The talk I was given to help me prepare for my lesson next week is Power to Overcome the Adversary by Elder Peter M. Johnson of the Seventy. Elder Johnson starts off by reminding us of our divine nature and destiny, and then lists what He calls "the three Ds of the adversary," which basically amount to Satan's battle strategy: Deception, Distraction, and Discouragement." Elder Johnson then spends a few paragraphs on each of these Ds, using examples to help describe them. He follows this list of Satan's tactics with a list of four things we can do to counter them, giving me a clear, if predictable answer to the question that forms the basis of my talk: "How Do We Overcome the Adversary and Find Happiness?" Elder Johnson's suggestions basically boil down to 1) Love God, 2) Pray daily, 3) Study the Book of Mormon daily, and 4) Take the Sacrament every week.
These suggestions aren't unique or remarkable, but Elder Johnson's repetition of the phrase "every day, every day, every day" gave the idea for a central controlling theme for my talk: daily. How do we overcome the Adversary? Daily. Okay, but really, how do we do it? By praying and studying the scriptures daily. Then how do we find happiness? Daily. The answer "daily" doesn't fit perfectly with each of those questions, but the concept does. We cannot defeat Satan once and for all. As long as we live, Satan will continually attack us every day, meaning that we need to continually repel him every day. This process can seem discouraging, and that's exactly what Satan wants. This will give me an easy transition into Elder Johnson's talk, describing the three Ds and Elder Johnson's proposed countermeasures.
This will lead me to my next point: that in order to win, there are things we need to do on a daily or weekly basis, including basically all the Sunday School answers. We need to pray and read the scriptures daily. We need to go to church and partake of the Sacrament weekly. We should also go to the Temple as often as we can manage it, weekly works pretty well. And we must always remember to keep our Love of God and our fellow man as our primary motivation and to try to keep the Holy Ghost as our constant companion and guide. Doing all these things (or as many of them as we can manage) on a regular basis will help us gradually build up our spiritual defenses and gain the power to resist temptation.
Of course, doing all these good things will also have the welcome side-benefit of helping us find happiness. Having the Spirit with us and successfully resisting sin are great ways to fill our hearts with joy and avoid the spiritual pain that detracts from that joy. Sure, qualifying for the Celestial Kingdom is certainly something we can look forward to, but we don't have to wait until then to find happiness. Through the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we can find peace, joy, and happiness right here in our everyday lives.
So, that's the basic idea for my talk. I'll break the ice in some way, perhaps using a few lines out of We Are All Enlisted to highlight the apparent contradiction between being involved in a high-stakes, eternal spiritual conflict and nonetheless being happy. Then I'll introduce my topic ("How Do We Overcome the Adversary and Find Happiness?") and the controlling theme ("daily") and proceed for there with the three Ds, the four countermeasures, and a reminder that The Spirit can help us make peace with our situation and find happiness in spite of it. It's a rough outline, and the introduction especially will need a lot of work, but it's a start. I'll flesh it out over the coming week using sections and subsections so I can either elaborate on all my main points to fill out all the time I'm given or so I can quickly cover the most important points if time is short. I'm the last speaker, so I'll need to be flexible enough to take any starting time and still end as close to exactly on time as possible. I have a lot of ideas to list, organize, connect, and develop, but at least now I have a plan.
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