Continuing from Modern Liahonas II, Quoting form “All Things New” by Fiona and Terryl Givens:
The call to discipleship is not for the faint of heart: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, If anyone [desires] to come after me, let him forget self and lose sight of his own interests, and let him pick up his cross and carry it, and let him [take] the same road with me that I travel” (Matt. 16:24, Wuest expanded translation). While the road Jesus traveled led to our exaltation, the work of discipleship is costly, painful, and grueling. Saints are good at service and at sacrifice. We live a high-demand faith, sociologists recognize. We give up time, and money, and energy. However, we are not a people overly given to contemplation of to devotional prayer and pondering. In Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 version of the Articles of Faith, he wrote, “We believe that God is the same in all ages; and that it requires the same holiness, purity, and religion, to save a man now, as it did anciently.”16 Unfortunately the article was dropped from our canonized version. We Saints have typically been as industrious as bees. As Wilford Woodruff once said with some impatience, “Strangers and the Christian world marvel” at our emphasis on “temporal work,” and responded that we can’t build up Zion sitting on a hemlock slab singing our ways to everlasting bliss; we have to cultivate the earth, to take the rocks and elements out of the mountains and rear Temples to the Most High God.”17 Spencer W. Kimball’s favorite motto, to which he so often reverted, was “Do it!” As Terry Eagleton reminds us, the Gospel of Matthew teaches, “Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick.”18 In this essential sphere of active, engaged, service-oriented discipleship Latter-day Saints have excelled.
We have not done as well in the meditative, contemplative half of discipleship. One reason may be our language of gospel “fullness,” which seduces us into a kind of complacency. We have modern prophets, we have additional scripture, we have correlated curriculum, and we believe we have answers to all those questions that haunt human history. We claim to know where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. All of this adds up to a picture of completion, wholeness, satiety. If we are not smug, we are satisfied. We read a scripture that mocks the world for their self-satisfaction “A Bible! a Bible! We have got a Bible and there cannot be anymore Bible” (2 Nephi 29:3). But do we liken that overconfident contentment to ourselves as Nephi admonished” (1 Nephi 19:23)
Bearing the cross of discipleship involves the strenuousness of the mind, as well as that part of the body and the heart. B. H. Roberts encouraged discipleship that is more intellectually effortful:
~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Faith Matters Publishing, 2020),69-70.
