more important than being authentic

While it is true that each of us travels an individualized discipleship journey on the covenant path, striving to keep our hearts and minds centered on Christ Jesus, we need to be careful and constantly vigilant to not be tempted to adopt this type of worldly philosophy in our life. Elder Quentin L. Cook said that “being sincerely Christlike is an even more important goal than being authentic.”

My dear friends, when we choose to let God be the most powerful influence in our life over our self-serving pursuits, we can make progress in our discipleship and increase our capacity to unite our mind and heart with the Savior. On the other hand, when we don’t allow God’s way to prevail in our life, we are left to ourselves, and without the Lord’s inspiring guidance, we can justify almost anything we do or don’t do. We can also make excuses for ourselves by doing things our own way, saying in effect, “I am just doing things my way.”

Ulisses Soares

"Aligning Our Will with His", General Conference October 2024

unless you intend to represent Him well

At baptism and when we partake of the sacrament, we witness that we are willing to take on ourselves the name of Jesus Christ. In this context, let us be mindful of the Old Testament commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” To our modern ears, this sounds like a prohibition against irreverently using the Lord’s name. The commandment includes that, but its injunction is even more profound. The Hebrew word translated as “take” means to “lift up” or “carry,” as one would a banner that identifies oneself with an individual or group. The word translated as “vain” means “empty” or “deceptive.” The commandment to not take the Lord’s name in vain can thus mean, “You should not identify yourself as a disciple of Jesus Christ unless you intend to represent Him well.”

Dale G. Renlund

"Accessing God’s Power through Covenants," General Conference April 2023

this is our greatest festival

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. … This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.

N. T. Wright

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008), 256, as found in "The Greatest Easter Story Ever Told," by Gary E. Stevenson. General Conference April 2023

i’m not commanded to do anything but to love

Robert Krulwich: Here is for you the hardest thing. I was just trying to think about how difficult this must be. You have been… Your life has been saved by her. She is, in effect, your savior. And yet your belief is that unless she accepts Jesus, that in some sense she is outside of grace and you know, I don’t know what you believe about hell and heaven, but that she might be punished. So what do you do about this weird combination. She’s insisting nope, not for me and you’re insisting oh no, this is the way it is and oh my gosh… Is it hard for you?

Jim Munroe: No, not at all.

RK: Okay

JM: And I’ll tell you why because it’s not my place to do that. I am very sorry to everyone who listens to this who ever feels like they got judged by a Christian because it’s never their place to do that. And this is where I think most of the times and everybody listening to this podcast is placed as kind of positioned or pigeonholed Christians and what they don’t understand is that I’m not commanded to do anything but to love and to start conversations, right? I’m not the one. I’m not the one who was sent into the world to judge, alright? But what I… so… putting it like that - i know where you want to go with this…

RK: No, this is I’m asking an honest question. You have to love the judge that may not love the woman who saved your life. That’s hard, I think.

JM: Yeah but at the same time it’s… That’s not what I’m.. that’s not my place.

Soren Wheeler: I have to say I think that we were sort of expecting that maybe sharper edge to the differences between JIm and Jennell. But the truth is, in the room that night Jim and Jennells conversation and thus their story start to feel like some kind of allegory, not for any particular religion, or moral code, but for a way of how to move through the world and hold your differences but still be one.

RK: Let me just finish this way. Do you have a sense between the two of you? Because obviously you stay very very good friends. I mean that’s obvious. Is there some...  Something that either of you can say that explains why you can dignifyingly but emphatically disagree and still stay in such extraordinarily close touch?

Jennell Jenney: I think the idea of humility and, as Jim might even say grace, is absolutely essential, no matter your tenets of belief. And that’s really what’s going to get you through conflict so yeah…

RK: And is it because you’re in this big ocean of the world and the two of you are just little little dots in there and so whatever you think it’s still you’re in a big ocean and there you are together? Is that the…

JJ: I think maybe yeah.

JM: Yeah. And…

RK: Do you have her bigness thing? Do you feel small?

JM: Do I feel small?

RK: Yeah

JM: I feel tiny. Humility at its root word it comes… The root is humos. Which means dirt. So when you become humble you become dirt.

RK: That’s better than the sea analogy, I think…

JM: I could keep going. You know, what god does with dirt is he creates things, but I won’t go there. But we become dirt, and I think where we get hung up is that we want to be right. And that hasn’t been brought into this yet. And right and wrong are… The words right and wrong I think in relationship are deadly words. I think saying I’m right, you’re wrong is not good for relationships. I think it’s…

RK: And have you ever said you’re right or you’re wrong to her?

JM: No.

JJ: I haven’t said it to him either, I don’t think.

JM: Never

RK: Well that’s a nice place to land.

JM: I think so.

"Match Made in Marrow," Radiolab. November 9, 2017. 

This piece was reported by Latif Nasser.  It was produced by Annie McEwen, with help from Bethel Habte and Alex Overington.

Having drawn the parallels between the humiliating brutal state-sanctioned death of Christ on the cross and the regular state-sanctioned lynchings of Black bodies, I'm personally convinced that there is no American who is able to embrace and teach Jesus like the Black American. Our experience as Black people provides a profound hermeneutic through which we talk about and experience the divine and ourselves. This alone is why the church needs us so urgently. They will never truly know Jesus until they know us. 

James Jones

Living on the Inside of the Edge by Christian Kimball. Common Consent Press. 2023. p. 262, 263. See also Student Spotlight - James C. Jones - Union Theological Seminary (utsnyc.edu) and Mormon church leader uses his faith to spread anti-racist principles : NPR

a mandate to be nonconformists

We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists. The Apostle Paul, who knew the inner realities of he Christian faith, counseled, "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.  

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1963. Fortress Press Gift Edition 2010. p. 12

freedom consists

One hundred thirty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln asked whether a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could "long endure". President Lincoln’s question is no less a question for the present generation of Americans. Democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community. The basic question before a democratic society is: "how ought we to live together?" In seeking an answer to this question, can society exclude moral truth and moral reasoning? Can the Biblical wisdom which played such a formative part in the very founding of your country be excluded from that debate?

Would not doing so mean that America’s founding documents no longer have any defining content, but are only the formal dressing of changing opinion? Would not doing so mean that tens of millions of Americans could no longer offer the contribution of their deepest convictions to the formation of public policy? Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

His Holiness John Paul II

Apostolic Journey to the United States of America. Eucharistic Celebration. Homily of His Holiness John Paul II. Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore. Sunday, 8 October 1995

deep wounds deepen us

Let yourself cry as you grow. Don't stuff your emotions down. Growing in Christ isn't all smiles and laughter. Let your tears, and the wounds they reflect, take you deeper with Christ than you could ever otherwise go. As I've heard my dad say, "Deep wounds deepen us."

Dane C. Ortlund

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners by Dane C. Ortlund. Crossway. 2021. p.135

pain will foster growth

Our natural instincts tell us that the way forward in the Christian life is by avoiding pain so that, undistracted, we can get down to the business at hand of growing in Christ. The New Testament tells us again and again, however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity. The anguish, disappointments, and futility that afflict us are themselves vital building blocks to our growth. We are "heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him" (Rom. 8:17). We most deeply know Christ as we "share his sufferings" (Phil. 3:10). "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Heb. 12:11).

Pain will foster growth like nothing else can - if we will let it.

Dane C. Ortlund

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners by Dane C. Ortlund. Crossway. 2021. p.125

the very root of Christian doctrine

[The Atonement of Christ] is the very root of Christian doctrine. You may know much about the gospel as it branches out from there, but if you only know the branches and those branches do not touch that root, if they have been cut free from that truth, there will be no life nor substance nor redemption in them.


Boyd K. Packer, “The Mediator,” Ensign, May 1977, 56, as quoted in “The Very Root of Christian Doctrine” by Thomas B. Griffith (judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when this devotional address was given on 14 March 2006). Speeches - Brigham Young University 2005-2006.

not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion

The right’s contention that we are a “Christian nation” that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, President Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that America “gives… bigotry no sanction.” In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, the Founders declared that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…” Washington’s expansive view of liberty also extended to those Christians who felt shut out of the mainstream. When American Catholics wrote him asking for “the equal rights of citizenship, as the price of our blood spilt under your eyes,” Washington agreed, replying: “As mankind becomes more liberal, they will be apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.”


American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation by Jon Mecham. Random House. 2006. p.18, 19