The following form the core of my faith.
Briefly:
God lives and loves each one of us completely, without reservation, equally, always. He has a plan for us to be fully happy. If we listen to and follow Him, He will help us fulfill that plan.
The Details:
God lives. He always has and always will.
He knows everything about us. He is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving. He does not change. He is eternal, meaning that He exists in a place where time and decay do not exist. His ways are higher than ours, and his thoughts are not ours.
Knowing all, He loves us and wants us to be happy. He has a plan to make that happen for each one of us. That plan is personal and glorious and extends from before our birth to far beyond this life. It is guided and powered by love. That includes, at its core, compassion, forgiveness, and grace.
Influences
No plan of His has been or ever will be threatened deterred, delayed, or obstructed by any force or being. Nor is He. We have the freedom to choose to delay His plan in our personal life, or reject it, but He has planned for that, and He will help us.
The extent to which we individually delay or reject God’s plan for us is the extent to which we give power to Satan. That is Satan’s only power. But that choice does not alter or threaten God’s plan, and He can counteract Satan’s influence if we allow Him to.
Ideally, we will go through this life learning through experience to become more like Him so that when we leave this life we will continue that learning.
Family
The family is the fundamental unit of eternity. Ideally, the family structure includes a father, mother, and children, the parents eternally united in love and equal partnership. This unit is patterned after our eternal and unbreakable relationship with God.
He is our father. He has a full and perfect understanding of all His children and loves us equally and eternally, regardless of time or any form of mortal difference, no matter what we do or believe about ourselves.
We are His spiritual offspring, His actual children born in spirit bodies before this earth was formed. There, we had all His physical attributes in spirit form.
Yes, that means that we have a Heavenly Mother.
As Their children, They wants us to be like Them. That means that They want us to have physical bodies like Theirs, to grow as sons and daughters who are strong, independent, and problem solving, becoming more like Them each day. This learning process is eternal, including premortal, mortal, and postmortal experiences. This Earth was enabled and filled with opportunities and opposition to help us make choices, all planned and enabled to help our spirit master our body through experience.
How
To learn how to do this, we must have the ability to make our own choices. God the Father has provided guidelines that protect us and to make us more receptive to His help. He helps us as we learn, providing counsel as to things to avoid and things to do, and how to do them. This guidance is formalized as “commandments” in Scripture and through people authorized to speak for Him — prophets — speaking anciently and today. As such, these commandments are our gateway to spiritual education.
Adding to His outward commandments, He speaks continually in our hearts and minds personal commandments through a spiritual process called revelation, giving us guidance, comfort, and strength.
Gathering
One of God’s commandments is that His children gather to strengthen each other. I am a member of the church of Jesus Christ, the same Church as the Church that Jesus Christ established during His mortal ministry, but which was corrupted. God restored His ancient church in these days as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gathering with these people each Sunday and at any other time strengthens them and me. With them I learn that I am not alone, and that God’s plan works in their lives and can work in mine.
The Purpose of Life
The purpose of our life is to have joy. It is our destiny. We learn what joy is by dealing with opposition, this contrast between good and evil helping us understand and be motivated to strive for joy and to enhance that joy by serving those who struggle as we did.
One day we will close our eyes to time and open them to eternity (2 Cor 5:1). After this life, we will continue honing our appreciation for joy and free will and will eventually live in places where we, through our cumulative thoughts and actions, have chosen to live. Those will be places of joy. There will be no devils, no pitchforks, no pits of lava, no centuries of wandering blindly through punishments, no God laughing at our pain. Those are devilish lies, intended to discourage our faith and distort our understanding of who our truly loving God is. The regrets we will feel once we recognize the potential and opportunities we wasted in this life, however, will feel just as bad. But we are destined, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, to get past that.
Jesus Christ is our elder brother. Through His selfless dedication to God, our Father, in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, He suffered the punishments — the pains of any sort — of anything that would separate us from God, paying the price for those self-erected barriers that we repent of so that God’s plans for us could be brought about in us. His purpose is to follow God’s will to make it possible for us to become personally perfected, thus able to stand with power and joy in the presence of Him who is all powerful and perfect.
The Motivation
The motivation for all of this is love. Our best response to that godly love is gratitude, recognizing what He has done and yearning and working with all our hearts to repay His love in some small part through our efforts. The more we learn about Him, study His word, pray to Him for help, and do His will by helping others, the more our efforts will align with His, and the more we will feel His joy.
If you want to know more, let me know.
Thanks!
-Lester Yocum