By raising our scriptures in devotional each week we demonstrate we are ready to be taught, and I appreciate you for coming thus prepared, but today I hope you came ready to act, as well. This devotional is going to be distinctive in that you will be doing. In Primary you learned a song called "Do as I'm Doing." This will be the pattern of learning for today. Prepare yourself to reflect and compose along with me. You can do it high or low, you can do it fast or slow, and in the end I invite you to compose.
Our focus today is to start considering and preparing the Exodus chapters of our own life's story. We will make as much progress as we can during the remaining twenty-five minutes of this devotional, but that will not be the end. You see, unlike many who visit and speak to us for devotional, I have the home court advantage, and I intend to use it. I will be here tomorrow, and you will see me next semester, or the semester after that, so I plan to capitalize on this opportunity. Before you leave this institution I hope you and I are able to share with each other our experiences. Think of it this way if it helps--you are all now taking an Exodus class. It meets each Thursday during forum time if you aren't busy attending another University Forum, or we can get together by appointment. I have never had the opportunity to teach a religion class here at BYU-Idaho, so now is my chance. I am easy to find in the faculty directory, and I look forward to future experiences beyond the time we share together today.
Let's get started. You will need to brainstorm at least two chapter titles for your Exodus story. I'll do mine and then you do yours--remember "Do As I'm Doing." Here are my two chapter titles. I am going to call the first one "Mortality and Leaving our First Estate: From Innocence to Bodily Experience," for now. The title for my second Exodus chapter is currently the title of my devotional today "Personal Exodus: Keeping and Transcending Our Second Estate." Now, when you have a potential title, I invite you to share it with us by tweeting it to "#BYUIexodus." With a working title it is time to explore together the concept of exodus and how it relates to each of us.
On a grand scale the settings of our stories are the same. First, a pre-existence followed by an exodus to earth life and finally, an exodus to resurrected life. While the accounts are similar, they are not without personal differences. Our experiences occur in different seasons of time--Moses in the times of the Old Testament, you and I during the time of Restoration. Let's explore in more detail. I will then invite you to begin composing your story while I share mine.
Moses' story begins in a symbolically interesting way. Recall the story--before Moses is born an angry pharaoh seeks to stop the progress of Heavenly Father's covenant people. This pharaoh seeks to become God and a law unto himself and after his rebellion is afraid that the growing potential of God's children will frustrate his own power, so he seeks to place the Lord's covenant people in eternal bondage to him. I think you might at this point be recognizing a similarity to the period referred to as the pre-existence. Moses is born and is separated from his Jewish parents and raised in the fallen world of Pharaoh until he recognizes and acts against the injustice of that world and chooses to follow his conscience rather than the cultural practices and laws of Pharaoh. This is a key experience in the life of Moses and will be a crucial period in our own stories. Ask yourself these questions: How did Moses recognize the injustice of Pharaoh? When did you and I come to the same conclusion about the world of Pharaoh? How did Moses find the moral courage, faith, and strength to strike out on his own, to find the God he had been separated from? These are the personal questions that as we answer will fill the pages of our Exodus chapters. Using these questions as a guide I will tell you my story as you contemplate and brainstorm your own.
Like many of you, and unlike the great Moses, my earthly parents taught me about the pre-existence and who I was before I was born on earth. But even with that knowledge I had to come to know and believe this in my heart as well as my mind. A devotional address given here in 2003 by Brother Matt Geddes helped me to understand my transformation from my first to my second estate, and I hope you will listen to what I share from his devotional and study the rest of it on your own so it can impact your life, as well.
On that cold December day Brother Geddes taught us about aesthetics and anesthetics. He instructed that ". . . an anesthetic is something that numbs us and makes it difficult or impossible to feel . . . [while] an aesthetic is something that does the opposite: it enlivens us, and increases our capacity and sensitivity to feeling."[1] With this idea I realized that keeping our first estate and following the Savior in the pre-existence allowed us to have these marvelous bodies which in turn grant us the ability to feel in ways that were not possible in our state of innocence in the pre-mortal world. We gained new powers to influence and be influenced by the light of Christ. Let me read to you about this from the Study Helps Section, Guide to the Scriptures from the Church's website regarding this concept. The light of Christ is:
"Divine energy, power, or influence that proceeds from God through Christ and gives life and light to all things. It is the law by which all things are governed in heaven and on earth (D&C 88:6-13). It also helps people understand gospel truths and helps to put them on that gospel path which leads to salvation (John 3:19-21; 12:46; Alma 26:15; 32:35; D&C 93:28-29, 31-32, 40, 42). "The light of Christ should not be confused with the Holy Ghost. The light of Christ is not a person. It is an influence that comes from God and prepares a person to receive the Holy Ghost. It is an influence for good in the lives of all people (John 1:9; D&C 84:46-47). "One manifestation of the light of Christ is conscience, which helps a person choose between right and wrong (Moro. 7:16). As people learn more about the gospel, their consciences become more sensitive (Moro. 7:12-19). People who hearken to the light of Christ are led to the gospel of Jesus Christ (D&C 84:46-48)."[2]
I also realized that while the veil that shrouds earth life from pre-earth life exists for both sight and feeling, in my experience it is easier to feel the influence of my Heavenly Father than to work out His existence and relationship with me through my logical mind. So I encourage you to record in your first chapters of your personal book of Exodus when you first started to feel the influence of your Heavenly Father. When was it that you first felt the stirring of your conscience and made a choice according to this manifestation of the light of Christ? Share the choices that have livened your soul as aesthetic experiences and also offer as a warning to others regarding the anesthetic forces of your earthly life. Consult the 13th Article of Faith as taught by Brother Geddes. His discussion of virtue and its seven common manifestations, loveliness, and things praiseworthy is highly instructive.
One outstanding aesthetic experience of my life was the priesthood assignment from my bishop to take the sacrament to my elderly and dying friends, the Powells. I felt closer to God each time we took the sacrament together. During another moment of my life while on a long training run I became swept up in a dream much like Nephi and Lehi's tree of life experience. Another aesthetic experience that enlivened my understanding of Christ as our good shepherd occurred while tending to our family sheep. There was the realization of eternity I felt as a young boy while laying on my back watching the clouds and then the stars one night. The feelings I had were much more powerful instruction than were the resulting thoughts. My dear brothers and sisters, you and I have made an exodus from our first estate and as part of our grand inheritance were given the ability to feel and know good from evil. By receiving a body that has upgraded feeling capabilities we can continue to progress rather than become stuck in our pre-mortal state.
My first chapter of Exodus consists of the aesthetic feelings and experiences that I have had. Now, as we continue, I invite you to jot down your aesthetic moments that mark your progression and exodus from your first estate to your second. Get some ideas down and we can visit about them in the weeks and months ahead. Once you have ideas recorded there are many different mediums by which you can express the feelings you have. Brother Geddes uses pottery, my brother Evan uses paint, my father uses music, my mom uses flowers, and Brother Bennion uses poetry. I even have students who express feelings as mathematical equations and they are outstanding--you should see them. Once you have explored these feelings you can develop talents by which to express them. Remember the parable of the talents and take advantage of the opportunities outside your daily schoolwork to develop such talents while here at BYU-Idaho. Even giving this address is an opportunity for me to express my feelings and develop my talents through the medium of public speaking.
Now it is time to begin considering our experience here in the second estate. Remember the title I have chosen, "Personal Exodus: Keeping and Transcending our Second Estate." Before leaving this estate we have a work to do--we must keep our second estate. We need to make sure not to lose what we gained by keeping our first estate, namely the manifestation of the light of Christ we refer to as our conscience. We read about those in the scriptures who lost their ability to feel, and in my life today I find myself running into more and more of this sad phenomena. Individuals are finding anesthetics to cope with the realities of a fallen world rather than aesthetics from a redeemed one. Recently, I had the opportunity to travel to multiple countries in Africa with our Cultural Foundation's Developing World team. I learned many things, but one of the simplest yet most profound lessons was how not to lose things but to keep and cherish them. Here are seven principles to consider, and with each I invite you to ponder and share with us again through a tweet what you see are the spiritual parallels (#BYUIexodus).
Principle 1: If it is precious to you, keep it with you at all times (e.g., passports, wedding rings, means of communication). Principle 2: If you feel like you are losing something, you probably are and should double check immediately, not waiting to figure out if it is actually lost. (I'll help you a little with this one: loss of the Spirit or testimony). Principle 3: Habits and patterns of behavior help you to keep important things safe. Principle 4: Distractions are dangerous and when distracted you often lose things. Principle 5: Being in a hurry or rushed or panicked will cause you to misplace things and leave them behind. Principle 6: You lose fewer things when you travel with others who watch out for one another. Principle 7: Cluttering your baggage with things you don't need makes finding the things you do need more challenging.
(By the way, there is a story from our trip to each of these principles, but I don't have the time now to share them.)
Along with not losing the important inheritance from our first estate, we must put our agency and conscience to the test and receive the saving ordinances of the gospel, namely baptism, confirmation, and the temple ordinances. In order to keep our second estate we need to be covenant makers and keepers. These covenants will help us not only keep but allow us to transcend this our second estate. Now let's explore this in more detail.
In baptism we are invited to take upon ourselves the name of Christ and live according to His gospel. The gospel, faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, is the way of putting off the natural, telestial part of our lives while in a telestial state. It is our exodus ticket to transcending our second estate and receiving additional degrees of glory, even becoming like unto God our Father.
For the next few minutes I want to talk particularly about the part of the gospel referred to as receiving the Holy Spirit. If we have the light of Christ and its manifestation, the conscience, by virtue of keeping our first estate, why is it necessary to receive the Holy Ghost? Why can't our conscience be sufficient to help us keep and transcend our second estate? Let me hopefully shed some light on this question. The Holy Spirit is the third member of the Godhead and shares with God the Father and God the Son a perfect unity of understanding, purpose, and doctrine. The Holy Spirit doesn't have a body of flesh and bones as we do, but is a personage of Spirit. In being so, the Spirit is capable, when invited, to enter and share with our souls not the telestial feelings of right and wrong we receive from our own conscience but the celestial feelings of right and wrong that exist in the third estate. These are God-like feelings from another higher plane of existence.
It is time now to share concepts from an influential devotional address given at BYU-Idaho by Lili Anderson in 2005 entitled "Three Realms of Law, Light, and Life." Pondering this address through the paradigm of Brother Geddes' concepts of aesthetic and anesthetic helped me to see the changes in our hearts and feelings that must occur if we are to keep and transcend this second estate. Put simply, in the pre-existence we had what we called earlier innocent feelings relating to eternal truth; we felt like it would be a good thing for us but really were somewhat clueless and innocent to the actual feelings of the flesh. In this life we have experienced natural man, telestial, or, from the field of psychology, egocentric, immediate gratification feelings relating to eternal truth. In this life we have felt the gamut of what the mortal body can experience. The next step of transcending our second estate is the terrestrial world, which according to Sister Anderson, is governed by obedient hearts, and following that there are the true celestial feelings of a celestial heart governed by charitable feelings. Let me quote from Sister Anderson regarding the celestial law and heart, which is where I am committed to go, and I pray you are as well.
Celestial law, I believe, can be defined as Christ-like being, as distinct from Christ-like behavior, which can be found at the terrestrial level. If we have self-control and we can delay gratification, we can behave like Christ, but we still are not as He is. In order to truly become as the Savior is, our heart and behavior must be integrated. That is, not only do we do the right things, but we feel the right things. We are not kind because we should be and it works better, but because we see people as God does and it is no longer in us to be unkind. The laws of God are not just observed, they are engraven upon our hearts. Coming to live celestial law is a line-on-line, precept-on-precept experience, a process dependent on our cultivating a sensitivity to the tutorings of the Spirit (see 2 Nephi 32:5). The outcomes of living celestial law are the peace that passeth all understanding (see Philippians 4:7), and creation/rebirth. This kind of creation is not only a reference to the future, when celestialized individuals will be able to participate in the same kind of creative work that the Father does, but a reference to the birth of the new creature in each of us (see 2 Corinthians 5:17, Mosiah 27:26), as we are born of the Holy Ghost and sanctified (see Alma 13:12, 3 Nephi 27:20).
Now back to the question of why we need to receive the Holy Ghost and not simply rely on conscience to get us through. This third member of the Godhead in its spiritual state knows and feels perfectly the true degree of sorrow for every sin, the true joy of every truth, the true profound comfort that God would give and is willing to share these with our hearts and souls so we can learn and be instructed more perfectly. The Holy Spirit is the teacher of how to move from a telestial conscience to a celestial heart. How can we truly repent and be cleansed from a bad decision unless we know and can experience through the Holy Spirit the anguish of the price paid for that sin by the Savior and the goodness and truthfulness of the law upon which it is predicated and which we have broken? The Spirit will guide you and I to celestial aesthetic or awakening experiences that will inspire us to not be satisfied with a mere telestial second estate life as your end kingdom and glory.
One of the aspects that distinguishes the type of education we hope to offer our students preparing to be teachers here at BYU-Idaho is that each learning experience needs to be felt along with being thought about. As we study the brain and the way in which a person learns, we are finding in ever-increasing degrees that the affective aspects of learning are as important as the cognitive ones. If students are educated to search the feelings of their souls as well as their minds, we believe they are prone to learn both by study and by faith and truly be taught by the Holy Spirit. In this way, I believe students who prepare to be future teachers here at BYU-Idaho truly are unique, and we will be fulfilling our mission to rethink education. Please seek the Holy Spirit's guidance and receive its celestial aesthetic feelings when it brings them to you as you learn. It doesn't matter the subject or the teacher. This step is a requirement of the learner.Let's continue on with Moses' experience in the book of Exodus. Moses is exiled from Egypt because he refused to fit into the laws and norms of Pharaoh's world. This can be a very lively part of our stories as we come to be exiled and freely leave the symbolic Egypts of this world.
I will share one of these experiences from my second book of Exodus with you. Right before leaving on my mission during my second semester of college at BYU-Provo I took an education class. It had no grades, and I was given the opportunity to design my own assignments for learning. At first, I despised the class and attacked the teacher with the laws of Pharaoh that I had become accustomed to. I attacked him like the task master you see whipping the children of Israel in the classic Ten Commandments movie. I jeered that he was a lousy teacher because he wasn't communicating exactly what he expected out of us. I told him that without points, how could I be motivated to learn, let alone the hormone-ridden teenagers I was preparing to teach. No human could ever get through junior high, high school, or college on intrinsic motivation alone. I even exiled myself from the class to avoid being tormented by being freed. I sought to find solace back in Pharaoh's Egypt which I had adopted. Imagine the great Exodus scene in that same Ten Commandments movie as the children of Israel are fleeing through the parted Red Sea and me running back to Egypt as fast as I could.
Shortly after my self-imposed-exile return to Egypt I went to my instructor's office to drive my final, well-rehearsed Pharaoh's nail into his instructionally irrational coffin. He charitably listened and weathered my railings with a smile and said, "You have put great effort into proving my ideas wrong, and I respect and admire that level of effort, but have you given equal effort to proving that these ideas I'm sharing with you might work?" The Holy Ghost pricked my heart--I know it was more than my conscience. I took with me my golden calf for a few more semesters until I had a sincere change of heart. Even in courses that were run like my beloved Egypt I began designing my own assignments and seeing if instructors would accept them, and to my surprise when they were good they frequently did. I started refusing to treat each course I took as a stand-alone learning experience to pass through by merely meeting the criteria of the instructor but began to integrate my learning into much larger wholes. I even stopped saying that I had to do homework and replaced that phrase with "I am going to go learn some more." Guess what? Now, I am privileged to work at a divinely guided but humanly run university that occasionally feels like Egypt, and I get the opportunity to bring out of bondage those who want to learn intrinsically. What a journey! What has yours been like? Get some ideas down and bring them to our Exodus class sometime in the future. Perhaps next Thursday in class we will see a sketch of someone's second chapter of Exodus experience, listen to an inspired melody being developed, or read a great and profound couplet that has been composed. I can't wait.
Back to Moses' story, he eventually finds and joins God's humble followers in Midian and diligently strives to put off the natural man of this world. He goes to the mountain of the Lord and sees the fire of the Lord and seeks to know more. It is at this point, through a prophet of God, we receive additional revelation for our day.
I have pondered the meaning of the book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, and I have come to see deeper meaning and application of this profound record in my life as I have likened it unto myself. Let me show you something interesting. Consider with me the beginning of the third chapter of Exodus as if you were the prophet Joseph Smith, in the spirit of restoring precious truths of the Plan that were lost. At verse four imagine being shown and translating the entire book of Moses as if it was given by the Lord from the burning bush. Then finish Moses' earthly story as he leads the children of Israel through the trek to the Promised Land. Please consider why this is given to us in our season of the Restoration.
Moses learns the truth of who he is and the calling God has for him in helping to deliver God's covenant people from their captivity. What does the Law of Consecration mean? Have you felt it yet? What does Zion feel like? These experiences will be great for the Transcending Our Second Estate section of Personal Exodus chapter two. If you haven't experienced this yet go back to the gospel and exercise faith, repent, seek and receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and you will is my testimony in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Mattew Geddes, "Aesthetics Verses Anesthetics," BYU-I Devotional Address, December 2, 2003
[2] https://www.lds.org/scriptures/gs/light-light-of-christ?lang=eng&letter=l