Self Mastery and God

A few weekends ago, I was spending the night at my brother's home and myself, my brother, and his wife got into a religious discussion. One of the topics was good and evil. We believe that there is opposition in all things and we also believe that God existed before the world was. But if God cannot create evil and Satan was a fallen angel, how does that happen? And the answer is as simple as looking around us here on earth. We can choose evil and we can push out the good within us but people are not born evil.

So if we think again about Satan and how he became evil, we can look to the scriptures and the prophets and can see that pride is the cause of his fall. So when we talk about pride, we are talking about people that are out for themselves, focused on their success, their efforts, and it's all about them! Them! Them! How do I get ahead? It is all about the competitive have-to-be-better-than-the-next-guy personality. So if we look at Christ and the Atonement, it is the opposite. It is a community. It is Zion. It is about helping people and serving and forgetting yourself. It is about family. It is about loving people. It is being humble and looking for guidance. It is trusting the Spirit. It is trusting God. It is about acting in faith.

So from our discussion, I feel like life is really about two things when it comes to our relationship with God: Self-mastery and the sealing of the family. I feel like the Atonement teaches us to love other people as well as how to build a relationship with God through revelation and faithful covenant-making and covenant-keeping actions. The sealing of a family is the highest ordinance a person can make and it is the culmination of all the promises and blessings of the temple. And with a family, we are able to find both the greatest joys and sorrows in life as we care so deeply for another person. We share in their successes and in their failures. We are there to lift each other and cheer one another on. And throughout this journey, the only person whose choices we control are ourselves. I feel like one of the biggest battles that we can have is with ourselves.

Honestly, I believe self-mastery is a journey where the commandments and the covenants we make become descriptions of our character and who we are as a person and less of a list of things we have to check off. We don't need a temple recommend to have a temple recommend. We need a recommend so we can go again and again and again to learn from God and serve our fellowmen. We are becoming like God through repentance and following Him in faith. This is what I hope is at the core of everything that I am and everything that I do.