Doctrinal Library

Success – A Journey or a Destination?

May this be our goal, and may we be willing to pay the price to obtain it and not be taken in by all the misinformation which is abroad in the land today about birth control, abortion and sex education, and other Satan-inspired philosophies; that we may look to the Lord and follow his living prophets and oracles today. I pray that we will, for I bear witness that God our Heavenly Father lives, and that he hears and answers prayers, and that he is concerned about his children, so much so that he sent his Only Begotten Son that we might have immortality and eternal life.

Marriage, Family Law, and the Temple

Further, in Roe v. Wade in 1973 the Supreme Court granted individual women the right to choose an abortion, thereby rejecting long-held beliefs in our culture about not only the social interests held by unborn children but also the social purposes served by allowing elected legislators to decide collectively about a question as value laden and sensitive as when life begins.

Three Tools to Build a Sacred Home

Our tarantulas and snakes are moral ones, and they are ever so subtle. They include disdain for household work, the difficulty of holding family mealtimes, changing roles for mothers and fathers, abortion, and the erosion of marriage through divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex marriage.

Our Mortal Body-A Sacred Gift

Many temptations, testings, and challenges come through the body. There must be opposition in all things. This is part of our proving ourselves. Most of the evil and temptations in our society today are directed at the body. Satan and his followers are seeking our destruction that we may become subject to him. Pornography, physical abuse, drugs, moral transgression, perversion, abortion, suicide, and murder are all vicious designs of Satan to destroy the souls of man. All are directed at the body. Our choice of music, literature, dance, movies, videos, television, friends, etc., can lead to base thoughts and actions regarding the body or to uplifting, respectful thoughts and feelings about the body. Those choices are ours.

Protect Our Homes, Renew Our Powers

We usually don’t have to worry about actual tarantulas and snakes invading our houses; instead, we have even more dangerous influences threatening us. Unlike Sister Burt’s invaders, our tarantulas and snakes are moral ones, and they are ever so subtle. Our modern advances have brought us the Internet; TV; DVDs; the erosion of marriage through divorce, cohabitation, same-sex marriage, and abortion; the difficulty of holding family mealtimes; the clothing we wear; our cultural disdain for household work; and changing roles for mothers and fathers. It would be nice if we could beat these invaders back with rolling pins and broomsticks, but literally it’s not possible—and figuratively we’ve lost many of our rolling pins and brooms.

The Sanctity of Life

In times past we have looked upon a person who saves another human life as a great hero; yet now we have come to a time when the taking of an unborn human life for nonmedical reasons has become tolerated, made legal, and accepted in many countries of the world. But making it legal to destroy newly conceived life will never make it right. It is consummately wrong.
For the unborn, only two possibilities are open: It can become a live human being or a dead unborn child.
Because she feels it, every mother knows there is sacred life in the body of her unborn babe. There is also life in the spirit, and some time before birth the body and the spirit are united. When they do come together, we have a human soul. For the Lord has said, “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man.” (D&C 88:15.)
One of the most evil myths of our day is that a woman who has joined hands with God in creation can destroy that creation because she claims the right to control her own body. Since the life within her is not her own, how can she justify its termination and deflect that life from an earth which it may never inherit?

The Price of Love

I read an interview with a lady who was suing her doctor because he did not tell her about amniocentesis, and therefore, she was not able to learn in advance that her baby was a mongoloid child and destroy the child through abortion. In the interview she said, “I’m happy that I know Tommy, but I would also have been happy if I hadn’t known him.” I wonder if that is true. I wonder how long the reverberations of destroying that life might have followed her, had she done it. There comes a time when you must pay the price, the sacrifice of love. How lucky she was to get the chance to pay it.

Appreciate Your Opportunities

What I’m saying to you is that we need to appreciate the special heritage and values that have come to us. Think for a moment what particularly distinctive insight the kingdom of God offers you in these matters: God, Christ, man, life, sex, marriage, family, resurrection, eternity. Special instruction has been given to us concerning conservation, pollution, liberation, population, elections, freedom, abortion, government, Christ. In these and many other very important principles, programs, doctrines, and matters, there are distinctive, special insights we have to share. But just knowing that or hearing it doesn’t really suffice, does it? We must learn to understand these insights and become really converted to them, and to act on them.

Awakenings: Living as Believers in the Nation we Have Now

One of the unofficial mottos of Brigham Young University is “Enter to learn; go forth to serve.” “Go forth to serve”—it is a better exit line than anything I could ever write. Dear friends, go forth to serve. Serve the poor. Help the weak. Protect the unborn children. Fight for your right to love and serve God and for others to do the same. Defend the dignity of marriage and the family and witness their meaning and hope to others by the example of your lives. If you do that, you will inspire others to do the same. And you will discover in your own life what it means to be fully human.

Catholics and Latter-day Saints: Partners in the Defense of Religious Freedom

So I come before you today as a religious leader who shares with you a love for our own country but also, like many, a growing concern about its moral health as a good society. In recent years Catholics and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side by side in the public square to defend human life and dignity. In addition to working together to alleviate poverty here and abroad, we have been together in combating the degradations associated with the pornography industry; in promoting respect for the right to life of those still waiting in their mother’s womb to be born; and in defending marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the sake of family against various efforts to redefine in civil law that foundational element of God’s natural plan for creation. I am personally grateful that, after 180 years of living mostly apart from one another, Catholics and Latter-day Saints have begun to see one another as trustworthy partners in the defense of shared moral principles and in the promotion of the common good of our beloved country.John Paul II poured his heart into the defense of religious freedom, but not primarily as a politician on the world stage. He denounced evils like racism, human trafficking, abortion, euthanasia, and the exploitation of workers and immigrants, but his approach was from the vantage point of a pastor to whom Christ had entrusted the mission to teach and care for the least of the Lord’s brothers and sisters (see Matthew 25:40).