The Irony of the Priorities of Our Desires

In my desire to blog about the Sacrament, I skipped over a Conference talk that I'd like to get back to now. In a talk titled Which Way Do You Face?, Elder Lynn G. Robbins of the Presidency of the Seventy said, "Trying to please others before pleasing God is inverting the first and second great commandments," which are first to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," and second to "love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt 22: 37, 39). Pleasing God should be among our top priorities, if not the top priority. Pleasing anyone else, even ourselves, should come second to that.

Elder Robbins spoke of some who feared men more than God. Today, I'd like to blog about the temptation and peril of loving ourselves more than God. The temptation is very present and alluring. We want to do what we want to do, not what God wants us to do. We want what we want, not what God wants for us. This is foolish because what God wants for us, what He's offering us, is greater than anything we can imagine or ever hope to obtain by ourselves. What God wants us to do is a wiser course of action and will lead to greater happiness than any path we might find or follow by following our own plans or whims. God can see the future, and He wants our future to be glorious. To that end, He has told us what to do to reach that glorious future. How foolish we would be to desire anything else!

How foolish we are for desiring other things. We don't quite have the vision and foresight God has. We can't see the end from the beginning like He can. We only see the roads that are in front of us. One of them looks fun, but leads nowhere. One of them looks promising, but really isn't. And one of them looks hard and steep, with no end in sight, and this is the road God wants us to follow. Human nature would have us choose either of the first two roads. A foolish man would chart his own course and follow his own plan rather than God's. An even more foolish one would follow the crowd, take the path of least resistance, and try to have a good time... until Judgement day. The only wise course of action for those of us who know God's will for us is to abandon our own schemes and instead follow the path that God has laid out for us. It won't be what we want to do, and it probably won't get us what we think we want, but it'll get us something better than we ever dreamed of obtaining, and in the end, we'll be glad we did it.

Putting God before ourselves is difficult but ironically more rewarding than putting ourselves before Him. Putting ourselves first, we might make more money or have more fun, but it won't last. Putting God first ensures that we'll "lay up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven" that will allow us to experience eternal joy forever. Putting God's desires before our own may seem counter-intuitive, but it's actually the best thing we could possibly do for ourselves. So, in a sense, putting God first means putting ourselves first, because God wants what's best for us, and putting our own desires first isn't really something that we actually want to do.