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Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. —Marcus Aurelius
not just that a new person is added to your life, one person among many. It’s that this new person changes for you what it means to be alive.
Rather than just storing up salvation for the future, life in Christ saves my life as I’m living
4 The Feel of a Life in Christ Life in Christ isn’t just a doctrine or idea. It’s real, material, and palpable. It has a certain “feel.”
difference between seeing things in the light and seeing the light that lets me see things.
both ordinary and divine. As Parley Pratt describes
Driving for days, I can forget that I’m driving. I can get lost in my head
Who was driving the car all that time?
How much of my life have I lived like this,
return to the present and discover, in being present, the presence of God.
willingness to feel
willingness to care
know in what manner to look forward to his Son for redemption” (Alma 13:1–2).
How can an ordinance reorder time and reconnect me with what it feels like to be alive?
point, if I spend my life looking forward in the wrong way—then I’ll miss this rest.
7 Types of Christ Types are symbols that reorder time. They make what is promised present.
As with a typewriter
all these things were types of things to come” (Mosiah 13:30–31).
for the wrong reasons, even good things sour.
hypocrisy.
that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward” (Matthew 6:5).
(Romans 6:3–8)
baptism is a time machine. It’s a vehicle for atonement.
shuffles Christ’s resurrected future into my mortal present and, in doing so, frees me from my sinful past.
With the sacrament each week, we anticipate in miniature the presence of God at that great wedding feast, the messianic banquet, promised at the end of time
God will wipe away tears from off all faces” (Isaiah 25:6, 8).
an ordinance is a door.
type is a door without a wall.
passed through
No one told me that, by being baptized, I was dying and being resurrected.
immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:9–10).
pretending that I’d earned all
(2 Nephi 25:25).
clearly sees his descriptions of the law as applying to both Jews and Gentiles.
circumcision is that of the heart” (Romans 2:26, 28–29).
Paul’s famous discussion in Romans 7:7–25 of how desire is shaped by the law.
desire is itself a certain way of looking forward.
hollow without love:
not charity, it profiteth me nothing”
laws don’t run as deep as the relationships they brace.
The gospel is a promise and God’s promises aren’t bound by time.
Spirit is the lifeblood of the body of Christ.
20 A Welding Link
earth will be smitten with a curse unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children,
What is the welding link? “It is,” Joseph says, “baptism for the dead” (D&C 128:18). Baptism is an engine for folding time.
(D&C 128:12). Baptism turns death into a door. It makes death come in the middle rather than at the end. It makes death just one part of life. It practices death as a way of shuffling time and sharing lives. This is doubly true when I’m being baptized for the dead. Not only do I die, but I’m brought close to where the dead themselves are. Then both of us, if we’re willing, can be resurrected together in Christ.
“being not weak in faith . . . considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith” (vv. 19–20). Abraham, “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations” (v. 18).
21 The Heavens Weep
for the Father and the Son to be all-powerful, it clearly includes the power to “shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains” (Moses 7:28). It includes the power to suffer, to endure loss and catastrophe and disappointment and still be God. As Christ showed Enoch—to Enoch’s astonishment—“the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept” (v. 28).
care (echoing the Latin word caritas for “charity”) to name Christ’s way of handling time. Let’s use it to name his way of handling sickness and loss and sin
