Spiritual Goal-setting
Earlier this week, Paul and I were having dinner with some friends. Paul leisurely commented about how we’ve started our food storage collection. “Oh that’s great,” one of them responded.
We’ve been feeling quite proud of ourselves for having started on the food storage commandment for a couple of weeks now. Then he asked, “so, what’s your goal?”
My first thought was, “Goal? What in the world do you mean?” Paul later confirmed the same thought.
Our friend went on to explain, “Yeah, like a 48 hour, 72 hour, week, 3 months or year?”
“Ahhhh, ummm, well...” We looked at each other sheepishly. The thought had never even occurred to us to plan a set amount of time. Even more tragic was that I had spent the last month thinking about the topic of this talk, spiritual goalsetting, when this episode took place. We were so proud of the fact that we had even thought to store food that we didn’t have the insight to think of what we were actually doing with it.
So, right then and there we tried to figure out how much we had. “Well, uh, let’s see, we probably have enough for a few days? No, a week. Yeah, probably a week. We could probably survive on 3 cans of beans and a couple of boxes of muesli for about a week.”
And we probably could. In the case of a hurricane up the Øresund Strait or a tornado down the Amager Fælled we would probably be ok for a short time, but our efforts to manage a long-term catastrophic event would most likely be thwarted. We had approached the commandment to create a food storage in a manner of convenience rather than a spiritual one. It’s good that we wanted to follow the commandments, but without setting a goal, we wouldn’t get too far.
Goal setting is an inherent characteristic of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For those who attended primary we are taught to memorize the Articles of Faith. With the help of patient primary teachers I was guided along the course of my childhood to memorize all thirteen. When I was 7, each month focused on each of the Articles of Faith so that by the end of the year we could recite the words verbatim. We had to get good enough so that when the bishop called us up to the stand after we were baptized and confirmed at age 8 we could recite the Article of Faith of our choice. I chose the eleventh.
As a teenager I entered the Young Women’s organization. There I participated in the Personal Progress program where we set goals by completing a series of experiences revolving around the, at the time, 7 values: faith, divine nature, individual worth, knowledge, choice and accountability, good works, integrity (now virtue). The boys, likewise, have their equivalent goal-setting program, the Duty To God award.
We are taught that scripture reading is most effective if we set goals: how long and how often. We’ve heard advice from the leaders of the Church to read at least every day for a half hour or so. The same goes with prayer--two times a day and before meals; Family Home Evening--every Monday night; tithing--10% paid consistently throughout the year; and the monthly goals of fasting, visiting teaching, home teaching. These types of things are easy to measure. We can either pray or not pray, visit teach or not visit teach.
Yet there are some goals that are a bit harder to quantify. Goals like “living a Christ-like life” and “reaching the celestial kingdom,” or even “keeping the Sabbath day” can’t easily be checked off a to-do list. These types of goals lead me to think, “well, how do I live a Christ-like life?” and “how do I get to the celestial kingdom” and “just how do I keep the Sabbath day holy?”
Commandments from the Lord such as these then can be thought of as the ultimate goal. That’s what we want to be. That’s where we should be if we want a complete fullness of happiness or as Alma described it in comparison to the fruit that is “sweet above all that is sweet and all that is white” in Alma 32:42: “ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst.” Likening happiness unto food definitely helps me to understand just how good eternal life will be.
With such a daunting task to “be like Christ” I appreciate the Church’s emphasis on goal-setting. By starting with the smaller yet crucial steps like a measurable scripture study and prayer we can turn to the Lord on a consistent basis, which will no doubt affect the way we think and consequently the things we say, and finally the things we do and thus help us become more like Christ.
So, goal-setting is specific. Neal A. Maxwell said that “a vague goal is no goal at all. The ten commandments wouldn’t be very impressive, for instance, if they weren’t specific, but simply were couched in a phraseology such as ‘thou shalt not be a bad person.”
Nephi in the Book of Mormon understood the value of being specific in setting goals. Once he and his family left their home and escaped from Jerusalem into the wilderness his father, Lehi, had a vision in which Nephi and his brothers were to return to Jerusalem to retrieve the records of their fathers. These records were written on brass plates and were kept by the evil Laban. Needless to say, Nephi’s brothers, Laman and Lemuel were not enthused to go back on a long journey to seek out some plates that they didn’t really care about from a guy who wasn’t so nice. But after some complaining they packed up their tents and made the journey. Once they arrived the brothers had a meeting to devise a plan for the retrieval. They decided to cast lots to see who would be the one to go get them. Laman, was the lucky winner. Laban’s approach was simple: He went to Laban’s house, chatted for awhile and asked for the plates at which point Laban got angry, threw him out and told him he was going to kill him. Not good. No plates.
The goal to retrieve the plates was unsuccessful, but Nephi approached the goal differently than his brothers, Laman and Lemuel. While talking with his dad prior to the trip, Nephi showed his confidence that this was a commandment from the Lord and not just a good idea. It is here that he then says the famous words (1 Nephi 3:7) “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.” Laman and Lemuel, on the other hand, did not express confidence in the Lord in this seemingly impossible task. When the first attempt failed, they were done and wanted to go back to their family.
Nephi then says in verse 15, “As the Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the thing which the Lord hath commanded us....(verse 16) Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord.”
Nephi then lays out another plan to his brothers: they’ll go back to their old home and collect the stuff they left behind--their gold and silver. He successfully persuades them to try again by teaching them the importance of the plates that they are going to get. Again, he shows that this goal is not a temporal, but spiritual. The brothers collected their riches and presented them to Laban at which point Laban threw them all out while keeping their property. Again, the plan failed. And again, Laman and Lemuel were bitterly angry with Nephi.
But they had set out to achieve the goal and that’s exactly what Nephi was going to do. He reminds them that (4:1) “[the Lord] is mightier than Laban.” Nephi then returned to the city and (verse 6) “was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” At this point the Spirit leads him to find a drunken Laban, kill him, then retrieve the plates. Goal achieved.
This story illustrates Neal A. Maxwell’s point that a vague goal is not a goal. The brothers demonstrated their ability to devise a plan, act on it, stick with it, and modify it once the initial plan didn’t work. The story also illustrates the difference between a temporal and spiritual perspective on goal-setting. Laman and Lemuel’s sour attitude versus Nephi’s spiritual attitude.
I was asked to talk today about “spiritual goal-setting,” but I’ve concluded that all good goals can be considered “spiritual.”
Let me explain.
The Lord in Doctrine and Covenants 29 verse 31 and 32 revealed to Joseph Smith that “For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal--
First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work...”
So we know directly from the Lord’s mouth that all things are created spiritually before temporally. This leads me to think that if we view our goals, even our most mundane goal, with spiritual eyes, we are more likely to seek the Lord’s help in achieving them and He is more likely to bless us, just as He did Nephi.
Some of our goals may seem like things we may not want to bother God about: losing those extra few kilos by the end of the year, cleaning our house before our spouse gets home, balancing our budget for the month. Yet, if we shifted our views then suddenly losing weight becomes “eating healthy and exercising because I want to treat my body more like a temple” and cleaning the home turns into “treating the home as a temple of God where we can feel the Spirit” and balancing the budget transforms into “organizing our funds so that we can properly pay our tithes, offerings and pay for the things we need.”
Elder Bednar in his general conference address on Receiving the Holy Ghost takes it to the next level. He asks us to
Now THAT is our goal: To be worthy of the Holy Ghost and act on His promptings.
If we apply the same technique to our daily to-do lists, I think we will find that the Spirit will transform the way we think about our goals and our priorities will thus be reshaped.
My friend, Lauren, explained it along these lines: As children of our Heavenly Father, a divine being, we, too, are divine. We have more potential than we mortally realize. If we believe in our divinity we might push ourselves to do more and be more. We, in fact, can literally do anything. We can harness the power of the Father and pull down His power--the power He has promised us--to accomplish much more. Goal-setting can be a test of our faith in what God has revealed to us about our own abilities. (Lauren Kay)
I’ll start now with my food storage.
End by bearing my testimony.
Earlier this week, Paul and I were having dinner with some friends. Paul leisurely commented about how we’ve started our food storage collection. “Oh that’s great,” one of them responded.
We’ve been feeling quite proud of ourselves for having started on the food storage commandment for a couple of weeks now. Then he asked, “so, what’s your goal?”
My first thought was, “Goal? What in the world do you mean?” Paul later confirmed the same thought.
Our friend went on to explain, “Yeah, like a 48 hour, 72 hour, week, 3 months or year?”
“Ahhhh, ummm, well...” We looked at each other sheepishly. The thought had never even occurred to us to plan a set amount of time. Even more tragic was that I had spent the last month thinking about the topic of this talk, spiritual goalsetting, when this episode took place. We were so proud of the fact that we had even thought to store food that we didn’t have the insight to think of what we were actually doing with it.
So, right then and there we tried to figure out how much we had. “Well, uh, let’s see, we probably have enough for a few days? No, a week. Yeah, probably a week. We could probably survive on 3 cans of beans and a couple of boxes of muesli for about a week.”
And we probably could. In the case of a hurricane up the Øresund Strait or a tornado down the Amager Fælled we would probably be ok for a short time, but our efforts to manage a long-term catastrophic event would most likely be thwarted. We had approached the commandment to create a food storage in a manner of convenience rather than a spiritual one. It’s good that we wanted to follow the commandments, but without setting a goal, we wouldn’t get too far.
Goal setting is an inherent characteristic of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For those who attended primary we are taught to memorize the Articles of Faith. With the help of patient primary teachers I was guided along the course of my childhood to memorize all thirteen. When I was 7, each month focused on each of the Articles of Faith so that by the end of the year we could recite the words verbatim. We had to get good enough so that when the bishop called us up to the stand after we were baptized and confirmed at age 8 we could recite the Article of Faith of our choice. I chose the eleventh.
As a teenager I entered the Young Women’s organization. There I participated in the Personal Progress program where we set goals by completing a series of experiences revolving around the, at the time, 7 values: faith, divine nature, individual worth, knowledge, choice and accountability, good works, integrity (now virtue). The boys, likewise, have their equivalent goal-setting program, the Duty To God award.
We are taught that scripture reading is most effective if we set goals: how long and how often. We’ve heard advice from the leaders of the Church to read at least every day for a half hour or so. The same goes with prayer--two times a day and before meals; Family Home Evening--every Monday night; tithing--10% paid consistently throughout the year; and the monthly goals of fasting, visiting teaching, home teaching. These types of things are easy to measure. We can either pray or not pray, visit teach or not visit teach.
Yet there are some goals that are a bit harder to quantify. Goals like “living a Christ-like life” and “reaching the celestial kingdom,” or even “keeping the Sabbath day” can’t easily be checked off a to-do list. These types of goals lead me to think, “well, how do I live a Christ-like life?” and “how do I get to the celestial kingdom” and “just how do I keep the Sabbath day holy?”
Commandments from the Lord such as these then can be thought of as the ultimate goal. That’s what we want to be. That’s where we should be if we want a complete fullness of happiness or as Alma described it in comparison to the fruit that is “sweet above all that is sweet and all that is white” in Alma 32:42: “ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst.” Likening happiness unto food definitely helps me to understand just how good eternal life will be.
With such a daunting task to “be like Christ” I appreciate the Church’s emphasis on goal-setting. By starting with the smaller yet crucial steps like a measurable scripture study and prayer we can turn to the Lord on a consistent basis, which will no doubt affect the way we think and consequently the things we say, and finally the things we do and thus help us become more like Christ.
So, goal-setting is specific. Neal A. Maxwell said that “a vague goal is no goal at all. The ten commandments wouldn’t be very impressive, for instance, if they weren’t specific, but simply were couched in a phraseology such as ‘thou shalt not be a bad person.”
Nephi in the Book of Mormon understood the value of being specific in setting goals. Once he and his family left their home and escaped from Jerusalem into the wilderness his father, Lehi, had a vision in which Nephi and his brothers were to return to Jerusalem to retrieve the records of their fathers. These records were written on brass plates and were kept by the evil Laban. Needless to say, Nephi’s brothers, Laman and Lemuel were not enthused to go back on a long journey to seek out some plates that they didn’t really care about from a guy who wasn’t so nice. But after some complaining they packed up their tents and made the journey. Once they arrived the brothers had a meeting to devise a plan for the retrieval. They decided to cast lots to see who would be the one to go get them. Laman, was the lucky winner. Laban’s approach was simple: He went to Laban’s house, chatted for awhile and asked for the plates at which point Laban got angry, threw him out and told him he was going to kill him. Not good. No plates.
The goal to retrieve the plates was unsuccessful, but Nephi approached the goal differently than his brothers, Laman and Lemuel. While talking with his dad prior to the trip, Nephi showed his confidence that this was a commandment from the Lord and not just a good idea. It is here that he then says the famous words (1 Nephi 3:7) “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.” Laman and Lemuel, on the other hand, did not express confidence in the Lord in this seemingly impossible task. When the first attempt failed, they were done and wanted to go back to their family.
Nephi then says in verse 15, “As the Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the thing which the Lord hath commanded us....(verse 16) Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord.”
Nephi then lays out another plan to his brothers: they’ll go back to their old home and collect the stuff they left behind--their gold and silver. He successfully persuades them to try again by teaching them the importance of the plates that they are going to get. Again, he shows that this goal is not a temporal, but spiritual. The brothers collected their riches and presented them to Laban at which point Laban threw them all out while keeping their property. Again, the plan failed. And again, Laman and Lemuel were bitterly angry with Nephi.
But they had set out to achieve the goal and that’s exactly what Nephi was going to do. He reminds them that (4:1) “[the Lord] is mightier than Laban.” Nephi then returned to the city and (verse 6) “was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” At this point the Spirit leads him to find a drunken Laban, kill him, then retrieve the plates. Goal achieved.
This story illustrates Neal A. Maxwell’s point that a vague goal is not a goal. The brothers demonstrated their ability to devise a plan, act on it, stick with it, and modify it once the initial plan didn’t work. The story also illustrates the difference between a temporal and spiritual perspective on goal-setting. Laman and Lemuel’s sour attitude versus Nephi’s spiritual attitude.
I was asked to talk today about “spiritual goal-setting,” but I’ve concluded that all good goals can be considered “spiritual.”
Let me explain.
The Lord in Doctrine and Covenants 29 verse 31 and 32 revealed to Joseph Smith that “For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal--
First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work...”
So we know directly from the Lord’s mouth that all things are created spiritually before temporally. This leads me to think that if we view our goals, even our most mundane goal, with spiritual eyes, we are more likely to seek the Lord’s help in achieving them and He is more likely to bless us, just as He did Nephi.
Some of our goals may seem like things we may not want to bother God about: losing those extra few kilos by the end of the year, cleaning our house before our spouse gets home, balancing our budget for the month. Yet, if we shifted our views then suddenly losing weight becomes “eating healthy and exercising because I want to treat my body more like a temple” and cleaning the home turns into “treating the home as a temple of God where we can feel the Spirit” and balancing the budget transforms into “organizing our funds so that we can properly pay our tithes, offerings and pay for the things we need.”
Elder Bednar in his general conference address on Receiving the Holy Ghost takes it to the next level. He asks us to
“reflect on the reasons we worship in the house of the Lord and in our Sabbath meetings. Yes, we serve our kindred dead in the temple--and our families and friends in the wards and branches in which we live. And yes, we enjoy the righteous sociality we find among our brothers and sisters. But we primarily gather together in unity to seek the blessings of and instruction from the Holy Ghost.”
Now THAT is our goal: To be worthy of the Holy Ghost and act on His promptings.
Bednar continues...”praying, studying, gathering, worshipping, serving and obeying are not isolated and independent items on a lengthy gospel checklist of things to do. Rather, each of these righteous practices is an important element in an overarching spiritual quest to fulfill the mandate to receive the Holy Ghost...Fundamentally, all gospel teachings and activities are centered on coming unto Christ by receiving the Holy Ghost in our lives.”
If we apply the same technique to our daily to-do lists, I think we will find that the Spirit will transform the way we think about our goals and our priorities will thus be reshaped.
My friend, Lauren, explained it along these lines: As children of our Heavenly Father, a divine being, we, too, are divine. We have more potential than we mortally realize. If we believe in our divinity we might push ourselves to do more and be more. We, in fact, can literally do anything. We can harness the power of the Father and pull down His power--the power He has promised us--to accomplish much more. Goal-setting can be a test of our faith in what God has revealed to us about our own abilities. (Lauren Kay)
I’ll start now with my food storage.
End by bearing my testimony.
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