Chapter Twelve

“He Doth Immediately Bless You”

In the first place, he hath created you, and granted unto you your lives, for which ye are indebted unto him. And secondly, he doth require that ye should do as he hath commanded you; for which if ye do, he doth immediately bless you; and therefore he hath paid you. And ye are still indebted unto him, and are, and will be, forever and ever; therefore, of what have ye to boast?

Mosiah 2:23–24

Continuing on with our list of ways the Lord makes our yoke easy and our burden light, we turn now to some things that are simple, everyday kinds of things, but which still greatly help us along the way.

Tender Mercies and Divine Signatures

I hope by this point in the book we have amply illustrated how much the Lord desires to bless us. He delights in honoring those who serve Him faithfully and He does so in some remarkable and even miraculous ways. I have chosen to describe these special kinds of blessings as divine signatures. We have now shared many different examples of such gifts.

Why do I include them here in a list of ways that the Father and the Son make life easier for us? Just ask Amanda Barnes Smith, Harvey Cluff, Drusilla Hendricks, LeGrand Black, the man who makes his living driving trucks, the merchant marine, Erin Eldridge, Yvonne Kerr, Francis Webster, Ellen Breakell Neibaur, a Jewish father and daughter, a young man from Albania, Margarete Hellwig and her daughter, or Lynn Lund. They can tell you.

Immediately

Here is one last insight in how the Lord makes our way easier and helps us carry the burdens of life. Sometimes when we get down and start feeling sorry for ourselves—what my mission president called a bad case of the “poor me’s”—it is easy to emphasize the difficulty of living the gospel. However, there is another way to look at it.

While I was bishop, I was reading in Alma 34 about when Amulek was teaching the poorer people of the Zoramites and pleading with them to soften their hearts. He told them this was the day of their salvation, if they would but act. He said, “If ye will repent and harden not your hearts, immediately shall the great plan of redemption be brought about unto you” (Alma 34:31). The word immediately caught my attention, but then I went on, not giving it much thought.

A week or two later one of the members of my ward came in to see me. This was a man who had been offended deeply when he was a teenager. He had been misbehaving in class to the point where his teacher literally picked him up by the belt and threw him out the front door of the chapel. The teacher told him never to come back, and he hadn’t. But he was a good man. He was a good husband and father. He helped out on service projects, often came to church with his family, and had no discernable bad habits that I knew of.

As he sat down, I could tell he was nervous, but after some preliminary chitchat, he told me that his daughter had just announced her engagement and planned to be married in about six months. This daughter was the apple of his eye, and after hemming and hawing, he finally asked what it would take for him to qualify for a temple recommend. We discussed that briefly. I confirmed that there were no problems with immorality or the Word of Wisdom. He said he had a testimony of Joseph Smith and could sustain the current Church leaders. He said he would commit to coming to church regularly. But when I reminded him that another requirement was that he be a full tithe payer, his head dropped. “I am willing to start, bishop,” he said, “but I haven’t paid tithing since I was a boy. How much would I have to pay?”

The question took me aback. I think he was asking how long he would have to pay it to be worthy, but another thought came into my mind. And with it, I remembered Amulek’s use of the word immediately. I marveled as a flood of understanding came to me at that moment. I decided this was a good teaching moment, and so remaining very sober, I began to ask him other questions. Our conversation went something like this:

ME: Tell me about how many years it has been since you graduated from college and have been fully employed as an adult.

HIM (startled, then after a moment): Uh . . . about thirty years.

ME: I know you can’t answer this exactly, but could you estimate what your average annual salary would have been during that time? (I knew he had worked for the same company for a long time, so I hoped this wouldn’t be too difficult to do.)

HIM (brow wrinkling): Hmm, I’m not sure. Maybe fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year.

ME: Let’s use fifty since it is easier to do the math. So during those thirty years, you would have owed an average of five thousand per year in tithing, had you been paying it, correct?

HIM (confused and a little wary): I suppose so.

ME (writing on a pad): So five thousand dollars times thirty years means that you owe approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in back tithing.

There was no response from him. He just stared at me.

ME (musing, pretending not to notice): If we were to add compound interest to that, then . . .

I stopped, then with a suddenly husky voice because of the lesson I was being taught at that moment, I said, “Brother Bill, if we were being strictly fair by human standards, you would owe somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars in back tithing.”

His eyes were wide, not sure if I was serious or not. Then I took out my scriptures and we read together what Amulek said to the Zoramites.

When we finished, I said, “Aren’t we grateful that the Lord is not absolutely ‘fair’ as we use the term? Otherwise, He might have to say, Since you turned away from me for thirty years, give me thirty years of faithful obedience, then we’ll talk about a temple recommend.”

I told him that he had six months before the marriage. If he began faithfully paying his tithing, attending church, and doing all else that was required for temple worthiness, I told him that I would be honored to be the one to extend that privilege to him. Which he did, and which I did.

Thirty years for thirty years? That’s the hard way. To immediately bless a person when they turn to the Lord, that gives a deeper meaning to the words “easy” and “light.”

I love the parable of the prodigal son (see Luke 15:11–32) because it is another powerful example of this principle. No court in the land would support that rebellious son if he claimed that his father “owed” him once he decided to return home. Fortunately, the boy wasn’t asking for that. He had truly had a change of heart. He would be grateful if he could even be one of the servants in his father’s household. That certainly beat slopping the hogs.

But then comes this powerful statement: “And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). How did the father see his son while “he was yet a great way off”? There were no cell phones or fax machines back then. No telegrams. No texting. There’s no indication that a letter was sent saying, “Dad, I’m coming home, if that’s all right.” The father had to be watching for his son. And when he finally saw him, he ran to meet him. He didn’t wait until he came all the way back.

In my mind, there is no more beautiful lesson in all of scripture about the grace and mercy and love of the Father than this story. We make the way hard for ourselves by our foolishness or stubborn rebellion, but when we decide to turn back, the Father makes it “easy” for us to return to the fold and He will immediately begin to bless us.

The Tithing Principle

Here is another example of how the Lord eases our way as we strive to be obedient to His will. I call this the “tithing principle.”

The scriptures make it clear that all things on this earth belong to God. He created the world and therefore, as He says, “all things therein are mine” (D&C 104:14). He has chosen to share His “personal property” in all of its richness and abundance with His children. One of the greatest of all human failings is the tendency to claim ownership for that which actually belongs to God. We purchase a car or discover a vein of gold or raise a bumper crop of wheat or invent a new technology, and say, “This is mine.” That God tolerates our selfish and shortsighted view is, in and of itself, a marvelous demonstration of His long-suffering grace.

In return for this limitless gift, God asks that we return one-tenth of our increase. We call that a tithe. What an incredible deal that is. If some wealthy benefactor gave us a million dollars on the condition that we would someday return even half of it back to him, we would consider this to be astonishing generosity. Even if he asked that we pay back nine hundred thousand of it, we would still be richly blessed.

God, however, asks only for one-tenth, a penny out of a dime, a dime out of a dollar. If we do that, He turns around and blesses us even more as He opens the “windows of heaven” (see Malachi 3:8–12). Here are other examples of the tithing principle:

• There are seven days in each week, but we are asked to set aside only one as His day and stop our normal activities. That is not even fifteen percent of the total week.

• A week has 168 hours. We are asked to spend only three of those hours attending formal worship services. We are asked to serve Him in other ways and to always remember Him, but as far as formal worship together as a congregation, He asks for less than two percent of our total time.

• In a twenty-four-hour day, if we spend even half an hour in scripture reading, prayer, and pondering about spiritual things (an investment of less than three percent), we will receive enormous spiritual returns.

• Physical fitness experts say that forty-five minutes of vigorous exercise five or six times a week is sufficient to maintain our bodies in good physical shape. That’s less than 1/24th of our time.

• One can plant a single bushel of wheat and reap a hundred or more in return.

The examples of this principle go on and on. Of course God requires something of us in return for some of these blessings, but in most cases we don’t have to return even a tenth of our goods. There is no tithing required for sunshine and rain, wildflowers and birdsongs.

To Summarize

We are here on earth to prove ourselves and to be tested. We live in a fallen world so that the conditions required for such testing are present. That means we will all experience adversity, trials, hardships, setbacks, tribulation, pain, suffering, sickness, and death. That is the paradox we face.

But in their great mercy and love for us, the Father and the Son have given us much to lighten our burden and ease the loads we must pull—a plan to help us find our way, a Savior to make it possible, the gift of the Holy Ghost, tender mercies, and divine signatures. With those in mind, let us close with the scripture that we started with in chapter ten:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28–30)