This past month I have been feeling a little down, I apologize for not getting a message to you for a while. This time I wish to share with you an article that I found in the April Ensign. It was entitled "Your Divine Heritage" By Elder Oaks.
There was a section that stood out to me, when I saw the title I laughed. But then while I was reading it, it was very powerful, and I thought that it would make a great base for a thought. With no further ado, the direct excerpt from the Ensign:
Spiritual Identity Theft
One of the great blessings of understanding our true eternal identity as a child of God is that our personal sense of self-worth can only be high. He loves each one of His children. We are each His son or daughter, with the potential to become like Him. In the gospel plan based on moral agency, we fail only if we make choices that lead to failure. But in that same light, we can make choices that will lead to our marvelous success. One of the great beauties of the gospel is that critical decisions are ours for the making.
Let us briefly discuss a significant threat to achieving our divine potential. Today we receive many warnings about identity theft. Some of you may have experienced the trauma resulting from this fraud. In our cybernetic world of trust and rapid transmission of medical, financial, and other personal data, we are vulnerable to exploitation of our identifying details. Theft of our numerical mortal identity can be costly and cause us a great deal of misery. But the theft of our eternal identity has much longer effects and more dire consequences. I am not talking about addresses, credit cards, or any other identifying numbers. I am talking about something much more basic and more important than who the world thinks you are. I am talking about who you think you are.
We know we are sons and daughters of God, with the potential to become like Him as described in His plan of happiness. We know this potential is achieved through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and through obedience to the eternal laws and principles embedded in His gospel. We also know that Satan is totally dedicated to thwarting and derailing this marvelous plan-of-happiness knowledge and process. We know that one of his primary tools is to entice us to forget who we really are—to fail to realize or to forget our divine potential. This is the cruelest form of identity theft.
How does Satan do it? He is quite straightforward and predictable. First, he attempts to prompt doubts in our minds about our divine potential. He even cultivates doctrine in the world implying we are much less than we really are. He undermines our faith—and thus our confidence—in our ability to achieve our potential. He strives to bring us to a mind-set in which we believe that we, individually, are not good enough to ever achieve our celestial goals.
In this same vein Satan seeks to convince us that we are so bad that even the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ is not sufficient to reach down to our lowly depths and draw us up unto our Savior. He tempts us into paths that seem to verify his cynicism about our grand and glorious potential.
He then hedges his bets by surrounding us with the gaudy, glitzy filth of pornography and other forms of immorality and thus precludes our being led by the Holy Spirit. He is a clever fellow with many tricks to make us forget who we really are: sons and daughters of God with divine potential.
Remembering Who We Are
Satan does not want us to understand our divine potential, but the Lord certainly does. He has provided us with countless scriptures and prophetic promptings to help us counter and resist these satanic pulls. One of the most powerful of these promptings is found when Helaman, under the Lord's direction, counseled his sons, Nephi and Lehi. He repeatedly admonished them to remember who they were and whence their marvelous spiritual heritage came: "And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall" (Helaman 5:12).
"Remembering" is a very important principle to help us keep in mind our true identity. This is why we partake of the sacrament each week: to renew our covenants we have made with the Lord in the waters of baptism, to remember Him and to keep His commandments, to refresh in our minds who we are and what our role is in God's plan.
This is why we go back to the temple: to renew our covenants that we have made in those sacred halls and to remind ourselves of these covenants and obligations. When we thus remember these sacred obligations, Satan's storms and attacks will not turn us from our quest—from pursuing our divine potential.
I pray that we may ever remember who we are: sons and daughters of a loving Father, who have the potential to return to His side and dwell with Him as celestial beings.
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I wish to add my own testimony of this. We are loved so very much by our Father in Heaven, he loves us and will continue to bless us, he isn't going to punish us because he is mad at us, but will always love us, and do what is meant for us. I was hit by a verse the other night, I didn't know why at the time, and so I thought about it, it was just today this morning(two days later) that I understood why it did. It was Romans 5-
8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet
sinners,
Christ died for us.
9 Much more then, being now
justified by his
blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.
10 For if, when we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God by the
death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.
11 And not only
so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the
atonement.
The reason it stood out to me was to show that God loves us, he loved us while we were sinners enough that His son died for us, why is he going love us less now, when we have the chance to come back to him? He isn't. He loves us dearly, and I pray that we might be able to remember who we are, and who those around us are, that we might be able to see the beauty, and happiness; that Satan will not have power over us to drag us down to the depths of misery and endless woe.
~Trezor Sheen Owens
