“The Worth of Souls Is Great”
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: February 24-March 2
“The worth of souls is great in the sight of God.” Each of us is of great worth to God.
There is no commandment in all of scripture—delivered from any pulpit by any prophet in any age—to make myself into someone God could finally love. There is no commandment to make myself into someone perfectly lovable. … There is, instead, always and only the single, eternal, unconditional commandment to do love’s work: to love God with all my heart, and then to join God in the hard work of loving others. —Adam Miller
Listen to one of our most popular podcast episodes, Come As You Are — A Conversation with Jen and Sam Norton. As FSY leaders, Jen and Sam began facing difficult questions about how to include and support youth with a range of perspectives and lifestyles. They wanted to affirm the wisdom of the standards set by the Church for youth; they also noticed that many youth were driven away the fear of exclusion they would experience if they fell short. As a result, many youth would drop out of Church activity before giving a chance to learn what it’s really about.
Through prayer, open conversations, deep listening, and creativity, Jen and Sam were taken on a truly transformative journey. They found their way to loving the younger generation more than they thought possible, and learning how to really champion them and their unique spiritual gifts. In short, they believe in believing in the next generation and giving them a more gentle on-ramp to following Jesus and reminds them that perhaps the most important word in the sacrament prayer and baptismal covenant is ‘willing’. Their story will be valuable to anyone working with youth, or who is interested in blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to Church callings.
The Lord rejoices when I repent.
Listen to “Repentance as Transformation,” a conversation between Thomas McConkie and Adam Miller on the Faith Matters podcast.
This is repentance as something like a positive way of life, rather than an occasionally negative thing that I have to do in response to my own failures. This is repentance as a kind of a proactive, positive cultivation of this open heart, that allows me to continually go beyond the limits of my own mind and my own soul. —Adam Miller
Listen to “Stories and Sin: A Conversation with Adam Miller,” which includes a question about how to help our kids develop a healthy relationship with these concepts:
If my experience of guilt fixes my attention even more firmly on myself, then I’m in trouble. If my experience of guilt turns my attention away from me and towards the people who I feel guilty about having hurt, then it’s working in the right way. It’s turning me in the right direction. —Adam Miller
If words like “repentance” feel like they come with baggage for you, we invite you to check out All Things New, by Terryl & Fiona Givens. The book starts by tracing the roots of our religious vocabulary and showing how many fundamental gospel concepts and words have become unmoored from their original foundations and can get us stuck in a gospel of fear that places limits on God’s love and grace. The book then dives into specific ways we might reformulate our language in healthy and inspiring ways as the Restoration rolls forth. Words like salvation, heaven, the fall, obedience, sin, justice, repentance, forgiveness, atonement, grace, worthiness and judgment are re-examined and illuminated.
Fiona and Terryl show us how we can renovate that vocabulary to embrace a gospel of hope where there is no final buzzer or sad heaven, because in their words, “Salvation and heaven are not rewards that God can dispense, or that we can earn. Relationships are forged. Life is the school of love, and our growing capacity for love constitutes the bricks out of which the heavenly Zion will be constructed.”
“All Things New is a game changer. Terryl and Fiona first trace how unhealthy ideas found their way into our religious vocabulary, and then offer us a more joyful, spiritually healthy way to view and internalize the gospel of Jesus Christ. I can’t wait to share this with family and friends.” —Steve Young
Read or listen to a chapter called “Atonement: From Penal Substitution to Radical Healing” here:
“It’s long past time for us to think more deeply, bravely, and creatively about what love, grace, sin, and justice mean in light of the Restoration. And, equally, it’s long past time for us to break with the traditional Christian grammars of original sin and retributive justice as we do so. All Things New is important work of just this kind.” —Adam Miller
Go even deeper with The Big Questions Project: Do we misunderstand Christ’s Atonement?, including this short conversation between Terryl Givens and Spencer Fluhman:
And find even more resources for different ways of thinking about “sin” here:
Joy comes from helping others come unto Christ.
What does the concept of forgiveness have to offer our relationships in the modern world? Listen to Fully Alive, our conversation with Elizabeth Oldfield:
We need compassion, but we also need to have a way of naming when we harm other people, and we need a way of restoring. And when no one is really responsible, no one is really forgivable.
There's this sense that no one is really responsible, but also you can't be redeemed. There's a gracelessness about our public conversations. There's a gracelessness, and a resistance to the idea that anyone can really change.
The radical claim of my faith is that anyone can change. No one is beyond the reach of grace. It's my most controversial opinion. And our desire to externalize evil from ourselves into other groups and other people means that we resist that, because “evil is out there, not within me,” is a much more comfortable position psychologically. …
I think part of the reason I want to reclaim sin and its healthy liberatory form is it might help us re-find our way back to forgiveness for ourselves and for each other.
I can hear the Lord’s voice in the scriptures.
In “Seven Gospels,” Adam Miller and Rosalynde Welch make a case that our scriptural canon is a springboard to endless interpretations that speak to us according to our spiritual needs.
The point of Scripture is not to tell us something. The point of Scripture is to do something. The point of Scripture is to introduce us to God and invite us to participate with God in the revelation of who and what he is. —Adam Miller
Scripture is this site where we can go, where God’s presence infuses the words, and if we put ourselves there and spend enough time there and open ourselves to it, then we too through the Spirit can experience some of that divine presence. —Rosalynde Welch
Jared Halverson also talks about the importance of the scriptures being a catalyst for revelations (rather than a catalog of past revelation,) and of bringing our questions and difficulties to the text and allowing the scriptures to respond to them, in “The Divinity and Humanity of the Book of Mormon.”
There’s something powerful about turning to scripture and engaging this cloud of witnesses, bringing your questions and difficulties to the text, and allowing them to respond to them. —Jared Halverson
Sharing the gospel brings great joy.
Can Latter-day Saints claim to belong to God’s true church when we learn, in our encounters with other people and religions, that we’re a tiny minority and that God is present and working through other religions too? Read “True and Living Church: Bearer and Receiver of Gifts,” a chapter from Restoration by Patrick Mason, and go deeper with more from The Big Questions Project: In what way is our church “the true church?”
In 2022, we spoke with Jeff Strong about the experience of missionaries in today’s mission field, including the unique challenges and opportunities they face. This conversation was based largely on a document Jeff wrote, called “What One Mission President Would Tell His Own Grandchildren About Serving a Mission.”
You can also hear about Jeff’s experience as a mission president of the Bentonville, Arkansas Mission where he and his wife led a phenomenally successful pilot program with their missionaries. For us, the story of the Bentonville, Arkansas mission has totally revolutionized the way we imagine missionary work.
