Covenants, Ordinances, and Blessings Part 4

Answering Mormons Questions by Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson deals with thirty-six commonly asked questions by your LDS friends and neighbors. It's a great resource for Christians who want to share their faith with friends and loved ones.

Be sure to pick up your copy today at your favorite Christian bookstore. Our ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Do covenants give Latter-day Saints power to love themselves? Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. This week we've been talking about the importance of covenants, ordinances, and blessings, taken from an article that is in the September 2021 edition of Liahona Magazine. It was originally a devotional given by Randy D. Funk of the First Quorum of the Seventy, a devotional that he gave on September 22, 2020 at BYU-Idaho, which is located in Rexburg, Idaho. In the October issue of Liahona Magazine, again, the subject of covenants comes up. And as we mentioned earlier in this week, it seems like covenant-keeping, temple participation, ordinances is a huge theme for the year 2021.

Well, in the October edition of Liahona Magazine, there was an article titled Covenants Can Transform Our Relationships. It was written by a person who lives in Utah, a woman by the name of Emily Abel. Now, I know nothing of this woman. I don't know how old she is or how long she's been a member of the church. I'm assuming she was probably born in the covenant, which means she was born into an LDS family.

But she makes some comments here that I think need to be critiqued in light of what Mr. Funk said in the article in the September issue of the Liahona Magazine. What does Emily say at the beginning of her piece? As a child, I was proud to be able to define a big word like covenant. Whenever the topic came up at church, I would proudly burst out, a covenant is a promise between me and God. Growing up, I made covenant through baptism and in the temple, and my definition remained mostly unchanged. I saw covenants as a set of rules for me to follow, and then God would hold up His side of the bargain by bestowing promised blessings. Now, why wouldn't she have that kind of a conclusion when it comes to covenants?

Why wouldn't she see them as a set of rules for me to follow, and then God would uphold His side of the bargain by bestowing promised blessings? Of course, if she kept her side of the bargain, let's not forget the banana illustration that Mr. Funk gave in the September 2021 edition of the Liahona Magazine. He says on page 32, If you bring me a dozen bananas, I will pay you $100. To accept my generous offer, you don't need to sign an agreement or even say you will bring me bananas. You simply need to go to the store or marketplace, buy a dozen bananas, and bring them to me. If you bring me a dozen bananas, I am contractually obligated to pay you $100.

Why? Because you accepted my offer by your performance. Covenants with our Heavenly Father work in much the same way. To receive the generous blessings He offers, we must act to accept them. As we then keep our covenants by what we do, we qualify for the abundant blessings He has promised. It's reciprocal. The Latter-day Saint does what they're told to do.

They do it. God promises to meet His end of the bargain. So when she says, I saw covenants as a set of rules for me to follow, and then God would hold up His side of the bargain by bestowing promised blessings, sounds to me like she's paraphrasing what Mr. Funk wrote in his article in the September issue of the Liahona Magazine titled, Covenants, Ordinances, and Blessings.

But she goes on. To me, covenants seem to be something to check off a list of life to-dos. I could see how other gospel practices like prayer and fasting were about developing a relationship with Heavenly Father.

But covenants seem to be about Heavenly Father's rules. Well, it turns out that my childhood definition was a good start, but it needed a few more lines if covenants were going to transform my life the way God intended them to. Notice very carefully here, she says, well, it turns out that my childhood definition was a good start. She doesn't say that her childhood definition was inaccurate.

She just says it was a good start. So she's not denying this idea that she says earlier that covenants seem to be something to check off a list of life to-dos. Yet, how many times have we talked to Latter-day Saints where they give us the impression that in order to receive the desired blessing, there are a number of things that they must do? I mean, even Mr. Funk, in his article in the September Liahona, he talks about the ordinances of salvation and exaltation. Then he names them.

He says that there are five of them that you must keep. So there is a list that Latter-day Saints really must check off if they hope to receive the desired blessing in this case. So I'm not going to draw the conclusion that she's saying it's not a set of checks that need to be marked off. It's just not the whole story. At least that's what she's trying to imply. What I get from what Emily Abel is saying in this article, sadly, and I'm going to be very blunt here, I think what she's doing here is putting a good spin on what covenant keeping is really all about.

And this is why I say that. In a pull quote, it has this statement, Covenants can give us power to love ourselves, serve others, and return to our heavenly Father and Savior. To that statement, I would add, that might be true in a Mormon context, but only if you are keeping them. You cannot assume that you're going to have power to love yourself unless you are keeping the covenants that you have promised to keep. In fact, if you're a Latter-day Saint who realizes that you're not keeping the covenants that you have promised to keep, I would probably be correct in assuming that a person like that perhaps even loathes themselves because they're not living up to the promises that they have made with their God.

And of course, the huge problem behind that is there are so many things that a Latter-day Saint must do. The bar is set so high that no Latter-day Saint can do it. Well, if you can't keep all these covenants, then how do you think you have the power to love yourselves?

Now, she's trying to tell herself that she does love herself, and she is keeping these covenants. And again, not to be mean, because we know from talking to Latter-day Saints, when we ask specific questions about where they are in light of eternity, I've never had one beat his chest and say proudly, I know I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, and when I die, God owes me all these things because I've done my part of the bargain. If you get a Latter-day Saint like that, all you need to do is ask them, hey, that's great, so you never repent? Well, if they do admit that they're repenting, then wouldn't they be going against what was cited in the September Leohona by Robert Funk in Mosiah 18, 8, and 9, where you're supposed to stand as witnesses at all times and in all things and in all places, even until death? Then you can hope to be in the first resurrection and have eternal life.

If you're not doing that, you don't qualify. And remember, as we've brought out this week, one of the pull quotes that they had in that article in the September issue of Leohona, they had Russell M. Nelson saying, God fixes the terms. Every person may choose to accept those terms. If one accepts the terms of the covenant and obeys God's law, he or she receives the blessings associated with the covenant. If one accepts the terms of the covenant and doesn't obey God's law, then what happens? He or she doesn't receive the blessings associated with the covenant. That's the illustration that Robert Funk was giving us in his article, but somehow I think Emily is trying to fudge with a little bit of the facts here.

What does she say down at the bottom of page 43 under filling in the missing pieces? These words from Elder Garrett W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were a helpful starting place for my evolving definition of covenant. Quote, By divine covenant we belong to God and to each other. Covenant belonging is a miracle. It is not to give up on ourselves on each other or on God.

Okay. But again, isn't that predicated on keeping the covenants? I mean, it's not just saying that you're going to join in on this covenant with God.

You have to basically keep them. And I can understand, well, it is not to give up on ourselves on each other or on God. But yet how many times have we talked to Latter-day Saints that seem to have done just that?

They know they don't qualify and they've been content to just believe that they'll make it to the terrestrial kingdom. She goes on in the next paragraph and she says, Since finding that quote, I've realized that covenants have a daily impact on our lives. When we truly live by the covenants we've made, we don't give up on ourselves on the people around us or on God.

You see, again, folks, it's all based on keeping those covenants. But again, I ask the question, well, what if you don't do that? What if you're struggling with that? What if you realize this is a difficult thing for me to do?

I can't live up to this. If you're not living by the covenants you've made, you can see why an individual might just give up on themselves, because they realize that this alleged merciful God, and I have the word merciful in quotation marks, is not quite as merciful as he's been described. Bill, this has been a week of, I think, depressing news if you're a Latter-day Saint and listening to this and understanding that you're not bringing 12 bananas to the table. You're not capable of bringing the right number of bananas in the right kind of shape that God desires.

And you might be a little depressed going, Okay, what do I do? I think we need to say, during a series like this, that there is hope for people who think that they have to do everything and somehow bring it to the table that they can't do. 1 John 4.10, this is as simple as it gets. This is what John writes. This is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Now I know Latter-day Saints believe in Jesus. He's in the Church's name, of course. But do you really know Jesus? Have you really received Him and put all your faith and trust in Him and not in yourself? Because Jesus brings the bananas, so to speak, to the table.

Exactly. Jesus lays those bananas out on the table and says, They're yours. We don't have to come up with the bananas because we're not capable of doing it, but Jesus imputes His righteousness into our accounts, not based on anything that I did or I am doing or I will do, but based on what Jesus did. This is love, that we didn't love God first. He loved us.

Based on the citation that I gave from J.C. Ryle earlier in the week where he said, The holiest actions of the holiest saint that ever lived are all more or less full of defects and imperfections. I think his illustration of the bananas works perfectly. As long as we can keep in our mind, because of our fallenness, the best we can possibly provide would be bananas that are moldy.

We are not going to bring fresh bananas. We can't. We're fallen. Everything we do is tainted by our sinfulness. This is why, folks, we are trying so hard to get the Latter-day Saint to understand that if they want to have that peace that passes all understanding, they have no choice but to trust in the completed work of Christ. And as you mentioned, Eric, His righteousness is imputed to us when we come to that saving faith, knowing that He is the one that provided these proverbial bananas through His death on the cross and His bodily resurrection. Viewpoint on Mormonism