Securing Our Exaltation

As I’ve said in previous blogs, missionaries have a lot of spiritual experiences as we see our Father-in-Heaven working with his children. Because of these experiences our faith and knowledge, commonly known as testimony, grow too. The use of this new found testimony is important. The natural tendency is to think that it is you, and, wow, what a spiritual person I am. Look how many people I’ve baptized or taught. Of course, that would be a big mistake, and a quick way to lose our access to the Spirit.

Because of the daily experiences we have feeling the Spirit and seeing it work in others, it would also be easy to think that the Lord is really happy with us and we are the direct path to the Celestial Kingdom. While we do have to be living pretty righteous lives to be instruments in His hands, it does not mean that we have our callings and elections made sure or that we are becoming spiritual titans that cannot fail. I think I felt the latter forty years ago when I was a young missionary, finishing my first mission here in Mexico. But the forty intervening years have shown me that I am anything but an invulnerable titan. There were times in those years that I grasped on to the memory of those missionary experiences to keep me going as I struggled to stay on the path that had seemed so easy and sure. In normal life with so many non-spiritual tasks to perform and so many distractions, it is much harder to keep the Spirit that we become so accustom to here in the mission.

This mission has given me a very strong sense of the reality of the things that are to come. I know that there is life after death and that it will not be the same for everyone. I know too that it is by the grace of God through his Son, Jesus Christ, that I have any hope at all of obtaining the Celestial Kingdom and that I must be living worthily to receive that grace. In that sense, my works here in the mission matter little except as they reflect the state of my spirit and heart. My mission is an act of consecration, submitting my will to the will of my Lord through the consecration of my time and resources. If I can keep this course upon leaving, I will have hope of arriving in the Celestial Kingdom. It is this state of heart and spirit that matter more that the experiences we see or feel. That is why when the Lord did away with sacrifices of blood he asked instead for the sacrifice of a contrite spirit and a broken heart.