Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease

Shelly taught this Sunday's lesson and it was based on the talk by David A. Bednar called "Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease". Thanks for the lesson Shelly!

We talked about how spiritual loads can give you spiritual traction. A lot of the time, tasks that we need to do to help us be more sensitive to the spirit are hard to do and can feel like a load. My husband and I have actually been having a hard time going to the temple because we want to do endowments, but it takes so looong. We tell ourselves that we will go after work, then we get home and are tired, eat dinner and don't want to do anything else for the rest of the night. Then we tell ourselves that we are going to go on Saturday, but Saturday is the day that we run all the errands we didn't want to do during the week. We also save Saturdays for fun things that take a little longer that we don't have time to do after work.

Maybe this sounds familiar to some of you. Other spiritual burdens might be reading scriptures daily, saying our own personal prayers, visiting teaching, fasting, etc. I know that doing these things will help us to draw closer to Christ, and the time spent doing spiritual things is time well spent. We've just need to take the time to do them.

Anyways, feel free to comment below if you learned something special from the lesson! I know I'm going to try harder to get my husband and myself to the temple this month.

:)  Lisa

Listening to the Holy Ghost

Today's lesson was given by Esther, she did an awesome object lesson at the beginning relating a flashlight to the Holy Ghost. If you have a flashlight in your hand but don't take any kind of action, you are not going to get any light from it. The light only turns on when you push the button, and that doesn't happen unless you push the button yourself.

We discussed how it is easy to get comfortable with living our lives. We get used to having the Holy Ghost with us all the time and sometimes don't realize we have even been prompted to do something. We go from grace to grace in the gospel, sometimes it takes a little more work on our part (reading the scriptures longer, writing in journal more) to get to that next level, and only then do we noticeably recognize the Holy Ghost in our lives.

Preach my Gospel chapter 4 lists out a bunch of different ways that we can feel the spirit:

1. Spirit gives feelings of love, joy, peace, patience, meekness, gentleness, faith, and hope.
2. Gives ideas in the mind, feelings in the heart.
3. Occupies the mind and presses on the feelings.
4. Helps scriptures have strong effect.
5. Gives good feelings to teach if something is true.
6. Enlightens the mind.
7. Replaces darkness with light.
8. Strengthens the desire to avoid evil and obey the commandments.
9. Teaches truth and brings it to rememberance.
10. Gives feelings of peace and comfort.
11. guides to truth and shows things to come.
12. Reveals truth.
13. Guides and protects from deception.
14. Glorifies and bears record of God the Father and Jesus Christ.
15. Guides the words of humble teachers.
16. Recognizes and corrects sin.
17. Gives gifts of the Spirit.
18. Helps to perceive or discern the thoughts of others.
19. Tells what to pray for.
20. Tells what to do.
21. Helps the righteous speak with power and authority.
22. Testifies of the truth.
23. Sanctifies and brings remission of sins.
24. Carries truth to the heart of the listener.
25. Enhances skills and abilities.
26. Constrains (impels forward) or restrains (holds back).
27. Edifies both teacher and students.
28. Gives comfort.

I bet each of us have had some kind of spiritual experience in one of these ways. If you look in Preach my Gospel it lists out scriptures that you can look up, to see each of these in action.

I am glad the Holy Ghost is here to help us all out, I have definitely been filled with peace when I am worried and reassured when I am not sure which step in life to take next. 

Anyways, hope you all have a great Sunday!

-Lisa