just have to pray and ask for His help, and then to heed His warnings and use the tools He gives us to win. With God's help, we can overcome evil, so we should always pray that God will warn and protect us from it.
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